When a Non-Profit Gets in Bed with the Enemy
The Mogul of Microsoft Goes for the Agent Orange Guys
by Paul Haeder / July 10, 2012
It's huge - asymmetrical, shaped like two fat boomerangs meeting in midair
at their mouths. The benefactors call it a campus. NBBJ architects had to
design a colossal office complex of 900,000 square feet to accommodated
1,200 employees. It cost around $500 million to build.
It's a prime piece of property in downtown Seattle, West Lake. The
non-profit got the 12 acres for a song - $53 million after the land was
appraised at $72 million.
Then the city of Seattle "gave" another $28 off the price, so this land
ended up costing Bill and Melinda Gates - their foundation - $25 million.
More than 40 people, as part of a global day of action against Monsanto,
recently marched to and around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation "campus"
in West Lake to deliver a letter asking the Foundation to divest from
Monsanto (the Foundation has more than $23 million in Monsanto stock as part
of a very odd mix of companies in their portfolio).
Trying to eradicate developing countries' diseases, forcing genetically
modified farming into Africa, and weighing in on and lobbying for
privatizing public education are just a few of the Gates Foundation's larger
goals, largely financed by $11.9 billion, with the following five top stock
holdings:
* Berkshire Hathaway Inc. - 73,997,400 shares, 49.75% of the total
portfolio.
* McDonald's Corp. - 9,372,500 shares, 5.21% of the total portfolio.
* Caterpillar Inc. - 9,590,400 shares, 4.86% of the total portfolio.
* The CocaCola Company - 10,182,000 shares, 4.31% of the total
portfolio.
* Waste Management Inc. - 15,716,367 shares, 4.15% of the total
portfolio.
They've got 500,000 shares of Goldman Sachs, 7.1 million shares of Exxon
Mobile and those half a million shares of Monsanto.
Monsanto's Chemical War on the World
What's all the protesting about? According to Dena Hoff, a diversified
family farmer in Glendive, Montana, and North American coordinator of La Via
Campesina, "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust's purchase of Monsanto
shares indicates that the Gates Foundation's interest in promoting the
company's seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The
Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the
largest seed company in the world."
These aren't sour grapes about one of the richest people on earth
capitalizing on stock trading. Monsanto, who created the dioxin-leeching
defoliant Agents Orange and Blue, is one of the main drivers of genetically
modified foods.
Heather English Day, director of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global
Justice, and one of the organizers in Seattle to bring attention to the
slash and burn mentality of Monsanto, the Gates Foundation's AGRA, sums up
the recent news on GE crops and foods: "Reports are coming out weekly about
impending crop failures of GE corn in Africa, pesticide resistance for GE
corn grown for ethanol in the US, and about indications that Bt toxins, the
primary GE pesticides, especially when in the presence with Roundup, have
potential impacts on human kidney cells and mammalian testis."
Another protestor-letter signatory is Les Berensen, a medical doctor who is
also with GMO Free Washington. His concern is tied to Monsanto's Roundup,
which has the main ingredient of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Berensen
mentions how salmon and other fish species are being affected by the huge
runoffs from fields of corn, beets, soy, cotton, and potatoes that are
genetically modified to take up to four or five dousings of Roundup.
He likens this day and age of Monsanto as a Frankenstein era for both
species in the wild and the human species. These anti-Monsanto events are
carried out regularly in many parts of the world, and they are attended by a
diverse group of people. In Seattle recently, several speakers rallied us
before we marched to the FOundation: Dan Trocolli, Seattle Educators
Association and Social Equality Educators; Kristen Beifus, Washington Fair
Trade Coalition; and William Aal, Washington Biotechnology Action Council.
One fellow holding a corn sign and getting signatures is Travis Young, UW
graduate student in planning and with CAGJ and AGRA Watch. He is seeing more
and more destruction of departments at UW through consolidation and outright
disbanding. He's working on food policies for several cities as part of his
graduate work.
Localized Food Security, Global Food Fights
"There are already many movements around healthy local food economies. There
are proven projects and farms in Africa that are both sustainable and
organic. Getting people hooked on Monsanto's seeds and pesticides with
micro-loaning that they can't pay back will result in more farms being lost
and more people moving to the cities. This is not a successful formula, and
the Gates Foundation should really lead by getting rid of its Monsanto
stocks, as a first step."
