Mitchel Cohen Write In Candidate for Mayor of NYC, Green Party 13aug01
Monsanto to School Kids: Have a Nice Big Glass of Pus. On Us.
Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is a genetically engineered drug injected into cows, which increases the levels of cancer causing and other dangerous chemicals in milk. Its manufacturer, the Monsanto Corporation, also manufactured the deadly Agent Orange.
Monsanto has been pushing farmers to inject cows with rBGH since 1994. Many small farms, however, continue to resist. Repeated injections of rBGH artificially stimulate cows to produce 10% to 25% more milk than normal, causing health problems for the cows and danger to consumers, especially kids, who drink rBGH milk or eat butter, ice cream, cheese or yogurt.
Although milk drawn from cows that have not been injected with rBGH is now widely available, New York public schools don’t buy that milk. Instead, the Board of Education buys most of its daily 3/4 of a million half pints of milk from Tuscan, whose suppliers inject their cows with the genetically engineered hormone. Monsanto has been fighting against consumer demands to require labels on genetically engineered products.
In mid April of 1997, the New York City Board of Education responded for the first time to public outcry over the use of genetically engineered hormones in school milk by announcing that, despite the protests, it will continue to buy milk and dairy products from companies that inject their cows with genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone. “The FDA has given us assurances milk is safe if it contains this growth hormone,” said Board spokesperson David Golub. “This is a non issue.”
But Golub, the Board he represents, the FDA, and the Monsanto Corporation (which manufactures the genetically engineered hormone), are lying to us; the milk is NOT safe. And it is banned in Europe and Canada.
rBGH derived milk contains dramatically higher levels of IGF-1 (Insulin Growth Factor), a risk factor for breast and colon cancer. IGF-1 is not destroyed by pasteurization. An article in “Cancer Research,” June 1995, shows that high levels of IGF-1 are also linked to hypertension, premature growth stimulation in infants, gynecomastia in young children, glucose intolerance and juvenile diabetes.
Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health and chair of Cancer Prevention Coalition, Inc., reports that IGF-1, which causes cells to divide, induces malignant transformation of normal breast epithelial cells, and is a growth factor for human breast cancer and colon cancer. Yet rBGH was never adequately tested before the Food and Drug Administration allowed it on the market. A standard test of new biochemically produced products and animal drugs requires twenty four months of testing with several hundred rats. But rBGH was tested for only 90 days on 30 rats. This short term rat study was submitted to the FDA but never published. The FDA had refused to allow anyone outside that agency to review the raw data from this truncated study, saying it would “irreparably harm” Monsanto.
In 1998, Canadian scientists managed to obtain the full studies for the first time. They were shocked to learn that the FDA never even looked at Monsanto’s original data on which the agency’s approval had been based. In reviewing the data, the Canadian scientists discovered that Monsanto’s secret studies showed that rBGH was linked to prostate and thyroid cancer in laboratory rats. Monsanto had actually cut the study short and omitted any mention of the cancers in their report to the FDA — or so the agency now says! And so, a few companies which had invested hundreds of millions of dollars developing a product having absolutely no consumer benefit and which poses a severe health risk, was able to foist its dangerous product on an unprotected populace with the help of the government.
All this has outraged Green Party organizer Maris Abelson: “Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) increases levels of cancer causing hormones and other dangerous chemicals in milk. It was the first genetically engineered drug to be widely marketed through the food supply, and the few long term studies that have been done raise serious questions about its safety. We’ve got to stop it, now.”
Abelson urges every concerned New Yorker to call the Board of Education today: (718) 729-6100. Tell them, “Stop buying from Tuscan. Purchase milk and other dairy products only from companies that do not use rBGH, and that are, preferably, organic.”
What’s All the Ruckus?
The Monsanto Corporation, manufacturer of rBGH (also known as BST and Posilac), has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in biotechnology development. It insists that IGF-1 levels are not elevated in milk from rBGH treated cows and that rBGH is perfectly safe. “Satisfied customers across the United States, many with three years experience, attest to the product’s safety. Further, the FDA confirms that no unusual or unexpected concerns about cow or human safety have been raised since Posilac’s introduction.” But Monsanto’s own studies refute that position. In its 1993 application to the British government for permission to sell rBGH in England, Monsanto itself reported that “the IGF-1 levels went up substantially [about five times as much].”
The U.S. FDA acknowledges that IGF-1 is elevated in milk from rBGH treated cows. Even proponents of rBGH admit that it at least doubles the amount of IGF-1 hormone in the milk. The earliest report in the literature found that IGF 1 was elevated in the milk of rBGH treated cows by a factor of 3.6. How could the company honestly assert there have been “no unusual or unexpected concerns”?
The mass outpouring of protests and growing technical data indicate otherwise; clearly, the company intentionally lied about rBGH and falsified its reports to recover its investment.
Since 1994, Monsanto has been pushing every which way to get farmers to inject rBGH into their cows. Bi-weekly injections of rBGH cause an increase in the amount of milk cows produce on average from 10% to 25%. The market is flooded with too much milk as it is, enabling middle men to pay farmers below their costs, bankrupting dairy farms in record numbers while retail prices remain around the same. (This, of course, enables agribusiness giants to purchase their farms at a song.) Some farmers have even felt compelled to kill their cows because it cost them more to feed and maintain the animals than they’d gotten back in sales.
With the addition of rBGH, small farmers are caught between a rock and a hard place. They know that the so called “extra” money they’re promised for squeezing more milk out of each cow with rBGH is a delusion. The market is already glutted. How could increasing the total volume of milk possibly help them compete with giant agribusiness conglomerates who can afford lower prices per gallon or even go into debt for a time and absorb the cost of antibiotics to treat the increased instances of diseases such as mastitis brought on by rBGH and more frequent replacement of their cows to win a larger share of the market?
