the lifeblood of a democracy is your ability to understand and act upon a problem once the facts are presented to you the purpose of this motion picture is to give you the facts and then you as individuals and citizens of a democracy must take action every culture on the planet Earth is always changing sometimes rapidly and sometimes very slowly these changes occur in different ways one is through diffusion of culture traits from one culture to another the primitive native quickly adopts many of the advanced cultures tools whose value is readily apparent to him on the
other hand primitive culture traits like the Indian maize are quickly adopted by the advanced cultures who see value in them as the science of Agriculture advances the world will be better fed than clothes and house you too will reap great harvests today agriculture is going far beyond nature to produce new miracles or an even better more abundant life on the farm today wherever you look you see the handiwork of scientists improved crops more productive soils more useful more efficient machinery they are the result of a miraculous agriculture wholesome wholesome wholesome gladness wholesome wholesome wholesome goodness
wholesome wholesome wholesome goodness Productions presented in the harvest of 1999 60 percent of Canada's canola crop was genetically engineered 90 percent of Argentina's soybean crop 50% of the US soybean crop 33 percent of the US corn crop was genetically engineered industrial agriculture is damaging the basis for future production we've got soil erosion soil compaction salinization water logging destruction of beneficial biodiversity loss of natural enemies of pests that's really occurring at an alarming rate three things needed to come together to make the Green Revolution work one was the development of specific high-yield varieties and often dwarf
varieties of wheat or rice and also corn that were derived by special outcrossing and hybridization techniques at Norman Borlaug perfected working in Mexico and also in southwestern United States secondly there was a tremendous investment of funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Bank to assist poor countries to develop a broader food base based on these resources and then third there was a tremendous availability and input and requirement for pesticides fertilizers and irrigation which combined to reinforce the value to American commerce of supporting this type of agriculture the Ford Foundation in the Rockefeller Foundation and
the 50s were concerned that if the issue of hunger in the third world wasn't addressed then poor people in those countries would be right for communist subversion the green revolution which is really the introduction of chemical agriculture under force circumstances to countries like India was basically created as an antidote to social change it was meant to reinforce patterns of inequality which did the smaller peasants lost their land because they could not afford to keep up with the credit payments linked to the Green Revolution the intensive water use has left large tracts absolutely desertified the agricultural
diversity that fed people has been wiped out and yes the production of rice and wheat has increased but that is not an absolute increase in food the production of legumes of darls of China of chickpea of oil seeds of mustard has all come down faced with the choice of crop failures and resulting worldwide starvation the use of pesticides and herbicides seems inevitable if we talk about pesticides specifically they came out of the defense industry the first modern synthetic chemical pesticides were derived from nerve gases developed by the Germans in World War two and they found
that by some simple changes in the molecules instead of having their greatest toxicity be for human beings they could have their greatest toxicity be for insects there are plenty of chemical factories left over from World War two we got a raft of secrets from Nazi Germany that allowed us to make organophosphate pesticides that we did not have the capacity to make before my uncle was in the intelligence service in the army and went to the IG Farben plant and got all the chemical secrets that they had for making organophosphates as well as plastics and this
in part contributed to a great expansion in our knowledge base for making chemicals that could be used in the pesticide industry through the chemistry of explosives that connects directly because of the chemistry of it with the chemistry of fertilizers and then coming out of the war you have a whole infrastructure of industrial capacity that was war oriented with nothing to do the impression I have is that chemical agriculture became the norm when it was clear that the progressive addition of rounds of fertilizer amendments to soils that are chemically based coupled with pesticide regimes that suppress
weeds and also controlled insect pests worked best on large scale operations where you could mechanized production and use aerial application of the pesticides the chemicals that are used for pest control historically through the 1950s and early 60s were by design chemicals with long environmental persistence like Florida comb DDT chlordane those are major chlorinated chemicals that have half-lives measured in decades rather than months or weeks the idea was that they build up a protective barrier in the soil against repeated infestations virtually all the chemicals I just listed oven ban and have terrible environmental consequences because of
