The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (7 page)

By 2004, the United States put in place a new foundation of governance for the conquered Iraq: one hundred orders enacted by Paul Bremer, chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority. One of them was particularly strange. Under the heading “Amendment to Patents, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law,” Order 81 authorized the introduction of GM crops and instituted intellectual property rights for seed developers. The order made seed saving of GM varieties illegal and forced farmers who used GM varieties to purchase seed each year.

Order 81 was not a law adopted by a sovereign country. This law was not enacted out of distress over the nourishment of Iraq’s people. The law’s lone purpose was to open a new potentially lucrative seed market for the multinationals that already controlled seed trade in other parts of the world. The corporate giants had a new market for their wares.

At the time of the invasion, five million acres of wheat were under cultivation in Iraq. About 97 percent of Iraqi farmers either saved seeds or purchased locally grown seed from nearby vendors. Untold varieties were being grown, including Saberbeq, a wheat landrace grown in northern Iraq that was known for the quality of its bread and its drought tolerance.

“Farmers shall be prohibited from reusing seeds of protected varieties.” At first blush, the language of Order 81 seems benign enough. Restricting seed saving of protected varieties did not interfere with traditional practices, did it?

It did, for two reasons. First, behind the backs of the farmers, the sneaky multinationals were quietly patenting seeds that indigenous farmers had manually and painstakingly developed through selection and over time. Suddenly, then, a farmer might not own a seed he had been growing and saving. All a corporation needed to do was hold a few farmers accountable for thievery through threats or outright lawsuits and the rest would cave.

Second, US Army soldiers, in a program dubbed Operation Amber Waves, were handing out free wheat and barley seed, free fertilizer, and free T-shirts emblazoned
UNITED FARMERS OF IRAQ
in several districts of the country. The seeds were GM. They ensured the genetic contamination of Iraq’s heritage crops and foretold the liability that would come to bear on Iraq’s growers. Call them seeds of empire.

“Introducing transgenic wheat means replacing this diversity and leaving it to extinction,” said Nagrib Nassar, professor of genetics at Universidade de Brasilia. “It will be replaced by a monoculture with a very narrow genetic base. This is a problem. This will be a catastrophe.”

In a separate advance in this war on farmers, consider this—Abu Ghraib, a town outside Baghdad, was conquered and controlled by
invading troops. The country’s gene bank was located at Abu Ghraib, where
Iraq’s germplasm securities were looted and lost. Sanaa Abdul Wahab
Al-Sheikh worked at the national gene bank at Abu Ghraib. During the invasion she hid about a thousand accessions, items in the collection, both
underground in her backyard and in her home refrigerator, and was able to save them. She now works at the rebuilt facility and is traveling the
country adding seeds to the gene bank. But ancient landraces of grains are disappearing as Iraqi farmers grow new GM varieties. The foundation of
Iraq’s food sovereignty eroded in a flash flood.

Jeremiah Gettle of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds offers for sale the seed of the Ali Baba watermelon, an Iraqi fruit collected in the 1990s by Aziz Nail. As Gettle says in his description of the melon: “It is now nearly impossible to get seeds from this ancient country whose people have lost much of their genetic heritage in the long, bloody war. Now our corporate agriculture has been kindly suggested to native farmers who are losing thousands of years of plant breeding work; I guess they have gained the freedom to sign a patent waiver and support our genetically engineered greed.” Baker Creek also offers four Iraqi tomatoes: Basrawya, Ninevah, Al-Kuffa, and Tartar of Mongolistan.

What happened in Iraq was part of an extremely well-funded, politically savvy, militarily connected, corporate-minded gambit to control the world’s food supply. That’s your food, too.

In the last century, 94 percent of vintage, open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties vanished. By 2005, the United Nations reported, 75 percent of the world’s garden vegetables had been lost. We’re hemorrhaging old varieties, despite the productivity, adaptation, and delicious taste of many heirloom strains.

