Natural Solutions Foundation
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.Organics4U.org
The following is a briefing on the facts and myths of GMOs which I prepared for members of the Panamanian Government and interested citizens concerning the dangers of genetically modified or, as they are known in Panama, transgenic foods.
The briefing notes the Panamanian legal situation. In Panama, as in the US, GMOs are permitted in the food chain without any labeling at all. This is an ecological, medical and consumer’s rights disaster.
Only strong consumer advocacy, and market pressure against anything which might have GMOs in it (that means avoiding anything which is not labeled “organic” or “GM Free”) will change US policy. But once the environment, or your body, is contaminated with foreign DNA, there is no know way to reverse that process.
Codex, like the US, is totally untroubled by GMOs.
Here is the Myth and Fact Summary
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
Summary of Myths and Facts RE: Transgenic Foods
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
May 25, 2008
The provisions of Panamanian Law No. 48 of August 8, 2002 that created the National Commission of Biosecurity for GMOs, in Article 7 – Section 8 – that the Commission “Promote the permanent update of the registries, national and international, of organisms genetically modified based on the precautionary principal.†This principal requires the utmost caution in allowing transgenic products.
The Natural Solutions Foundation urges the Government of Panama to implement this provision of law by imposing an
immediate moratorium on any additional GMO approvals without strict risk analysis and competent scientific proof of
lack of risk.
Myth:
Transgenic crops increase yield, reduce cost and reduce pesticide use. In fact, experience and analysis of the impact of GM crops have shown that none of these commercially useful, but unfounded, assertions is accurate.
Fact:
– Roundup © Ready crops require increasing use of Roundup © since super weeds become resistant to the herbicide
– Additional herbicides and pesticides become necessary to maintain adequate crop status
– Crop yield is often disappointing, in part because Roundup © can cause sudden crop death
– Transgenic crops are more sensitive to drought, an increasing problem in a warming environment
– Studies since 1999 consistently show that economic, social and environmental degradation follow use of transgenic crops
– Pollinator and predator species are seriously impacted by transgenic crops, including both habitat destruction (Roundup ©) and Bt production
Myth:
Panama has no transgenic crops
Fact:
Panama had registered coffee (arabica), yucca, yam, banana, banana tree, sugar cane, taro root, several varieties of rice, maize, pumpkin, kidney bean, sorghum, and strawberry with UPOV, the International organization, as of 2006 and is releasing a long grain transgenic rice in a few days.
Myth:
Transgenic crops are carefully regulated before release in prepared foods or as crops
Fact:
In the US, where virtually all transgenic crops originate, the FDA and USDA operate under a 1992 Executive Order which says that modified and unmodified foods are equivalent. Hence, no safety or other testing is required and both FDA and USDA refuse to require or examine safety testing. Only a patent is necessary to release a food into the food chain and environment. No environmental impact studies or statements are required.
Myth:
Transgenic foods are safe
Fact:
Transgenic foods have unintended and rapidly changing biological impact since the inserted genes, the promoter organisms and the marker organisms are foreign to the genome of the plant and are unstable in it.
– FDA and other US government scientists have issued strong warnings about the dangers of transgenic organisms which have either been suppressed or ignored.
– US Center for Disease Control found that food-related illness increased up to 10 fold since the commercialization of transgenic food
– The only published human feeding study verified that genetic material in transgenic soy transfers into the DNA of intestinal bacteria and continues to function
o Glyphosate (Roundup ©) resistant DNA has been shown to revert and become a glyphosate producer in the gut and in digestive bacteria. Glyphosate is a highly toxic compound associated with infertility, cancer, auto immune diseases and other serious consequences upon ingestion or other exposure
– Every commercialized transgenic organism released into the food supply has already undergone extensive genetic revision and change
– Early understanding of the genome held that its function was fixed and rigid.
– Today we understand that the genome is a fluid and dynamic system.
o Foreign DNA changes the proteins coded for in unpredictable ways with unintended consequences which
may take years to manifest or be identified
o DNA remains active and viable long after the death of the cell or organism
o Transgenic DNA may not be broken down by the digestive tract
o Transgenic DNA transfers to living cells and inserts itself into the genome of plants, bacteria, humans and other
animals through horizontal transfers coding for unknown proteins and leading to antibodies, allergenicity,
– Allergenicity cannot be predicted in advance but all corn, maize and soy tested for allergenicity according to WHO standards have failed because they have allergenicity characteristics
– GM foods which may or may not be allergenic in themselves can confer allergenicity to other foods and tissues
– Transgenic genes are inserted by the same process used by researchers to provide models of unstable DNA and are
inherently unstable
o Safety and quality are impossible to control with unstable genetic material
o Unintended horizontal transfer is impossible to control
o Expression of transgenic genes can change from generation to generation
– Promoter viruses mutate within the genome and have been linked to serious communicable and non communicable diseases:
o Multiple Drug Resistant Tuberculosis
o Cancer (including leukemia)
o Slow viruses
o Auto immune diseases
o Immune suppression
o Morgellon’s Disease
o Allergens
– Soy allergies rose by 50% in the UK soon after transgenic soy was introduced.
– Transgenic soy creates multiple problems in animal studies:
o Cooking increases soy allergens by as much as 700%
o Digestive enzymes are reduced
o Livers show toxic injury which is reversible after switching to natural soy
– Rats fed transgenic canola had livers which were 12-16% heavier
– Bt crops produce huge amounts of Bt which are
o Often insufficient to kill pests
o Sufficiently poisonous to harm beneficial insects
o Provoke strong, sometimes lethal, allergic reactions
– Synthetic genes do not function identically to natural ones with serious/lethal consequences for animals consuming them
– Antibiotic resistant marker organisms are known to have transferred their resistance to other bacteria and somatic cells conferring resistance to formerly clinically useful antibiotics through horizontal transfer
– GM labeling is forbidden in the US. Lack of species specific or
any other identification of GM food makes impossible
o Epidemiology
o Traceability
o Liability
– Bt toxins are significant toxins in themselves. While natural levels of Bt are safe for humans, transgenic Bt crops produce levels up to 10,000 greater and are documented serious
allergens
– Human and animal reproductive failure and sterility are common
consequences of exposure to
o Roundup ©
o GM soy
o GM corn (including an organism patented by Epicyte in 2001 to cause permanent male sterility – organism now
owned by DuPont and Monsanto)
– GM food consumed by animals causes the animals to become transgenic in unknown ways
– When consumed, these otherwise non-transgenic animals provide an unknown, and unregulated source of foreign DNA which then enters the human genome with unpredictable and unintended consequences
– Animal studies show when fed GM chow or feed
o Huge increases in
o Fetal death
o Low birth weight
o Failure to thrive after birth
o Sterility among offspring mated to each other
o Grazing animals die in large numbers
o Animal infertility when out-mated
Myth:
Transgenic crops can be contained in the area where they are planted
Fact:
Transgenic crops contaminate both same-species and other-species plants.
