Ive been reading a lot about GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in preparation for the debate I am moderating Thursday evening between Virginia farmer Joel Salatin and holistic physician Joseph Mercola in Atlanta.
The debate, a fund-raiser for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, assumes everyone is against GMO ingredients in food. It is focused on the best means of informing consumers about the presence of GMO ingredients. Mercola will be arguing for government-mandated ingredients listing, and Salatin for a hands-off market-based approach.
One of the things I have learned about the GMO issue is that the matter of identifying genetically altered ingredients continues to simmer around the country, even though Californians famously rejected Proposition 37 last fall–in the face of stiff corporate opposition–which would have required companies to identify GMO ingredients in their products.
Laws requiring labeling, or prohibiting GMO food, have been introduced in nearly half of all states. At least two, Maine and Connecticut, have actually passed laws, though their implementation is based on neighboring states passing similar laws.
Washington state residents vote today on Initiative 522, which also requires labeling of GMO ingredients.
Whats intriguing about this bubbling up of concern about GMO foods is that it is happening at the state rather than the federal level. Indeed, the feds have avoided the issue, ever since Barack Obama in his 2007 campaign for President, famously declared, Well let folks know if their food has been genetically modified, because Americans should know what they are buying. Guess that was before he met the corporate bigwigs who run things.
The more localized push on behalf of GMOs is similar to what is happening for raw milk. We have seen in a number of states that have sought, in response to federal pressure, to limit small-farm freedom to sell raw milk–including California, South Dakota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, and Vermont, among others–communities unite in protest against the state initiatives.
As acrimonious as some of these struggles become, Id say they are positive for one huge reason–they help unite communities in a common cause on behalf of good wholesome food. In the process, people become educated about the joint corporate-federal partnership designed to promote cheap processed, sanitized, genetically altered food.
Its a difficult fight, against tough odds. By some estimates, 80% of all the ingredients in processed foods already are GMO. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) gives the federal government, and its Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a potential stranglehold on regulation of farms and other food producers, large and small, beginning next year.
But communities have tremendous power, once they are willing to assert it.
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Lastly, on the debate: There will be a Q&A period following the debate. Readers here are invited to submit questions about GMO labeling, via the comments section, and I’ll be try to use as many as possible.
The Joe vs Joel debate is sold out, but will be live-streamed via the FTCLDF, by registering here–cost is $19.95, as part of the fundraiser.)
I think the main question that I would ask of these two is….what should we do about the GMO issue & what approach would be most beneficial with the GMO question…do we lobby to get the ingredients out of the foods (there-by eliminating the need for labeling), do we lobby for a major change in farming practice by eliminating the planting of GMO seeds (there-by eliminating the GMO ingredient from even getting into the foods & again, eliminating the need for labeling) or do we lobby the government to make these companies libel & responsible for the devastating affects that these GMO ingredient have & will continue to cause? I so wish that I could be there in person for the debate, but thankfully I can stream it Thursday night!! We will be looking forward to you summary of the event!
This negative fight should be carried on by whatever means necessary, including trying to force state governments against their will to lift the curtain of secrecy over where these things have been hidden in our food. (Not that it’s difficult to learn where GMOs are – anything non-organic with processed corn, soy, canola, cottonseed, sugar unless it says “100% cane”; meat, dairy, eggs which are neither pastured nor organic, covers the vast majority of it. But anything which simplifies the food education process is a good thing, and anyway transparency is a basic democratic right.)
So people shouldn’t see this as “government interference”. The government has already interfered to an extreme extent. GMOs exist at all only as the product of an agricultural planned economy dedicated to aggrandizing them. Ballot initiatives and other grassroots movements for labeling are trying to take one aspect of the government’s existing wicked policy and make it better for the people.
But if Mercola’s arguing for giving the FDA power over it (which is what any central government labeling policy would mean), that’s the worst possible outcome. This part of the grassroots food movement is something worth building for its own sake, and it’s the only thing which can get real labeling state by state, instead of a sham FDA policy whose only real teeth would be to preempt state policy. The real goal of preemption is to gut stronger lower-level measures and smother grassroots democracy itself.
Here’s my essay on preemption.
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/gmo-labeling-and-preemption-strategy-notes-2-of-6/
But labeling itself is no panacea and will not be sufficient. Both economically and in terms of the contamination of crops and wild progenitors of crops, GMOs are totalitarian, and humanity cannot co-exist with them. The real goal has to be their total abolition.
One way I’ve tried to understand the GMO issue more is by asking our farmers who use GMOs what they think about them. Our alfalfa farmer farms about 2000 acres. He grows certifed organic alfalfa, commerical alfalfa, and commercial GMO alfalfa. (We buy the organic.)
I asked him to tell me more about why he grows what he grows. He said that first, he’d love to grow all organic, but…organic requires that he grow on his very best soil. Organic crops must be strong and healthy enough to outrun the weeds and resist the bugs. Most of his farm land is not high enough quality to grow organic. He is working on soil building, but it is a labor-intensive process for one farmer to accomplish on 2000 acres.