I blame the shrinking of our food choices on corporations. I almost never blame anything—save perhaps a willingness to believe lies and be cheated—on people. At the expense of our soil, our health, our culinary traditions, our environment, and our communities, traditional ways of growing food have been stolen by corporations and replaced with chemicals and radicalized seed.

Two concepts are important to this conversation. One is the idea of vertical versus horizontal production. Vertical production of food means control from the top down. Horizontal production means the control is at the level of the producer or eater. When I bike past a cornfield with a little sign that says P1376XR, which is a DuPont GM corn, I feel crushed. But when I think about the organic or biodynamic or naturally certified farmers who sell at our farmers market, on their little farms toiling in
their human-scale fields, I stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

In my mind I see a map of our coastal plains region, stretching from the geologic fall line toward the coast. Within a morning’s bike ride I can reach Debra and Del Ferguson in their grassy pastures (Hunter Cattle Company), Relinda Walker with her acres of purple and orange carrots and canary melons (Walker Farms), Jimmy and Connie Hayes with organic peanuts (Healthy Hollow Farm), and Cindy and Larry Kopczak with their pecan orchard (Snug Hill Farm). I could put on my boots, start walking, and get to them.

On the contrary, I could walk for years and never find Monsanto in his field or standing in front of his tailgate at the Saturday market. Monsanto is in the sky.

The second concept is the idea of one large entity versus many smaller ones. Farmers have been told for three decades now: get big or get out. The new adage, in direct opposition to the industrialization of agriculture, is
get small or get out.

The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat.

—Wendell Berry

In the 1980s and 1990s, chemical companies aggressively moved to purchase privately held seed companies in order to capitalize on the profits that genetic engineering promised. The modus operandi was to buy a company, retire the seed stock, and offer their own seeds. Monsanto went on a shopping spree.

As Bill Kte’pi explains in
Green Food: An A-to-Z Guide
, there are two kinds of expansion. One is horizontal, the consolidation of smaller companies that operate within the same sector in order to decrease competition. In vertical expansion, a corporation dominates all aspects of production. The corporate giants were practicing both types of integration; Monsanto moved vertically from chemicals to seeds, then horizontally through seed companies.

For a while it was dizzying. Under the header American Seeds Inc. (ASI), in November 2004 Monsanto acquired three Iowa seed companies—Crows, Wilson, and Midwest. In 2005, Monsanto announced that it intended to expand and spent $1 billion for Seminis, the world’s largest producer of fruit and vegetable seed. In one fell swoop, Monsanto was the largest seed and biotech company in the world. It surpassed DuPont. On the heels of this purchase, Monsanto purchased NC+ Hybrids (supplier of corn and soybean seed, headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska) and Emergent Genetics Inc. (cotton seed). Fifty-two million dollars later, in the fall of 2005, Monsanto owned Fontanelle Hybrids (Fontanelle, Nebraska), Stewart Seeds (Greensburg, Indiana), Trelay Seeds (Livingston, Wisconsin), Stone Seeds (Pleasant Plains, Illinois), and Specialty Hybrids. The purchases continued.

By 2006, ten companies controlled half the globe’s commercial seed sales. Monsanto (United States), Dupont (United States), and Syngenta (Switzerland) led the vanguard. In 2007, the top ten seed companies accounted for 67 percent of the market. In 2009 Monsanto’s market share for seed corn was 36 percent.

Monopoly is not a game.

A 2005 report detailed that the biotech industry as a whole lost $6.4 billion in one year. Since the mid-1970s it has lost more than $45 billion. So what’s the reward for all this maneuvering? In many ways, the biotech industry in general (and Monsanto in particular) is like a giant start-up company. The corporate hope is that investors will, in the long run, see their efforts at conquest come to fruition. They hope to hit the jackpot sooner rather than later—and they may, as soon as enough of the world is conquered, enough farmers are disenfranchised, and enough of our food supply is lost forever.

And they may not.

