A Corporation No Mother Could Love

"Our work in wheat is focused on helping improve wheat productivity, including breeding, biotechnology and improved agronomic practices," said Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles in a statement.

This sentence says it all, but no, not in the way Monsanto would like. Notice the curious expression, “helping improve wheat productivity.”

First question—helping whom? The wheat? The farmer? The greater good?

Second question—at what is wheat being productive? I sort of know what I do, which is get up, write some stuff, teach a few classes, and hope vainly (and formerly secretly) one day to go viral. But what does wheat do?

The questions go on and on. I knew, though I prefer not to think too much about the matter, that cattle breed—but wheat? And if wheat does breed, do cattle then pollinate? And what’s the deal with the “biotechnology and improved agronomic practices?”

Spokesmen are supposed to speak, which implies communication, but this is a classic example of a sentence that says absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s utter gibberish—which would be OK, if it were spoken. We had a president recently who spent eight years falling into one sentence and then scrambling to get out the other end. It was agonizing to watch, although it also could be amusing. Once, during one of the debates, I was present in a large room of University of Wisconsin students as Bush tried to come to the end of a sentence. He paused, trying to find some light in the dimness of his brain, and the group collectively held its breath. Then a whispered question from somewhere in the room: “is he stoned?”

But the “in a statement” up there at the end of the first paragraph makes me believe that this is not spoken, but a press release. And that’s standard—would you want to be Lee Quarles and have to explain face to face what a genetically modified wheat plant was doing in an Oregon field a decade after your company had stopped testing it?

So the question is, is it intentional gibberish or unintentional? My first instinct was unintentional—the corporate mindset had so settled in Quarles’s psyche that he was first, incapable of logical thought, and second, completely convinced that wheat could breed, use technology, or improve agronomic practices.

Now, I think it was intentional. And I think he must be chortling, up there in Missouri. It’s fun, you know, to practice this bit of mercurial foolishness with the language. I do it frequently, and for the same reasons as Quarles.

Raf (peering inside the refrigerator): Who drank the beer?

Marc (practicing for his mayoral bid): First of all, I’d like to thank you for that question, and to say that it’s citizens like you: ordinary men and women, people who get up in the morning and put on their clothes and feed the kids and go to work, you ordinary, good, decent men and women who form the background of our community—it’s people like you, unafraid to ask the hard questions….

Raf (flatly): You drank the beer.

Marc (unstoppable): I’m calling today for an independent, bipartisan commission…

Raf (walks away in disgust)

Repeat that twice a week for thirty years and you have a fair sampling of my marital life. And I am sure that Quarles can do it better than I, since I focus most of my time on writing short and lucid, as opposed to long and opaque. Quarles, on the other hand, spends fifty or sixty hours a week doing just the opposite.

And I hope they pay him well, because he’s gonna be a busy little bee, as things heat up. A Kansas wheat farmer, wonderfully by the name of Barnes, has filed suit against Monsanto, and so we get the following statement.

"Tractor-chasing lawyers have prematurely filed suit without any evidence of fault and in advance of the crop's harvest," said David Snively, Monsanto executive vice president and general counsel.

Right, it might be Snively—and is Dickens making up these names?—who “said” it, but it has Quarles all over it. Notice the nice shift: it’s not the good farmer, standing in his field. No, no—Monsanto is smarter than that! Can you imagine a photo of Barnes standing alone in his field, mopping his brow, squinting into the camera, standing against the wheat field that rolls endlessly and perhaps genetically modifiedly into the distance? And then a picture of the home office of Monsanto? Nope, let’s not go after the farmers, who are anyway Monsanto’s customers / pawns. So Quarles gets Snively to say it’s the lawyers—who rank a bit lower than farmers on the lovability quotient—and then he gets a spark of genius!  

I see Quarles in his office—a large windowless affair—sitting before his computer, wondering how to give this sentence a spin. “Tractor-chasing,” whispers the muse, who then goes off to smoke a cigarette. Quarles grins—she’s never let him down yet.