their persistence their ability to concentrate up the food chain and their concentration in food crops particularly crops that have a heavy oil base like corn and others the whole mentality of industrial agriculture is really similar to the whole mentality of war humankind against nature man against nature and using the same kind of weapons that we use to dominate people in in warfare one of the newest and most versatile weapons in dows arsenal of chemical warfare and I think we can contrast that to the alternatives to organic farming or more a Greek illogical approaches which are
gentler techniques which don't involve the domination of nature but really the living with nature there's a USDA study from you know from information they got in 1998 that showed that the average revenue per acre on a farm larger than 2,000 acres was this is bringing here what's $21.40 for acre for a year on a large-scale farm however the average revenue per acre on a farm of 10 acres or smaller was 1960 dollars on our farm it's probably somewhere around like like 15 16 thousand dollars per acre one of the reasons why large farms are relatively
unproductive compared to small farms is that large farms the world over tend to use monocultures a monoculture is a single crop species planted over a very large area and large farms have to use that unproductive farming system because their size means that they have to Mecca their operations and it's difficult to mechanically plant or mechanically harvest more than one crop yet that's terribly inefficient the idea that the average production on a larger-scale farm the average revenue for a year is you know a little more than twenty bucks I mean how the hell can anybody possibly
make a business out of that and the answer is by having hundreds of thousands of acres so I guess the point that becomes really important is the fact that that we believe that small farms and are efficient is because they do not have the subsidies whether these are farmers in third world countries like the Philippines are Mexico or these are small family farms in this country they're all on the brink of extinction because the subsidies that should be provided to them the support that should be provided to them is all being channeled to big agribusiness
corporations let's see how the system works the way the system works in essence is that it works to keep the prices low that farmers receive for what they produce while subsidizing the corporations like Cargill or like Archer Daniels Midland or continental grain that take us farm products and export them so that they can put them onto the global market at prices they can undercut farmers anywhere else in the world you see Tommy with the tools we have today farmers all over the country can produce great surpluses since we continuously have a surplus of many of
our grains and we have the lost commodity prices in probably 15 years presently the question is why do we continue to insist that we need a second Green Revolution about technology revolution in order to feed the world us agricultural research in colleges industry and government goes forward result new products new businesses more jobs help yourself to a miracle [Music] you hope in the battle for control [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes well we come down to Safeway is one of the world's biggest supermarket chains to try and get the message across that they should not be selling
genetically modified food I come from England one of the countries where there's been a very big campaign on this whole issue and really what we're saying now is that you know we need to stand back from this unnecessary and very dangerous experiment I think the main concern here is that the genetically engineered food Safeway is GE free in Europe and they haven't even begun to label in the US which is somewhat of a concern and double standard for Europeans and United States citizens genetically engineered foods could be having effects on people right now but because
they're unlabeled no one would know [Music] biotech is an incredibly broad subject area I really if you take the textbook definition it's the use of living organisms are components thereof to make useful products processes and services all the food we've eaten all our lives that our parents of eaten and our grandparents have eaten and so on it's all been genetically modified just by various kinds of techniques many consumers would be surprised to find out that our modern tomatoes are derived from an ancient predecessor that was a tiny berry in fact that was quite toxic it's
through literally hundreds of years of selective breeding that is genetic modification that we have the modern tomato what we're talking about is the the extraction of genetic material out of a reproductive reproductive context a context that has been evolving with this piece of DNA over millions of years taking it out manipulating it as a chemical and then putting it back into another reproductive context where it's going to operate in a different way this this type of manipulation the transgenic manipulation really has no precedent in history or in evolution here in fact is the answer to
a dream as old as man himself a giant of limitless power at man's command the beauty and peril of genetic engineering is that you can move genes from as far distant a species as a flounder into a tomato to ensure that you have a plant that's tolerant to very low temperatures because of antifreeze genes that are present in the flounder but you could find that same gene in any number of other organisms it was just easier to take it from a flounder than it was to take it from another plant but you'll find those genes
and plants as well that type of engineering is made possible by the universality of the genetic code that plant or animal species can read each other's genetic messages and in fact you and a P and a cow have all about you know 62 90% of your DNA is very similar you're much more closer to these organisms here than you might think you are her because an awful lot of the basic housekeeping genes are very very similar the FDA considers them to be the same as traditionally bred crops so there's no label required there's no testing