– Monsanto sues about 500 farmers per year for intellectual property rights through “volunteer†seeds trespassing on the farmers’ land via pollen drift and pollinator contamination
– Organic and conventional plants are irreversibly contaminated by
transgenic plants
o Although the US allows 10% GM contamination in certified organic foods (1), compared with most countries’ limits of 0.9% or 1.0%, organic foods sources are still in short supply in the US because of gross contamination of organic crops
o Conventional crops quickly become contaminated
o Louisiana rice crop contaminated with pharmaceutical rice grown by Bayer – many farmers now growing corn instead to avoid contamination
o Pharmaceutical rice by Bayer Cropscience was shipped as human food to at least 30 countries
o All South African corn now contaminated with Monsanto’s MON810 which has not been approved for human consumption and is considered unsafe in Europe
o New Zealand contaminated by 3 years of mislabeled shipment of maize by US
o All Mexican corn now contaminated by US corn
o Super weeds and super pests are prevalent wherever transgenic crops exist
By popular request, below is a copy of Dr. Laibow’s eAlert from April 2, 2008, entitled: “My God! What have we done?” This post relates to Morgellon’s Disease and GMOs.
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My God! What Have We Done?
Think a moment about what we are doing to ourselves on this planet.
Have you heard of the nightmare condition called Morgellon’s Disease?
https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=599
Victims experience unbearable sensations – all the time, day and night – of insects crawling under their skin, burning and itching so terrible that people have committed suicide to end the torture. To make matters worse, much, much worse, these unfortunate people, who range in age from babies to the elderly, have open lesions on their skin that produces sharp, thin red, black, blue and white fibers and black sand-like grains. The fibers appear to move as if alive and, incredibly, when placed in a Petri dish after removal, continue to move and grow!
The origin of this horror has been unclear since it was first named in 2001 by the mother of a 3 year old baby whose symptoms she described and documented on a website. Since that time, thousands of people have been identified with this condition for which the only successful cure has been that most potent (and safe) of all antibiotics, nano silver. But the nature of the condition, and its cause, have remained a mystery until now.
This Plague Brought To You By BioTech
When fibers from Morgellon’s Disease lesions from numerous patients were analyzed by competent scientists, they were found to contain DNA from BOTH a fungus and a bacterium used in the production of commercial Genetically Modified plants and animals!
Merging organisms that have totally separate DNA and characteristics for the sake of profit, regardless of the health or other consequences, the line between animate and inanimate has been crossed.
And we are all paying the price.
Like the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, who transformed the non-living into a living creature which escaped his control, the biotech industry has, we fear, created a real Frankenstein’s Monster: Franken Foods which are bringing new plagues on us and on the earth. The future of our planet is literally and truly at stake. That is why the Natural Solutions Foundation has taken on the task of educating decision makers about GM threats.
As our good friends and collaborators from the Ecological Options Network (http://www.eon3.net/ ) have noted on their website, “To survive in the world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way. As never before, the future of each depends on the good of all.” Statement of 100 Nobel laureates on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize
That’s Our Table!
A majority of Americans already know that they do not want to eat GM foods but the FDA and other decision makers in the US and abroad do not necessarily get the message yet. After all, Big Biotech, like Big Pharma, has bought a seat at the Power Table – in fact, some say they have bought the whole table. Well, we, the “netroots” — the consumers, have a seat at the table, too – in fact, it’s our table! We want the food on it to be clean, wholesome and healthful. That’s why we need your help to make sure this message is heard at every Codex meeting and in the halls of power around the world.
As it happens there is a Codex meeting coming up this month in Ottawa Canada where labeling of GM foods will be on the agenda, once again. For almost 20 years the US has been trying to force Big Biotech’s Agenda down the throats (literally!) of the rest of the world. It has not been going well for the US.
The wonderful innovation in Codex proceedings that began at the last Codex Working Group on labeling of GM foods (Feb, Accra), when developing nations told the US that it can no longer dictate what happens to them and their health for the sake of the corporations who determine US policy (and who send advisors to sit on the US delegations of every Codex meeting), will be put to the test at the Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL), April 28-May 2, 2008.
Natural Solutions Foundation will be there, reporting e very day to tell you what’s going on, straight from the shoulder. No other organization has the respect and cooperation of so many countries in the Codex community.
AFTER the CCFL meeting we will tell you all about the strategy meeting that we have helped initiate and its impact on the proceedings at CCFL. You can understand why we are not saying much about the who, what, when or where. The why is pretty clear: an emerging coalition of nations is taking their own power back to make it clear that their food and health- and yours, since so much US food is imported from the developing world – – is not for sale. The US FDA, EPA and USDA may be for sale, but these countries actually value the health of their people so much that they will not permit GM foods in their countries or will only permit GM foods if clearly labeled as such. It remains to be seen how effective the developing nations are in their coalition strategy. We’ll let you know!
The Natural Solutions Foundation will be there, supporting and assisting them and you’ll have a ring-side seat.
But this is an expensive endeavor. In a few days we’ll leave for Africa to meet with the officials in charge of food safety and our Agricultural Project to enhance crop production and nutrient density using magnets. Then, off to Benin where we meet with Father Godfrey Nzamuio, the Founder and genius behind the remarkable a UN Center of Excellence for Africa, the Songhai Center (http://www.songhai.org/songhai_en/), video at www.YouTube.com/NaturalSolutions our mentor on sustainable beyond-organic Zero Emissions farming for our Panama Santa Clara demonstration project – see: ( http://www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org ).
Next, we head to Ottawa for the 2008 meetings of the CCFL and the meetings around it that could change the course of Codex, then off to Panama to meet with people who are interested in becoming part of the Santa Clara Project. If you are interested in knowing more about the community To find out about how to become a participant, click ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/NSF-Panama/join ).
After that, we are off to the Codex Alimentarius Commission meeting in Geneva where each Codex committee reports on its work and moves it forward (or not – that’s our opportunity!)
One of our supporters has generously donated $25,000 to cover the cost of airfare for the three members of the Natural Solutions Foundation delegation on this trip. That is a wonderful start and we are deeply moved by their support. The trip will cost a lot more.
