Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/270856
Abby's Magazine - March / April 2014 | Page 27 with having to clean up all of these messes.' But that ran kind of counter to the way grassroots movements normally work. If you look at most of the environmental movements in the twentieth century, they've all been about cleaning things up after the fact. We couldn't get any traction or action at the grassroots level because it's hard to tell people about things that might happen when you don't have anything in reality to point to." Public Awareness While GMOs are getting a lot of attention in the US currently—and much of that in the organic and natural food space—this is only after a significant portion of our food supply is either GMO or GMO linked. Hansen explains this late reaction as culture related. "There has been attention on genetic engineering from time to time in the US media," Hansen remarked, "but nothing as sustained as in other countries. I think that's in part because people in the US up until more recently haven't cared as much about the food they eat and how it's grown, compared to Europe and elsewhere. In Europe twenty or thirty years ago, food was important; for example, you could be in a small town in Italy and the food you would get would be fresh and tasty. Here in the United States twenty or thirty years ago, people would eat a tomato and it didn't matter if it was one of those mechanically harvested ones that are like golf balls and have virtually no flavor. Over in Europe people wouldn't buy that kind of stuff. "I can remember thirty years ago trying to get interest in agri-ecology and similar issues, and the mainstream people looked at me as if I were crazy. People were busy eating hot dogs and all these other things." It's Just Good Business Meantime, while the public was in the dark, genetic engineering of foods became the darling of the investment community. "A lot of industrial monoculture is based in short-term economics," said Hansen. "Supposing you had a system that was sustainable, had slightly lower yield but could replace itself for a thousand years; since in economics we discount future gains, if you could make a higher profit and destroy that system within fifteen years, the economic logic might tell you to actually do that." There was an additional, less obvious factor that made industrial agriculture appear more attractive in the US than it really was. "Another part of the problem in the US as to why industrial ag has worked so well is because of an action of geography," Hansen explained. "We had some of the best soils in the world—topsoils that were two to three feet deep. No other place in the world had soils like we had in our Midwest, so we were able to do all this industrial farming and it looked incredible. Over the years we've been losing that topsoil." International Viewpoint But while the powers that be have managed to keep the GE economic ball rolling in the US, the international community has taken quite a different tack. "The US has tried to convince the rest of the world of the viewpoint that 'there is no difference between GE and traditionally grown crops,' and the world has not agreed," Hansen said. "Codex Alimentarius is the global-food-standard- setting organization of the United Nations. There was an eighteen-year fight at the Codex committee on food labeling, and we finally got a document in 2011 on labeling of GE foods: there is now global agreement that genetic engineering is different from conventional breeding. They said there should be testing of GE foods, and they even laid out what some of the tests should look like." Codex recommendations are voluntary— meaning a nation can adhere to them or not if they so choose. But nations can refuse to buy goods from a country (such as the US) that are genetically engineered; and because of the written Codex recommendations, the World Trade Organization—the UN body that deals with global rules of fair trade—will stand behind such refusals. In short, the US "official stance" on GMOs is causing it to be squeezed into an international trade corner. Additionally, an international agricultural panel has drawn similar conclusions. "There was an international panel called the IAASTD—International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development—a global meeting of four hundred scientists. Their document came out in 2009