The Global March Against Monsanto

Today was the global March Against Monsanto.  While I don't expect that a march with the astrological configuration it had will have much effect anywhere in the world, and less here where it was begun and completed on a Saturday, entirely within the local planetary hour of Venus, it may yield some networking for those with the power to make the changes necessary.  (I addressed the astrological chart for the March in a previous post.)  But my husband and I marched anyway to offer our support for policies and legislation that will break Monsanto's hold on our local Hawaiian agriculture and help break its stranglehold on the nation's food supply, the first time either of us has really gotten into political activism.


It is particularly important here in Hawaii that this be addressed, as Monsanto takes advantage of the conditions here to produce 2-3 crops of experimental crops each year (as opposed to the one they can reasonably get on the mainland without stupid-high expenditures on climate-controlled buildings). They conduct these experiments with no oversight whatsoever, and no accountability for what happens if their chemical or genetic creations escape their fields and get into the local ecology. There are plants and animals found here in Hawaii that are NOWHERE ELSE in the world, many of which are already in danger of being crowded out/killed off by invasive species and are the subject of intense conservation efforts. They don't need to be put further at-risk by genetically-modified escapees, or by yet more toxic chemicals dumped on them. Neither do we: that shit all gets into the water here, and this is an ISLAND. Fresh water supplies are limited, and everything that gets into it winds up affecting the local coral reefs eventually.

And by the way, Monsanto profits off both sides of this. They get huge amounts of government money to design seeds that can't reproduce themselves (forcing their clients to come back to them year after year), in addition to whatever other changes have been made (some of which can make their way into our own genetic sequences and interfere), and seeds that can tolerate higher levels of pesticide, and sell those to farmers at a gross profit every year. Then they sell the pesticides. Unless it's organic, if you're in the US you don't know for sure whether your food is free of their contaminants (though I'll give you a hint: if it costs less than its organic counterpart, it was produced on government subsidies: therefore there's a good chance it contains at least one GMO ingredient, usually corn or soy. Follow the money). But they're completely off the hook right now for all the damage they do to people and to the environment. And that shit needs to change.

All of the claims which the biotech industry has made to support its existence have fallen flat.

GMOs do NOT produce more food: in fact, field yields are consistently about 20-30% less, and their nutritional content is anywhere from 10-30% less than conventionally grown (which is still less than organic produce).

GMOs do NOT reduce the reliance on fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides: Roundup-Ready corn was developed specifically so that farmers could spray even more and not kill their crop, and bT corn produces its own pesticide inside the kernel - where you cannot wash it out at the kitchen sink.

GMOs DO increase the incidence of plant and insect pests that are immune to the very modification the crop was engineered for.

GMOs DO decrease biological diversity, INCREASING the risk of major food shortages should a blight strike an area that concentrates on a single strain of food crop.

GMOs DO increase the amount of toxins of both chemical and biological origin that get into both the food and water supplies, and not all of their effects are known - but the effects that ARE known and confirmed are enough to have more than twenty countries banning GM products from their shelves and their fields. If this were warfare, it would have been banned under the Geneva Conventions.

GMOs DO increase the use of pesticides - including the neonicotinoid pesticides now associated with Colony Collapse Disorder (or what has been termed the Bee-pocalypse). 

I'm sunburnt, tired, and sore from walking all the way from where we parked at Ala Moana Mall to the Duke Kahanamoku statue at Waikiki Beach and back, but I am glad I went. This has been a good day, and if all we did was swell the crowd of 1000+ even slightly, we helped the march get attention from the tourists and local vendors. Change starts with the awareness of the need, and awareness starts with the visibility.

Next time you hear about it and start to yawn, remember: while there are other giants and demons in the biotechnology world, Monsanto is by far the worst (and the biggest and easiest target).  Monsanto developed Roundup (glyphosate),  polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), Agent Orange, and rBST/rBGH (associated with accelerated onset of puberty, cancers and major hormonal disruptions), and is associated with 31 (20 archived, 11 active) Superfund sites - all communities in which their poisons were manufactured.  Do you really want to trust them with the food on your table?