The 545 people who donated to the Natural Solutions Foundation during the month of March have our profound thanks! Without you, we could not continue our work. Moving forward is becoming easier because our footprint is larger in the health freedom world and in the developing world. We have been asked by the Codex Contact Points of two countries to work with them to establish Natural Solutions Foundation organizations in their countries!
But there are both on-going and special expenses we need your help to cover . Won’t you make your tax-deductible donation –
( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189 )
right now to make sure that your health and freedom have the voice and the vision that they deserve? Small donations add up. Big donations are wonderful. Whatever you can give, give! And thank you! And if you donate $100 or more, we will count that as special help towards the funding of our documentary film on health freedom and the Codex agenda. Don’t forget that every purchase you make at our outstanding online store, www.Organics4U.org helps to fund us and helps to keep you healthy. And you get a 40% tax deduction of the total price, too!
We Are There For You, Wherever That Takes Us
The health freedom issues don’t stop at Codex. They are larger than compulsory drugging or vaccination. They go beyond medical privacy. They include forced toxification with dangerous areal sprays, for example, or taking kids away when their parents won’t medicate or vaccinate them.
When California and the EPA decided to spray for a non pest with chemicals which are not safe and whose long term effects are not known, but to spray every 30 days for 5 years none the less, the Natural Solutions Foundation was rght there for you. To donate, click here ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189 )
In fact, you can take a look at my comments and General Stubblebine’s at a meeting last month on the insane spraying of the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) by visiting our webpage, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org or our YouTube channel at www.YouTube.com/naturalsolutions where you will find more information on the California spraying plan for that mythical pest, LBAM. While you are there, check out the amazing Songhai videos!
GM: the Most Expensive Cheap Food You’ll Ever Eat
GM food is cheap. It is grown under conditions that turn lush complex ecosystems once known as “farms” into monoculture (single crop) deserts. The very concept of integrated farming, where one plant or animal uses the waste of another and sustains the first one (or yet another) is meaningless in monoculture. Vast industrial techniques and huge government subsidies make GM food inexpensive and chemical additives keep the prepared and fast foods so easily available cheap, cheap, cheap.
Foods “rich” in GM ingredients and chemical substitutes for real flavors and components are poor in nutrition. But when you pick up a box of this or that or drive through a fast food lane, you don’t tend to count the cost of that cheap food: cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, Morgellon’s Disease, potentially lethal allergies, infertility, depressed immunity, auto immune disease, poor school performance, depression, anxiety, worry about a loved one’s illness or your own, doctor bills, hospital bills, lost days at work or school, etc. The “food” may be cheap, but the price you pay for eating or serving it is enormous.
To read a summary of the health concerns associated with GM foods, click here ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/?p=600 ).
While the US is dedicated in its support of the deadly technology which produces “food” then-President George H. W. Bush declared — without a shred of science to back him up — to be identical to natural food, other countries are beginning to fear that they have made a terrible mistake in embracing GM technology. While the rest of the EU, for example, fears GM foods and ingredients, Romania, concerned about the damage to the environment and health, is considering ending its approval of GM food crops.
Click here ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=598 ) to read more. While the US approves GM sugar beets to provide you with GM sugar ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=585 ) later this year, the EU has blocked approval of a GM potato ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=587) for this year’s planting.
Australia, whose last Prime Minister could not wait to get as many GM crops into the ground as possible is seeing things a little differently now. Strong agitation is pressing the government there to delay approval of GM crops ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=587 ) until their safety has been tested and fairly evaluated.
When you go to a market that sells real, nourishing foods (perhaps your local farmers market) you do not hesitate to bear the extra cost of organic and wholesome foods. You know the hidden cost of cheap, factory-made Franken Foods is the health of your family.
Staples like taro in Hawaii, rice in Asia, soy and corn in the US have already been genetically modified. Papaya, peas, potatoes, pigs, they are all fair game for the GM boys (and girls). Never mind that species besides the crop which has been genetically modified are being contaminated — for example, us, through Morgellon’s Disease. Insects, arguably significantly smarter than we are, have already figured out how to resist the super plants and their loads of super pesticides, becoming resistant and passing their resistance on to the huge levels of pesticide many plants are engineered to produce. In South Africa the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) has published trial results that indicate stalk-borer larvae have developed the ability to survive the Bt poison contained in GM maize [corn] plants. Click here ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=580 ) to read more.
But consumers who do not want to eat GM foods and do not want their word, or their bodies, contaminated by GM technology and its cataclysmic mistakes are on the march. In Hawaii, where taro is a staple food, consumers have gotten the State Legislature to consider a 10 year moratorium on GM taro ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=584 ).
It would be a good idea to make that march a quick step double time, too, because even the existence of clean food, certified organic, is threatened by the use of GM plants. That may be hard to imagine, but GM food spreads beyond its boundaries on wind and wheels and wings. The continued availability of components to make organic foods, which are grown without pesticides, artificial fertilizers, genetically modified components or other food-born toxins is in question.
Widespread contamination of U.S. corn, soybeans and other crops by genetically engineered varieties is threatening the purity of organic and natural food products and driving purveyors of such specialty products to new efforts to protect their markets.
Read more ( https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=588 ). This is particularly remarkable when you consider that although most countries allow a 0.9% contamination level of GM components in organic products, the US allows a shocking 10% contamination in certified organic foods. So if products which are 90% free of GM crops are increasingly hard to come by, what does that say about the urgency of the situation for those of us who do not want to undergo forced drugging by toxic components or Franken Foods?
Ready to Get Involved?
I hope you are now good and steamed and looking for an outlet for your outrage (justified) at a system which actively prohibits labeling of GM foods because it (the FDA) knows that you will reject GM foods so they make it a crime to tell you if your foods are genetically modified.
Join the Natural Solutions Foundation Say NO! to GMO forum and become part of a community ready for action. Visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/no-genetically-modified-food to become a member of the forum.
And, most importantly, get everyone you know to join as well. If ever netroots had a part to play in shaping policy, now is that time. And if ever the timeline before the tipping point into environmental disaster was close enough to take action without waiting any longer, now is that time, too.
We need to force the FDA to REQUIRE labeling of GM foods, not forbid it, to hold hearings on the safety (really, the lack thereof) of GM foods for the environment and for people, to make all corporate information submitted to the FDA about GM foods and non-food crops public, to find out what the USDA knows and does not know about the pharmaceutically modified crops it has lost control of, according to an internal audit of its Pharma modified crop test plantings, etc. And we need to do it quickly.
