Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Klar, a Vermont grass-fed beef farmer, and an attorney and pastor who lives in Westfield.
[M]odern industrial farming methods are a growing menace to our ecosystem, and to human health. We can no longer afford to permit corporations to lie to us about the health risks of their products. The other big lie we must confront is that we need GMOs in order to feed the world.
Even if this absurd statement were true, it would suffer from a serious shortcoming: as author Wendell Berry observed, “… the land should not be destroyed for any reason, not even for any apparently good reason. … If [the loss of fertility of the soil and the loss of soil as a renewable resource] does happen, we are familiar enough with the nature of American salesmanship to know that it will be done in the name of the starving millions …” (The Unsettling of America, 1977). And Mr. Berry’s prediction was true — it is exactly in the name of those starving millions that the agriculture industry is lying to American consumers today.
A 2017 United Nations Human Rights Council Report concluded that “Reliance on hazardous pesticides is a short-term solution that undermines the rights to adequate food and health for present and future generations.” (Report of the Special Rapporteur). This is not about whether GMO crops themselves are “safe” — it is about how many unsafe chemicals are used to produce them. We stopped using fluorocarbons and PCBs because they were damaging the environment — shall we keep using Roundup, neonicotinoids, Bt toxin, and atrazine because we are told GMO foods are “safe”? These chemicals are not safe.
In her seminal book “Silent Spring,” published in 1962, Rachel Carson made the case against DDT and other chemicals. She was attacked by the chemical industry, but her analysis was proved right. Bald eagles, peregrine falcons, osprey and other birds were being decimated. The EPA was formed, and bans of DDT saved these bird populations … kind of. Now we have whole new worlds of bird-killing chemicals. Neonicotinoids have been strongly linked to the die-off of bees, but they are also implicated in bird deaths: “Scientists refer to neonicotinoids as ‘systemic’ pesticides because they affect the whole plant rather than a single part. As the pretreated seed grows, it incorporates the insecticide into every bud and branch, effectively turning the plant itself into a pest-killing machine.” (“Second Silent Spring? Bird Declines Linked to Popular Pesticides”). Bt toxin, wedded to corn DNA through genetic engineering, similarly saturates GMO corn with toxins.
Then there is glyphosate (Roundup). Originally used as an industrial pipe cleaner, glyphosate was also patented by Monsanto in 2010 as an antibiotic — because its disruptive power affects bacteria as well as plants. Many GMO crops are specifically designed to be immune to the glyphosate that kills the weeds. But while those GMO crops may be harmless, the glyphosate is not. The weeds are developing immunity, requiring increased applications, and the glyphosate is also being used in non-GMO crops as a desiccant just days before harvest.
Increased use of glyphosate has been linked to increased problems with human health in India, Latin America and the U.S. These include cancer, autism, Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease and intestinal infection, and many other ailments. Where do people think gluten allergy came from? Since the advent of glyphosate-dependent GMO crops in the 1990s, our human health and our ecosystem have been under attack for short-term profit, and the effects will only worsen until we alter course. Glyphosate compromises earthworms, non-target insects, and fish, and is present in most American rainwater.
Here in Vermont we face this challenge not just in our GMO-labeling debate, but in the battle to halt the toxification of our groundwaters by industrial farming. The federal EPA was formed in response to Rachel Carson’s complaint that the USDA possessed oversight of pesticides while promoting the concerns of the agriculture industry. Today, Monsanto has been shown to influence the EPA. And in Vermont, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Farms, and Markets is overseeing both agriculture and pesticide use, a blatant conflict of interest.
Wendell Berry said it best, writing back in 1977: “That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality.” This is an organic truth.