Monsanto has no sensible answer. Instead, it swings its mighty stick: Fear. “Soon everyone else will be using rBGH.” It’s like any new machine employed in production. It will lower the price of milk even more, and increase the quantity. If you don’t use it, you’ll go bankrupt. But, and here’s the carrot, “if you start using rBGH now, before everyone else, you’ll get the jump and do all right.”
That’s quite a powerful “argument” — the threat of bankruptcy and the looming shadow of bank foreclosure. To counter it, Green activists have joined dairy farmers and other local consumer groups in coalitions across the country to stop Monsanto from achieving the “critical mass” it needs to apply its new genetic engineering techniques to milk production. Once Monsanto reaches that point, farmers fear, they will be driven by market forces to use any means available — including rBGH — to increase the amount of milk their cows produce just to chase the ghost of breaking even as the wholesale price plummets.
Is rBGH Safe for Cows?
Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is like “crack” for cows. Bi weekly shots “rev” up their system and force them to produce more milk for perhaps a few years, and then their milk production declines dramatically. rBGH also makes them sick.
Their udders swell and develop painful, bloody lesions — an infection known as “mastitis,” which is “treated” by giving cows huge doses of antibiotics. The cows suffer through shortened lifespans and increased birth defects, rates of metabolic disease, infertility and stress.
What’s more, there’s pus in the milk. Farmers must buy heavy doses of antibiotics to treat rBGH cows’ frequent infections, which occur seven times as often in cows treated with rBGH than in those who are untreated, last six times as long, and leak pus, blood, bacteria and increased levels of antibiotic residues into the milk. Shockingly, the very companies that produce rBGH add to their profits by manufacturing antibiotics and tranquilizers which they then sell to dairy farmers to combat the side effects — which end up in the milk. High levels of antibiotics passed along to the mother or to children could impair the development of the immune system in children, cause the growth of resistant strains of bacteria and viruses, and lead to serious health problems.
High School students at a “No rBGH” parade and rally in Brooklyn in February 1997, organized by the Brooklyn Greens, were quick to point out that they were moved to participate upon learning of increased levels of pus in rBGH milk. Some of the students altered Dairy Council ads, and made signs out of them. Instead of “Got Milk?,” the signs read “Got Pus?” Ben & Jerry’s donated free non rBGH ice cream for the protest.
Cows into Cannibals
The use of rBGH intensifies the already unhealthy confinement of animals in industrial scale dairy production.
Factory farming of animals is immoral; some cows spend their whole lives tethered to machines. Increasingly, they’re viewed as “units of production” instead of sentient beings. Some Florida dairy herds grew sick shortly after starting rBGH treatment. One farmer, Charles Knight, lost 75 percent of his herd due to the injections while Monsanto and company funded researchers at the University of Florida withheld from him the information that the same thing was happening to other farmers and their herds. Knight says Monsanto and the university researchers blamed _him_ for the high death rate.
Even in death — which, in general, comes earlier to rBGH injected cows — the animals are seen as part of the machine, the “production process.” In recent years the industry has taken to “rendering” animal carcasses, which means grinding up dead and often diseased cows into animal feed and other meat products. (Some ad agencies have added their own “spin” on the practice, calling it “recycling.”) Approximately 40% of the “rendered” beef is used to make hamburgers. The rest is mixed into cow feed, along with sheep brains and other “rendered” animal parts. Cows, like many animals, are by nature vegetarian.
Turning cows into cannibals is gruesome enough. But now, with meat being derived from diseased rBGH treated cows, each burger or bucket of feed contains an increased proportion of antibiotics, synthetic hormones, viruses, bacteria, and chemicals. The ratio intensifies each time around the cycle of death.
The situation is compounded by genetically engineered hormones. rBGH injected cows require more protein than normal. So they consume even more rendered meat in their feed, which concentrates the amounts of synthetic hormones, antibiotics and other chemicals even further.
Just a short time after this practice became widespread, health officials began to notice a dramatic increase in the rate of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) — “mad cow” disease — which is caused by “prions” found in diseased and waste animal body parts, offal and blood. Prions cause infected cattle to literally develop holes in their brains, suffer seizures, fall down and die. Recent studies indicate that mad cow disease is linked to the devastating Creutzfeldt Jakob disease in humans.
A prion is a form of protein having the normal chemical composition but is shaped differently. When it comes into contact with normally constructed proteins it causes them to relapse into the deformed shape, triggering a chain reaction. Prions are able to withstand severe heat, such as pasteurization and even irradiation. There is no known way to defuse them. They may incubate for 30 years, and are passed to humans who eat meat from sick cows, regardless of how well one cooks the meat.
The U.S. government, of course, maintains that no BSE infected cattle have been discovered in the U.S. But, as Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn write, the disease may have appeared in the U.S. before the outbreak in England. “Richard Marsh, a vetinary scientist at the University of Wisconsin, was raising the alarm about BSE in American cattle back in 1985. Marsh discovered an outbreak of spongiform encephalopathy at a mink farm in Wisconsin. The mink had been fed a protein supplement made from rendered cows that had supposedly died from `downer cow syndrome.’ Marsh believes the cows had actually succumbed to a previously undetected form of BSE.” Around 100,000 cows a year die from downer cow syndrome in the U.S. Most of these dead cows are rendered into protein supplements to feed other cattle. As Cockburn and St. Claire see it, “if this is true, the U.S. cattle population may already be infected with BSE and American meat consumers may have already contracted CJD.
All of this has severe environmental and economic as well as health consequences. Groundwater becomes even more polluted as mutated, drug resistant viruses, fungus, and bacteria develop in response to the increased use of antibiotics and genetically engineered chemicals and, through waste run off — often used as fertilizer — enter the water supply and soil.
