Ursula Rozum: We deserve to know what's in our food, despite what Monsanto says

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Are genetically modified foods to blame for the decline in honeybees? (AP file photo)
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on June 16, 2013 at 7:33 AM, updated June 16, 2013 at 7:36 AM
Since Monsanto can’t stop states from passing GMO laws, they are taking preemptive steps at the federal level.

For decades, my grandfather has cultivated pear trees on his little dzialka, a community garden plot our family received in the late 1970s under Poland's communist government. Many families received the plots at a time of food shortages. My grandparents always proudly proclaimed their vegetables as "natural" and "no spray."

I recall many hours spent weeding and picking off cabbage worms, and my grandpa concocting a strange yet effective fertilizer from fermented nettles. For kids like me, time on the dzialka meant a little work, but mostly hide-and-seek, eating of berries straight from the bushes and lots of mosquito bites. After decades of tending several saplings, waiting for them to be big enough to bear a significant amount of fruit, my grandfather is now worried that he will get no pears from them.

His neighbor's honeybees recently died off, as have many hives of small-scale beekeepers throughout Poland.

The disappearance of the bees is worrisome for many farmers and community-gardeners like my grandparents who cultivate small plots to supplement the food they buy and who rely on bees to pollinate their crops. According to Britain's Independent newspaper, more than 30 separate scientific studies have found a link between the neonicotinoids, pesticides which attack insects' nerve systems, and falling bee numbers. The decision in April 2013 by the European Commission - the EU's legislative body - to ban these insecticides was based on a study by the European Food Safety Authority, which found in January 2013 that neonicotinoids pose a risk to bees' health. While the two year ban wasn't unanimous, the EC's exercise of the precautionary principle put public and environmental health before the interests of the biotechnology industry, which continues to claim that neonicatinoids are safe.

In the US, our federal regulatory agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, allow the biotech industry to perform their own tests to demonstrate their products are safe enough to introduce into the environment, making us (and beneficial insects like bees) unwitting guinea pigs for the biotech industry.

On May 25, the international March Against Monsanto drew attention to the biotech industry's immense power and influence over our food system. In Syracuse, citizen activists held up the honey-bee to symbolize the harmful effects of biotechnologies. Tiny, furry, and essential to our food system, many of us see common cause with the humble bumble bee. We're just going about our own business, trying to be productive citizens and take care of our families, and our health is being jeopardized by poisons and food additives that most of us aren't even aware of. In the U.S., most of the corn, soybean and cotton plants cultivated are grown from genetically engineered (GE) seeds developed by Monsanto. GE crops, also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are created by transferring genetic material from one organism to another to create specific traits, such as resistance to herbicides or to make a plant produce its own pesticides to repel insects. Many GE crops are designed to allow farmers to use more pesticides, like the new variety of neonicatinoids, and herbicides, at levels that used to kill the plants.

Since we are what we eat, there are few things more basic than our right to know what's in our food. Yet Monsanto and other biotech companies are actively obstructing efforts to allow consumers to choose whether or not we want to consumer products that contain GMOs. This is unacceptable, whether you think GMOs are benign or are a skeptic like me.

In November 2012, a GMO labeling referendum, Proposition 37, was defeated in California after Monsanto, DuPont and other "food" companies spent $45 million on ads to defeat the initiative. Agribusiness won a razor-thin victory, 51 percent to 49 percent. If their products are so great, why doesn't Monsanto want us to know when we are eating them? The European Union has been labeling GMOs since 1998. Yet in the United States, even though over 90 percent of the American public supports GMO labeling, biotech companies are standing in way of our right to know what's in our food - in what amounts to an egregious attack on individual freedom.

On June 3, a GMO labeling law was approved in Conneticut and another is likely to pass in Maine. In New York, GMO labeling has been delayed, after a proposed GMO labeling bill died in committee. State Assembly member Dennis Gabryszak, a Democrat from Western New York, withdrew his support, allegedly after coming under pressure by the Council for Biotechnology.

Since Monsanto can't stop states from passing GMO laws, they are taking preemptive steps at the federal level. Earlier this year, the unpopular "Monsanto Protection Act," an act that gives biotech companies immunity from federal prosecution for planting illegally approved GE crops, was slipped into the 2013 Federal Appropriations Bill. I contacted Representative Dan Maffei for his position on the Monsanto Protection Act (which he voted for as part of the Appropriations Bill) and his thoughts on GMO labeling, but have yet to hear back.

Monsanto may not be the only biotech company responsible for introducing poisons into our food supply, but in the U.S., they are the largest and undeniably the most influential, dominating policy through campaign contributions and lobbyists. But in this of age of information, citizens have tools available to counter the assaults of companies like Monsanto on our freedom and democracy. Until corporations are barred from spending money on political campaigns, citizens can practice a creative form of "campaign finance reform" by boycotting the companies that stand in the way of our right to know whats in our food. For example, the Organic Consumers Association has compiled a list of companies that helped finance the defeat of the GMO labeling initiative in California. We can also continue to pressure lawmakers to pass GMO labeling at the state level. Anyone who denies consumers the right to know what's in the food we're eating is unfit to call themselves a representive of the public interest. And the presence of genetically modified ingredients in foods - without transparent safety testing - amounts to a massive science experiment on human health in the name of corporate profits.

Humans have practiced a gentle form of genetic modification for millenia. But what the biotech industry is pushing on us today is much different than the gradual selection of preferable traits by food growers. What we're observing now is a whole lot of dead bees, as well as an increase in food allergies and serious human diseases including cancer, autism, ADHD, and dementia, just to name a few. It should come as no surprise that the industry whose profits depend on the sale of products that might be responsible for all of the above insists that they're safe. But we should know better.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have grandparents with fruit trees. Hopefully, if the bees don't all die, on my next trip to Poland I'll get to enjoy some pears. In the meantime, I'll be tending my backyard garden the "no spray" way my grandparents do, squashing bugs and cabbage worms and admiring the cute bees when they come by.

And of course, I'll keep agitating for GMO labeling on this side of the pond - anything else would be un-American.

One more thing
» Here's a plug for a beneficial pests workshop from Cornell Cooperative Extension. It's an introduction to the ways beneficial insects can help in your home vegetable garden, with a focus on identifying and welcoming insects that prey on common pests.