He said that synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides allow farmers to “cheat” and make lower-quality land productive.
He also said that given his choice between GMO and non-GMO alfalfa, he chooses the GMO variety. This is because the non-GMO variety is not resistant to Roundup. For weed supression on non-Roundup-resistant alfalfa, he has to use other types of herbicides which are much, much more toxic and dangerous to him personally. He said: “I know folks don’t like Roundup, but that’s because they haven’t met the alternatives. I can buy Roundup at the hardware store. The other herbicide options are much more dangerous. I have to suit up, wear a mask, and often obtain a special permit and put out notices prior to using them.”
So in his opinion, if you can’t grow organic, GMO alfalfa is the lesser evil.
Don’t get me wrong. I detest GMOs. I would like to seem them eliminated from the planet. However, I appreciated our farmers candid assessment of the situation.
My solution: More farmers farming smaller plots of land with diversified crops. GMOs are a solution to reduce labor and increase yield for large scale farms. No, one farmer likely cannot achieve the soil building required to organically farm a 2000 acre mono-crop. But 40 farmers on 50 acres each probably can develop their soil and produce many more calories per acre.
If you have the time and inclination, I’d love to hear Mr. Salatin expound on his comment that is presented here as the core stance and fundamental reasons for the debate.
To quote: “Mercola will be arguing for government-mandated ingredients listing, and Salatin for a hands-off market-based approach” when you don’t even know and can’t find out what you are buying?
My question: How can you espouse a hands off approach that would literally prevent you from actually knowing what is in your food, and when you don’t know (and it’s not even legal for you to find out) exactly what you are buying? That doesn’t sound like a free market to me.
Mr. Salatin’s own food at home for his family, is very likely safer than that of the vast majority of Americans who buy mostly commercial distributed corporate foods. He grows his own stuff, and has a much higher lever of information on what he eats than is possible for the rest of us.
I suspect his perspective is based on his business profits and financial status, that could be affected by regulation and potential costs of running his own business. But how does that make lack of regulation desirable for the rest us who are truly interested in food safety above all, and would prefer to be informed in our purchasing decisions and choices?
Our last 3-4 generations and political leaders have gyrated away from hiring local people to do the work and towards instead cutting costs by buying petroleum based machines (mostly made in China) that do that work instead. Ask me why I don’t bother to vote anymore other than with my wallet, as empty as it has become lately we still eat very well and skip the fancy modern cheap brightly colored crap with too many ingredients that I can’t even pronounce never mind know what they are under ambiguous assumed industry names. So go ahead call me a cynic but don’t give up hope. Yet.
Get some sun and give some smiles, it only costs pennies more.
On a brighter note. A great point is made by a recent “raw milk earth shaker” and 13 page article published by Ton Baars PhD titled “Milk Consumption, Raw and General, in the Discussion on Health or Harzard” is simply brilliant.
The point is this:
“When ever a single person is made ill there is always enough scientific will to conclude the cause of the origins of the illness and to place specific blame….but it is not true of the inverse when one person gets well.” Those are my words…but capture the concept so well written in Dr. Baars. His work is a must read and is a peer reviewed and published article just published this year. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ton_Baars/publications/
I could not stop reading it. I have it in PDF if any one wants it. Just email I will send.
It is my new bible and references all of the EU raw milk studies and draws down on the regulatory establishment to improve raw milk safety,….becuase raw milk it is not going away and it has great health benefits not available from cooked processed milk.
Meanwhile even the USDA admits that GM alfalfa will inevitably contaminate all organic and non-GM alfalfa. Indeed, some organic cattle-raisers and dairymen who rely on non-GM alfalfa suspect that one of the goals of RR alfalfa commercialization was to render organic meat and dairy untenable unless GMOs could be allowed under the “certified organic” umbrella. That, of course, has always been one of the USDA’s dreams. It would’ve been the case from the start if massive consumer outrage hadn’t prevented it back in the 90s.
The way that quote frames the debate is a fine example of why “formal debates” are so fraudulent. They intentionally set up fraudulent either-ors, and either or both participants agree to argue in a way which is fraudulent from the point of view of the real world and common-sense morality. That’s why aspiring lawyers love being on the forensics squad so much. Salatin used to love that too.
In this case the framing seems to be intentionally set up to obscure the best option, grassroots labeling drives and enactment, in favor of two bad options, the status quo or federal preemption (basically also the status quo).
But when millions are being made ill it has to be covered up, and so it is, by the government, the corporate media, the “scientific” and “medical” establishment, ad hoc “food safety” outfits like Barfblog, etc.
I’m reminded of what Stalin said: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
He was talking about his own version of Big Ag, basically the same as ours.
From the onset I refused to use glyphosate due to its wide spectrum of toxicity and this was in the days when they were trying to tell us that it was biodegradable and safe. I have not planted any GM crops including Alfalfa and I also refuse to use bacterial inoculants on the seed that I plant. You need to be careful however to avoid pre-coated seed because the inoculant is imbedded in the coating.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GMMINA.php
In conclusion, GM microbes have begun to be ubiquitous invaders of the North America ecosystem. This massive invasion took place with little or no public awareness and input, and with very little monitoring of the impact of the invasion. The environmental risk assessments of the commercial microbes were rudimentary and frequently erroneous. We may have a bio-weapons equivalent of a time bomb on our hands.