Ever greater quantities of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizers and other toxic chemicals are applied to the land to deal with the new strains of resistant germs, blights and diseases, further contaminating soil and water. These are manufactured by the very companies that produce rBGH and other genetically engineered products. So are the antibiotics and tranquilizers sold to dairy farmers to combat the “side effects” of rBGH. For Monsanto, as with other corporations, the name of the game is profits, profits at any cost.
A Method to Their Madness
Monsanto is playing the same game it once played in developing the herbicide 2,4,5 T, used in Agent Orange, another Monsanto product. Back in the 1960s, Monsanto, working closely with the Pentagon and the Veterans’ Administration, intentionally falsified key data on the effects of Agent Orange on human health in order to sell the deadly defoliant to the government for “use” in Vietnam. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged that the government’s exoneration of Agent Orange was “politically motivated .. to cover up the true effects of dioxin, and manipulate public perception.” Similar concerns erupted over Monsanto’s manufacture of Aspartame, the chief ingredient in NutraSweet and in diet soda, which causes brain lesions in laboratory rats.
And then there’s Monsanto’s manufacturer of PCBs. Monsanto’s Sauget, Illinois plant discharges an estimated 34 million pounds of toxins into the Mississippi River. The facility is a major producer of chloronitrobenzenes, bioaccumulative teratogens detected at levels as high as 1,000 parts per billion in fish over 100 miles downstream. The factory was the world’s only manufacturer of PCBs until Congress finally banned them in 1976. They are still present today, 22 years later, at high levels in Mississippi River fish and are ubiquitous in the global ecosystem.
Monsanto also manufactures butachlor (trade names: Machete, Lambast), an herbicide which poses both acute and chronic health risks and can contaminate water supplies. Although Monsanto manufactures butachlor in Iowa, the herbicide has never been registered in the U.S. or gained a food residue tolerance. In 1984, the EPA rejected Monsanto’s registration applications due to “environmental, residue, fish and wildlife, and toxicological concerns.” Monsanto has refused to submit additional data requested by the EPA. Despite its recognized dangers, Monsanto sells butachlor abroad. Dozens of countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa use the product, primarily on the paddy rice which constitutes almost all of U.S. rice imports. Clearly, Bovine Growth Hormone is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, Monsanto, Hoffman LaRoche and other manufacturers of vaccines injected, often involuntarily, into GIs, are working “behind the scenes to contain the government investigation of Gulf veterans’ health problems.”
Monsanto and other pharmaceutical companies continue to cover up the dangers in genetically engineered drugs, herbicides, pesticides and uranium weaponry — a cover up essential to ensuring mega profits, business as usual. As in the cases of dioxin/Agent Orange, PCBs and Aspartame, neither Monsanto nor the FDA have performed the appropriate long term studies on the effects of rBGH on the environment or on the health of people. Nevertheless, rBGH was fast tracked through government, with strong support from theClinton Gore administration. Meanwhile, Monsanto flouted the law at every opportunity. One law, for instance, required Monsanto to notify the FDA about every complaint the company received from dairy farmers such as Charles Knight, whose situation we discussed earlier. But four months after Knight complained to Monsanto, the FDA had still heard nothing from the company. Monsanto officials say it took all of those months to figure out that Knight was complaining about rBGH!
After witnessing so many lies, it is no wonder that people across the country — indeed, throughout the world — don’t trust a thing Monsanto says. For instance, the company claimed that every truckload of milk in Florida is tested for excessive antibiotics. But Florida dairy officials and scientists on camera say this is simply not true.
Likewise, Monsanto says that Canada’s ban on rBGH had nothing to do with human health concerns. But Canadian government officials say just the opposite, and that, in fact, Monsanto had tried to bribe them with offers of $1 to $2 million to gain approval for rBGH. (Monsanto officials say those funds were for “research.”) No wonder that outraged consumers have forced legislation to be introduced requiring labeling of dairy products derived from rBGH cows in state after state, only to be torpedoed as often by Democrats as Republicans at the behest of Monsanto. Instead, new legislation pending before Congress limits the liability of corporations, and is receiving fervent support from the pharmaceutical industry to fend off consumer lawsuits against genetically engineered products.
Both major parties fill their warchests with campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. Taking their cue from Washington, many so called progressive Democrats such as 1997’s NYC mayoral candidate Ruth Messinger and Bronx Boro President Fernando Ferrer have gone to bat for the industry and opposed labeling, under the delusion that genetic engineering is the key to progress. In today’s Mayoral race in New York City, Alan Hevesi has joined Ferrer in championing the development of genetic engineering facilities as a means for “developing” New York City’s infrastructure in the inner city.
Radiation and Milk
Cows’ milk and other dairy products have been associated with serious health problems even before recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone was given the go ahead by the Food and Drug Administration in late 1993. Atomic bomb tests caused radioactive isotopes like Strontium 90 to enter cows’ milk in the 1950s. It became the subject of protests and national debate, and played a role in winning the first comprehensive test ban treaty on nuclear weapons.
The issue was raised again following the disastrous accidents at the Three Mile Island (March 1979) and Chernobyl (April 1986) nuclear power plants. For the first time, statistical evidence was gathered directly relating the large increases in total and infant mortality that occurred across the United States in the summer of 1986 to the heightened amount of radioactive iodine, cesium, strontium, and barium in rain and milk fallout from Chernobyl halfway around the world. Radioactive isotopes in milk have, by now, compromised the immune systems of an entire generation. While protests have forced a few of the most dangerous chemical sprays like DDT off the market, new and even more dangerous sprays have taken their place. Chemical, hormone, antibiotic and radioactive residues in dairy products continue to contribute to the rise of asthma, cancer, AIDS and other illnesses.