That’s what I’m voting on. That’s what I’m praying for. That’s the world I’m working toward—that every Frankenseed investor loses her ass and my neighbor farmers keep growing the seeds on which they’ve always fed themselves, their families, and their livestock.

By now some of us know the dangers of toxic agriculture and the hazards of processed food, especially sugars, carbohydrates, fats, and high-fructose corn syrup. But another danger lurks.

The introduction of GM food has been a nightmare and folly. Without adequate or honest study, it has been approved by the FDA behind the smokescreen of one small but important phrase—“substantial equivalence”—which assumes that a novel food is as safe as the conventional food it replaces. The FDA website outlines the procedure for their approval of a bioengineered foodstuff. Developers submit a “summary of safety and nutritional assessment” 120 days before the GM food is marketed. The companies then compare a few key components, such as toxicity and allergenicity, against safe plants. “We monitor the levels of nutrients, proteins, and other components to see that the transgenic plants are substantially equivalent to traditional foods,” said Monsanto’s Eric Sachs. “If the levels are similar, then the GM experimental food is deemed identical for all practical purposes and no further testing is necessary.”

Before the introduction of any new medicine or other powerful technology, long-term and thorough testing would seem to be in order: toxicology assessments, tissue cultures, multigenerational studies, allergy testing. Superficial testing does not account for the myriad possibilities of plant transformation and its potential to damage human health. In effect, the FDA’s position is that there is no problem until a problem is identified.

Dr. David Schubert, a medical researcher at the Salk Institute in California, and William Freese of the Friends of the Earth published a paper in 2005 called
Safety Testing and Regulation of Genetically Engineered Foods
. “The picture that emerges from our study of US regulation of GM foods,” said Schubert and Freese, “is a rubber-stamp ‘approval process’ designed to increase public confidence in, but not ensure the safety of, genetically engineered foods.”

Nor have any labels been required by the US government—despite “right-to-know” campaigns by consumer groups and overwhelming support nationally for the labeling of transgenic products. Corporations prefer to avoid labeling since they understand that sales of GM foods would decrease if consumers knew what they were buying. By not requiring corporations to identify GM products, the FDA (more interested in the business of moneymaking than in the health of citizens) robs citizens of the right to know what’s in their food. “Labeling is a situation where the FDA is officially charged with promoting biotechnology,” said Jeffrey Smith, a visionary activist who has worked for years to bring attention to the menace of GM products and who is the author of the best-selling
Seeds of Deception.

There is one way an eater can avoid GM food and that is to eat organic products. The National Organics Program, which writes the guidelines for inputs and systems that organic farmers may employ, prohibits the use of GM seeds. As Dave Hensen, director of the Arts and Ecology Center in Occidental, California, said, “Organics is one of the last lines of defense for all time.” However, there is no way to avoid eating GM foods entirely because of contamination.
Acres USA,
a sustainable agriculture magazine, reports that genetic drift has resulted in the contamination of
all
US corn, for example.

Actually we don’t know this yet. The story of the perils of GM foods has not been told, in part because the mouths of the storytellers have been duct-taped shut and in part because the story is not yet known. The need for scientific studies has been ignored; those conducted have been suppressed.

The evidence of hazards in GM foods, however, is mounting. As Dr. Michael Hansen, senior scientist for Consumers Union, said in his 2002 lecture in Mexico entitled “Bt Crops: Inadequate Testing,” “There is increasing evidence—from both epidemiological studies and lab studies—that the various Bt endotoxins (including those from maize, cotton, and potatoes) may have adverse effects on the immune system and/or may be human allergens.”

Some of the adverse evidence comes from Australia, where a pea weevil threatens the field pea industry. Common beans, on the other hand, carry a gene capable of killing the pea weevil. When researchers in a ten-year project to develop a GM field pea tested this gene, it did not cause an allergic reaction in mice or people. However, when the gene was transferred to the pea, the new GM peas caused allergic lung damage in mice. What is significant about this study is that it indicates that a transformation happening during the transfer process may make GM food hazardous.