Ken
http://www.naturalnews.com/042805_GMO_labeling_initiative_I-522_guerilla_warfare.html
Evidently this is the root of the problem: Ignorance and deception.
http://foodbabe.com/2013/02/12/how-food-companies-exploit-americans-with-ingredients-banned-in-other-countries/
That is indeed the necessary attitude, since this is a war. (Monsanto is insisting.) But to muster the necessary soldier attitude, labeling can’t be the goal. This has to be a full-blooded abolition movement.
As an abolitionist I’m currently supporting state-level labeling because transparency is a democratic right and because this is the main form of GMO activism right now in the US. But I see the labeling goal as insufficient in itself, only a step toward abolition, and the struggle for it as primarily an opportunity for education, propagating the abolition idea, and forming permanent grassroots organizations dedicated to abolition.
[quote]: “I recently talked to a small food producer who said the cost of labeling his products was a major hindrance to introducing new items into his food line. Each label press run, with setup charges and bulk purchase requirements was a cool ten grand. Ouch.
Will the high cost of mandated labeling end up benefiting Big Agribusiness and putting the little guy under?”
[end quote]
Taken from this link: http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/joel-salatin-debates-joseph-mercola-on-gmos-thurs-nov-7-live-and-online/#more-35435
Said another way:
Kill one person…you are a murderer…..Kill several hundred thousand people and you are a conquerer.
2. What does it have to do with GMO labels? It’s talking about the cost of the packaging, not the difference between writing an “e” or an “E”. (Which is the only difference it would make to add a few letters like, “This product may contain GMOs”, which is all the label would be.)
3. It’s Big Ag who’s dependent on keeping this secret. It’s yet another government-imposed economic barrier against the community food sector, which would benefit from the enemy having to honestly label its inferior products.
I didn’t write the article so I’m not able to answer your questions, but I think there are pro’s and con’s to this issue, just as there are to any issue these days. Personally, I don’t trust labeling because there is no real truth in labeling anymore – and apparently (per the new WA State fiasco) that’s the way bigphood wants to keep it and they’ll pay a lot to do so. If these companies don’t want us to know what’s in something, they just give it a different name – so we can’t recognize it right away. Look at all the ways they can disguise sugar, for instance. And that’s just one ingredient.
And as far as I’m concerned the “debate” isn’t going to solve or prove anything in reality. But it’s a good gimmick to keep people focused.
Ken
Does that sound like I don’t trust anyone?! You’d be right in that assumption. Labeling doesn’t make me feel any better one way or the other. In this dog eat dog world we simply have to take our chances I guess.
But it seems that meat packers cannot, as the USDA only recently approved the first “non-GMO” labels.
Disclaimer: I have read most of Joel’s books and generally thing that he’s a good writer and overall on our side, but also regularly read lots of Mercola’s stuff and I’d say he’s been doing better things and taking the stance more in line with most of us here IMHO. We shell sea.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy but here it is:
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/11/a-libertarian-farmers-take-on-gmo-labels.html
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/bar-fight-booze-industry-furious-over-campaigns-saying-weed-safer-alcohol
This is similar to the claims that one is safer than the other, and actual statistics to back them up.
You choose.
Salatin reveals himself to be his own kind of smug, elitist, foodie lout. (Exactly the kind he criticizes in other cases.) His position boils down to, if you lack the time, money, and initial knowledge orientation to seek knowledge on your own, then you have no right to your information. At any rate, governments and corporations have a right to lie to you.
(As for his belligerence, that’s an old lawyerly trick he learned when he was on the debate team in school. I guess Mercola never did that before, if he let himself get flustered.)
If you think about it for a moment, Salatin’s position is strongly in favor of entrenched power and big government, while it’s up to the individual to pull himself by his own bootstraps against such a massive hostile environment. Obviously few will be able to do so on their own, which is why the people need to organize against governmental and corporate power. Part of this is forcing the corporate state to do things like label foods. All this is so obvious it’s hard to believe Salatin’s serious. But then in the past we’ve seen him try to misdirect attention away from corporations and government and toward piddling little NGOs.
(Let’s also keep in mind that Mr. Anti-Government Freedom Fighter happily avails himself of the big government privilege of making himself a corporation. If his rationale would be that “of course corporations shouldn’t exist, but in this current hostile framework we use what we can from the system toward our own better goals”, the same would of course apply in every other context, including using ballot initiatives to force governments to do things they don’t want to do, like give us our information about our food. So Salatin’s definitely a hypocrite, we merely don’t know yet how bad of one. Maybe on second thought he’s changed his mind about wanting to be the “Tyson of grassfed”, the way he says corporate types have lobbied him.)