required and we really don't know what's gonna happen it's an outrage and that isn't safe even if you don't inner cable something you ought to be done about why doesn't the government step in in theory the government has three agencies that could regulate biotechnology generated agriculture the first and foremost would be the Food and Drug Administration but it decided beginning in 1992 to allow the deregulation of these crops from its point of view because they were equivalent to existing plants and foods a very convenient tool called the substantial equivalence principle was cooked up to say
let's just treat genetically engineered organisms like conventional crops of course they don't say that when they want to patent those same things then at that point they say these are novel these are not natural but when it comes to safety they say just like nature exactly as nature made it I sometimes call this ontological schizophrenia FDA under the regulations as they exist at the moment can are only obliged to label if in fact there is a potential problem with respect to safety and efficacy now how the products of biotech are produced is actually a process
that's not a product in itself FDA do not have any capability under any regulatory authority to actually label based purely on process and I think a lot of people don't realize that secondly the US Department of Agriculture could regulate these plants as they would any new plants they decided that these plants did not comprise a new category of plantings compared to other hybrid type varieties that are already on the market sound science has demonstrated time and again that many bio technological advances are safe and reliable but if consumers at home and abroad don't share our
confidence they will reject genetically treated product and we won't be able to get a return on the enormous public and private investments that have been made in biotechnology then the epa has the opportunity to regulate plants that might pose new environmental risks or would pose risks because they themselves the plants have pesticides in them rather than creating a new regulatory framework or new laws there was a decision may the recognition that existing laws could be applied to this industry and at that time there was a term and a construct that was coined that is is
called the coordinated framework and that refers to the what is supposed to be a viable effective coordinated effort among those three agencies so we have three different agencies each one in my viewpoint only half-heartedly are not at all taking an aggressive regulatory posture to control this industry [Music] what one there's a reason we have confidence in the federal bodies that analyze the safety of our food they may not be perfect but nobody believes they're in anybody's hip pocket they're world's best experts we have an orderly discipline system here terry has global responsibility for Biotechnology regulatory
public policy and external affairs for DuPont nutrition and health he was formerly the aphids administrator here in USDA and might I add up to medley it's nice to see that this professional life beyond government we must continue to argue in multilateral forums like the WTO that our biotech products have withstood the strictest scientific scrutiny it's nice to see that this professional life [Music] [Applause] [Music] based on our experiences the existing FDA guidelines have been transparent effective and now function to assure the safety of our food supply the consumer certainly has a right to know what
is in his or her foods but placing the words genetically engineered genetically modified or bioengineered on a label does not provide content information GMOs are stealth ingredients in cereal snack foods infant formula pancake mix and pet food will these in stealth ingredients further fuel the cancer epidemic in America we don't know will they produce life-threatening allergic reactions we don't know the majority of GMOs have been developed to withstand higher levels of pesticide spraying or to produce their own insecticides will these foods endanger more children's health that are already compromised we don't know with regard to
labeling we are opposed to mandatory labeling of these products we feel as there are consumer benefits that are promoted other than the production benefits we have now that those companies selling those products will want to clearly get that information to the public so that they can take advantage of that intended market the market will drive that issue FDA signed it to policy for biotechnology foods and ingredients provides consumers with everything the activists have asked for except the ability to sow confusion and mislead consumers with government blessing choice is provided if a consumer wants to buy
food and I derive from enhanced crops they can buy organic and also pay the higher cost if they want accurate and reliable information on health and nutrition that is mandated by law if they want to know if their personal preferences in regard to genetic modification have been met companies are free to meet those preferences provided there is sufficient consumer demand the potential contamination of organic crops has created a nightmare for those of us trying to ensure the integrity of our organic ingredients we are now having to consider the cost of testing all of our ingredients