We need to get GM foods out of schools, hospitals, and off our tables, and we need to do it now!
GM is the problem, but WE, yes, WE! Are the answer…
Featured Film
Cindy Sage and the BioInitiative Report: Biological Standards for Microwave. Click
( http://blip.tv/file/597424 ) to view this important film. Be prepared to be shocked if you think your cell phone (or your kid’s cell phone) is safe to use!
We know there are a number of other health freedom issues that that excite your ire. Chief among these is the continuing story of mandated vaccinations. You can follow some of those developments at my co-trustee, Ralph Fucetola JD’s blog. Click here: http://vitaminlawyerhealthfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/media-blitz-supports-big-pharma.html
There will be more about these issues in future eAlerts!
Natural Solutions Foundation:
We are more than just talk, and so are you!
Rima E. Laibow, MD
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Songhai, Porto Novo, Benin
Day 3, April 19, 2008
We landed today in Cotonou, the capital of Benin and the shoving began: African airports are like airports everywhere, but worse. Everyone apparently needs to be first, whether there is any point to being first or not.
I don’t need to be first and neither do General Stubblebine or Tyson, so we were pretty close to last – last off the airplane, last through customs, last to get a baggage cart, last to get our luggage.
Tyson, however, was nearly the first of our party to get vaccinated! I am strongly averse to vaccination and, to my mind, the more you study any one particular vaccine, the more you NEVER want to take that preparation. That is certainly the case with Yellow Fever Vaccine. Although many countries in Africa require proof of vaccination against this devastating disease (unnecessary, really, for people who have access to good health, Vitamin C and silver solutions) for entry. Bert, Tyson and I were able to produce exemption letters for our visas and secured our visas for Benin without any difficulty.
I had forgotten that, once you clear passport control and get your entry stamp in Benin, there are two guys in (what once were) white coats asking to see your Yellow Fever Vaccination card with a valid stamp on it. We speak English. They speak French. The possibility of communication was nill to none. Gen. Stubblebine and I tried the words for “Exemption letter†in as many ways as we could think of. We failed miserably. Finally, ready to go home, I suppose, since we were close to the last people on the plane, the two vaccine police men gave up in exasperation and waved their hands, shouting, “Go! Go!†and waving us through the door.
Tyson, however, was separated from us and was not so lucky. Before he knew what had happened, he was sitting in the Health Officer’s Office being asked in French for something (he does not speak French). He, too, kept saying that he had an exemption letter (from me, in fact!) but there seemed to be no uptake on that. He looked up from getting out the letter from his papers and saw that the Health Officer was bending over a refrigerator from which he took a vial and a syringe. “No! NO!” Tyson said and waved his letter of exemption around (probably a little wildly – I know that is the way I would have waved mine!). The man got out a yellow International Vaccination Card, stamped it and said, in perfect English, “Give me 10 Euros [ Approximately $16 US].
Tyson gave him the Euros and the man waved him out of the office WITH a vaccination card but WITHOUT the vaccination!
Once we got through the pushing and shoving at the luggage conveyor, we exited past a Beninese guard who checked every single one of our luggage tags to make sure they matched the numbers on our luggage. With all the people ahead of us, can you imagine how long that took?
Finally we exited the baggage area only to realize that the customs people were opening every suit case of every traveler. I stopped dead and looked around in utter dismay: It was already 9:45 PM and we were clearly going to be here for hours. For some reason (I have no idea what it might have been), the customs official nearest to me looked up, saw me and said, again, “Go! Go!” and we made our way out into the crowd waiting to greet their friends and relatives, associates and colleagues. There was a gentleman in a brilliant and distinctive African suit waving a very welcome “Songhai” sign. We clustered around him and he led us to the van he had brought to pick us up from Songhai.
Because our plane had not come in the night before, his two hour round trip to the airport (and the fuel which is so important in this very poor country) was wasted. He was, however, gracious and helpful nonetheless.
When we got to Songhai Center about an hour later, we were greeted in this oasis of plenty and prosperity in the middle of want and hardship by Father Godfrey Nzamjou, the man whose inspiration lives and breaths in Songhai. Although the restaurant closes at 10, he and his staff had kept it open for us (how different from Paris!) and we had an hour or so to converse and orient ourselves.
We were led to a modern building with suites and bedroom, each with a shower and private bath.
The next day, we toured the compound in the morning and saw the ingenuity, love and tenderness, yes, tenderness with which this land has been turned from a desert into a Garden, perhaps a Garden of Eden. Today, in a world where food riots are becoming more commonplace daily, the fertility which has been coaxed from the land is an urgent lesson for possibilities and a call to action. The Panama Santa Clara Project will follow the Songhai model for farming without waste or pollution. Imagine what we can do with land that is so abundantly fertile!
The heat was truly ferocious and about 11:00AM we retired indoors because anywhere outside was impossibly hot. We had more excellent food, all grown here, and waited for Fr. Godfrey to come back to us for more discussion.
Around 4 PM he arrived and said, “OK. Now you know what we have at Songhai. What are you looking for?” We spoke at depth and at length and videotaped the discussion. I think it is important that you see that and will mount it as soon as we have enough bandwidth to make that possible. It was a wonderful conversation in which we expounded on our dream and Fr. Godfrey said that this was what he had been waiting for.
We agreed that we must support each other’s work and he reaffirmed that he will, without a doubt, come to Panama to set up the design for the zero emissions farm complete with bio-digester and bio-gas for fuel independence as well as power independence. Fr. Godfrey is the proud “papa” of the largest bio-gas facility in Africa. Cheap, easy and clean, bio-gas can heat our water, run our generators, pump our liquids, grind our grains, etc. And we will learn from a master!
But Songhai is much more than just a fuel independent system. Please take a moment when the tape is mounted to watch it and capture the shared dream of this world leader whose Center is a recognized United National Center Excellence in Africa.
After more chat and dinner (outstanding, of course), Tyson, General Bert and I set to working through the immense number of details for our community in Panama, the Santa Clara ARC, with the clear understanding that what we are doing now is highly preliminary since the community will ultimately make these decisions for itself.
That took us late into the night and we fell asleep quite exhausted. Oh, by the way, there was still no internet connection.
Day 4, April 20, 2008
Today was our “BIG DAY” at Songhai Center. Father Godfrey is immensely busy and he agreed to give us most of a full day to discuss our plans and possible working together in considerable detail – that is a large part of why we came.