The direct injection of rBGH into cows raises the issue once again. As long as kids drink milk or eat butter, ice cream, cheese or yogurt, they are especially susceptible to radiation, pesticide residues, impurities, and, in the case before us, the high levels of antibiotics and increased hormonal levels found in rBGH derived dairy products. Monsanto claims that the government monitors antibiotic levels, and that they are safe. But the FDA generally tests for only four types of antibiotics. “Both the GAO and the Milk Industry Foundation, which reports on drug testing, have found that a wide variety of drugs are used and not tested for. Thus, an increased use of antibiotics in response to a rise in rBGH induced mastitis would likely go undetected in the milk supply.”
While most milk companies now oppose rBGH and have pledged not to use it, New York City public schools continue to contract with Tuscan, which refuses to sign rBGH free pledges and continues to contract with farmers for milk that may come from cows injected with rBGH. “If I can’t test for it, I’m not going to put our company’s neck on the line by making that kind of pledge,” said Peter Stigi, senior vice president of Tuscan Dairy Farms. But the FDA, Monsanto and Tuscan _are_ able to test for it; they’ve chosen not to. In 1991, the American Medical Association said that it was possible to develop a test to distinguish between the natural hormone and rBGH. But incredibly, the FDA refused to develop an rBGH detection test. Nor did it require Monsanto to do so. Then, a German company announced that a test could easily be developed to detect rBGH in milk. But no one thought it important enough to develop it. As long as no test existed, the FDA and Monsanto could pretend that rBGH is indistinguishable from the natural hormone, implying falsely that the two hormones are identical.
Angry members of the National Farmers Union (NFU) decided to take on the bureaucracy. The NFU raised contributions and hired a laboratory, Kara Biologicals of Stanton, New Jersey, to develop a low cost strip test to detect the presence of rBGH in milk. And now, two Cornell University researchers, Vitaly Spitsberg and Ronald Gorewit, have developed another way to detect rBGH in milk. As it turns out, Monsanto’s claim that there is “no difference” between the natural hormone made by the cow and the synthetic hormone manufactured in the lab is but another false pearl in its necklace of lies. The synthetic hormone is detectable in milk because it has an addititional amino acid sequence, methionine, compared to the naturally produced hormone. How will this affect those who consume milk derived from rBGH injected cows? No one knows; those tests have never been done.
Nevertheless, Monsanto continues fighting tooth and nail against consumer demands to require appropriate labels on dairy products. And now, the giant pharmaceutical companies are gearing up for the real battle, in which rBGH is only the opening salvo: The right to patent, own, and profit from the very substance of life itself.
What Is Genetic Engineering?
Genetic Engineering is the process of redesigning DNA molecules to create new forms of life. Scientists are recombining genes from plants, insects, bacteria, animals and humans to more fully exploit the commercial possibilities of agricultural and pharmaceutical production.
Genetically engineered foods are unlabeled and, mostly, untested. The health consequences of eating genetically engineered foods are largely unknown; what has been engineered into the genetic code of such staples as corn, soy and rice has never before been part of our diet. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans, for example, are genetically modified to withstand increased exposure to the company’s herbicide Roundup. The company advertises its soy as “herbicide resistant” — a euphemism for what is actually herbicide _saturated._ We ingest these additional chemicals, produced in every cell of the plant, along with our food.
Cows fed Roundup Ready soy produce milk with significantly higher fat content than those fed ordinary soybeans. At a meeting of the Working Group on Biosafety of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity on October 13 17, 1997, scientists from around the world concluded this to be direct proof of a substantial difference between genetically modified and ordinary soy. They also found that the application of glyphosate (such as the herbicide Roundup) increased the level of plant estrogens of bean crops. Estrogen, including that from plants, is known to impact mammalian tissue and is one of the triggers of humans cancer.
As if all of that is not bad enough, certain diseases are, for the first time, beginning to cross the “species barrier,” following trans species genetic implantations. There has already been some crossover between pig and human viruses, and gene modification across species also subjects us to higher levels of toxins and allergens. Genes from peanuts and Brazil nuts implanted in soy can cause severe allergic reactions, even death. Yet the products containing peanut genes have no warning labels. (Soy with Brazil nut genes were forced off the market several years ago.) Genes from flounder implanted in tomatoes to keep them from freezing, and genes from chicken spliced into potatoes to keep them from bruising raise all sorts of ethical problems for vegetarians.
Genetically synthesized scorpion toxin is brushed on fruit to keep away pests. The manufacture of synthetic vanilla is already playing havoc with the economies of Madagascar, the Comoros Islands and Reunion Island, which depend on natural vanilla exports as their primary source of income.
Bio engineering, backed by the might of the U.S. military, is now being used as part of a conscious policy to drive indigenous people from the lands they’ve traditionally shared and on which they’d grown food for themselves and their communities. Agribusiness companies, increasingly tied to pharmaceutical corporations, want profitable crops grown for export. As Oxfam puts it, “Hunger is increasing because immense wealth is flowing out of poor countries and into rich countries. Far greater wealth in the form of crops, minerals, timber, labor power, skills and cash is being removed from poor countries and transported to the world’s wealthier countries than the other way around. More than $50 billion in capital is transferred annually from the global South to governments, banks, corporations, and lending agencies based in the global North. … [Today] the free market revolution has only widened already extreme income inequalities and worsened poverty” throughout Latin America. <“Oxfam urges big changes at World Bank,” Financial Times, Sept. 30, 1994.> In fact, in 1973, 36 of the world’s most impoverished and starving countries were chief suppliers of export crops to the U.S. And it has only gotten worse.
By newly “enclosing” agricultural lands and pasture, legalizing confiscations after the fact, agribusiness corporations, USAID, the World Bank and the IMF have been able to drive formerly self sufficient peasants and the rural proletariat off their lands and to cities in search of work, generally as laborers in near slave conditions in assembly or export zone sweatshops. The lands are then taken over by giant corporations and plundered for soil depleting strip farmed export crops and the extraction of natural resources.