which could potentially be contaminated at some point in the growing or manufacturing process and I really can't help but have this the question to me that if the confidence is there in the safety of these products why is there so much objection to labeling [Applause] [Music] well what's happened in England is that there's been really a total collapse in the market for GM agriculture people over there once they realize they were being fed food that they didn't want to eat and once they saw Monsanto's advertising campaign which was trying to make them feel guilty about
blocking developments that would feed the world it's obviously patent rubbish people got very angry and they've decided that they don't want to eat it contamination in this experiment is not a possibility it's not a probability it is an inevitability and it's my contention that what these companies are trying to do is to say oh dear look there's contamination all over the country now oh no it's gone it's gone the field mustard is going to maize he's got him to Bali it's got into just about everything till 8 horses bolted what's the point of keeping the
stable door shut any longer it may be contaminated well we did a study in Mexico in a special area of Mexico this is the center of diversification and domestication of corn where corn was brought from the wild state into domestication and cultivation and this area is recognized internationally as an area of diversity where we hold the diversity of genetic resources that we need to bring into our cultivated crops every year to confront problems like new pests new diseases drought changing climate and so on and so forth we were very surprised to find it immediately we
actually were expecting to see just negative controls from samples of these land races this Creole varieties in in the highlands of Oaxaca in the mountains of Oaxaca and Mexico and to our surprise we had very high levels of contamination already as soon as I felt secure about our results because we did not want to report something that was just spurious or wrong I contacted the Mexican government and what they did immediately which is I think the responsible responsible thing to do was to set up an independent study to see whether we were right or wrong
and soon enough they show that that yes we were right and their results are compatible with ours - really the quantitative detail we know it's not like an oil spill that you can put a boom around it when we have genetic pollution we cannot put a boom around it there is no controlling it for many years we have been assured that these manipulations - these transformations are under control that genetic materials are going to stay where we put them in the agricultural field and not go anywhere there was talk about buffer zones that would be
placed around transgenic fields thinking that pollen would not move out or beyond those buffer zones and I think the first level of importance of these discovery is that that we find that that control really doesn't exist the sites that we looked into our at least hundreds of miles away from any transgenic field and also they are distant from transgenic manipulations in time we have the benefit of a moratorium that the Mexican government placed on planting of transgenic corn so we know that at least legally since 1998 there shouldn't have been any transgenic plants nearby pollen
can travel up to four kilometers it knows no boundaries and genetic modification is occurring on close to 100 million acres worldwide it's going to be virtually impossible to keep a field from being contaminated in one way shape or form from genetic pollution there is this policy contradiction in Mexico between banning the planting of corn but allowing totally open access to an international market of corn especially the US so Mexico imports about 6 million tons of corn from the US every year and in those 6 million tons of corn they know they are receiving about 30
to 40% transgenic corn that is not segregated and it's not labeled so there's no way to separate it supposedly these two policies are compatible in the sense that the imported corn is only going to go for consumption and not for planting but that of course is a red herring in a place like Mexico where people have lived for thousands of years of corn in a very very tight relationship so most people in the countryside will plant what they eat and eat what they plant the agency's been refining its policy pertaining to drift with conventional pesticides
it's a significant amount of work on that in recent years but but genetic drift has not been included in that and we don't have a specific policy with regard to genetic drift there have been four cases of farmers in whose fields were found growing crops containing genes that were owned by companies to whom those farmers had not paid a fee for those for the seeds to grow those crops or the technology fee that they're required to use those crops and what this meant was that the farmer had violated the intellectual property of some huge corporation
and it might have happened because wind blew pollen onto the fields from a neighbor's field on onto a farmer's field nevertheless at least in Canada courts have found that those farmers have violated intellectual property and ofe to companies whose crops they never wanted in their field the biotech companies that create these products have no liability for them and no biotech company is yet been capable of getting any kind of insurance policy for any of their products at all so all of the agreements that they have when they sell these products to commercial farmers are are
placing all of you know all of the accountability for any detriment caused by on the farmers so say commercial farmer pollutes organic farmer but an organic farmer has to put a lawsuit against the commercial farmer is like two people without any money whatsoever like trying to fight a legal battle a lot of these crops have been engineered with a a bacteria called back sillas thuringiensis it's a naturally occurring soil bacterium which acts as an insecticide the BT plant exudes this toxin from every cell throughout its entire lifecycle scientists have seen residues in the soil up
