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June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
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Roya
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June
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19, 2003
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Victory
at Little Big Horn Day
June 25, 2003
Butterflies and Farmworkers
Taking
on the USDA and the Riot Cops
By
DAN BACHER
When over 2,500 protesters rallied and marched
against the USDA Ministerial Conference in Sacramento on June
23, the streets of Sacramento were filled with hundreds of police
officers decked out in Darth Vader-like riot gear and the latest
weaponry.
They looked as ridiculous as they were
intimidating. The "terrorists" they were armed for
battle against were a colorfully-dressed, loud and peaceful group
including young women and men dressed as butterflies and ears
of corn and, at the head of the march, Dolores Huerta, co founder
of the United Farmworkers Union with Cesar Chavez.
The participation of Huerta is very significant,
since the UFW was the first organization to fight against corporate
agriculture in its world center, California's Central Valley.
After successfully organizing for better wages and working conditions,
the union began warning politicians and the public about the
danger of increasing mechanization and technology that would
only benefit large agro-chemical corporations and displace small
farmers and farmworkers from the land in both the U.S. and Mexico
and other countries.
Now the UFW is part of the broad worldwide
coalition, including Via Campesina, Food First, the Pesticide
Action Network, and other organizations, pushing against the
USDA's and Monsanto's drive to sell unsuccessful GE technology
to the rest of the world.
"Genetically modified foods have
never been tested by the EPA and FDA," said Huerta at a
rally before the march "Nobody knows what they will do in
to people or the environment."
The USDA, USAID and the State Department
invited ministers from 180 nations to Sacramento under the the
guise of furthering U.S. commitment "to reduce by half the
number of hungry people in the world" by promoting next
technologies for food production, including genetic engineering.
The Sacramento Coalition for Sustainable Agriculture, Food First,
Public Citizen and other opponents of GE food held a series of
packed events prior to and during the conference, including a
teach-in, debate, movie showning, organic ice cream socical and
organic food fair.
"This isn't about feeding people
throughout the world," Huerta said. "It's about Monsanto
or other large corporations making profits from selling GE food.
If they really wanted to feed us, they would feed us healthy
food. In fact, a lot of food is thrown away in the U.S. because
it's considered surplus."
She emphasized that the technology being
proposed at the Sacramento Ministerial is part of the same unsustainable,
unproductive and toxic agriculture that drives small farmers
off the land in Mexico and other countries - and forces them
to go to work in U.S. fields for low wages.
"Farmworkers and small formers don't
profit from genetically modified food or other agricultural technology,"
said Huerta. "The large agribusiness corporations are putting
small farmers out of work. The small corn farmers in Mexico have
lost their farms and come to work in the U.S. for slave wages."
She emphasized that hunger will be solved
not through GE foods and increasing agricultural production in
the hands of a few, but by attacking poverty by supporting the
organization of workers and small farmers.
"Companies like Monsanto are not
going out of their way to give farmworkers a union," she
added. "It's all about control of the world's food supply
by large corporations, not about solving hunger."
She said that mandatory labeling of genetically
modified food in the U.S. would be a good start because the majority
of people don't want GM food.
"You have to hand carry this message
to everybody you know and get involved in the electoral process.
We need to get the politicians who support GE foods and corporate
agribusiness out of office," she stated.
In a debate between GE advocates and
opponents at the Crest Theatre that night, Silvia Ribeiro of
the ETC group, the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration
in Mexico, confirmed Huerta's statements about corporate control
of food being the real reason for the ministerial conference.
She said that only five companies are involved in GE production,
with Monsanto topping the list with 91 percent of the GE seeds.
"When we're talking about GE crops,
we're really talking about one company, Monsanto, trying to get
ahold of the production," said Ribeiro . "The U.S.
has 66 percent of the transgenics in the world. However, Monsanto
GE crops, including corn, soybeans and canola, haven't been doing
well in the U.S. Monsanto's sales have steadily decreased the
last 4 years - and they need to find markets elsewhere."
Independent research has revealed an
alarming spread of GE corn genes in Mexico in fields many miles
from where transgenic corn was planted. The drift of GE crop
genes to fields planted with organic and conventional crops is
something that is impossible to contain.
Monsanto has demanded that U.S. and Canadian
farmers pay them for seeds spread onto their property by wind
drift and bees, even though they didn't want the seeds in the
first place. Monsanto contends it owns the "intelletual
property rights" to the GE seed and crops.
Percy Schmeiser, a farmer from Bruno,
Canada being sued by Monsanto for refusal to pay for GE seeds
that drifted onto his property, announced at Monday's rally that
his case against Monsanto would be heard in the Canadian Supreme
Court in January. "This is about maintaining the rights
of farmers throughout the world against big corporations like
Monsanto," he stated.
The ministerial is one of the key international
meetings leading to September's WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico.
The Bush administration will be pushing corporate globalization
through the expansion of sweeping trade agreements in Cancun.
Many opponents of GE food at the Sacramento protests, who contend
that healthy food is a basic human right, will be sending representives
to Cancun.
Dan Bacher can
be reached at: danielbacher@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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