Corporate Knights recently caught up with Lynas during his recent visit to Toronto to speak with Ontario farmers. In a wide-ranging interview, he spoke of the anti-GMO movement, the ongoing battle over labelling requirements for GM foods, and some promising public-sector GM projects in the works.

CK: Tell us about your transformation from GMO opponent to supporter.

LYNAS: I was one of a large group of people involved in the early stages of the anti-GMO movement, but was certainly neither the most vocal nor the most effective. That being said, I’m really the only one that’s discovered science, to put it simplistically, and come out and talked about it. So I’m in a unique position of being somebody who’s publicly reversed their position on this – and that’s brought me a lot of attention, some of it welcome and some of it unwelcome.

CK: Why is it that many environmentalists place so much trust in science when it comes to climate change or loss of biodiversity, but these standards change once GM crops come up?

LYNAS: Anti-GMO people have been described as the climate skeptics of the left. Although that’s a simplification of the issue, it illustrates that what we’re talking about is a political issue. Climate skeptics (on the right) tend to be anti-big government. They’re against climate science because it will almost certainly require government intervention into the economy, while anti-GMO people are against the involvement of big corporations like Monsanto. They’re against biotechnology because it appears to only privilege big corporations. Now neither of these two positions is evidence-based, but the problem is that people find their information through the process of confirmation bias to justify pre-existing positions.

CK: Opponents of GMOs tend to focus on corporations like Monsanto being very litigious and protective of their seeds, at the expense of smaller farmers. Is that your thinking?

LYNAS: Monsanto did sue various farmers, and there have been numerous cause celebre like Percy Schmeiser. The question is, if all these GMO crops had blown into his field, how come they were in such neat rows? He clearly wanted to use the technology without paying for it. The reality is, if you contaminate someone’s property, you can’t sue them for property theft. The whole charge is absurd and wouldn’t stand up in court. Monsanto’s never taken out a case that’s alleged that, but that myth is persistent and still very powerful.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Monsanto should have refrained from suing anybody to avoid developing such an image problem. Even so, they felt the need to protect their intellectual property (IP) from farmers who wanted to save their seed and basically steal their IP. Farmers who use it have to sign an agreement that they won’t save the seed. It’s a biologically self-replicating technology.

Now if you’re concerned about IP and the patenting of crops, for me the logical corollary is to promote the development of GMOs in the public sector. I’ve been working with Cornell University, where I’m a visiting fellow, on a new project regarding Bt Brinjal, a GM eggplant that is pest-resistant in Bangladesh. Farmers there are currently spraying toxic insecticides without any kind of protection, often wearing nothing more than flip-flops. They spray it a hundred times a year during growing season, which leads to tens of thousands of poisonings annually. The GMO version would not need to be sprayed. It would be a vast improvement both environmentally and in terms of public health. The use of genetic modification, done in the public sector by a consortium of international and Bangladeshi scientists, has nothing to do with Monsanto.

I can’t say this enough: if you’re concerned about corporate monopolization, you don’t try and ban an entire technology in response. Back in the day, if you were concerned about Windows being a monopolistic approach to an operating system you didn’t try to ban all computers. What you want to do instead is to make the technology more available in the public sector, in a non-IP protected way, for the benefit of the poorer farmers. For me, that is way more interesting because there are so many applications, from golden rice to Brinjal, where GMOs can promote food security and the sustainability of agriculture.

CK: You mentioned golden rice. Can you discuss the controversy around it?

LYNAS: Golden rice is a single, targeted approach to tackling vitamin A deficiency, which kills two million or so children per year. Millions of families are dependent on rice for their staple food, so if there was beta-carotene in that rice it would reduce that deficiency and save a number of lives.

The opposition to golden rice is internationally supported. There’s this mentality in the west that promoting agro-ecological organic farming is the way to go for poorer countries, but the reality is that it confines farmers to a form of very low productivity farming. If they’re at subsistence level, they are currently struggling to feed themselves and their families. So you’re actually promoting food insecurity by externalizing the urban foodie biases of the modern world onto developing countries where they need to increase their productivity.