to a year after the crop has been removed this corn which is called BT corn kills monarch butterflies and it's the pollen of this corn just the pollen contains enough of the toxin to knock out the larva of the monarch butterfly what dr. Loe see at Cornell found in laboratory simulations is that the monarch butterfly and his first studies died at about a 50% mortality rate subsequent studies suggest maybe only 7% of butterflies will die it's still an immense impact in an evolutionary sense and a completely unanticipated one other non-target insects that would be affected
are those that happen to ingest the pollen which is toxic to any species that has a larval form that has an alkaline gut and low C's work stands out more because it's a pilot study that that was should have been done 15 years ago when this technology first emerged then the fact that it showed a dramatic effect there increasing this feeding studies the first time around they probably they did quite a bit of feeding Studies on the actual components that the products of the genes themselves they didn't do quite as many but they are now
of the feeding studies of the actual expression of these genes in the crop plants themselves we have seen the development of insects that are resistance resistant to the BT crops and and the development of herbicide resistant weeds so these technologies are dated their data they take a very long time to produce and but they they are defeated by biological rules very quickly now some of the crops being grown contain chemicals that are useful to manufacturing processes or contain pharmaceuticals that we must not ingest one example that I think it is very interesting is the corn
that is being produced reportedly by these companies in Diego that has spermatocyte all properties so it's corn that if you if you eat it as a as a man you would become sterile and we worry even more because of what is commonly called the Starling scandal in which industry and the regulatory agencies were supposed to have kept a particular corn off the plates of people in the United States and we're not able to their systems of segregation their systems of controlling what went to our food plate didn't work once you've done snarling corn on us
we say darling so Aventis corporation produced StarLink corn which is a genetically engineered corn epa approved it only for animal feed because of concerns that StarLink could cause food allergies the cry 9 c didn't look like any known allergen the one thing it failed on was stability because the notion of courses with these proteins is if they stay stable within a simulated gastric environment which is what they did these proteins can then potentially be carried through and into the bloodstream and institute an allergic response the IgE immunoglobin czar produced in response to this so the
the agency said well let's hold on a moment here this looks like it's more stable than all of the other crime proteins these are the cry proteins that are produced for the other companies that were introducing BT proteins and into crop plants and they said well we really are concerned about this from a human health point of view we've no proof we've absolutely zero proof that it's an allergen but it is more stable and we have to be concerned about that so in fact they went ahead and gave a split approval now of course they've
decided they're never going to do that no company would ever want to do it again because it's just too difficult to segregate it all the way through and to ensure that you've identity preservation all the way through because know if you're looking at every field and every mill in the country there is some probability that animal feed and human feed may get mixed up we have now found that Starling has made its way into food supply it's contaminated corn products throughout the u.s. 300 food products have been recalled so far Aventis is facing up to
1 billion dollars in costs related to the recent food recalls Aventis is now petitioned EPA and said we believe StarLink is safe and we want you environmental protection agency to allow StarLink in the food supply after the fact in the case of StarLink we never were able to get to a safety finding around human food use and so after quite a bit of review with that material out in the channels of Trade and a lot of it being sort of held up in suspense and how we resolved the issue there was a question about whether
we were going to retroactively Lee approve that food use and and ultimately we didn't we didn't issue that approval because we couldn't make that safety plan there are innumerable different cultures on the planet Earth many encompass a very small group involving only a tribe or a series of villages such tiny culture groups dot the continent which the earth people call Africa [Music] and the other hand the continent called Europe is largely covered by a huge civilized culture which has spread over many parts of the earth being able to change whole cultural practices in these countries
is not a trivial trivial problem as Florence Wambugu said the real advantage of biotechnology is its package technology in a seat you don't have to teach these people to introduce new cultural practices because many individuals have tried this over the years since colonial times right up until the present day and they've not succeeded in doing it it's incredibly complex to teach people new cultural practices whereas if you give them a seed that the technology is in the seat so it's it's actually neutral if you like insofar as as the actual scalability it would be the