We began with breakfast at 8 AM in the restaurant which serves about 200 meals per day to visitors. All food served here is grown here or on other Songhai Centers so everything is not only fresh, but free of pesticides and all other types of synthetic, chemical additives. It is wonderful knowing that every bite was grown by the labor of people who love the land and understand how to nurture it so it can nurture them. We are very eager to replicate that loving relationship between our food and our selves as we come to create the farm and farm school which will be a core activity of the Santa Clara ARC.
We took a tour of the facility including the foundry, the kiln, the fields, the food processing areas, the store, the animal sheds, the fish pond, the composing area, the bio gas facility, etc., etc. All of this amazing integrated farming has been created here in the total absence of fertile soil. Fr. Godfrey told us that he had worked 15 years of the 20 that he has been here to create this astonishing fertility. We start in Panama with astonishingly fertile land!
Songhai’s rich productivity daily feeds 1500 people (300 workers and their families, which average 5 people), about 100 students who are in training, typically for 18 months, and the 200 guests who come to the African and Western restaurants. I think it is an easy leap to conclude that our fertile farm will be producing much more than we members of the community, guests and health center clients can consume so it is reasonable to expect that one center of profit for the Santa Clara ARC will be the distribution and sale of outstanding food!
Because of the intense heat, everything stops for several hours during the middle of the day. Everything, that is, except lunch. We wove our way from shade spot to shade spot to the restaurant for lunch and much talk about what we have seen. Tyson is a black smith/iron worker so he was particularly fascinated by learning what he needs to know to make the bio gas apparatus and by the machines which Songhai designs and makes on site.
Later, Fr. Godfrey came to where we are staying, where there is, mercifully, air conditioning and we started to talk together. I asked him how many other groups like ours had come to set up sister facilities as we are doing.
Tyson had the foresight to set up a video camera to film this discussion and it was a great decision. The video is not compatible with my computer so we have to download it to a disc and upload it that way. Clearly we do not have the opportunity here in Songhai, but we will do so shortly.
The upshot of the discussion was that we are what Fr. Godfrey has been waiting for as a partner community! We will bring our experience in order to work toward sister health centers in Parakou, Benin and Santa Clara, Panama. He will use his experience to make Santa Clara a full zero emissions facility farming center and school.
Meanwhile, we had missed our appointment with Col. Mikode, the Codex Contact Point for Benin because we arrived more than a full day late. This delay winds up having significant impact on Codex. Read on.
Dinner, then more intense discussion and off to bed.
Day 5, April 21, 2008
Today we started the day with meeting for about an hour during breakfast with Fr. Godfrey. By the way, Songhai makes its own delicious yogurt. After about an hour, he had other things to do before heading off to Nigeria to meet with government officials there to replicate the Songhai model there. There are also two people from separate projects doing similar things in Nigeria. One is, like Gen. Stubblebine, a General.
Sometime later, Col. Mikode and Pascal, the head of the Benin Horticultural Research Station came to see us. They had good news and bad news for us.
The good news was that they had prepared a budget and program for the agricultural project using magnets to treat the water used to grow plants. Preliminary results suggest significant increases in crop yield, nutrient density, plant vigor and significant decreases in water utilization. Given the rapidly worsening shortage of food in the word due to climate change and diversion of food crop acreage to biofuels (which cost at least 29% more energy than they produce so the bargain is a very, very bad one for the planet, its carbon balance and its people) the ability to increase yield and nutritional value, while eliminating all requirements for pesticides and other chemicals, is a very important asset. Equally important, perhaps, is the reduction in water usage to get stronger and more vigorous plants.
I had been perplexed by the fact that nothing was happening with the agricultural magnet project – nothing. I had designed a simple (and, I hope, elegant) design which would test the hypotheses of increased crop yield, increased nutrient density, increased plant vigor and decreased water usage but they require actually being carried out to show anything. I could not understand it when I got an email saying that the project was postponed until they got the money to carry it out.
When Pascal presented me with the document outlining the costs, I nearly fell off my chair. Instead of 6 test beds, there were 33. Instead of raised beds edged with scrap lumber of corrugated tin or sand bags, they were asking for 4.2 metric tons of concrete, thousands of bricks, etc.
It was clear that we needed to talk!
The next interesting meeting was a telephonic one with Dr. Koura, who was supposed to serve as the Beninese delegate to the Codex Committee On Food Labeling next week in Ottawa. She had informed the Codex Contact Point, Col. Mikode, that she would not be funded by the WHO Trust Fund at 11 PM on Saturday evening but that email was not read until 9 AM Monday morning (yesterday). That means that Benin will not have a voice at this important Codex meeting where the initiative begun by the African nations at the meeting in Ghana in February this year to demand labeling of Genetically Modified Organisms was pushed forward so impressively.
I asked our Natural Solutions Foundation Trustees if we should not host (i.e., pay for) the Beninese delegate to make sure that there was a strong voice from this country at the Codex meeting. We quickly agreed and the next thing we needed to do was convince Dr. Kora and the Beninese government that this was a good idea.
Col. Mikode had no problem with it and said that if Dr. Koura was willing, so was he.
Day 6, April 22, 2008
Early this morning Tyson, General Stubblebine and I set off with a translator to visit Pascal at the Horticultural Research Station to find out what had gone wrong with the Agricultural Magnet project and retrieve 20 pairs for use here at Songhai.
Because we had a translator with us this time, as opposed to the last time we talked with Pascal, we discovered what the problem was: Language difficulties led to Pascal believeing that since we had identified 11 potential crops for the experiment, he would need to conduct the experiment with 3 beds of each crop. The undertaking would be huge and he wanted to build structures to make it possible. I explained that we wanted to choose 2 crops from the 11 and Pascal heaved a huge sigh of relief. We walked out to the fields to see where the projects would take place and Pascal has already applied the magnets to a buried rigid water pipe in preparation for our visit. Once we got the miscommunication out of the way, it became clear that a real project using amaranth and tomatoes would be carried out and carried out well.
We are eager to get those results and the results from the Songhai application. It is our hope that the results are robust enough that we can begin to change agricultural practices in many places in the world. It is essential, the Natural Solutions Foundation believes, to reclaim food production, eliminating pesticides and other dangerous chemicals, and making ti clear that the best crop yield is produced by natural means, not by GM crops. Dr. Koura, on the other hand, when we finally did get together this afternoon, was not so sure it was a good idea. She had “turned off” the process by telling her bosses that she was not, after all, going and was adamantly reluctant to tell them that she could now go under our sponsorship.