CK: Battles have sprung up in a number of individual states across the United States over proposals to mandate labelling on all food grown using GMOs. What’s your position on this?

LYNAS: This is where I get very critical of the biotech industry, because I think their strategies have been entirely counterproductive. Effectively spending millions of dollars trying to stop consumers from knowing where their products are being used is essentially the opposite of advertising. That’s tailor-made to make people feel scared about something, if it looks like there is an effort to cover up what the ingredients are in their food.

The way to dispel some of this mythology and fear mongering is to give people access to information. Opponents want a big GMO label because they want to stigmatize the product and get it off the shelves. They’re into prohibition, but there’s got to be some kind of middle road where we can actually give people the information that they want without the skull and crossbones stigmatization attached to it. You have to give people the option of finding out what’s in their food. Transparency should be the friend of science on this. If you don’t fill the void, the void will be filled by the conspiracy theorists. Let’s have farmers explain why they’re using GMO crops, and scientists demonstrate why they’re continuing to develop them. If you’re Monsanto and you want to explain why it’s beneficial for farmers to use this, you can if it’s labelled. You can’t if it’s hidden.

CK: What are the biggest barriers to the sort of open-source GMO research you’re advocating for?

LYNAS: Currently, it costs tens of millions of dollars in the United States to get through a regulatory system that is only applied to GMOs, but not any other form of crop breeding. In the U.S. and Europe, the only players that can navigate the system are the very biggest players, so the activists have created a situation where only corporations can afford to commercialize biotech crops. In the U.K. we’ve got Rothamsted Research and the John Innes Centre doing fantastic GM crop research. They’ve looked at aphid-resistant wheat, which wouldn’t need to be sprayed with agrochemicals. Can they get that through the European Union system? No way. So farmers are effectively banned from being able to access this technology. That’s the real stumbling block.

CK: Some GMO opponents have accused you of being an industry stooge. How do you respond to these accusations?

LYNAS: I’m a shill for science, I’m not a voice for hire. No one’s ever tried to buy me. It’s a classic ad hominem technique – if you can’t discredit someone’s argument then you try to discredit them personally.

CK: Some people have even drawn comparisons to Greenpeace activist turned industry consultant Patrick Moore…

LYNAS: For me, he’s a model of what to not end up as, because the only asset you have in my position is your independence, your credibility.

The post Open-source GM crops? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But another attack has been taking place for over a decade, steadily and surely, with little major news attention. From 1997 to 2007, over 180,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. Rather than the affluent echelons affected in Mumbai, this tragedy strikes at the agricultural heart of India: a nation where about 70 per cent of the population is still involved in a 5,000-year-old tradition of agriculture.

Indian farmers in crisis

“You could see the suicides coming,” says farmer Karuna Futane. She and her husband live in the “suicide belt” of Vidarba, Maharashtra.

“All around us, farmers were losing their children to the cities; they were becoming lonely and hopeless,” Futane says. “All their money was going out from the village, and nothing was coming back. In society overall, there has been a loss of sensitivity, dialogue, and connection among people. It was only a matter of time.”

“Suicide has become so common that no one takes it seriously anymore,” says Giridhar Patil, an agricultural activist in Nashik, Maharashtra.

The big picture

In 2007, 16,632 farmers committed suicide. Since records are likely to exclude tenant and women farmers, this is actually a conservative estimate.

According to a study by Professor K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, nearly two-thirds of all suicides occurred in five states: Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. These states were leaders in the high-yield agriculture program known as the Green Revolution. They have also embarked wholeheartedly into the SEZ (Special Economic Zones) program: a program that invites multinational corporations into their areas to set up shop, with promises of more relaxed environmental regulations and tax breaks.

“[There is] an acute agrarian crisis across the country,” says Nagaraj.