same for a farmer in a poor country as to a very wealthy farmer in this country but it comes down to that that we are saying that innovation and creativity is only going to take place in in labs with men in white coats all that innovation and antique knowledge that has existed in the fields passed from one generation to generation is being ignored putting the gene Magritte vitamin probably have heard for many people the story of Golden Rice and this from a scientific point of view it was an incredible engineering feat for a scientist to
be able to actually genetically modify a complete metabolic pathway so he went back to a very basic precursor of vitamin A production this was it's called journal journal diphosphate and then he stitched on all of the other enzymatic steps needed to produce beta-carotene in rice I mean this is an incredible scientific feat the vitamin A rice was a simple trick that could have been done 20 years ago in fact it could have been done by conventional means to breed plants that would have a higher concentration of vitamin A since there are neighboring varieties that already
have high vitamin A contents from a human nutrition point of view of course the jury is still out as to how efficient that's going to be they're still looking at issues of bioavailability but it's an incredibly efficient way to develop to deliver these nutrients especially to countries where nutrition is a real problem there are plenty indigenous species in the squash families for instance that have extraordinarily high amounts of vitamin A as do sweet potatoes and other often pigmented carotene containing plants to put the beta-carotene gene into a rice plant was really I think an artful
saw in order to get more support to biotechnology more than a cure for a nutritional problem in the public that would be consuming the rice using biotech there's several ways that this can be addressed in addition to just introduced involve Asia carotene there's there's other work going on in producing high iron content rice again iron deficiency especially for women and children is a major problem in developing countries well what does malnourished children and people who are not well what they really need is the vaccine against the social disease called poverty if only the health budgets
and social safety net programs of whether United States or whether overseas if only the governments were allowed to do their jobs by financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF we would not need rice with vitamin A we would not need rice and other things with all the vaccines in it I think though insofar as the consumer is concerned the real advantage is going to be the in the area of quality traits where they look at shelf-life taste and very important nutritional aspects both at the macro level at the protein in carbohydrate and fat
level where you're looking at better ways to introduce a more balanced amino acid ratio into your diet which is something of course vegetarians have to look at all the time using biotechnology you can do this for many different crop varieties so that for example you can have high lysine corn because the cereals are often low in lysine are on the other side you can have sulfur rich proteins introduced into the legumes because they're low in sulfur rich proteins at the micro level during there's incredible capability of improving the quality of vitamins and minerals especially antioxidants
as we've become more aware of the fact that we need to eat healthy food to stay healthy rather than always running to the doctor for cures although biotech has the answer to that as well but it's much cheaper and much more effective to eat healthy in the first place rather than trying to cure the ills of ill eating later on in life and with biotech that's incredible capabilities five million people in the world today billion of them in abject poverty about one person in seven about 800 million people in the world so malnourished they do
not participate in work life and family life living on the edge of starvation genetic engineering clearly falls right within the Green Revolution mindset it's another production Estero to dealing with problems of hunger if indeed it really exists to deal with hunger at all that's what Monsanto and other companies would have us believe probably it deals more with their bottom line than hunger but let's take them at their word at face value and say it's an approach to dealing with hunger first of all if it could increase yields that doesn't necessarily mean that it would have
a positive impact on hunger just like the Green Revolution it's an expensive technology genetically altered seeds are much more expensive than normal seeds they usually require a technological package like Roundup herbicide that's expensive that goes with them and they're clearly going to create the same kind of economy of scale that puts smaller poorer farmers at a disadvantage just like the Green Revolution so even if they did significantly increase yields they would still be likely to lead us back into the paradox of plenty more production more hunger more poverty yeah there is hunger and many of
us are told that there is so much hunger because there too many of us it's because of overpopulation and we need to grow more food as the people indulging and genetic engineering would like us to believe and people who have promoted industrial agriculture Green Revolution but we have to really understand that there is no problem of food production in fact the problem in United States right now is overproduction and yet according to USDA last year the number of people who do not have adequate access to food had increased from 30 million from previous year to
