This week, IoM Friends of the Earth’s Cat Turner
asks us to get cross and complain loudly – NOW
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It was Henry Kissinger who famously said: ‘Control oil and you control nations. If you control the food supply, you control the people.’
Not an admirable man, but certainly a smart one: he understood the ways in which fundamental resources such as food can be used as tools to manage populations – and through it their health, wealth and ability to make choices.
Does all that sound a bit improbable? Surely governments and bodies such as the United Nations and the World Health Organisation, who make the rules about food production and distribution, have our best interests at heart. After all, just look at their names: ‘United’; ‘health’. The words sound so benign, don’t they?
And even when things go badly on a global scale, it’s hard to believe it’s anything other than well-meaning but muddleheaded incompetence, or sheer bad luck. Because to wield that much power, and to use it to the detriment of the people you govern, would be wickedness on a scale that no one wants to believe in. A world where that can happen just isn’t a safe place to be.
That unbelievability, though, might be what makes it possible. Because right now, there is a co-ordinated assault on your ability to feed yourself healthily, and it’s going very well. (For business, that is, but not for the rest of us). Before too long, organisations such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and the like could control – in fact ‘own’ – the rights over many natural staple foods, and over your rights to grow them for yourself in your garden. Monsanto has already been successful in patenting conventionally-grown broccoli in certain countries (no, I’m not kidding), despite the fact that no less than 2 million people signed a petition protesting against this. Many saw it as the theft of a natural resource – an existing plant type – something that used to belong to all of us, or no one, depending on your viewpoint.
How can this have happened without an outcry across the world? Here’s the timeline of recent events:
– April 15, 2013: Ms Angelika Werthmann queried the European Parliament’s ability to grant Monsanto rights to own natural plant species derived through conventional breeding (ie, not genetically engineered). The species were cucumbers, broccoli and melons. At the time she did not get any reply.
– June 12, 2013: a Monsanto subsidiary called Seminis was granted patent number EP 1597965 in respect of conventional broccoli. It owns it: it didn’t invent it, but now broccoli belongs to Seminis, and not to the world.
– July 2, 2013: Ms Werthmann finally got her reply from the European Commission’s Mr Barnier – after, of course, Monsanto had had its way. His response was, predictably, favourable to Monsanto.
So there you have it. The Monsanto group of companies now owns, in certain countries, a “plurality of broccoli plants .. . grown in a field of broccoli.” A company can claim a patent over a food plant which already exists, thereby in theory controlling who can sell, swap, save and grow that plant - and how much they pay to do so.
You might recall that earlier this year I wrote in a Green Column about the EU Plant Reproductive Materials Law, which was passed this year and will be enacted into national country laws by 2015 at latest. That law paves the way for the criminalisation of selling, swapping or saving of any seed type which isn’t on a national plant register (yet to be established). Who’s going to own those seed types and patents? Monsanto and its ilk, of course – it’s just fired the first salvo.
Now, it might be tricky for Monsanto to implement its rights, and a number of farmers and gardeners groups have said as much: ‘We’ll just carry on as normal, how would they ever police it?’; ‘We should just grow our own food and avoid buying their damaging pesticides and seeds’; and ‘Why fight Monsanto when we can just buy organic? If we just do our little bit, we’ll win in the end.’
Not so. Local efforts are important – now more so than ever, in fact. Buying and growing good, honest local produce is essential if we’re to support our island’s farmers, and the health of our families.
But if we don’t protest loudly, and at international level, then hard on the heels of that broccoli will be the cucumber and melons they have their eye on.
And whilst the island isn’t part of the EU, many EU directives find their way into our national laws.
Then it could become ‘normal’ for every food plant you can think of, from potatoes to hemp, to be owned and controlled by them, with our tacit permission.
Do you want to live in a world where what you or your local farmer can grow is controlled by companies like Monsanto – not just controversial genetically modified crops, but – following the ‘broccoli precedent’ – conventional plants too? Do you want to see the end of local and ‘heirloom’ varieties? No, me neither.
I started this piece with a quote from Kissinger. Catherine Bertini, who was head of UN food programmes in 1995, later paraphrased him as follows: ‘Food is power. We use it to change behaviour.’ Sheesh. No joke.
On October 12, 2013, the Manx March Against Monsanto will be reconvening, and we hope you’ll join us.
I hope also that as many readers as possible will take the time to find out more about what’s happening to the world’s, and your personal, food supply. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, share the news. Write letters, join campaigns, sell your shares in those companies. Do the ‘small stuff’ by living well – but if you care about your future, and that of your children, now’s the time to get involved with the big stuff too.
You’re not insignificant, your voice counts, every letter or email or cry of protest helps. Please use it.