Many protesters wear Haz-mat suits, and many carry signs belying the fear of
this giant genetically modified experiment taking place in mankind. I met
Ellie Rose at one of these events; she's working on Transition Seattle and
buttressing "a culture of engagement through a group called We the People
Power."
Karen Studders came from Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, where for two
months she lived in a tent. Studders, in her mid-sixties, once worked in big
business, for government organizations, and with United Nations agencies,
plying her legal and science degrees from the University of Minnesota. "We
have to act quickly. The abuse of these corporations, which is so blatant
now, has got to stop. I have a lot of hope after being part of the Occupy
movement, especially after we were illegally evicted."
She not only went from tent to tent to listen to the ideas and rebellion of
the youth, but she went into a self-made retreat after the police crack
down, traveling to various cities to see the Transition Town movement up
close and personal.
The security at the Foundation does not accept any signed letters. We tried
delivering one asking the Gates Foundation to divest from Monsanto. I talked
with several Foundation employees - researchers with higher education
graduate degrees and doctorates. They said that Foundation's policy for
employees is to "not let us engage in any dialogue on any issues of
controversy." Which means, nothing but the weather can be discussed?
(Whoops, climate change seems to affect disease and crops). Additionally,
any nice, well-crafted and footnoted handouts on Monsanto and Roundup
pesticides they might be handed "will have to be handed over to security
once we enter the building."
Those three monkeys - see, hear, and speak no evil - seem anachronistic in
the 21st century for a think tank outfit like the Gates Foundation.
Fortunately, less than a week after Seattle's event, dozens of protesters
monkey-wrenched Monsanto's California office in Davis, an area close to the
Capitol, through vocal activism. Unlike Seattle's event, the California
activists made demands to shut down the biotech giant which has its talons
in the United States government, including the Supreme Court.
"If a small group can take down their office for a day from some mild
protests, a few hundred thousand can take down the entire company -
permanently," wrote journalist Anthony Gucciardi from Natural Society.
Frankenstein's Agronomists and Etymologists
Pretty strange news these days on the Franken-crop front, also known as the
genetically engineered/ genetically modified food battlefield.
A top-secret visit by Bill and Melinda Gates to Australia in December to
check up on their $10 million test crop of genetically modified bananas
"capable of resisting disease." Field trials at South Johnstone, Queensland,
Australia, are pointing to a GE banana with more pro-vitamin A than regular
bananas.
The stuff of movies like Soylent Green or some 21st Century James Bond plot.
Poor African nations are in the sights of big agri-business and
biotechnology outfits like Monsanto, Bayer, Chimera, BASF, Syngenta. The
Gates Foundation's AGRA - Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa - is all
about top down mandates, hyper-technology, corporate-driven solutions, and
sometimes bizarre genetically modified organism in a hocus pocus that puts
profits ahead of precautionary principle.
Seven Billion Guinea Pigs and counting .
Full steam ahead for outside-the-local-region solutions, and damn the local
knowledge, those land races of food and crop varieties that have stood the
test of time - and culture.
George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the nation's largest organic farming
cooperative, which had more than $600 million in sales last year, puts it
plainly: "There is a growing awareness that our [food supply] system makes
us all guinea pigs of sorts."
Story after story, incident after incident prove to more than just the
organic foodies that genetic engineering isn't the answer to famine, climate
change and strengthening food security for poor and rich countries. The seed
company Pioneer (owned by Dow Chemical) was developing a GE corn strain,
Herculex, that had wrapped up in its DNA a toxin that would help it resist
corn rootworm. The problem was, as a group of scientists working at
Pioneer's request found out, that GE corn killed ladybugs.
Here's where the GE-Biotech story gets ugly - according to the journal
Nature Biotechnology, Dow prohibited the scientists from publicizing the
research and kept it from the EPA. That corn bio-tech "creation" was
approved in 2003.
Now the narrative really gets close to the HG Wells story of The Island of
Dr. Moreau: Nature News reported that a research team discovered two
varieties of transgenic canola in the wild, plus a third variety that is a
cross of the two GM breeds. One of the transgenic varieties found was
Monsanto's Roundup Ready canola, - engineered to be resistant to glyphosate.
The other one, from Bayer Crop Science's Liberty Link canola, is resistant
to gluphosinate.
That third cross contaminated variety contained transgenes from each of
these, and, through it's own evolutionary track, is resistant to both types
of herbicide.