Transparency as such is indeed a democratic right, and Salatin’s bigotry against basic rights should earn him contempt. More importantly, anyone who knows anything about getting a real movement going knows you need to start where the action is, and right now the main form of anti-GMO action in the US is the labeling movement. So that’s where abolitionism is trying to get going. Labeling itself is insufficient, but all the experiences of organizing for it and learning about it and about GMOs in general, including the harsh experience of seeing what corporate money does to democracy, make the fight for labeling a promising investment in the future of abolition.
Salatin seems so clueless that he doesn’t recognize that one of the very best places for the working of his “right to seek” is within the experience of a grassroots democracy movement, any kind of movement, but especially this one.
I’m focusing on Salatin’s awful position rather than Mercola’s because this is an example of why this “movement” will fail, if it does fail. It’s because although everyone vaguely agrees that Big Ag is the enemy, everyone nevertheless self-indulgently insists on his own incoherent private ideology and would rather squabble endlessly about these ideologies than agree on basic operational goals (like abolishing GMOs) and then organizing like soldiers to fight and win a war. This kind of thing is well known to be a pathology of “the left”, but as we often see it’s just as bad in the food freedom movement.
No matter how much pride our maverick “rebel” types take in their orneriness, in the end all they’re going to do is hang separately. As a Gloucester fisherman who helped organize their CSF (Community Supported Fishery) said, “If you stick with the Lone Ranger routine, you go bankrupt.”
As for me, given any proposed tactic, strategy, idea, etc., my only question is, Will this help or hurt in the fight to abolish GMOs? I have zero prejudices otherwise.
I would merely respond to this sentence, But how does that make lack of regulation desirable for the rest us who are truly interested in food safety above all, and would prefer to be informed in our purchasing decisions and choices?
Nothing does. You can call the companies, ask. If you don’t get clear answers, you can not support that company, but that product.
There is no need for the government to intervene for people to know what is in their food… and if companies lie to you, you can sue them for that lie. Keep proper records, take them to court if they tell you their foods are gmo free and then you find out they are not.
but with government involvement, we get what government labeling, which is full of lies and half truths that lull people into a comatose state of blind stupidity and trust, and enable corporations and the like to easily manipulate the system to their benefit.
In a free market, a seller has no obligation to inform a buyer of all their ingredients, etc. You don’t understand what a free market is, so you misrepresent the issue from the start… a free market is where there is no coercion for seller or buyer, nor barriers to entry and exit from the market beyond the natural ones that that industry inherently creates.
So, in a free market, if you want transparency, you can seek to get it from companies, and if you don’t, you can leave that market. That is what Salatin advocates. That is true regulation, regulation that works, that decentralizes power and puts it in the hands of average people.
And it is available to anyone right now regarding GMOs who wants to know – we have the non-gmo verified project, we have local farms, and we have companies with phone numbers to call.
If you don’t get a clear answer from the company, you know they should not receive your support.
Pretty simply.
Gosh, this is right up their with pulling the ole Bill Anderson on this blog…
Salatin is pretty well historical informed, he is no intellectual lightweight. Many would not at all agree with Salatin seems so clueless that he doesn’t recognize that one of the very best places for the working of his “right to seek” is within the experience of a grassroots democracy movement, any kind of movement, but especially this one.
So, because we disagree with you, we are all clueless bedeviled big corporate statists, eh? Yeah, that really builds a movement…
But if all he has to say about the movement is anti-democratic nonsense, then he ought to say nothing about it. That is indeed what I say to anyone who has nothing to contribute. If all one knows how to do is obfuscate the abolitionist imperative by injecting irrelevant nonsense stemming from one’s cranky ideological idiosyncrasies, then one’s part of the problem. For example this blathering about “there’s no right to know, only a ‘right to seek’ “. In other words not only do we have no rights at all, and it’s a world of might makes right, but we shouldn’t use the aspirational and inspirational language of rights as a weapon against the corporate state. That, of course, is stupid.
I’d say Salatin and you are the ones who are intolerant, if you’re not willing to stick to your own work but insist on injecting divisiveness into projects you’re not even working on. Where’s Salatin’s proposed strategic alternative to using the labeling movement as a vehicle toward building a real abolitionist movement? (As I’ve said many times here, labeling as such is not the goal.) The chapter on GMOs in “Folks This Ain’t Normal” is eloquent on GMOs as an abomination, scientism, how they’re a worthless product, and other things, but offers little in the way of political strategy. (Ironically, the one specific political suggestion is a liberal one – legally ban patents on life. That’ll require rather more in the way of liberal-type lobbying than a ballot initiative for labeling, won’t it?) It implicitly calls for the same kind of hang-separately quietism he was advocating in this “debate”. The suggesting to get church-based discussion groups going is good, but at some point that’ll need to go somewhere specific.
If you have an alternative, I’m all ears.
There’s clearly zero similarity between myself and Bill Anderson, other than that we both criticize your evidently sacrosanct idol Joel Salatin. The difference is that Anderson took stupid irrelevant potshots, whereas I’m critiquing him on a matter of core strategy. You must really revile Mercola for daring to argue! Or are you just an elitist, and since you only know me as a commenter therefore I somehow am not entitled to join this debate?
BTW, if your customers had yours and Salatin’s do-nothing, don’t-organize attitude, where would you be today?