We tried every which-a-way to Sunday to persuade her, but she was not movable. We got ready to write to the US and UN Ambassadors from Benin to see if they could provide a person to attend the meetings (it is much easier to get a Canadian visa from the US) when we got a piece of very bad news, indeed.
This information makes us think that we are seeing a pattern: The Ugandan Codex delegate had taken the ball into his own hands and arranged an African strategy session on GM labeling the day before the CCFL meeting was to begin. He is a credentialed delegate from a member nation. Canada denied him a visa twice.
The strategy of the power brokers is clear: fix it so the opposition cannot show up and then claim that the process is legitimate. That is pretty much the same as arresting the opposition and claiming that your election was democratic (or counting the votes on a programmable electronic voting machine with a predetermined outcome, for that matter!)The Codex process is far from legitimate. Our Trustees have just spent an extended period on the phone working out our next strategic moves to deal with this new tactic.
More to follow.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.Organics4U.org
What Do the FrankenFood/FrankenCrop/FrankenAnimal Defenders Have to Say for Themselves?
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Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.organics4U.org
Reason Denied
Reason Magazine may be a voice of libertarian politics and economics, but, at least on the issue of Genetically Modified Crops, it has made a serious mistake. Kerry Howley, a Senior Editor at Reason, http://www.reason.com/news/show/125722.html, has somehow forgotten a critical element when writing an ringing apologia full of industry propaganda for the apotheosis, the pinnacle in the triumph of free market over sense or, indeed, reason (and perhaps survival) itself. What he has forgotten is science. Fact, the handmaiden of science, lies trampled in the dust as well. And so does health, yours, mine and the planet’s.
In fact, although unbridled free market economics is the central chord of the libertarian song, the chorus is “As long as your freedom does not hurt me”. And therein lies the rub: Genetically Modified ANYTHING hurts me, and you, and every sufferer of Morgellon’s Disease and every biological function of the earth. But, at least until recently, it certainly has been good business!
But since when is damaging the biosphere not hurting me?
Since when is modifying bacteria which take up residence in our soil and in my gut with potentially lethal long and short term consequences, not harming me?
Since when is creating corn which ensures permanent male sterility and mixing it, unlabeled, into my food, not harming me?
Since when is altering crops to produce so much of a natural pesticide that farmers and their families die from the allergic reaction they experience to breathing the crop’s pollen not harming me?
Since when is introducing “food” into my body, without my consent, which increases allergic reactions, including deadly ones, by 50% not harming me?
Since when is modifying fish so that they are larger, more aggressive and breed earlier in their life cycle so that they will replace native, unmodified fish in the wild, leaving me no choice to eat non GM FrankenFish (because they have been made extinct) not harming me?
Since when is inserting unstable genes into my food which then, undigested by a gut not prepared by long acquaintance to digest them, wander around my body and insert themselves in unpredictable locations in my genes and those of a baby I am carrying if I am pregnant not harming me?
Since when is creating materials which infect and infest me with pseudo life forms bringing a new plague upon the earth, the horrifying and disfiguring Morgellon’s Disease, not harming me?
Since when is creating foods whose wandering genes turn on, or off, my own genes in a totally unpredictable way leading to disruption of the orderly process of genetic control in my body not harming me?
Since when is introducing genetic material which, in the random context of where it happens to land this time in this or that cell, produces proteins never before made inside of any living body (or, perhaps, outside of one, either) without my explicit permission not harming me?
Since when is lowering fetal survival rates though the food the pregnant woman eats during pregnancy, or ate during her own child hood, perhaps, not harming me?
Since when is introducing food into my children’s diet which, in laboratory studies, has been shown to cause damage to the gut, the kidneys, the immune system and the survivability of the young not harming me?
Since when is creating super weeds through genetic drift not harming me?
Since when is creating bugs which, in response to super pesticide production in genetically modified crops, have become resistant to pesticides and capable of new crop devastation without available control not harming me?
Since when is invading farms where non GM crops are growing and destroying their millennia-old genetic material (which I have the enzymatic capacity to digest) not harming me?
Since when is providing food which contains enzymes which confer tolerance for deadly pesticides to a genetically modified plant, but which, in my gut, may transform to produce the same deadly pesticide (a known cause of cancer, infertility and other highly dangerous conditions) they were altered to tolerate not harming me?
Who asked my permission to introduce these things into my body and my world. I would remind Mr. Howley that it is, indeed my world, as well as the world of his commerical free market buddies.
I do not recall signing an informed consent to be a trial subject for the greatest (and possibly most deadly) experiment in human history. Interestingly, I also do not recall signing a contract to allow the degradation and dangerous contamination of 75-80% of every bit of food that I eat with Genetically Modified ingredients. Do you recall signing those documents? So the libertarian chorus, “As long as it does not harm me” seems a little flat in this particular song. Dead flat.
When then-President George H. W. Bush declared that GMOs were equivalent to non GM food and determined public policy, do you recall any safety testing used to guide that decision? Neither do I. When the FDA permits GM foods on the market – that means in your body and mine – without ANY safety testing or a review of the internal safety assessment of the companies that have patented these foods, do they ask us to concur with their decision to allow GMOs in our food which are either under moratorium or banned in a large part of the world, developed or not? But here, in what is alleged to be the most developed nation in the world (with little to back that up in the health and food safety areas!), we are subjected to “foods” and crops and animals which are simultaneously declared to be exactly the same as unmodified foods yet sufficiently unique to patent. And those products of innovation and free market success are, according to the FDA’s website, to be judged in their safety and product liability through the sorting out process of the Court system.
Of course, without traceability there can be no liability. Without labeling there can be no traceability. Thanks for nothing.
So where is the free market, libertarian ethic here? What it comes down to in Mr. Howley’s underlying, structural view is that if you can get away with selling it, not only must that be a good thing to do (“free market”), but hey, “caveat emptor”, let the buyer beware – if they can get away with selling the stuff, they sell it, so it must be good. Of course, the ever-industry-friendly FDA and USDA tie the buyer’s hands and blindfold their eyes by making sure that the consumer has no knowledge whatsoever of what foods do and do not contain GM ingredients. They actually specifically prohibit such labeling because they know full well that consumers will shun the contaminated, altered and potentially very dangerous products which their industry friends have created if they know what they are eating or buying.
Full Free Market Speed ahead and Damn the Facts
GM food crops which have been modified for pesticide tolerance lead to more, not less, pesticide use. Since they are proffered by the maker of the very pesticide they tolerate so well, farmers are encouraged to use more and the free market gets another boost while the food supply, both the consumer’s and the farmer’s health and the environment all take substantial hits.