It doesn't take graduate degrees in agronomy, chemistry and botany to figure
out that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta have set loose into nature
unnatural and untested plants that proliferate, cross-breed, and create new
plants.
We have no idea what these GMOs are doing to us as biological entities
eating so many foods containing GE canola, soy, corn and beet sugar used in
a so many processed food products consumed by tens of millions of people.
Climate Change and Seeds
For more than two decades, and especially this past year, the alarms have
been going off concerning climate change making an already difficult
situation of global food security, and in Africa in particular, worse.
The climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, had all sorts of
panels on food insecurity complicated by the effects of climate change.
Which countries have the least capacity to adapt? Developing countries -
i.e. the majority of countries.
The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change - that body disregarded by Republicans and lambasted and vilified by
the Tea Party and blokes like presidential aspirant, Ron Paul - recently
made it clear with a convergence of dozens of scientific studies and
organizations that there will be deleterious impacts of climate change on
agriculture, livestock and fishing.
The Last Fish
Here's how screwed up the GE-GMO purveyors are - genetically altered salmon,
pen raised, of course, have been DNA-bombarded with the genes of a fresh
water bass species so they get five times the size of "normal" farmed salmon
in the same 18-month period. Feeding those Franken-salmon corn meal, soy
by-products and chicken and beef renderings adds to the gross experiment.
Here's an even more strange fact that is pushing GE technology into
husbandry and fisheries sciences - a single bluefin tuna will make
international headlines when it sells for more than $100,000 at Tokyo's
Tsukiji market. They are so rare now - overfished to near extinction - we
have to marvel at the rapidity of the globe's drive for wild food. Fish are
probably the last wild food Americans eat. Sushi joints from Seattle to
Missoula and Las Vegas are as popular as Carl's Jr.
When I talk with sushi-eating friends about their habits, they shrug it off,
saying they might as well eat the last of the wild marine protein before the
world contaminated everything and shifts to GE-Everything.
Famine, Hunger, Solutions
Floods and inconsistent weather patterns affecting rainfall have impacted
most parts of the world, situations worsened by the prices of fuel. Oxfam
correlates this impact into hardship -climate change will help double food
prices by the year 2030.
These factors, seen before and after Durban's "Climate Conference Debacle,"
are churning up the debate on genetically modified food. The Gates, Monsanto
and some agricultural experts are convinced that GMOs will provide part of
the answer to the long-standing hunger and food insecurity challenges that
have plagued the African continent for half a century.
But civil society, social justice advocates and others from non-governmental
organizations urged world leaders to focus on the importance of food
security, particularly in Africa. Wilfred Miga of PELUM sees food in Africa
tied directly to individual countries' identity and sovereignty - food
culture and the right to grow they're called. PELUM is an association in
Zambia giving political and technical voice to small-scale farmers in rural
areas. It's simple for people like Miga - improving livelihoods and
increasing the sustainability of farming communities by empowering
ecological best practices.
Miga said PELUM understands that despite the challenges the African
continent faces, GMOs are not a universal answer to food insecurity. In
fact, he like thousands of others in the food sovereignty movement know GMOs
gut food sovereignty because those crops are patented, they are
bio-manipulated to have killer or assassin genes that prevent germination
without the pesticides and other artificial inputs created and marketed by
the same seed companies or subsidiaries, and the crops in mass plantings
will contaminate all other wild or non-GMO crops, in a worse case scenario.
Hawaii had widespread contamination of papaya crops from GM varieties, even
in the seed stocks that were sold as conventional.
Jimmy Buffet and the Mosquitoes that Ate Key West
Worse yet, back to HG Wells, is the GE mosquito, in Jimmy Buffet land (maybe
he'll score a song about the Franken-squito and Margarita-ville).
UK-based Oxitec is going to release genetically-engineered mosquitoes in the
Florida Keys this month, the first-ever U.S. release of these engineered
bugs.
Aedes aegypti are produced by this private biotechnology company in hopes
that their offspring will die at a young age in an effort to lower mosquito
populations and limit the spread of dengue fever. Genetically-engineered
mosquitoes were released by Oxitec in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and
Brazil. Eradicating dengue fever is laudable (I had a case of it in
Guatemala, and I never deviate from calling it Break Bone Fever to this
day), but the company's claims that their GE mosquitoes are sterile and they
have eradicated the fever are wrong: their mosquitoes are fertile, and no
one has successfully eradicated dengue fever from any population.
