Evoking the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, when a chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant (now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) killed and injured tens of thousands of people, Shiva said that chemical manufacturers had long since transformed themselves into the biotech industry. “War and agriculture came together when the chemicals that were produced for warfare lost their market—and the industry organized itself to sell those chemicals as agrochemicals,” Shiva said.
Energized, activists on Kauai decided to take their animus against the companies to the streets. In December 2012, Fern Rosenstiel, who grew up near Agent Orange test fields, organized a small protest by the Kauai airport. She was joined by Dustin Barca, a professional surfer who, at the age of twenty-six, had become a successful professional fighter in mixed martial arts. Surfing and fighting had made Barca famous on Kauai and around the state, and he decided to leverage his fame to galvanize people against the chemical companies.
Barca had an idea. That same month, during the Pipeline Masters surfing competition on Oahu, he made headlines just by standing on the beach.
“There were 30,000 people on the beach, millions more [watching] on TV,” Barca told me. “Me and this little kid carried around a bright red and yellow banner that said ‘Monsanto’s GMO Food Poisons Families.’ That was my first, initial move to get the word out, on the north shore of Oahu, the most famous surf spot in world.”
When I met Barca, he, like Klayton Kubo, refused to talk in public. He didn’t know who might be watching. But even more than Kubo, Barca is used to fighting. He has the wiry frame of a welterweight. He is missing teeth. His ears have been so damaged they have turned inside out. Ever since he’d entered the political fray, he’s had people videotaping him, he said. At a recent anti-GMO rally, he confronted a man taping him with a video camera. “I told him, ‘Whoever sent you is going to have to do better than that,’” Barca said.
“Are these companies good for people or nature? How can we tell if they don’t give us the information?” Barca said. “We know what they’re doing. They’ve admitted they’re spraying 2,4-D near our communities, and the trade winds blow every single day. We’ve gone so far into a place where everything is done behind closed doors. It was the same thing that Dole and others did to overthrow the queen. History repeats itself. You just have to know the blueprint to catch it.”
Emboldened by the anti-GMO energy he felt at the surfing tournament, Barca decided to see just how much energy he could leverage across the state. He and Rosenstiel set about organizing marches on all five islands where companies were testing GMOs and pesticides.
On Oahu, close to 3,000 people turned out for a rally in the pouring rain. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot of people who feel like I feel,’” Barca said. “That set up the momentum.
“We went to a different island every Saturday. First was Honolulu. There’s a town there that is the Waimea of Oahu, surrounded by Monsanto experimental fields. We went to a high school over there. You literally walk fifty feet behind their fields. All the kids are running around, these are experimental fields. There are giant aerial sprayers. They can spray 250 times a year, dozens of times a day.”
As word spread, the anti-GMO crowds continued to turn out in droves: 300 came out on Molokai, one of the smallest of the islands; 1,500 on the Big Island; 2,000 on Maui.
Meanwhile on Kauai, with anti-GMO energy reaching a peak, Gary Hooser found himself in a bind. If he encouraged activists to stand out in front of expensive tourist hotels, holding up signs saying that Kauai is “Ground Zero for Experimental GMOs,” his community stood to lose tourism dollars. He decided instead to introduce a bill that would force companies to do what they so far had refused to do: disclose what they were spraying, on what crops, and in what fields, “to see if we have anything to be afraid of.” The bill also sought to create no-spray buffer zones around schools, homes, and hospitals. His bill carried criminal sanctions for companies that refused to comply; Hooser hoped this would at the very least encourage whistleblowers.
“People were concerned with pesticides and GMOs, so what was I supposed to do?” Hooser told me. “I met with the companies, asked them to give me their data, asked them to help me separate the wheat from the chaff, and the companies wouldn’t tell me anything. They wouldn’t respond to my questions. They lied to me. They were telling me they ‘only use what other farmers use.’ No other farmers use this stuff, and not in anything like the toxicity or the volume. The more they lied, the more I dug into it, and the more angry I got.”
Industry executives claimed the bill’s disclosure rules were unnecessary, unfair, and pseudoscientific. Alicia Maluafiti, the executive director of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, a biotech trade group, called Kauai’s move “a pretty pissy bill.”
