Two of the biggest names in biotech get kicked out of a rural Oregon county
You could drive for miles in rural Jackson County in southwestern Oregon and see farm after farm.
But many of those farms for years have been harboring a secret that even the farmers themselves didn’t know. They’d been contaminated by greedy, billion-dollar genetically-modified (GMO) seed companies.
Now county residents have officially delivered companies like Monsanto and its Swiss counterpart Syngenta an eviction notice. They’ve passed an outright ban on GMO crops and a federal judge just upheld the law.
But there’s more to this story than farmers and residents standing up to GMO corporate giants and their Roundup Ready crops.
The GMO fight in Jackson County proved how biotech companies are secretly taking over America’s farmland — and how close they’re coming to denying you the right to buy non-GMO foods.
That’s what Jackson County farmer Elisa Higley said after a federal court recently ruled the county’s ban on growing GMO crops is legal.
But Higley will be the first to tell you that this isn’t a David vs. Goliath story in some far-off county most people have never heard of. This is about a grave and growing threat to your right to choose non-GMO food for yourself and your family.
A threat called “drift.”
Jackson County farmers like Steve Fry and Chris Hardy got a crash course on drift a few years ago, when they learned that Syngenta had been secretly planting GMO crops sometimes just hundreds of feet from organic and non-GMO farms like theirs.
Even the tiniest amount of genetically altered seed blowing in the wind — through a process called “drift” or “pollen drift” — can cause an entire field of organically grown crops to become worthless. Fry and Hardy lost their crops after they could no longer guarantee they were GMO-free.
“If GMOs stayed on the land they’re planted on, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” said Higley.
The USDA often requires buffers between GMO and non-GMO farms to prevent contamination through drift (and to protect non-GMO farms from dangerous herbicides like Roundup), and Syngenta seemed to be violating that law all over Jackson County. After the company refused to stop — and the USDA refused to act — county residents took matters into their own hands.
Hardy, his fellow farmers, and other health-conscious citizens gathered nearly 7,000 signatures to place an outright ban on GMO crops on the 2014 ballot. And that’s when the craziness really started.
Agricultural giants such as Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Bayer CropScience and Sygenta poured a fortune into front groups with names like “Good Neighbor Farmers.” They fought the ballot initiative — which still passed with two-thirds of the vote — and then unsuccessfully tried to block the law in federal court.
“Family farmers know well that GMO contamination could quickly destroy a family farm, but it was so encouraging to have a federal court support farmers’ right to defend ourselves against GMOs,” Hardy said after a federal judge ruled the ban was legal earlier this month.
Of course, the problem with drift isn’t limited to Oregon. It’s being hotly debated in Indiana, Minnesota, and in agricultural communities all over the country. Years back, the Union of Concerned Scientists analyzed six types of seeds that were supposed to be non-GMO and found widespread cross-contamination.
So the same industry that has fought labeling laws that would help us know which foods are GMO is now directly attacking farmers’ ability to grow non-GMO foods. Fortunately, farmers are starting to fight back and that’s good for our food supply and our health.
“Family farmers should not have to live in fear that our farms will be contaminated by genetically engineered crops,” Higley said.
Neither should people like us who buy what those farms produce.
Sources:
“Jackson County’s GMO ban taking effect: What happens next?” Jacy Marmaduke, June 6, 2015, The Oregonian, oregonlive.com