According to the USDA, only two percent of genetically engineered foods are developed to enhance taste or nutrition. 98 percent are artificially designed to make food production and processing more profitable for the 3 percent of the world’s landlords — mostly giant corporations — that have come to control 80 percent of the world’s land and the food grown on it.
One of the ways international agencies accomplish this is by systematically dumping cheap or free food onto the local markets, undermining local producers and forcing them to drastically cut their prices to compete. (This is different from legitimate food emergencies in which short term contributions are critical, although even there many so called “natural” famines are in reality man made by the policies of the IMF and World Bank.) Since so many small producers are dependent on immediate income to stay afloat, any significant drop in income destroys their community and way of life, and enables large corporate farmers to take them over and consolidate their hold on both the production apparatus and the market. The dumping of hybrid and now cheap genetically engineered corn in Mexico, the special water and soil requirements, and the corporate patenting of seeds threaten to undermine stable indigenous communities centered around growing and marketing local corn. The Zapatista rebellion in January, 1994, focused on opposing the importation of corn under NAFTA and the destruction it would cause to their local, self sufficient economies.
As the industry grows more sophisticated, genetic engineering — which reduces everything in nature to objects for commercial manipulation, the commodification of life itself, and the constant genuflection before the gods of profit — and the private patenting of seeds provide international capital with powerful weapons for imposing the IMF, World Bank, and USAID’s “structural adjustment programs” on the Third World.
Take the new genetically engineered corn. Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring insect repellant that organic farmers effectively apply in small doses to individual plants. In the early 1990s, Novartis (the gigantic corporation recently invented by combining Ciba Geigy and Sandoz) patented a way of encoding each corn plant to produce its own Bt. Instead of limited amounts of Bt being applied in specific and well defined areas, Bt now is produced in every cell of every plant over entire fields of genetically engineered corn. Not only does this kill insects beneficial to crop pest management, it quickens widespread resistance among undesired pests, reducing diversity and, in effect, making it easier for diseases to spread quickly across the entire field, rendering Bt — which is relatively harmless to humans — completely ineffective and depriving organic farmers of one of the few insecticides that they can use safely.
As weeds and insects are repeatedly exposed to herbicides and pesticides, the varieties tolerant to the toxin survive and become the norm, reducing (and even eliminating) its effectiveness, requiring farmers to apply heavier doses of pesticide to kill increasingly resistant pests. Organisms that had been under control now become veritable plagues wiping out enormous quantities of crops. Genetically engineered foods subject us to viruses, bacteria and other organisms that mutate into more virulent strains for which we’ve developed no resistance. Scientists race the blights by “designing” new insecticides and herbicides before bacteria, viruses and fungi are able to modify their capacities accordingly. This only leads to an acceleration of the crop chemical treadmill, where farmers use more and stronger chemicals to control pests, more chemicals in the environment, more damage to nearby plant varieties and soil fertility, and vast reduction of biodiversity.
And so, as we move into the new millennium, we find that in just 100 years, the world has lost 95 percent of the genetic diversity that existed in agriculture at the beginning of this century. Agribusiness already dumps more than 500 million pounds of herbicides on U.S. farmlands each year. Monsanto’s Roundup, whose product sales come to $1.2 billion a year, leads the toxic parade. A study released in August 1995 found that levels of herbicides in drinking water in 29 cities and towns tested in the Corn Belt exceeded federal safety levels.
And now, researchers at Riso National Laboratory in Denmark are finding that plants — whose “natural” immunities develop over many years through the interaction of many varieties, species, and microbes as part of a coherent (if fragile) ecosystem — spontaneously cross fertilize. Genetically engineered canola (rapeseed), for instance, passes its genes for herbicide resistance to surrounding weeds; the same is true of other plants. The offspring resulting from the cross breeding of genetically engineered and weedy plants are not only herbicide resistant themselves, they also are capable of passing on resistance to subsequent generations.
Unlike defective products of other technologies, genetically altered organisms, once released, are irretrievable and self replicating. Herbicide resistant qualities can spread to weeds. Rapid growth capacities can spread to pests. Antibiotic resistance can spread to bacteria such as staphylococcus, diphtheria, salmonella, bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid and a whole range of dangerous diseases. And genes for new and virulent toxins can, accidentally or purposefully, spread to wild plants. Engineering on the genetic level introduces dangers of a qualitatively different magnitude which can easily become irreversible. Genetically engineered lifeforms are on the verge of permanently disrupting the already precarious ecological balance of the planet.
Why Didn’t Government Just Say “No”?
In the global capitalist system, “research and development” means the public takes all the risk and pays for development and corporations then privatize that knowledge and reap the profits. Human health and safety, and environmental degradation, are rarely factored in in determining corporate costs. In such a system, genetic engineering makes monocropping the cost effective option. It fills acre after acre with the same kind of crop, the easier to utilize certain kinds of machinery and chemicals, “speeding up” agricultural production the way Taylorism assembly lined industry.
Genetically engineered soybeans, corn and corn syrup (a sweetener used in almost everything we drink), potatoes, strawberries and cotton are now coming to market. rBGH continues to be the spearhead of the new genetic engineering technologies which are overturning the previously unbreechable biological boundaries between species, and even between the plant and animal kingdoms.
I’ve already outlined a number of reasons why rBGH is bad: The cows get sick more often, die more quickly, and there’s pus and increased hormone levels of all sorts in the milk, which are potentially cancer causing. There is already a milk surplus in the U.S. and no need to artificially induce cows to produce more. Thousands of dairy farmers are being driven out of business by large factory farms; rBGH accelerates that process, in line with the IMF’s and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs.