Indian government policies favour large-scale, industrial, and corporate farming. Mechanization on large farms has dramatically reduced the number of people working in agriculture, leading to rising unemployment and an influx into urban areas.

As state investment in agriculture has disappeared, land and water stresses have worsened. Operating costs have shot up, with some inputs seeing cost hikes of several hundred per cent. This has forced farmers to take out high-interest loans from banks and private lenders to stay afloat.

Meanwhile, crop prices have crashed due to massive US-EU subsidies to growers, casino-style commodity futures markets, and price rigging by large corporations. Farmers often don’t make enough revenue to cover their interest payments.

Stories of difficult industrial agriculture transitions have played out worldwide for the last half-century, reaching as far as Canada’s own Prince Edward Island. The province has lost 325 of its 400 hog farmers in the last six years due to centralized retailing and international commodity pricing.

In India, the additional burdens of changing weather patterns and irregular rainfall have pushed farmers into an endless cycle of debt, depression, and despair. Often, suicide is the only way out.

“Even as subsidies for corporate farmers in the West rose, we cut our few, very minimal life supports and subsidies to our own farmers,” says Nagaraj. “The collapse of investment in agriculture also meant it was, and is, most difficult to get out of this trap.”

The other Green Revolution

To Western ears, a green revolution sounds promising. But in India, the Revolution has signaled a major switch in Indian agriculture over the last 50 years.

“Out of the Green Revolution, only 10 per cent of farmers made money. The situation of the other 90 per cent was not improved at all,” says Vasant Futane. “The government is now promoting corporate sector farming and helping companies like Monsanto and Reliance to acquire large plots of land. They are ruining the environment, leading to the permanent degradation of the land.”

In 1961, Norman Borlaug, a Rockefeller Foundation affiliate who created hybrid grains, traveled to India to pitch the use of hybrid seeds to solve its looming food crisis, ostensibly due to unusual droughts, incomplete land reforms, and population increases. Rather than addressing these root causes, the government launched its own program of hybrid plant breeding. Crop yields increased dramatically, and the leaders of the Green Revolution were highly praised.

But India has seen the Revolution’s dark side; though food exports are booming, famine lingers because biased distribution channels are limiting the ability of the poor to access food.

The suicides are just one of many environmental and socioeconomic effects of the Green Revolution. The new ‘high yield seeds’ require chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow. Farmers must repurchase these seeds every season since they cannot be replanted. Every year, crops require additional fertilizers and pesticides as nutrients diminish and pests grow resistant to the chemicals. And with everyone planting the same seeds, a single disease can devastate an entire nation’s harvest.

Such difficulties manifest themselves as suicides. Tragically, the majority of the farmers have been committing suicide by ingesting the very chemicals that have destroyed their land, families, and communities.

An oasis in the desert

In this midst of this destruction, Futane and her husband Vasant are creating an oasis in the desert. Inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution—a small-scale organic farming system that does not require weeding, pesticide or fertilizer applications, or tilling—as well as the non-violence practices of Vinoba Bhave and Mahatma Gandhi, they are attempting to cultivate Swaraj, a state of self-reliant living. Swaraj emerges when people begin to take their lives in their own hands and take responsibility for the whole — self, nature, and community.

The Futanes practice contour bunding and sowing, a type of watershed management. Crops align with the landscape to maximize water use and conserve topsoil. Farmers use free, natural fertilizers, such as cow dung and cow urine. Mixed cropping is also practiced.

“We try to show local farmers that through these methods, they can improve the quality of their soil and increase their yields,” Vasant Futane says. He also suggests that reducing spending on luxury and consumer items like extravagant weddings and motorcycles will help communities to prioritize spending on food.

“[Villagers] can decide to give loans to each other and avoid banks with their high interest rates,” he says.

Futane also advocates seed banks for traditional seed varieties to reduce market dependencies. His greatest hope lies in a direct link from farmers to markets.

