On December 4, Occupy Wall Street held a "Farmers March" to Zuccotti Park in New York City, organized by the Food Justice Committee of Occupy.
Gardeners, farmers, seed growers, health care workers, and union members formed a natural allegiance, connecting the dots between hunger, diet-related diseases and unchecked corporate power.
Maine-based organic farmer Jim Gerritsen, listed as a visionary changing the world by Utne Reader, participated in the rally.
As president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGTA), which represents the organic seed industry, he’s the lead plaintiff against Monsanto in a lawsuit to protect growers and consumers of organic foods.
Monsanto’s genetically modified organisms (GMOs) not only cause irrevocably damage organic crops, but also open organic farmers to patent infringement lawsuits. If a GMO is detected in an organic crop, Monsanto can argue the farm holds its patented product and must pay for it.
Indeed, Monsanto has sued 90 farmers in the US for patent infringement and has raked in about $15 million in settlements, according to the Center for Food Safety.
Monsanto dominates the sale of seed stocks worldwide, especially corn, soybeans and cotton, and sends private investigators to farms suspected of replanting saved seed.
In OSGATA v. Monsanto, Organic Seed Growers is leading 83 plaintiffs in the case against Monsanto – individual farmers, seed companies and agricultural organizations that have signed onto the case represent about 300,000 members nationwide.
"Monsanto is trying to achieve seed control based on aggressive assertion of patent infringement," Gerritsen says. The goals of the lawsuit are to protect organic farmers against patent infringement lawsuits and to challenge the validity of patents issued to Monsanto.
"Organic farming is predicated on the concept of crops free of GMO content," he said, noting the irony of a suit against a farmer by the company that has destroyed that farmer’s crop.
"If organic seed is contaminated, there is no way to grow nongenetically modified crops," he said. "The outcome will be either seed controlled directly by Monsanto or contaminated by Monsanto."
"President Obama promised mandatory labeling of genetically modified products and we must hold him to that," he says. Meanwhile the deputy commissioner of the FDA, which regulates labeling, Michael R. Taylor, is a former vice president of Monsanto.
"I have not spoken to one farmer who doesn’t understand the message of Occupy Wall Street," he told the New York Times. "We have fifth- and sixth-generation farmers up where I live being pushed out of business, when all they want to do is grow good food. And if it goes on like this, all we’re going to have to eat in this country is unregulated, imported, genetically modified produce. That’s not a healthy food system."
Under a new two-year pilot program at the USDA, regulators are training the world’s biggest biotech firms, including Monsanto, BASF and Syngenta, to conduct environmental reviews of their own transgenic seed products as part of the government’s deregulation process, reveals TruthOut. The FDA is allowing the GMO industry to regulate its own crops.
A coalition of nearly 400 businesses and organizations filed a legal petition with the FDA to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods.
Although glyphosate, known by its tradename Roundup, is widely thought to be safe, more studies are showing it’s not. The most widely used herbicide in the world, the U.S. Geological Survey released one of the first studies to document high levels in streams, rain and air throughout the the Mississippi River watershed, where it’s used the most to control weeds on GMO corn, soybeans and cotton.
If you want to volunteer to gather signatures for the California ballot initiative that would mandate GMO labeling, sign up here. It begins the last week of December.
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