Yet Monsanto, along with such huge transnational corporations as Novartis and Eli Lilly (in which the family of former Vice President Dan Quayle holds controlling interest), remain unregulated warlords over their fiefdoms, policing dissidents and public health advocates.
How could this have happened? In 1993 the Food and Drug Administration approved recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone for use in milk cows without performing the required longterm health studies. The FDA official who “fast tracked” rBGH approval was Michael R. Taylor. Until 1991, Taylor had been a law partner at King & Spaulding and lawyered on behalf of Monsanto during the FDA approval process of rBGH. He was soon appointed to the Food and Drug Administration, where he “fast tracked” rBGH approval. Upon becoming Deputy FDA Commissioner, Taylor appointed others from Monsanto to positions at the FDA, with President Clinton’s approval. Margaret Miller, former chemical laboratory supervisor for Monsanto, was one of them. She is now Deputy Director of Human Food Safety and Consultative Services, New Animal Drug Evaluation Office, Center for Veterinary Medicine in the US Food and Drug Administration. She published a number of pro rBGH papers as an FDA official which were co authored by Monsanto’s hirelings, and called for policy directives exempting rBGH milk and other genetically engineered foods from labeling.
Meanwhile, Richard Borroughs, the doctor who originally supervised the rBGH target animal safety studies, was fired (under pressure from Monsanto) for insisting on enforcement of stringent animal health standards in rBGH research.
King & Spaulding continued to represent Monsanto even as its former directors and employees fast tracked rBGH approval through the FDA. Monsanto filed lawsuits against dairies that had labeled their milk “rBGH free,” and threatened to sue any dairy company making similar claims. Monsanto never won any of those suits; but the hundreds of millions of dollars it was willing to spend has enabled the company to get away with strong arming dairies refusing to inject their cows with the hormone, and deterred small companies from labeling their products as “rBGH free”. Despite failing to win a single round in the courts, Monsanto has been nevertheless able to create enough economic and political intimidation on smaller companies to win economically what it cannot win in the courts.
In March 1994, the Pure Food Campaign and the Foundation for Economic Trends, under the leadership of Jeremy Rifkin, petitioned the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate Taylor’s apparent conflict of interest. Three members of Congress then asked the General Accounting Office to investigate. Within days of the FET complaint, Taylor was mysteriously transferred out of the FDA.
But Taylor and Miller are hardly the only officials doing Monsanto’s bidding inside the government. As Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown did more than anyone to insure that Clinton and Gore became, indeed, the Administration from Monsanto. As head of the Democratic National Committee Brown garnered huge financial contributions from the biotech industry and vigorously promoted their interests. Brown also flacked for the biotech industry’s attempts to patent genetically engineered human cells against the opposition of foreign governments: “Under our laws, as well as those of many other countries, subject matter relating to human cells is patentable and there is no provision for considerations relating to the source of the cells that may be the subject of a patent application.” At the time his plane crashed over war torn Yuogslavia, Brown was accompanying a few dozen high level corporate executives seeking to ferret out “investment opportunities” among the misery there. The conflicts of interest between government and industry are appalling, and dangerous. From Brown on down, the Clinton administration catered to every outrageous whim of the biotech industry. Much of the government’s position on genetic engineering came under the supervision of former Hunter College president Donna Shalala, who was Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Except for Clinton and Gore, it was Shalala who had final say over these odious policies and corruption. And it is the “progressive” Shalala who let Monsanto and the other corporations get away, literally, with murder.
Take the case of Mickey Kantor, a power broker, former U.S. Trade Representative and trusted Clinton adviser. Kantor became Secretary of Commerce following Ron Brown’s death and continued his predecessor’s boosterism for biotechnology. In mid 1997, Kantor left his job at Commerce. He was immediately appointed to the Board of Directors of … the Monsanto Corporation.
Joining officials who changed job assignments from service in government to positions in the biotechnology industry was Marcia Hale. She had been assistant to the President of the United States for intergovernmental affairs. Her new appointment: Senior official for the Monsanto Corporation in coordinating public affairs and corporate strategy in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Also switching sides over the last couple of years were:
· L. Val Giddings, who went from being a biotechnology “regulator” at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to being the Vice President for Food and Agriculture at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a pro biotech propaganda arm. Giddings, who had represented U.S. government (and, purportedly, the people’s) interests at the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Biosafety Protocol, attended the second meeting on the protocol as the representative of the industry;
· David W. Beler, former head of Government Affairs for Genentech, Inc., and now chief domestic policy advisor to Al Gore; Linda J. Fisher, former Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pollution Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances, and now Vice President of Government and Public Affairs for Monsanto;
· Josh King, former director of production for White House events, and now director of global communications in the Washington, D.C. office of Monsanto;
· Terry Medley, former administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the US Department of Agriculture, former chair and vice chair of the US Department of Agriculture Biotechnology Council, former member of the US Food and Drug Administration food advisory committee, and now Director of Regulatory and External Affairs of Dupont’s Agricultural Enterprise;
· William D. Ruckelshaus, former chief administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, now (and for the last 12 years) a member of the board of directors of Monsanto;
· Lidia Watrud, former microbial biotechnology researcher at Monsanto, now with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Effects Laboratory, Western Ecology Division; and,
· Clayton K. Yeutter, former Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, former US trade representative (who led the US team in negotiating the US Canada Free Trade Agreement and helped launch the Uruguay round of the GATT negotiations), now a member of the board of directors of Mycogen Corporation, whose majority owner is Dow AgroSciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical.
One of the leading shills for Monsanto and a very visible proponent of genetic engineering is former US President Jimmy Carter. And, should any of the legal cases make their way to the Supreme Court they will be argued before Justice Clarence Thomas, among others. Thomas — one might remember from Anita Hill’s testimony — began his career as a lawyer for … Monsanto. And one of the chief witnesses on behalf of Monsanto will be Dr. Louis Sullivan, former head of Health and Human Services and now a paid apologist for the company.