And Quarles may also have to deal with this, one day:

An amendment inserted into the 2013 Farm Bill passed by the House of Representatives' Agriculture Committee Wednesday would revoke the ability of individual states' lawmakers to pass GMO-labeling laws, food advocates warn.

What does this mean? Well, suppose a liberal, agricultural state like Vermont decides to pass a law requiring that all food sold in the state have a label, saying This product contains genetically modified food products. Would you buy it? Of course not, why should you?

And Monsanto knows that. So we’re going to have a federal law that says that states have no right to require that food is labeled as GMO, or (presumably) even GMO-free.

Now then, did Monsanto actually come out and say, “hey look, we don’t want you to know what’s in the potato salad?” Nope, they got an Iowa representative, Steve King and shame on you, to tweak it as the PICA—Protect Interstate Commerce Act. This isn’t about labeling, this is about interstate commerce, see?

One wonders—was it Quarles who dreamed up the name? Perhaps so, because one critic of the act, Heather White, noted a stylistic similarity:

"This impenetrable language simply means that states would be prevented from regulating just about any agricultural product in commerce," White wrote, adding that, "This sweeping provision would severely undermine all states’ authority to set standards for environmental protection, food safety or animal welfare. It would apply to genetically engineered food labeling, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) regulation, antibiotics use in meat and other local and state food and farm regulations."

It’s one thing to drink all the beer—that’s inadvisable but forgivable. But to modify all the food, threaten a billion dollar wheat market (Japan and Korea have just announced they’re not buying American wheat), and then turn around and sneak a bill into a farm act that would prevent anyone from knowing what they’re putting in their mouths, or —God forbid—their children’s mouths?

Unforgivable.

Life Under the Palm Trees

Hey, guess what! There’s a new member in Puerto Rico’s Agriculture Hall of Fame and it’s none other than that benign, loveable agri-giant (it’s a word now, computer!)—Monsanto!

 “What,” you say, “what’s Monsanto doing in Puerto Rico?”

A very good question with many answers, most of them not known. What is known is that the biotech industry is very large in Puerto Rico—we have the second largest amount of land per square mile devoted to genetically modified seed production and experimentation. Who’s number one?

Hawaii.

Astute and discerning readers of this blog—and if you’re reading this, you are by definition astute and discerning—will have noted that both Hawaii and Puerto Rico are islands, separated from the continental United States by thousands of miles of sea water. Is that just coincidence?

If you say yes, then I’d really like to tell you about this bridge I happen to own…..

As you can see from the clip below, genes from genetically modified seeds have been found in plants a thousand miles from the nearest source. There’s something, you see, that all these guys with advanced degrees in genetics and bioengineering haven’t thought about. The wind blows.

Now little Puerto Rico has several other advantages that other states don’t have. The weather, for example—you’d really have to modify severely a soybean to get it to grow in Iowa in January. But in Puerto Rico? Not a problem—you can get four crops a year.

There’s also the fact that we, as citizens, are not as activist as the good folk of Wisconsin or Iowa. Most of my students had tuned out the news, and why not? Six more murders, eight more corruption schemes, inane stories about celebrities—who needs it? Just dealing with the morning tapón (the traffic jam), soothing / ignoring the crying baby, dropping off the kids, doing the next leg of the tapón, and trying to sneak by your boss so he / she doesn’t know you’ve drifted in late was enough to exhaust most of my students—and it was just 8AM. Life is hard on the island—nobody has much time for standing around in demonstrations, or probing into what’s going on on the island.

And then there are some nice incentives. We once had a pharmaceutical industry—you can thank Puerto Rico for all that lovely Valium you’ve enjoyed for years—but whoosh, that went away. So what’s next?

