[Scpg] A bit more background on the APHIS action

[steven sprinkel]

written in January for ACRES,USA




T R A N S I T I O N S






March  2004







On the agricultural biotechnology front, the past year has been filled with
truths suddenly revealed which many GMO opponents sensed would be eventually
borne out. Many facts are emerging that justify our long-held antipathy to a
technology that is superfluous and loaded with risk. Whether or not the
information is shared publicly depends somewhat on our own demand for it.

Organic farmers and consumers were not much concerned about the advent of
"superweeds" brought on by the abusive quantity of Roundup herbicide raining
down on 80 million acres world-wide. Organic farmers don't deal with weeds
that way, so many thought herbicide resistance was somebody else's problem.
Weeds resistant to glyphosate ( Roundup's active ingredient, now offered
under half a dozen labels other than Monsanto's) had been forecast as early
as 1995 by some freethinking agriculturalists. I observed modified soybean
fields with tall red amaranth surviving  the weed-killer in 1999-and the
farmer I was with thought the beans may have been sprayed twice!

Now the wide dispersal of weeds resistant to glyphosate is documented fact,
not theory, and farmers and chemical suppliers are pressed to devise
alternative tank mix formulations and strategies. Of course, the salient
concern about superweeds is that GMO agriculture would lead us to use even
more chemicals, not less, as the industry even continues to promise to this
day. So organic farms neighboring the Roundup-Ready fields are exposed to
even greater contamination.

Another development which we thought deserved greater attention covered the
disinclination of livestock to consume genetically modified crops, and the
negative side affects-even death- from consuming GMO feeds. Isolated
livestock stories keep surfacing around the world. But the potential
connection to a real public health concern is rarely made. Causal evidence
linking human consumption of GMOs and any number of novel semi-epidemic
diseases is barely broached professionally, but general suspicion grows
within a mistrustful consumer sector. In Woelfersheim, Germany, a dairy
cattle herd recently died after eating a diet limited to GMO corn ( Syngenta
's Bt 176) and that news was given major emphasis in many countries. When
anyone complains about anti-US bias towards GMO crops in Europe, we need to
remind people that Syngenta is a Euro-based concern.

If for a moment we could pretend to be unbiased, answer this question: Why
are there so many independent authors publishing books condemning GMO
agriculture and so few praising it? The latest effort, and one of the best
released in 2003 is Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government
Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating  by
Jeffrey M. Smith.

Beyond modest consumer polls about food preferences, one way to quantify
consumer disaffection with GMOs is the rocketing demand for organics,
specifically measured by the intermittent scarcity of various organic foods
( apparently we are all out of organic safflower oil) and high prices of
organic products though organic farm acreage has doubled in the past decade.

Yet activist energy levels are down and goals, at least in the US, are
vague. Nonetheless, the urgency of the matter should remain obvious. The
wrong people with selfish motives are mishandling life in the form of DNA.
Such being noted, we do have some bright news as well, to hopefully spur us
on over the next rise.

Now a golden opportunity arises for us to change the direction GMO
agriculture is taking us, and the effort will put the issue back on the
front page, at least for the moment. USDA's Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service (APHIS) seeks public comment on regulations governing
genetically modified organisms. Please take note of this action, study it
and respond. Please refer to the accompanying box.

Frankly we are amazed that APHIS asks our opinion with regard to the
environmental consequences of planting GMOs and the interstate shipment of
them. For years, many observers openly questioned with some cynicism the
wariness of the APHIS watchdog as the environment was polluted intentionally
with artificial organisms.  Wild organisms that damage agriculture, like the
glassy-winged sharpshooter ( a multi-million dollar control and prevention
effort in the Southwest) are acts of nature we can rarely predict.
Preventable GMOs provoke immense losses in crop value, contaminate the
environment and are a drain on our GNP because of unnecessary litigation
like the Percy Schmeiser case in Canada, as well as all the testing,
segregation and documentation. And we do mean to imply that your tax dollars
are working over time on this one. The unauthorized emergency federal
spending on biotech errors has to be immense.  Biotech Ag is a cheaper way
to farm? Amish horse plow farmers beat this system any day.

APHIS is supposed to protect agriculture from unwanted organisms like
imported weeds, insects, and plant diseases. Recently they have been very
busy with the BSE (mad cow) situation in Washington State. Now the agency
asks if it should broaden its regulatory scope beyond genetically engineered
organisms that may pose a plant pest risk to include genetically engineered
plants that may pose a noxious weed risk and genetically engineered
organisms that may be used as biological control agents. Do regulatory
requirements for these organisms need to be established? What environmental
considerations should influence this change in regulatory scope?

Look at those sentences. USDA wants to know if environmental considerations
should be used when regulating this technology? I think I'll take the
afternoon off to read and study the whole measure: it's only 1800 words in
length, and located on the web at:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2004_register&doci
d=fr23ja04-11

This is a call for Public Comment. We suggest that important changes within
USDA's regulatory framework might be possible if enough respondents make an
effort. Ample public comment against the proliferation of GMOs would help
redefine USDA policy, shift the thinking of authorities and give traction to
this subject for the news media and thereby engender broader discussion. We
are not supposing that numbers approaching the 275,000 respondents to the
1997 USDA organic proposed rule are possible, however fifty thousand is a
doable goal and we are aiming at it.