Media & BGH
In February, 1997, two veteran news reporters for Fox TV in Tampa, Florida, were fired for refusing to water down an investigation reporting that rBGH may promote cancer in humans who drink milk from rBGH treated cows. It is the link between rBGH and cancer that Monsanto pressed Fox to remove from the story.
Award winning reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre had been hired by WTVT in Tampa to produce a series on rBGH in Florida milk. After more than a year’s work on the rBGH series, and three days before the series was scheduled to air (starting February 24, 1997), Fox TV executives received the first of two letters from lawyers representing Monsanto saying that Monsanto would suffer “enormous damage” if the series ran. Monsanto’s second letter warned of “dire consequences” for Fox if the series aired as it stood. Despite the fact that WTVT had been advertising the series aggressively, the station canceled it at the last moment.
According to documents filed in Florida’s Circuit Court (13th Circuit), Fox lawyers then tried to water down the series, offering to pay the two reporters if they would leave the station and keep mum about Fox’s censorship of their work. The reporters refused Fox’s offer, and on April 2, 1998, filed their own lawsuit against WTVT. The Wilson/Akre lawsuit charged WTVT with violating its license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by demanding that the reporters include known falsehoods in their rBGH series. The reporters also charged WTVT with violating Florida’s “whistle blower” law, and that Fox ordered them to remove all mention of “cancer,” changing it to “human health effects” whatever that may be.
After a five week trial and six hours of deliberation which ended August 18, 2000, a Florida state court jury unanimously determined that Fox “acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs’ news reporting on BGH.” In that decision, the jury also found that Jane Acre’s threat to blow the whistle on Fox’s misconduct to the FCC was the sole reason for the termination… and the jury awarded awarded $425,000 in damages which makes her eligible to apply for reimbursement for all court costs, expenses and legal fees.
The whistle blowing journalists, twice refused Fox offers of big money deals to keep quiet about what they knew, filed their landmark lawsuit April 2, 1998 and survived three Fox efforts to have their case summarily dismissed. It is the first time journalists have used a whistleblower law to seek a legal remedy for being fired by for refusing to distort the news. http://www.foxbghsuit.com. See, “Milk, rBGH, and Cancer,” Rachel’s Environment & Health Weekly #593, April 9, 1998. <http://www.monitor.net/rachel.>
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PART 3 by Mitchel Cohen
What Can We Do?
There is a growing movement to fight the use of rBGH. One way to hammer the final nails into rBGH’s coffin is to force New York City public schools, which buy 750,000 half pint containers of milk each day, to buy milk only from companies that do not use rBGH treated cows.
1) Call the NYC Board of Education today: (718) 729 6100. Demand that the Board purchase milk and other dairy products only from companies that sign a contract not to use rBGH milk. (You might add that you want all milk purchases to be “organic” as well.) You can also write to: Mr. Kevin Gill, Office of School Food and Nutrition Services, 44 36 Vernon Blvd., Long Island City, NY 11101.
Boycott School Milk and all rBGH derived dairy products. In New York City, the Brooklyn Greens and Manhattan Greens distributed more than 9,000 brochures to parents coming to pick up their kids at public schools, who then flooded the Board of Ed bureaucrats with phone calls and letters. The same can be done anywhere; it is an excellent way of getting out there and mobilizing a huge grassroots constituency.
That is an effort easily overlooked by many non profit organizations who are often so intent on being invited to a seat at the with policy makers that they lose sight of building the alternative power base needed to force through changes. People are outraged that their kids are being used as guinea pigs, that there never was any long range testing, that rBGH milk is unlabeled, and that there’s no need for rBGH to begin with; they are beginning to raise a ruckus.
It’s important that boycotts not be passive. Parents cannot just say, “I won’t let MY kids drink the milk.” For one, rBGH induced hormones are also at higher levels in ice cream, cheese, and other dairy products. For another, ALL kids are being affected. We have to force a change in policy.
One way, which we are now about to implement in New York City, is to encourage high school kids to set up direct action environmental organizations in their schools and then link those schools with each other, take them to candidates’ forums, and raise hell. The point is to turn individual concern over what one is putting in their body into _political_ concern for what is being produced and how to stop it — that is, turning individual concern into a mass movement.
2) Call the Green Party’s rBGH toll free hotline for the latest updates and activities: 1 888 NY4 GREENS. Learn the Facts. Become a Green activist. Help distribute brochures in your school, around your neighborhood and in front of local stores. Invite us to speak at your meetings. Spanish language pamphlets and speakers also available.
3) Support legislation banning rBGH dairy products. NY City Council Intro #766 would prohibit city agencies from purchasing from companies that use rBGH in milk. Resolution #1605 calls on the Board of Education to purchase only rBGH free milk. Both have been prevented from coming to a vote by the Democratic Party controlled City Council, under the leadership of Peter Vallone who is now running for Mayor in the Democratic primary after having lost the previous election for governor. Perhaps it is not so unexpected to learn that Vallone’s prior campaign accepted money from the Monsanto Corporation — an “investment” that, for Monsanto, has paid dividends in New York City. Democrats and Republicans are united in blocking similar legislation in the State Assembly and Senate.
4) Support NY State Assembly bill A.2668 requiring mandatory labeling of all dairy products derived from rBGH cows, and certification and inspection of all dairy herds. The label should state: “Contains milk from cows treated with genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.” Demand mandatory labeling of all dairy products derived from rBGH cows. Fight for legislation banning rBGH dairy products and all genetically engineered foods.