“It’s not about community health, it’s not about pesticide use, it’s about getting rid of these companies,” she said. She called the pesticide disclosure bill “fearmongering by Mr. Hooser and the extremists on Kauai.”
Companies dismissed complaints by repeating that both GMOs and pesticides were highly regulated by the government. Genetically engineered products “have been out there for seventeen years now,” said Mark Phillipson, Syngenta’s head of corporate affairs in Hawaii. “There have been 3 trillion meals served that have had genetic-engineered components in them, and not one reported incident, acutely or long term, associated with GM causing an allergen or toxicity issue.”
During the hearings on the bill, hundreds of people from both sides showed up to voice their opinions, many of them wearing colored shirts to show which side they were on.
“We made shirts with red and yellow, representing the strong in Hawaiian tradition. They wore blue,” Dustin Barca told me. “It was almost like the Bloods and the Crips.”
Companies urged their employees to show up en masse to counterbalance the protesters. “The companies bussed workers in here so we couldn’t even get in to testify,” Rosenstiel said.
Indeed, the battle caused a lot of collateral damage in the Kauai community. “We had a number of doctors come forward—a clear majority of pediatricians signed a letter supporting the bill—but even they paid a political price,” Hooser told me. “These doctors get hammered. They didn’t say they ‘know illnesses are caused by this spraying,’ they just said they were concerned. But the pushback by the companies, their bloggers, the media stuff, it’s been intense.”
During one hearing, a councilman asked an official from the state Department of Agriculture if there was any evidence of pesticide drift. Complaints do come in, the official said, and the state goes to houses, swipes the windows, and sends the samples out for testing. When the investigation is complete, the neighborhood is notified. The whole process—if it actually gets completed—can take two years.
What if it’s a pregnant woman or a child who’s being exposed? Gary Hooser wanted to know. What good is a two-year lag in the testing to them?
As the vote neared, Rosenstiel and Barca helped organize another march. Some 4,000 people marched to the Kauai County Building to support the bill. Some wore gas masks. Others wore death masks. Many wore red T-shirts with yellow letters saying “Pass the Bill.”
Finally, after a hearing on the bill that went on for nineteen hours straight, the Kauai County Council passed Hooser’s bill, 6–1. The mayor vetoed the bill, but the council overrode his veto. It was official: Kauai’s anti-GMO activists had pushed their elected officials to pass a bill requiring some of the world’s most powerful companies to disclose what pesticides they were spraying and where. In a very real sense, the vote was a watershed.
Yet within weeks, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta, BASF, and Agrigenetics Inc. (a company affiliated with Dow AgroSciences) sued the county in federal court. Their argument: Company farming practices adhere to state and federal laws. Local laws have no jurisdiction over them.
In August 2014, federal judge Barr
y Kurren agreed with the companies that the state pesticide law preempted any county law regulating pesticides.
An attorney representing two of the companies said she was very pleased. “This is what we told the county when they were discussing it initially,” she said. “I think they wasted time, effort, and money trying to fight for a law they had no right to pass in the first place.”
Gary Hooser saw the ruling differently. “We passed the bill with a democratic process, with thousands of citizens involved,” he told me. “We got the votes like we were supposed to. We overrode the mayor’s veto. And they sued us for the right to spray poisons next to schools.” The anti-GMO forces on Kauai have appealed the judge’s decision; it is now awaiting a hearing in federal court.
Before the dust from the political fight could settle, Dustin Barca, the surfer and professional MMA fighter who had done so much to organize the anti-GMO rallies, decided to make one last public push: he ran to unseat the mayor who had vetoed Hooser’s bill. During the campaign, he ran—literally, ran—around the island; three marathons, back-to-back. Although he didn’t win, he did pull 40 percent of the vote.
“This was totally untypical of me,” Barca told me. “I just had a voice in my heart and my head that said, ‘You have to do something about this right now.’ I threw my whole selfish life away and went into selfless life. I’m not doing this to get rich or famous. I could be making millions fighting in the UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship]. I’m here for my kids. No other reason.”