I’ve always thought and said that farmers, customers, and movement activists will need to work together, with aspects like community food and GMO abolitionism being complementary. But if farmers insist on going it alone, and even attacking us, I guess I’ll have to rethink the whole thing.
Foods should be labeled with respect to ingredients, and the nature of those ingredients. The sixty-four dollar question is however, how are we going to simplify this process so that we do not end up with a complex, massive, and burdensome regulatory framework?
Unfortunately we currently have a regulatory quagmire that fails to adequately inform the public while at the same time threatening to control us to the nth degree.
The problem with current government regulation is that it is too specific and when regulation becomes overly specific it can be easily manipulated by tptb. This leads to complications, which tend to obfuscate rather then provide clear and accurate information.
All of what we have today in North America was built on monarchism, revolution, and democracy. These systems however are only tools which people use to achieve a goal. These systems are merely a reflection of the human psyche and are not in themselves the cause of our dilemma nor will they solve it.
Each individual from the President or the Prime Minister down needs to honestly examine their conscience and decide if they want to be ruled by a Godless, might is right pride driven philosophy or the wisdom of Jesus Christ.
The later will require major upheavals in the way we think and relate to our fellow human beings and the world around us.
Ken
I don’t think labeling could ever be sufficient in itself, let alone a panacea, even if effectively enacted by a state (a big if). But it can be a good step, at the state level. The federal government has no legitimacy to be involved in such issues at all, could not competently do this even if it wanted to, and would never want to, since the US government is the most aggressively pro-GMO organization on earth, short of the biotech corporations themselves. On the contrary, a federal policy would have only one purpose, to preempt state-level policy and grassroots democracy.
That’s why I disliked the framing of this “debate” from the start, since it looked like it was designed to conflate grassroots democracy at the state level with FDA preemption, in order to slander the labeling movement as a whole. Meanwhile the “pro” position was doing the same thing but from the opposite point of view, trying to hijack the labeling movement for the industrial organic Hirshberg/AGree/Whole Foods/Walmart agenda. They all merely want to normalize GMOs under the “natural”/”organic” umbrella.
So to conclude, no we shouldn’t want to set up a labeling bureaucracy (which of course wouldn’t be needed anyway to enact any of the state-level proposals), we should want to make this issue part of the laboratory of democracy, toward the eventual goal of abolishing GMOs completely, as the result of a soil-up democratic movement.
This will certainly require major upheavals in the way we think and relate. Those kinds of upheavals happen most of all in the course of bottom-up political and cultural participation.
Polyface Farm
Oct. 7 Unedited first negative speech by Joel Salatin in the Joe vs. Joel debate for the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund annual gala, Atlanta, Georgia
Topic: SHOULD THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MANDATE GMO LABELING ON FOOD?
No. As a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer, I’m well aware that taking such a position is contrary to the thinking of many dear friends in the integrity food movement, Dr. Joe certainly being one of them.
At the outset, let me make two things abundantly clear: I despise GMOs. On our farm, we pay extra for non-GMO grains. We buy organic. I do not like GMOs, Sam I am. I do not like them here or there, I do not like them anywhere. Secondly: I categorically reject the notion that being against federal labeling makes me a friend of Monsanto or a friend of GMOs. Being opposed to prohibition id not make a person in favor of alcoholism. Sometimes policies make strange bedfellows, and that’s the case here. At issue is the federal mandate, as opposed to state, local, or completely non-governmental options. What is NOT at issue is whether GMOs are good or bad.
I have 8 lines of analysis.
1. Europe is not the blueprint for societal success. While I very much like some things Europe does, many things mandated there are horrible.
To assume that because Europe does it makes it chic and sexy and progressive is naive and overly simplistic. It is an entirely different culture: food culture, property rights culture, government regulatory culture. To think that a European model of anything can be simply transposed to the U.S. is foolish. Europe bans GMOs outright; it does not simply label food. That’s an important distinction and actually far more efficient policy than food labeling. Europe did not develop GMOs. Europe does not have embassies around the world staffed with people strong-arming governments to use GMOs. And Europe doesn’t have the Kardashians.
2. A government label is a marketing license. At our farm, we’ve been skewered by the label police more than once on some arcane and inane infraction, from pica size on print to wording. Only a higher power can license a lower power. I cant give you a driver’s license because I have no authority to give you that license. When we ask for a license, we admit that the license giver has authority over that activity or commodity.
I would ask you: Do you want the government to have the authority to license your food? Really? Suddenly that takes on a different notion, doesn’t it? The authority to license is the authority to deny access. When we ask for a government label, GMO-related or not, we’re voluntarily submitting ourselves to the authority and wisdom of government officials to determine what is acceptable in the marketplace. Acceptable orthodoxy is irradiation, feeding dead cows to cows, DDT, cloning, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, sub-therapeutic antibiotics, and routine vaccinations, NOT compost, pasture-based or multi-speciated.
If there’s one thing the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund should be promoting, it is the notion that food commerce should be able to occur voluntarily between consenting adults without bureaucratic intrusion. I summarily reject the notion that the government is in authority over my food–any food.