I attended a meeting in Africa at which Sylvia Matsebo, then Minister of Health of Zambia, was present and we had a chance to talk. I do not know when I have met a more clear sighted and dedicated woman in public life, unless it was the Minister of Health of Kenya, also present at that meeting. When President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia rejected GM food for his people, as referenced by the article below, I cannot but believe that Ms. Matsebo was at the head of his advisers, telling him what was good for his people, not for his pockets. Would that our advisers and our leaders had the courage and wisdom on this issue of President Mwanawasa!
In 2004, author Robert Paarlberg noted, “Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.” Today the situation is worse with more products and more percentages of crops grown in the US and elsewhere modified to the point that the supply of GM ingredients to manufacture organic foods is not in jeopardy. For Natural Solutions Foundation concerns, see above.
Reason rests its comfort level with this technology on the assertion that Mr. Paarlberg makes that there are no studies showing the danger of GM foods. That is as patently false as the statement made to me, personally, in a meeting on June 9, 2005, by Dr. Edward Scarborough, the US Codex Contact Point, that there is simply no literature showing the impact of nutrients on health. I sent him, in response, a bibliography containing references to 10s of thousands of peer reviewed articles and books showing the impact of nutrients on health, a good part of them sponsored by grants, or conducted directly by, the US Government. He never responded, of course. My letter, and that bibliography, were published through our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and the bibliography was referenced in our Citizens Petition to the FDA to compel them to cease their illegal “HARMonization” of US dietary supplements to Codex standards. You can join this legal challenge to US Supplement Codex policy here (https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=184).
Mr. Paarlberg exudes joy over the fact that plants modified to make their own pesticides do so at levels up to 10,000 time the amount made by the organism that manufactures it in nature. It is quite effective at the lower level in nature but at these enormous concentrations not only do insects, both crop pests and beneficial ones, die, but the impact on our bodies when we eat the food from the crops – or wear the clothing made from these fibers – modified in this way, is completely unknown. What is know is that the pollen can cause pneumonia and kill people exposed to it as happened in the Phillipines during cotton pollination time.
What is also missing from this enthusiastic recounting of the wonders of this technology is the 22,000 farmers who have killed themselves in the State of Gujerat (India) in their final grim protest against what this crop has done to them – driven them off the land because they cannot afford to pay the intellectual property tax added to the cost of the seed after they were given the seed free for the first year, destroyed their cultures and devastated their families. Somehow that does not count in the economium of free market thinking.
Happily publishing Mr. Paalberg’s unsubstantiated (and inaccurate) assessment that there is no damage to the environment, in the face of well-documented information to the contrary, and blithly accepting the premise that “gene flow”, aka “contamination” is no different from natural crop cross pollination (which does not require the payment of taxes to the “owner” of the natural gene), and the prohibitions against saving seed because of intellectual property rights which accrue to the owner of the patented genes), Reason has lost its reason.
On the issue of organic farming, things get even weirder. Instead of using vermicluture (adding worms to soil) and returning nutrients and soil organisms (or adding them for the first time) through natural means such as composting (every village produces waste: using it properly returns nutrients to the soil – see the Songhai videos here (http://www.youtube.com/naturalsolutions) – the answer of this industrial agriculturalist and Reason seems to be using synthetic fertilizers which deplete the soil more and more with each growing cycle, leading to green, but non nutritive plants. Both Mr. Howley and Mr. Paarlberg seem to have forgotten, or have never known, that organic agriculture replenishes and enriches the soil as a basic technique of food production, rather than wresting contaminated and demineralized plants from an increasingly devitalized soil. Their intentions may be good, but their information, and hence their conclusions, make no biological sense whatsoever. True, they make free market sense. That’s the problem, as I see it.
However, despite his frustration with the lack of penetration of GMOs in Africa, Mr. Paalberg genially recounts that he sees hope on the horizon “Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the [GMO] drought-tolerant maize project.” Mr. Paalberg may find hope in that. I find it depressing and frightening in light of the aptly named “Doomsday Vault” in which native seeds are being stored by the hundreds of millions in the frozen wastes of Norway above the arctic circle in the bowels of a hollowed-out mountain. The Doomsday Vault was sponsored, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same people who brought nearly universal vaccination to the children of Africa.
If you are a believer in the wonders of vaccination, that is a generous and humanitarian project. If you are familiar, however, with the literature, not just the propaganda, on vaccination and the impact it has on human populations (autism, cancer, immune collapse, heavy metal poisoning, auto immune disease, etc.), then this “generosity” becomes a cause for concern. The concern is, in my mind, equal to the concern on learning that Mr. and Mrs. Gates have chosen yet another way to forward the biological nightmare of genetically modified foods in yet another vulnerable population.
The Natural Solutions Foundation will attend the 2008 Codex Committee on Food Labeling (April, Ottawa) where the African nations will deal, once again, with the US attempt to push unlabeled GM foods on them through both product and seeds. We will be actively engaged in supporting their leadership to prevent this effort from succeeding. In February, at a meeting on this issue in Accra, the African nations created a de facto coalition which elicited the support of Norway, Russia, Japan, the EU and Switzerland. They, unlike the free market folks, understand that governments have a role to play in protecting the health of their people from corporate desires to expand markets.
Please support the efforts of the Natural Solutions Foundation to educate and disseminate information on these crucial issues.
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Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
Demon Seed
How fear of life-saving technology swept through Africa
Kerry Howley | March 28, 2008
In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,†President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.â€
The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.â€
Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.
reason: Was there a particular experience with African farmers that led you to write this book?
Robert Paarlberg: Partly it was the strong impression made on me by my own visits to rural Africa, working with African organizations, working with USAID, working with International Food Policy Research Institute. I started visiting small farms in Africa 15 years ago. I’d seen a lot of poor farmers in Asia and Latin America but absolutely nothing like this. There was simply no uptake of any modern productivity-enhancing technologies at all in some cases. And I wondered why I hadn’t been aware of this. And then, when I saw more and more narrative in the NGO community and the donor community that was frankly hostile to science, I thought “I have to put this down and write a book for younger people in the donor community who may not remember the importance of technology uptake in Asian agriculture 40 years ago.â€
reason: You suggest that your understanding of modern ideas about food production arises from interactions with your students. What is it that they want?
Paarlberg: My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.
reason: Can you give an example of a genetically modified seed or organism, something in use today?