5) We need to throw the bums out of office. But our fight cannot be limited to the electoral arena or we’ll lose. We need to leaflet stores and target them for more militant action if they continue to stock dairy products derived from rBGH cows. If they don’t respond, organize picket lines at the stores. Make “No rBGH” part of the powerful unionization campaign of immigrant workers now underway at local markets. (Leaflet the WORKERS on the picket lines, too!)
6) Bring up this issue at every opportunity. Circulate petitions against rBGH at PTA and Community School Board meetings. Get your friends to carry them in school and around the neighborhood. Confront candidates as they run for elected office. (The upcoming Senate campaign in New York provides an excellent opportunity for this type of “issue raising”. In New York City, Save Organic Standards has begun a “Healthy Schools” campaign centered around eliminating genetically engineered milk and other foods from schools. <SOSNY@mindspring.com>
7) Every college has some connection to pharmaceutical corporations and biotechnological research and development. Organize campaigns on your campus against them, as well as against such facilities as the former Audubon Ballroom, across from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital — New York’s newest and one of its most dangerous centers for genetic experimentation — and the genetically based National Violence Initiative Project, which is headquartered at the hospital and University. Demand an end to patents on life: Eliminating patents takes the profits out of genetic engineering. We’ll then see which scientists will continue to do their “research” on behalf of the public good and not suck at the udders of Washington cash cows injected with genetically engineered hormones.
Pharmaceutical corporations and biotechnological research and development facilities provide sitting targets, just as ROTC buildings and Department of Defense research and recruitment once did. Every college now has some connection to them. We need to begin a similar campaign against the privatization of our universities and colleges, and especially against their collaboration with pharmaceutical and biotech corporations.
8) Hold contests for the best parody of the “Got Milk?” advertisements. Put up posters and “improve” existing ones. Organize your building, school, workplace and neighborhood.
9) We are now launching this campaign throughout New York City. The Greens are in need of funds, so please send what you can. For more information, additional copies of this brochure, in depth fact sheets, lists of companies pledging (or refusing to pledge) to be rBGH free, and public speakers, write to NY State Greens/Green Party: c/o Afrime Derti, 755 Washington Ave. #503, Brooklyn NY 11238; or to Andy Zimmerman, at turtle@westnet.com .
Remember: In every danger there also resides opportunity, if only we learn to look for it and develop it correctly. The issue of rBGH in milk is so straightforward that it is an ideal place from which to launch a much greater campaign against the genetic engineering of foods, vaccines and medicines, privatization of knowledge through “intellectual property rights,” patenting of synthesized genetic sequences for private profit, the consolidation and concentration of farmland, who controls our food?, mistreatment of animals, the growing domination by corporations and, in general, the system of exploitation that rules our lives.
For More Information about rBGH:
ActionGreens: c/o Mitchel Cohen, 2652 Cropsey Avenue, #7H, Brooklyn, NY 11214, mitchelcohen@mindspring.com .
North East Resistance Against Genetic Engineering (NERAGE): nerage@sover.net .
Campaign for Safe Food: c/o Ronnie Cummins, 860 Highway 61, Little Morais, MN 55614. (218) 226 4155; alliance@mr.net; http://www.purefood.org .
Save Organic Standards (SOS): 638 E. 6th St., NYC 10009. (212) 529 9720; sos ny@mindspring.com .
Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet: 40 West 20th St., 9th floor, NYC 10011, (212) 242 0010.
Consumer Policy Institute, Consumers Union: Att: Michael Hansen, PO Box 2015, Yonkers, NY 10703, (914) 378 2000; hansmi@consumer.org .
Food & Water: RR 1, Box 68D, Walden, VT 05873, 1 800 EAT SAFE; foodandwater@igc.apc.org ; Fax: (802) 563 3310. foodandwater@igc.apc.org .
Just Food, & Green Guerrillas: 625 Broadway, #9C, NYC 10012. (212) 674 8124.
Council for Responsible Genetics: 5 Upland Rd., Suite 3, Cambridge, MA 02140. (617) 868 0870; crg@esential.org ; http://www.essential.org/crg .
The Edmonds Institute: c/o Beth Burrows, 20319 92nd Ave. West, Edmonds, WA 98020, (425) 775 5383; fax: (425) 670 8410; (206) 670 8410; beb@igc.apc.org .
Greens/Green Party USA: PO Box 1134, Lawrence, MA 01842 [there will be a new Chicago national office for GPUSA beginning in September 2001], (978) 682 4353; gpusa@igc.apc.org , www.greens.org .
RAFI: Rural Advancement Foundation International: 110 Osborne St., Suite 202, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3L 1Y5 Canada. (204) 453 5259; rafi@rafi.org
Rachel’s Environment & Health Weekly: c/o Environmental Research Foundation, PO Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403, erf@rachel.clark.net .
The Humane Farming Association: PO Box 3577, San Rafael, CA 94912.
Greenpeace/Toxic Trade Update: 1436 U St. NW, Washington, DC 20009.
Student Environmental Action Coalition: PO Box 1168, Chapel Hill, NC 27514 1168.
The Ram’s Horn: PO Box 3028, Mission, British Columbia V2V 4J3 Canada. (604) 820 4270; kneen@web.net .
Women’s Environmental Network, 87 Worship St., London EC2A 2BE, England. (44) 171 247 3327; WENUK@gn.apc.org .
See also “Genetically Engineering the New World Order,” by Mitchel Cohen, an indepth analysis of genetic engineering, the World Bank/IMF and the new colonialism; and articles by Robert Lederman on Eugenics, posted to the archives of sprayno@yahoogroups.com .
And, pick up a copy of “Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering”, edited by Brian Tokar and published by Zec Press, distributed in the US by St. Martin’s, where all of these arguments are developed in full detail.
Milk: cruel, unhealthy, and bad for the environment. Say No to Milk! 