36 million Americans not having adequate access to food and the reasons for those people not having enough food to eat offer the fact that the 800 million people who are undernourished in this world lies in the fact that there is too much of social and economic inequality it's 800 million people are hungry today every one of those 800 million people 10 20 30 years ago used to grow their food and feed themselves world hunger is created by destroying people's capacity to feed themselves which includes both a destruction of small farming systems as well as a
destruction of people's entitlements through a highly iniquitous economic structure which creates corporate welfare by robbing the poor of their thing and that's in the rich countries and that's in the poor countries 70% of the world today is fed by small-scale farming most of the food needs of the poorer parts of humanity are met by having biodiversity rich farming biodiversity will feed the world not chemicals ecological cycles will feed the world not genetic engineering I really think that this technology has an awful lot to offer to smaller farmers like my father because he and in my
early life we couldn't afford actually to buy a lot of the chemicals fertilizers or pesticides etc that that you see used so much over here and we lost a lot of our crops we wouldn't have the same level of productivity and we lost a lot of our crops to both diseases in the field and at the post harvest level and I thought what you know a biotech there's such incredible capability of using you know that totally organic substance DNA to be able to improve the loss of farmers [Music] the farmers that have embraced genetic engineering
are the farmers that are the large agribusiness farmers growing huge enormous monoculture tracts of different soybean varieties or cotton varieties or in the Midwest the corn varieties that are now genetically engineered it is so easy to call anyone a farmer Monsanto would like to call itself a farmer in fact very often in international negotiations the issue is can corporations be farmers and they would like themselves to be called farmers anyone who has an interest in making money out of Agriculture calls themselves a farmer but we have a very clear definition that the FAO has those
who labor with the soil but biodiversity to produce food then connection with laboring is what makes a farmer and those who don't actually work on the land work in fisheries work in forest based agricultural production are not farmers and therefore many representatives so-called and many institutions so-called that are created to clamor for biotech seeds are basically France Monsanto France they buy the company France [Music] a box of vetoes which is like three dollars something only less than ten cents of it goes to the farmer in this country who grows wheat so the question lies way
to the rest of the money go and that's when it becomes very important to look at the vertical and horizontal integration of the of the food industry then it goes into packaging it goes into shipping so you have a situation where according to the latest census there is no category of farmer on a census because when less than 1% of the population is involved in a profession this is to exist so I said that they're on the brink of extinction in this country family farmers but if you look at the census figures they're already extinct
the food processing system is really owned by multinational corporations and we've lost control of our food supply and right now we're in a situation of how do we get it back I think we support organic farmers and I think we support organic farmers in our local areas I think it's important that we begin to get back to our roots where we shake hands with our farmers we go to the farmers markets and we say how did you grow these foods where's your farm can I come out and take a look can I walk around is
it close by boy way I'd love to to get to know you a little bit find out some philosophies behind how you grow your food my name is Jason McKenney and principal operator here for pure it's my greetings hi I'm Katie Dwight and I work with Jason here and both live in San Francisco and commute down here together and bring most of our vegetables back up to the city or to people on the coast here in Half Moon Bay we're a very small-scale organic operation growing on a basically a four and a half acre plot
pretty much single truck single tractor operation going to farmers markets going to a Community Supported Agriculture program and sales to restaurants to the kind of Agriculture that we practice here is a very human scale agriculture you know we are talking about two people growing you know anywhere between 60 to 70 different varieties of vegetables and fruits on a very small garden like plot of land for essentially eight to nine months of the year and it's really a very different scenario given the very very personal care that we're able to give to everything not to mention
even all of the different all the different organic techniques that we use for soil maintenance a lot of people if they think about you know oh I want to start a farm or I'm interested in farming they maybe have a kind of idealized view of what that's all about and the bucolic crock between weeding and harvesting that's just about all we do and people don't think about that I don't know what people think think oh yeah the farm that'd be great I'll go out there and I don't know what do you think sit around in
the Sun or something get other people to do that harvesting yeah yeah we were trying to figure out the other day how how long it usually takes us to build a pile and it kind of depends on the time of the year depending on how much but for good part of the view or building you see if they I guess what what I feel so strongly about is that one thing I think we lack in our society to do is community surreal strong solid community so I think food is the basis event it could be