Paarlberg: Bt crops have been engineered to contain a gene from a naturally occurring soil bacterium that expresses a certain protein that cannot be digested by caterpillars. Mammals can digest the protein with absolutely no problem, but caterpillars cannot. When the caterpillars eat the plant, they die.
What’s wonderful about this is that it’s so precisely targeted at the insects eating the plant. The other insects in the field aren’t affected. Using conventional corn instead of Bt corn, you have to spray the whole field and you end up killing a lot of non-targeted species. With this variety, you don’t have to spray.
reason: That sounds less scary than “Genetically Modified Organism.â€
Paarlberg: The book makes the argument that the overregulation of this technology in Europe and the anxieties felt about it in the United States are not so much a reflection of risks, because there aren’t any documented risks from any GM crops on the market. I explain that reaction through the absence of direct benefit. The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders. Consumers don’t get a direct benefit at all, so it doesn’t cost them anything to drive it off the market with regulations. The problem comes when the regulatory systems created in rich countries are then exported to regions like Africa, where two thirds of the people are farmers, and where they would be the direct beneficiaries.
reason: How pervasive are genetically modified foods in the U.S.?
Paarlberg: Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.
reason: Are there documented safety risks that merit caution?
Paarlberg: There aren’t any. It’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash.
reason: What about environmental risks? Don’t GM crops affect surrounding plantlife?
Paarlberg: The only impacts they have different from conventional crops are beneficial to the environment. They allow you to control weeds and insects with fewer sprayings of toxic chemicals. And they don’t require as many trips through the field with your diesel tractor, so you burn less fossil fuel. And there is more carbon sequestered because you’re not tilling the soil the way you otherwise would.
There are environmental impacts; there is gene flow. The pollen from a genetically modified maize plant will flow into a neighboring field and will fertilize the crops in that neighboring field. Some of the seeds, as a consequence, will contain the transgene, but that’s no different from pollen from a conventional maize plant flowing into the next field. It’s only if you decide arbitrarily to define gene flow from genetically modified crops as “contamination†and flow from all other crops as natural. Only then does it start to become describable as an adverse effect.
The worst environmental damage ever done by American agricultural was the dustbowl of the 1930s, when we plowed up the southern plains to grow wheat, and all the topsoil blew away. The way we increased production back then was to expand crop area, which was environmentally disastrous. It was a calamity. That was the way we tried to increase production before we had high yielding crops, before we had high yielding wheat varieties, before we had hybrid maize, before we learned to increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation.
reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?
Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.
reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.
Paarlberg: Everywhere!
reason: Right, everywhere. But Asia has moved on in recent memory. The Green Revolution introduced new biological breakthroughs to Asian agriculture to the point where no one today thinks of South Korea as a rural backwater. Why was Africa not a part of this?
Paarlberg: One reason is that Africa is not easily irrigated. The big irrigated crops like rice aren’t to be found in Africa and the big investments in the Green Revolution went into improving Asian crops like rice. The crops Africans grow weren’t the crops that were being improved during the green revolution.
But I don’t blame it all on the Asia-focus of the original green revolution; we have had plenty of time to invest in scientific research for Africa’s crops, and to make investments in rural public goods like roads or power to make it affordable for African farmers to purchase fertilizer. But African governments have not done that job. In my book I show that typically African governments will spend less than 5 percent of their budget on agriculture even though that’s where two thirds of their citizens work. And if you don’t have larger public sector investments than that, there is just not going to be any uptake in the countryside. But then I go around and show that you can’t blame African governments, entirely, because prosperous donor countries are no longer supporting agriculture in Africa.
reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character†for the same governments.
Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.
It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.
reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.
Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.
reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?
Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.
In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.
reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?
Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.
reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.
Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.â€
So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.
I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.
reason: But there are functioning organic farms. If I decide to buy only organic food from Africa, what will I be buying?
Paarlberg: It wouldn’t be grown by small fair-trade-type poor farmers. It would be grown through a vertically integrated, probably European, company that would bring in the machinery, bring in the seeds, bring in the fertilizers, set up a production system that would more nearly resemble a colonial-era plantation than a small independent African farm.
reason: We’ve seen similar resistance to GMOs in India and Brazil, both of which now have legalized the use of genetically modified crops. What happened?
Paarlberg: Farmers were planting them illicitly before the final approval—that’s one reason they were forced into the approval. The technology worked so well that farmers were planting them on their own and you couldn’t criminalize all Brazilian soybean growers so you had to approve them. Similarly in India, Bt cotton spread on its own and performed so well that the government was eventually shamed into approving it.
reason: You aren’t just calling for people to get out of the way. You want increased aid for agricultural research. But why would any of this require aid? If it’s going to prove profitable, shouldn’t the incentive for private investment be there?
Paarlberg: The farmers who need the technology in Africa don’t have enough purchasing power to be of interest to private companies. Or they’re growing crops that aren’t a part of a commercial seed market that would interest private seed companies. The only way to reach them, really, is to consider the crops that they grow, for example tropical white maize or cassava. It’s a little bit like the orphan disease problem. It’s really something that has to be done as a public good by the public sector.
That’s how the green revolution proceeded in India in the 1960s. It was a wonderful success, and it wasn’t really driven by the private sector. It was driven by philanthropic foundations and public investment. Also you need not just seed improvement, but more rural farm-to-market roads, electrification, and things that really governments and only governments are incentivized and capable of doing.
There was a time, before scare stories about technology spread, when the concern was a much more legitimate one: that we’ve handed this technology over to private companies to develop, and they won’t have any incentive to get it to Africa. And to some extent that’s still a legitimate concern. There was never any fear that Brazilian farmers or Canadian farmers wouldn’t be able to get the technology, because they’re big commercial growers. The concern was originally that Africans would want the technology but wouldn’t be able to get it because they didn’t have the purchasing power or the investment climate that could attract private companies.
reason: The book is 200 pages of frustration. Are there any glimmers of hope ahead?
Paarlberg: Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the drought-tolerant maize project that I describe in chapter 5 of my book. I’m very pleased that the Gates Foundation has seen the opportunity that this new technology provides. It would be too bad if drought tolerant corn were being grown in Iowa in 2010 and not available to the farmer who really needed it in Africa.
Drought in Africa pushes small farmers back into poverty whenever it strikes. They have to sell off all their household possessions to buy the food their families need until the next season. It blocks the escape from poverty that they might otherwise achieve. Anything that puts a safety net under crop yields is going to protect small African farmers from that periodic decapitalization and let them start accumulating assets for a change.
Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.