As an example they tell me who is working the giant corporate farms: Premium First Select Hog Farms in northern Missouri pays recruiters in Los Angeles $150 a head for trainloads of Laotions to work the 250,000 penned-in sows they have in their complex. The workers live in substandard company housing and receive just enough money to pay rent and food costs back to the company and maybe send a little home.
After years of struggling to keep his farm afloat, Bill Christison now has a new worry: corporate crops. For thousands of years, farmers have been breeding plants for certain traits. Higher yield wheat. Whiter rice. Sweeter strawberries. Smoother tomatoes. Now there is a new way: insert a new bundle of genes into a seed's DNA so that the resulting plant will have some feature that the researchers want. Resistance to frost, or certain insects, or a brand of herbicide produced by the researchers. It's called Genetically Engineered (GE) or Genetically Modified (GM) food.
After only a few years, GE/GM food is big business: half the soybeans grown in the United States are genetically modified. Around the world, corporations are trying to sell GE/GM foods to farmers and governments, saying that biotechnology innovations will triple crop yields without requiring any additional farmland, saving valuable rain forests and animal habitats.
As practical farmers, these folks are not opposed to the idea of tinkering with seeds to improve crops. However they are very concerned that it is the agribusiness corporations who are researching, promoting and selling it.
Take Monsanto, the leading corporation promoting GE/GM foods to consumers. Monsanto is the same company that manufactured nearly all the PCBs (a chemical which causes all sorts of health problems) in the United States until they were banned in 1976. Monsanto also manufactured Agent Orange, a chemical sprayed to defoliate the Vietnam jungles during the Vietname war, which is linked to cancer and reproductive problems in war vets.
And they make pesticides. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Monsanto is a "potentially responsible party" at 93 Superfund sites, the most dangerously polluted places in the United States.
As the writer Molly Ivans put it, ěthis is a company that has put its faith in technology without bothering to properly research the consequences.
Bill Christison resents their attempt to control farmers access to seeds: Monsanto recently said they would stop their research on "Terminator" seeds that would fail to reproduce themselves, compelling farmers to buy new ones from the company each season. They continue to produce "Roundup Ready" crops which are resistant to only one herbicide, made by Monsanto.
Farmers and consumers around the world have expressed outrage at the control over natural resources that a few corporations are asserting. They are protesting. But Monsanto and other companies have a lot invested in GE/GM foods, and are using international business groups like the World Trade Organization to pressure governments to lower their barriers to modified foods and crops.
They hope their GE/GM foods will be let into world markets, as they are in the United States, without labelling that would identify them. They say that their engineered crops are the only way to end world hunger.
But the Missouri farmers say that they grow more than enough food to feed everyone in their area, but thousands of people in nearby Kansas City go hungry because they can't afford to buy the food. The Missouri farmers are trying to sell directly to inner-city families to lower the cost. They say that poor distribution and high cost is what creates hunger, not scarcity.
They fear that like the corporations that have shut down their family farms, the production of GE/GM foods around the world is motivated by short-term profits. Until fifty years ago when pesticides were created and the companies making them said they were safe, all farming was organic. Now they are telling us that GE/GM food will make safe, healthy food that tastes better and end world hunger. Bill Christison said after dinner, "I thought we had cornered the market on hog s__ here in Missouri, until Monsanto came along."
-Stefan Lynch (Also, hear Stefan talkabout his innovative vegan delivery meal business)
(Stefan's website is at www.queerspawn.com)