“In 1990, we planted 25 local variety papaya trees. The fruit were beautiful. If we went to sell it in the city, we would have gotten a lot of money for it. But we decided to sell them in a nearby large village,” he recounts. “There, people discarded the artificially ripened ones and would save up money to buy our papayas. Other farmers began growing these varieties, because they saw the value in them.”

The Futanes feel it’s unlikely that the Indian government will support them in making these changes happen.

They explain that today, farmers can only find genetically modified cotton seeds on the market. In fact, homegrown seeds may soon become scarce in India, since the government wants farmers to use corporate varieties only.

“I feel genetically modified crops (GMCs) have to be banned and boycotted,” Vasant says. “Manmohan Singh [the Prime Minister] is signalling to Monsanto to help launch India’s second Green Revolution. The government has turned a blind eye to the situation of farmers. It is time to protest for only direct subsidies, not indirect subsidies by way of company products.”

Indeed, given the lack of media attention, as well as the government’s active courtship of transnational agribusiness giants, its openness to GMCs and its following of World Bank policies, India’s government seems locked on this course. Support for large-scale factory farming and export-oriented agriculture will make the country dependent on foreign private investment.

“India’s minister of finance, Palaniappan Chidambaram, envisions a future where 85 per cent of India’s population lives in cities and only 15 per cent are engaged in agriculture,” writes Mira Kamdar, author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World.

“[He sees] an India with a heartland as empty as that of the United States with its few remaining farmers completely beholden to the agribusiness giants who sell them their seeds, their fertilizers, and their pesticides, and then buy their harvests.”

An organic future?

To critics who say that organic farming cannot produce enough food to feed the country, Karuna Futane responds: “Actually, if city people – who are respected – started coming back to the land, farmers would recover their pride and dignity. They would encourage their children to be part of it again.”

“Consumers need to understand that you can’t rush or substitute with farming. To be farming-literate is as important as being computer-literate. Without food, everything else is impossible.”

Vasant puts it simply: “City people can’t eat nuts and bolts and survive. Why don’t they connect with the land? If they do, then they won’t put such a burden on the farmers.”

Town and country

ReStore is an urban citizens’ collective created in Chennai by Sangeetha Sriram and her friends in response to a growing quest to relate the suicides to city-dwellers’ lifestyles.

“We wanted to create a space where people in the city could come together, look at what’s happening, and experiment with new ways of doing things. We thought food would be a good starting point, because there is already a lot of awareness around pesticides and organic foods,” says Sriram. “Though they want safe, whole food, and are aware of chemical residues, most people look at food in isolation. Eating well and responsibly is not just about [consuming] organic.”

ReStore sources produce from reliable rural organizations that work with small farmers and then sells this produce at a twice-weekly bazaar. ReStore also makes sure that farmers are producing enough food for themselves first. “We don’t want them to just grow millets for Chennai,” Sriram says.

To further bridge the gap, they have launched ‘Restore Earth Connections’, a program that takes city people on farm visits for mud-building, cow dung plasters, sowing and harvesting millets. Over 100 people signed up in the first week.

Groups committed to small-scale farming, organic produce, local ecologies, and whole and healthy foods have sprung up in other parts of India and the world. Southern Ontario has the CRAFT network which is helping to train the next generation of organic farmers and Saskatoon’s own Percy Schmeiser has become a global hero for taking on Monsanto single-handedly and bringing the issue of GMO contamination to the forefront of global food issues.

Cuba also converted its predominantly input-intensive agriculture to over 95 per cent organic farming, including large tracts of city farming, when the Soviet Union collapsed and its oil pipeline ended. With government support, this large-scale conversion took place in less than four years — a clear sign that more suicides and further disaster can be averted.

“We get hopeless sometimes, but we still have to keep going,” Vasant Futane says. “We will keep our fire lit, so that when someone needs light or heat, they will come to us. This is the Gandhian way. Mother Earth can satisfy everyone’s need, but not anyone’s greed.”

“When people start living according to their needs, we will find our way to true Swaraj.”

The post Cash crops appeared first on Corporate Knights.