3. Demanding GMO labeling may be exactly what the industry wants. Just a few days ago on Oct. 15, British environmentalist and GMO advocate Mark Lynas addressed the Center for Food Integrity Summit in Chicago, a consortium of U.S. food industry leaders. He called for federal mandatory GMO labeling as the best way for the industry to tell the story of its marvelous benefits. Listen to him: “foods containing GMOs or GM-derived products are no less safe than their conventional alternatives–there is as strong a scientific consensus on this issue as there is on many comparable issues like the science of climate change.” A few sentences later, he says: “Indeed, GMOs may well be more safe than their conventional alternatives.”
I want you to listen to his argument. After pointing out that the labeling agenda is really an anti-biotech agenda, he said: “And let there be no mistake: banning biotech is the explicit agenda of many pro-labeling activists. They talk about consumer choice, but what they actually want is to remove all choice. The want what I call prohibition based on superstition. ” Ouch. Is this where we want to head? How many of us in this room had good hearted, salt-of-the-earth well-meaning ancestors who fought for alcohol prohibition? Are we being equally duplicitous by jumping on the label-GMO bandwagon?
4. The consumer has no right to know. The founders of our great nation offered the right to pursue happiness, the right to seek, if you will. Thomas Jefferson promoted pursuing knowledge, not an entitlement to knowledge. That’s an important distinction. Indeed, today’s culture writing the Bill of Rights would say that the second amendment entitled every American to own a gun and would create a government bureaucracy to make sure every person had one whether he could afford it or not.
We’ve turned pursuit into entitlement and that cheapens inalienable right, which is bestowed by God, not governments. Right to know cannot be guaranteed by anyone or anything, just like a right to be educated, a right to good medical care, or the right to financial security in retirement: these cannot be guaranteed as entitlements just because the government says so. What we guarantee is the right to pursue these things.
In his latest book, New York Times bestselling author Jay Richards notes that “it’s impossible to have full information in almost any transaction . . . . I’m using a MacBook Pro, and when I bought it, I shopped first for brand, which in the case of computers is a hugely important data point. After that, screen size, processor speed, and price. I didn’t know a thing about 99.999 percent of the construction and supply chain of the machine. Neither did anyone in the Apple Store where I bought it. If a free market required the parties in the sale of a personal computer to know everything about the transaction before the sale, no one would ever get around to buying a computer.”
I would even take this one step further. An entitlement to knowledge mentality dismissed prisoner abuse at Guantanimo Bay as being necessary for our right to know. Coerced confessions lead to cleverspeak and moral/ethical erosion. Voluntary confessions lead toward clarity and understanding. Demanding the heavy hand of federal agents to beat out of unwilling citizens information that other citizens want to know is not a good solution for anything.
That we the people should depend on the federal government for our knowledge, to demand that our knowledge depend on the morsels our bureaucratic caretakers dispense, is profoundly un-American and childish. Folks, I assume everything the government tells me is an outright lie or at least tainted with cleverspeak and dubious agendas. And I certainly don’t want my knowledge dependent on a bureaucrat nanny. Forsooth, are we really going to put Monsanto mogul Michael Taylor in charge of deciding what a GMO is and then arbitrating guilt and innocence? He’s the ogre at the helm of the Food Safety Modernization Act, a scorched earth anti-small farm and heritage food regulation with Draconian plans.
No matter how much you might hope that this time will be different; this time we’ll have honorable people as regulators, that’s not the way to bet. It’ll be the same old same old–lies, confusion, obfuscation and demagoguery.
5. Asking for federal intervention in this matter is not superior to a hodge-podge of state initiatives. To think that a centralized structure is better than decentralized options, each vying for policy superiority assumes that competitive ideas have no merit. That in this country we so quickly arrogate to a centralized federal level every societal remedy illustrates that we as a culture routinely abandon state prototypes in favor of a one-size-fits-all approach.
Look at the mockery centralization made of organic labeling. Now we have carogeenan in baby food and a host of adulterations in the federal 1990 Organic Foods Protection Act. A patchwork of functioning state wording, when arrogated to the federal level, prostituted the regulation to the highest bidders. If it weren’t for groups like the Cornucopia Project and Mark Kastel to sue the regulators over and over and over and over, we’d have virtually no integrity at all in bureaucracy. Had organic certification stayed private and/or state, their competitive cleansing would today make them better than the federal sham.
Are we to assume that the agencies overseeing GMO labeling will be more righteous than the shenanigans on-going at the National Organic Program? If past is prologue, we don’t need any more federal meddling in labeling laws. A decentralized, individualistic patchwork of state initiatives will gradually refine the wording, protocols, and oversight that work, and that’s the best way to arrive at consensus–through a vibrantly functional period of dissensus. Let the state jockey for the most functional system; the cream will rise to the top.
6. Even if labeling would reduce GMO consumption, the ends don’t justify the means. We could eliminate drunk driving fatalities by eliminating automobiles, but such a cure is worse than the disease. We tolerate whackos and socialists not because we like them, but because to silence them strikes at the heart of free speech.