the basis of any community because we all of us so giving good food to people who can't have a direct connection with the land so get a connection through the people that greater food for them CSA which stands for Community Supported Agriculture describes a relationship between a group of people gathered around purchasing and committing to purchase their food generally produce directly from a farm life power was one of the earlier CSAs and and I think has a slightly different concept than a lot of the CSA's a lot of CSAs are more like subscription farms where
you'll get a box every week but there isn't the sort of extended community involvement that life powerhouse trips to the farms we actually sort the vegetables each Saturday morning so you know where another CSA you go to a spot and pick up a box that's already set up for you we take the vegetables as they come down from the farm and spread it out among the the shareholders baskets it's seasonal and they grow in Mendocino County in a valley that's high the season is May to early December so in May its spring vegetables lots of
greens and then summertime it's summer vegetables tomatoes and corn summer squash and then into the fall which is always this incredible transition I love greens and and winter squash and root vegetables and I I always welcome that time of year in terms of food initially the first couple of years it was a little daunting you know as their own you know what do we do with you know we'd get cabbages in the spring and in the fall giant cabbages we still sometimes they're a bit daunting but you know you knew you had to start really
getting into the cycle which now I I love it's a radically different relationship because it's an it's an it's a relations and economic relationship of Association not of competition and there's a common good that both parties are working toward and that is the sort of sustaining of that farm and mate'll like the right thing to do they use apprentice labor on the farm Stephen glory really committed to the educational aspects of the apprenticeship program and they've started up sharing with a few other farms so the apprentices will go away for a weekend and go to
another to learn different things from that farm one of the perennial issues for small farmers is sort of how to how to keep going there's been such a loss of farmers in this country and the effort to provide an environment for people to learn and to learn sustainable farming practices is a really significant part of what life our community farm is doing we need to be working with CSS to ensure that their programs are available in inner-city areas low income areas in a lot of ways the Community Supported Agriculture program hasn't really penetrated that kind
of a socio-economic difference or strata you know it really plays into a stigma that that I find it's just only distressing it's people thinking that organic food is is really just for rich people but that's a really big reason why we why we bring stuff to to the Alemanni farmers market in the southern part of San Francisco which is in their various farmers markets in the region and a lot of the markets have extremely different feel to them some of the markets are kind of even more sort of XI XI and yuppified then you know
then a Whole Foods Market and the food the price is you know the prices and the varieties of food that are there really show it Alemanni is definitely like a very lowbrow market it's it's a place where people go for bargains people don't really think or care about organic there and I think that's a really big reason why we go there it's cuz you know it's in our community and it's a way of bringing food you know that we know you know its direct from here so we can give a pretty you know we can
give a really good price for organic food and what you know in many cases ends up being a very good price you know that people even expect just at the market itself and I think it's it's really had a a pretty positive effect there's been a lot of people you know who you know I wouldn't call them like organic converts necessarily but like they know they say this stuff tastes a hell of a lot better than the guy next to you I think in terms of making of addressing that kind of a that kind of
a disparity that exists between you know in the organic market the the farmers market is a much more viable tool for it than than the Community Supported Agriculture program I think for all of us who care about food this is a very exciting moment and especially at Seattle at the World Trade Organization we saw the role that the food and agriculture movement not just in this country but from around the world played in mobilizing people the younger people the elderly women children just about everyone and so we are at this really important a point in
time where we can demand a basic human right to safe nutritious food we have to burn honest access from Seattle and demand a basic human right to that food the entire edifice of genetic engineering is built on a reductionist Cartesian world order that genes are frozen discrete atoms they have no relationships with anything else we will stay and behave exactly you decide their traits and qualities are that's not how the world function the world functions through relationships the world functions through constant dynamic flux they are not discrete entities in biology genes are a total theoretical
construction [Music] you may well decide whether mankind is bettered or destroyed by the products of science [Music] you you