While reviewing the proposal you will note that the agency suggests that
there might be more oversight and it also proposes to lessen restrictions on
some aspects of transport. APHIS suggests that they are considering relaxing
regulatory requirements in some areas, and they also ask if there should be
an exemption for low contamination levels, i.e., seeds of GMO crops that are
intermingled with non-GMO. One also should ask, is the biotech industry
behind the proposal? Because restrictions may be relaxed as a result.
Therefore, utilizing this opportunity to redirect the federal government is
important to the over-all effort to maintain purity in the seed supply and
food system. We are also sure that the biotech industry will leap at the
opportunity to comment as well. We need to counter them.

We are not certain if another development dovetails rather coincidentally
with the APHIS measure, but large numbers responding to APHIS will hearten
members of the organic community in Europe who are members of IFOAM. The
International Federation of Organic Farming Movements (IFOAM) is calling for
the European Union to set specific standards for the protection of organic
foods and farming and non-GMO foods and farming against GMOs. They seek a
European Action Plan for Organic Farming, which will correctly identify the
promise and potential of organic farming and not merely measure its modest
capacity at present.  IFOAM has created a new division operating in
Brussels, which proposes to work closely with the unified European
government because " general co-existence measures have to be implemented to
prevent organic agriculture from GMO-contamination. GMOs and GMO
contamination is strictly unwanted in organic farming. The Commission and
Member States must protect the freedom of choice of  both consumers and
farmers (not just organic), make owners of the GMOs  fully responsible for
their crops and for preventing spreading of their GMOs, and build up a
strict liability system. For seeds, threshold levels must be set at the
lowest detectable level (0.1%).






We own the facts required to be heard better, but search for a persuasive
platform to launch from. Intuition guided the movement for years, over a
decade or more, while institutional proof was awaited. The anti-GMO movement
was founded on the idea that something like releasing artificial genetics
into the food supply and the environment was conceptually bankrupt and the
call for caution needed little explanation. The basic research required to
command the attention of policy makers is coming out, but will those with
authority act? Shooting the messenger seems to be the result instead.

Three of the scientists responsible for first refuting some of the unfounded
claims of biotech non-science met in Berkeley, California at a symposium.
Mark Dowie reported on the meeting in the
Sunday, January 11, 2004 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

We have covered the stories of  Drs. Arpad Pusztai , John Losey, and Ignacio
Chapela here previously. Losey lead the 1999-2000 research on monarch
butterfly mortality when their larvae consumed pollen from Bt corn. Arpad
Pusztai raised alarm a few years earlier when laboratory animals developed
immune-system deficiencies after consuming genetically modified potatoes and
Chapela first drew attention to the contamination of Mexico's corn by the
illegal production of GMO crops there. Pusztai ( Rowett Institute in the
United Kingdom and Chapela ( University of California) have lost their jobs.
The Pusztai case reads more like a spy novel, with burglaries and theft of
his research documents.  Losey is still at Cornell but his curiosity in this
field may have been tempered by the heat of the attacks leveled at him by
Monsanto ( and amplified by the members of the mainstream press as if they
were lobbyists for GMO agriculture). Chapela's story is the most recent,
perhaps the most compelling argument for restraint. Mexico does not allow
the production of GMO corn, but literally no supervision was provided by
authorities, no education promoted by the manufacturer, and ineffective
government investigation of the probably irreversible genetic contamination
even after Dr.Chapela's original findings were corroborated by another
researcher.

If the pro-GMO crowd and its government defenders are so emphatic about
science-based decision making, why is some knowledge stifled, stolen and
unjustly vilified, while positive research results that have been literally
purchased by corporations are instead held up as the truth? Sierra Club
Biotech Committee member Neil Carman suggests, that the plight of these
scientists reveals " how modern academic and research institutions today are
corrupted by corporate funding; all four have faced a firestorm of
industry-catalyzed attacks."

GMO proponents enjoy an unfair advantage with the institutional press. In
this age, the longest, loudest howl seems to be confused with the sound of
certainty. Corporations have by far the loudest message heard because they
buy their way in. Substantively probing questions about the safety of GMO
foods are rarely posed, probably because the press is unfamiliar with the
scientific territory.

But better news still rises up, authored by Andrew Pollack in the New York
Times.  Right on the heels of the APHIS public comment request, another
federal agency seems to have offered the most convincing evidence of all
that new rules for GMOs need to be in place. Maybe they should get together
and compare notes. The National Research Council of the National Academy of
Sciences January, 2004 study deals with 'bioconfinement', and dwells
predominately on insufficient control measures put in place by industry to
maintain the purity of wild species-specifically wild salmon, threatened by
farmed varieties which are known to have escaped their pens in the past.
Three days after the Academy report was released, the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting aired a report saying that over 80% of all salmon consumed in
the US are the farmed variety, so the numbers of confined salmon seem much
greater than most of us realize. However, the Academy report concerns all
forms of bio-engineered organisms, including those producing pharmaceutical
products and GMO food crops. These various events are coinciding with a
serendipity we should not fail to notice and act on.



----- Original Message -----
From: <seedmind at usa.net>
To: <ccpg at arashi.com>; <scpg at arashi.com>
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 3:46 PM
Subject: [Scpg] Earth Jobs Encampment begins


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>
>
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