We continue to allow backyard swimming pools, knowing that 50 children will drown in them this year. Zero tolerance simply doesn’t work.
Furthermore, assuming that labeling is the most efficacious way to accomplish reduced use of GMOs is a stretch. Does anyone really believe labels? Our farm uses completely bogus nutrition labels. They are incorrect by a factor of 1,0000 percent, but the USDA demands that we have them, so we put them on. It doesn’t matter that they are a lie. We tell our customers they are untrue. The reason is because we can legally use generic USDA labels; any deviation requires customized food studies costing thousands of dollars. Our customers don’t buy based on a label; they buy based on what they see in the field and what they feel in their guts. Government-regulated labels are a joke, and that’s the truth.
7. Federal labels are the poorest way to remediate the GMO problem. Let’s list some of the other remedies:
a. Buy organic—not USDA credentialed, but personally or privately vetted.
b. Know your farmer
c. Look for non-GMO labeled products.
d. The Weston A. Price Foundation Smart Shopper Guide.
Indeed, Dylan Charles writing in Waking Times May 27, 2013 gives this prophecy: “In the not too distant future, consumers will be able be able to run on-the-spot tests for environmental toxins, GMOs, pesticides, food safety and more with their smartphones and other hand-held devices.” This biodetection technology is almost here, he said: a “wedge-shaped cradle . . . contains a series of optical components–lenses and filters–found in much larger and more expensive laboratory devices . . . At the heart of the biosensor is a photonic crystal.”
Are we really creating much ado about nothing here, yelling, screaming, kicking, and demanding a bigger federal government police state when personal pursuit of knowledge will give each of us true liberation from industrial contrivances?
To suggest that the first and most efficacious remedy for any societal ill is federal government regulation, more bureaucracy, and more police power shows a profound lack of creativity and a prejudicial mindset against personal empowerment. Every one of us, right now, can know and opt out of GMOs; nobody is holding us hostage. The only hostage is our minds to government dependency. That’s what needs liberating.
How do we stimulate personal knowledge? By insisting on personal responsibility. If we shift that responsibility to know to the government, we simply encourage ignorance. We don’t exercise discernment muscles unless and until we have to. When the onus is on us to learn something, we step up to the plate. A label mandate dumbs us down and creates lethargic interest rather than aggressive seekers. After all, when the government is watching out for us, our mental acuity can focus instead on the latest Kardashian excitement.
8. Finally, mandatory federal labels chases the wrong solution. The right solution is a return to reverencing property rights. Think about the massive investment of time, money, effort expended in this labeling initiative. The person-hours reading action alerts; time spent signing and writing petitions, picketing and getting out the vote.
Now imagine if all that energy had been invested in demanding that district attorneys and state attorney’s general would simply enforce basic common law property rights. Under trespass law, if my bull wanders onto your property and tramples your flower bed, I’m liable. If I refuse to acknowledge liability and refuse compensation, any district attorney will help you to help me understand that my fist ends at your nose.
In our modern American these life forms that Monsanto owns, these alien patented buings–for now let’s call them Monsanto’s bulls–these inherently promiscuous beings run willy nilly onto my farm trampling my life, my property, committing sexual orgy in my fields, and not only is Monsanto not liable for trespass, but the courts of our nation are so convoluted that they have determined that I must pay Monsanto for the privilege of their bulls trampling my flowers. Farmers suing for redress are rebuffed like peon peasants. What if the first time this egregious trespass occurred, all the effort we’ve seen in the labeling movement had been focused on that district attorney’s negligence? Goodness, he would have been disbarred.
Folks, where are the caretakers of our rule of law? Where? Cowering behind wine and cheese dinners, behind bought elections. Where is the outrage among us? You see, unfortunately, this issue can’t even raise a whimper because as a culture we’ve drunk the socialist cool-aid that private property is not worth defending. In fact, we think private property is bad. That my farm is really yours to control. My creek is yours to canoe in. My cheese is yours to regulate. My farm production is yours to license. America is one grand playground.
We have so eroded and abandoned the most fundamental virtue of Americanism–to be secure in our persons and effects, that every person would have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (in the original drafts, this was property) that we don’t see anything as personal; all our liberties are just what the government decides to give us, rather than inalienable rights we have of God and we only give the government the right to meddle in a few of them. Goodness, under Obamacare I don’t even own my own nose any more. When the government decides that your fist does not need to end at my nose, or that I don’t even have a nose, we’ve become a nation of barbarians and uncivilized beasts.
I would like all of us here tonight to realize how we’ve cheapened our argument by asking for a bigger federal government, more policing, more regulations, more taxes, more tyranny, instead of demanding the better remediation of liberty, which is my freedom to operate on my own land free of trespass. If we can’t have anything that’s “my stuff,” we have no personhood, no self-actualization, no individual identity. What we need to do is preserve the sanctity of the Joeness of Joe and the Joelness of Joel.
What of the people who don’t know or don’t care? The people being hurt by ingesting GMOs? They have the right to pursue the truth. They should have the right to choose and hurt themselves if they want to. To undermine freedom in order to save someone from their own wayward path is a road to hell paved with good intentions and naivete.