So, this corporation from overseas gets to use 36-square acres near the Key
West Cemetery as a testing plot (undisclosed location) for up to 10,000
genetically engineered mosquitoes.
Many questions about genetically-engineered mosquitoes remain unanswered,
and since Friends of the Earth exposed this GE mosquito release story,
here's what that group has to say about the real questions behind the
release:
Who's regulating this release and who more importantly, who will be legally
and financially liable if something goes wrong?
Shoot, what about the unintended consequences of decreasing in Aedes aegypti
population have on the local food chain and ecosystem? Could other more
dangerous bugs take its place, such as the Asian Tiger mosquito which is one
of the most invasive species on the planet?
Informed consent? Will Oxitec be required to obtain the free and informed
consent of Key West residents (unlike in the Cayman Islands where "no public
consultation was undertaken on potential risks and informed consent was not
sought from local people")?
The super-mosquito next generation? What happens when Oxitec's mosquitoes
survive into adulthood (since 3-4 percent have been found to do just that
despite the flaw engineered into their genome)?
It's not just a male thing! Although Oxitec plans to only release male
genetically engineered mosquitoes, what are the risks if female genetically
engineered mosquitoes are released (since the company sorts them by hand and
up to 0.5 percent of the released insects are in fact female)? Since females
bite humans, how could this impact human health? Will it hamper efforts to
limit the spread of dengue fever?
Do we need more corporate marketing of things like mosquitoes? Since Oxitec
cannot completely eliminate a mosquito population will countries and
communities become dependent on Oxitec for the indefinite future? What
economic impacts will such dependence have on communities?
Two Carrots a Day . and Corporations are NOT People
This entire GMO debate has to be framed by community power over corporate
power. The Occupy movement speaks to some of that, and the Move to Amend
(reversing or nullifying a Jan. 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United)
also touches upon some of this corporate malfeasance and misdeeds. But it
takes a real in-the-trenches person like Richard Grossman, who died November
at age 70, to cut through the bedrock of why these corporations or
foundations like Gates have way too much control and power.
He started off 40 years ago talking about how corporations had taken control
of our environment. He has since looked at the systemic failure of the
United States federal government which has since day one been in cahoots
with the oligarchy and land-holding elite:
"One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don't talk much about
corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people
who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.
"But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years
before that they were the propertied nobility in England. In the USA, a
minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws,
using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate
property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom
leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the
educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive,
to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop
or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don't lay a hand on
systemic reality, don't touch the structure of governance and law, don't
question the country's great myths. For the past century or so, one such
realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast
energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast."
So what's for breakfast? Cassava? Friends of the Earth Nigeria is showing
why even non-GMO messed-with hybrids pose problems with biodiversity. Using
hybridization and selective breeding, three new yellow varieties of cassava
with loads of vitamin A will supposedly help with malnutrition, blindness
and death.
Can anyone in the Gates' Foundations AGRA project understand why this
supposed research breakthrough gets dismissed by groups like Friends of the
Earth Nigeria (FoEN). The argument is around why the International Institute
of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) research team in Ibadan would be messing
around with one of Nigeria's key food crops.
It's about biodiversity, something corporations scoff at when it comes to
finding ways to "beat or speed up mother nature." Here's the irony with all
of this agronomic meddling: two carrots can easily provide the daily vitamin
A requirement.
Plain old carrots for breakfast. Easy to plant, easy to eat, and not one
iota of that process is tied up in Dow, Monsanto, General Mills, or Bill
Gates, or any stockholders' greedy interests.
Paul K. Haeder lives in Seattle, after having worked as a communications,
language, composition, writing instructor of the freeway flier variety in El
Paso for the University of Texas, the El Paso Community College, many
language institutes, Park College, the US Army, La Tuna Federal Correctional
Institute, Packard Electric in Juarez, New Mexico State University, and
several cities in Mexico. In Washington State, he taught at Gonzaga
University, Spokane Community College, Spokane Falls Community College. He's
back on the job market, looking for something in the Vancouver-Portland
"area." He can be reached at: <mailto:haederpaul_at_gmail.com>
haederpaul_at_gmail.com. <
http://dissidentvoice.org/author/PaulHaeder/> Read
other articles by Paul.
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Received on Tue Jul 10 2012 - 10:35:57 EDT