Well, we decided to make ourselves the capital for agricultural biotechnology, and we put in some nice little incentives to do it. Here’s what the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo had to say:

Transgenic seed companies operate freely and the government protects them. The whole structure to continue making Puerto Rico a transgenic paradise is based on Law 62 of 2009, better known as the Business Promotion and Development of Agricultural Biotechnology Law, driven by Luis Fortuño. It establishes "cutting edge" public policy for Puerto Rico to become a mecca for these companies, giving them fast-track permits, facilitating the acquisition of buildings and providing financial incentives through the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company and the Department of Agriculture.

Well, there is a little problem. First of all, the constitution of Puerto Rico specifically states that no company can own more than 500 cuerdas (about an acre) of land. It was a measure designed to protect local farmers from giant agricultural interests—remember King Sugar? But Monsanto has 1500 cuerdas, 500 of them from the government itself. So how does Monsanto do it? The old trick—set up a subsidiary company.

OK—what’s the land being used for? Some of it is crops, and the government pays the agribusinesses a buck or two for every hour paid for field laborers. But most of it is lying vacant—its only use is to isolate the fields from contamination. And all of the land, apparently, is surrounded by tall chain link fence, with coiled barbed wire at the top. If you stop and take a picture, a cop appears from nowhere and tells you that’s prohibited.

Yeah? Even if it’s land owned by the government of Puerto Rico?

There might be another problem as well—Puerto Rico produces almost none of its food. In fact, less than 10% of the food consumed on the island is actually grown on the island. In terms of food security, we’re in terrible shape. Oh, and agriculture represents only 1% of our gross domestic product.

So here, under the tropical sun, we have another set of contradictions, paradoxes, absurdities that only García Márquez could dream up. We are luring multinationals to come down, scoop up vast parcels of land which will go unused to produce a series of crops that will not benefit us (most of the experiments, by the way, are for corn—not frequently thought a tropical crop) and that may in fact harm us. Oh, and we don’t have the land in the first place, and every time the price of oil goes up, the California head lettuce in the grocery store jumps 20 cents.

And you know, it’s not the first time. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when there was still a lot of chemical / pharmaceutical production on the island, parents began noticing something a bit strange. Girls as young as 2 were growing breasts. So what was causing it?

It’s been studied; it’s still not clear. Here’s what a study cited in a report by the Center for Health, Environment and Justice had to say:

“Premature breast development (thelarche) is the growth of mammary tissue in girls younger than 8 years of age without other manifestations of puberty. Puerto Rico has the highest known incidence of premature thelarche ever reported. In the last two decades since this serious public health anomaly has been observed, no explanation for this phenomenon has been found. Some organic pollutants, including pesticides and some plasticizers, can disrupt normal sexual development in wildlife, and many of these have been widely used in Puerto Rico… The phthalates that we identified have been classified as endocrine disruptors. This study suggests a possible association between plasticizers with known estrogenic and antiandrogenic activity and the cause of premature breast development in a human female population.”

My question—are we going to wait until we develop weird cancers or start frothing at the mouth before we start studies that will return answers of varying validity? Fifty countries, according to our friends at the Center for Media and Democracy right there in Madison, Wisconsin, required labeling on foods with GMO ingredient. The European Union has banned the stuff. And here’s what Carmelo Ruiz Marrero of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety had to say:

And 2008 saw the release of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report (IAASTD), a unique, unprecedented and definitive report on the state of world agriculture. It was authored by over 400 international experts, subjected to two independent peer reviews, and was the product of an inclusive and participatory process in which industry, governments and civil society participated as equal partners, with the support of UN agencies and the World Bank.

The report concluded, in a nutshell, that the model of industrial, corporate, globalized agriculture cannot continue, as it is unsustainable and is literally eating up the planet’s patrimony, and favors in its stead small-scale agroecological production that uses local resources and minimizes the use of fossil fuel-based inputs- precisely what environmentalists and organic farmers had been advocating for decades.

Puerto Rico has one of the most highly paid legislatures in the country, with advisors making colossal sums of money. How could such a bad, such a cynically evil situation occur? A kickback here and there—sure, we’ve learned to expect that. But putting a whole island’s health at risk? Why would you do that?

Open up your wallet and see….