People are waking up. Inertia is on our side. Just look at the proliferation of state GMO initiatives and growth of non-GMO foods. Let’s not mess it up with an immediate federal mandate. And let’s take the high road of freedom rather than coercion.
On the other hand (4) is a morass of bogus “arguments” and pro-government lies. No one’s demanding a label which describes every technical intricacy about how a MacBook works. We just want to know whether or not there’s plutonium inside it. How stupid. And that he slanders grassroots activists against corporate power by comparing us to the very corporate state whose torture at Guantanamo we’d also abolish: For this Salatin deserves nothing but contempt.
Obviously the right to know depends overwhelmingly on we the people to seek out our knowledge. But that doesn’t mean governments and corporations have the right to hide our information from us. If they force a pollutant into OUR VERY FOOD, they have to tell us where they put it. I’m simply shocked that a non-industrial farmer of all people, Salatin or anybody else, would dispute that. Yes indeed, that puts one on the side of Monsanto. (News flash: If you agree with Monsanto on something, your position is wrong.)
By that logic, what does Salatin think he’s allowed to hide from visitors to Polyface? I know there’s been disputes about that in recent years. I guess, according to him, people must then “seek”, whatever that would mean.
This was the part of Salatin’s spiel which infuriated me. If he’d just stuck to attacking the federal government, we wouldn’t have a problem. But he clearly despises the people, except insofar as we confine our notion of our filthy “rights” within the limits that HE dispenses to us. Well sorry, but the people are increasingly uninclined to obey elitists of any sort, including faux-populists like Salatin. I’ll say to him the same thing I say to any FDA bureacrat: Don’t tell me what to do.
Not that it matters. The grassroots labeling movement is indeed a seeking, and therefore something Salatin should be wholeheartedly supporting. “But no! When I said ‘seek’, I meant only in the way I approve!” Sorry, we the people will decide in what way we wish to seek.
BTW, Europe doesn’t ban GMO imports in processed food, it requires labeling. I agree that there’s little comparison between the situations in Europe and the US, but Salatin’s lack of factual correctness here, intentional or not, doesn’t help his overall case.
I think that he is extremely knowledgeable about farming and has done great things to inspire new farmers, and reinvigorate those already farming. But to take the position he’s doing on this is bizarre. GMOs are like a virulent cancer, and anything that will help to bring about their demise should be welcomed by sensible people.
Salatin isn’t an anarchist-he obviously believes there’s a place for state governments, so why would this line of attack be such anathema to him that he’s willing to help Goliath?
His argument somehow reminds me unpleasantly of the view that some complacent types hold towards poor people; that the problem with them is they just don’t work hard enough, and because of that they deserve the bottom of the barrel in life.
And since John M is friends with Mr. Salatin, he can tell him that Mama says all that 😉
Oh, but yet we should depend on the government to police what foods are safe eh?
“To suggest that the first and most efficacious remedy for any societal ill is federal government regulation, more bureaucracy, and more police power shows a profound lack of creativity and a prejudicial mindset against personal empowerment.”
Joel, if you read this please know that I and a lot of others have just lost a lot of respect for you. Labeling does not equal “regulation, bureaucracy, police power” etc that’s bullcrap, we just want truth and transparency in what you are selling to the public. I’d like to have that basic knowledge even if you don’t.
The only government involvement should be the requirement to label *GMO or not*, and occasional spot checks to make sure nobody is outright lying about it, otherwise it’s an honor system and cheap to implement.
[quote from article]
“This year Hungary, which had banned GM crops, found that the forbidden crops were being grown illegally anyway. The government didnt hang about all the crops were destroyed. A new Hungarian law enacted back in March stipulates that before any new seeds are introduced into the market, they must first undergo checks to make sure they are free of GMOs. They are now considering making the planting of GM seeds a felony. And Russia is considering a total ban.”
[end quote]
[quote]
“What is noticeable about these bans is that in many places both people and their governments are not against research into genetic modification. No. They are against the wholesale marketing of the biotech corporations that have no regard for the earth. But why Poland, Hungary, Paraguay and the rest? One reason may be that in so many places, despite the globalisation of Western culture, people have managed to maintain their links to a rural peasant culture; a culture that lives according to the pace of nature; that lives closer to the land; whose farmers embody generations of earth-based wisdom and whose people have an interest in growing clean healthy food because it is what they themselves eat.
This is not to say that the bans we have achieved will not be reversed by GM-lobbied politicians. We must keep up the pressure. People who love their patch of earth and love the food they eat are turning out to be remarkably GM-resistant unlike their genetically modified politicians who are now logic- and science-resistant and extremely lobbyist-tolerant.”
[end quote]
Taken from this link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/genetically-modified-politicians-their-battle-to-persuade-the-public-to-accept-gm-food/5359610
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And america has the complete gall to promote these countries as being “backward”? I’d say it’s time americans vote for a little *backward*.
This article has quite a bit of good information in it, but the url is a bit touchy and sometimes won’t open. Keep trying,