About this time, the state Department of Agriculture and Kauai County agreed to set up a fact-finding effort to look into pesticide use. They recruited nine volunteers with backgrounds in agriculture, environmental health, and toxicology. Kauai County split the $100,000 cost of the study with the state Department of Agriculture.
“The big question, the meta-question if you will, is: Are people being harmed from pesticides being sprayed by GMO companies?” said Peter Adler, a veteran mediator who will oversee the project. “We hope to really present some pretty rigorous inventories of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we need to know still and find out. People are talking at their conclusion levels and we want to get down to: What’s the data? What’s the evidence?”
For local residents, there were other “meta-questions,” like whether they should have a say in how their land is used, and how they can protect their own neighborhoods. They have had some victories: in May 2015, a federal court jury awarded $500,000 to fifteen Waimea residents who claimed the red dust from DuPont Pioneer fields caused “loss of use and enjoyment of property.” The verdict said that DuPont Pioneer failed to follow generally accepted agricultural and management practices from 2009 to 2011; the jurors found the “seriousness of the harm to each plaintiff outweighs the public benefit of Pioneer’s farming operation.”
Ten days after the verdict, DuPont Pioneer shut down its 3,000-acre experimental field operation in Kekaha. It plans to consolidate it with operations on Oahu.
At the end of April 2015, Gary Hooser flew to Switzerland to speak at a Syngenta shareholders meeting in Basel. He wanted to ask the company to stop using chemicals in his district that are already illegal in the company’s own country—indeed, across the company’s own continent.
The company did not welcome him. On his blog, Hooser recently wrote:
Syngenta did not want me there and was working on many levels to prevent me from speaking, but legally there was nothing they could do to stop me . . .
I asked them to withdraw from their lawsuit against the County of Kauai, to honor and follow our laws, and to give our community the same respect and protections afforded to the people in their home country of Switzerland. I pointed out that their company uses highly toxic Restricted Use Pesticides (RUPs) in our community, including atrazine, paraquat and four others that they are forbidden by law from using in their own country.
We are not going away and we will not tap out. So long as these companies continue to disrespect and disregard the wishes of our community, we will continue the battle to make them comply.
Fern Rosenstiel, who had organized so many of the marches on Kauai and the other islands, accompanied Hooser on his trip to Switzerland.
“For me, this island is the trunk of the tree,” Rosenstiel told me. “If we can get these companies off this island, if we can cut this tree down, it will cause a positive worldwide reaction. I’ll be here until the day I die, or until these guys are gone.”
6.
Fighting for That Which Feeds Us
Around the time Kauai voters were rattling the biotech world by approving a pesticide disclosure law, a group of indigenous Hawaiians and back-to-the-land farmers on two other Hawaiian islands—Maui and the Big Island—were going a dramatic step further: they were pushing to ban GMOs altogether.
To the big agrochemical companies, this was a far more dangerous game. Being forced to tell people what they were spraying on experimental farms was one thing. Being voted off an island—by what amounted to a pair of tiny county ordinances—was something else entirely.
The Big Island, basically, had one GM crop—Dennis Gonsalves’s papaya—and wanted to lock the door tight before any of the big companies moved in. Maui was a different story. To companies like Monsanto, Maui was not just a warm place to test out new crops; it was the very center of global GM seed production. The majority of the corn seed Monsanto sells to farmers in its biggest markets—Argentina, Brazil, and the United States—originates on Maui. If the island’s voters got their way, Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences (the other biotech giant operating there) would have their GMO operations shaken at their foundation.
Beyond this, of course, was the ongoing global perception game. It was one thing for companies to lose fights in Europe—GMOs had never been welcome there—but losing another major public relations battle in the United States was something else altogether. Banning GMOs on a couple of little islands could ignite larger movements in bigger places that were already primed for the fight. Vermont. Oregon. California. And then? South America? India?
For the companies, already shaken by the Kauai vote, the battles on Maui and the Big Island were about global markets and their ambition to sell seeds and chemicals to the world. They would spend millions of dollars to prevent the anti-GMO ball from rolling any further. There was no way they were going to let a small group of activists derail their global business plans.
But for the people on the islands themselves, the battles were far more intimate. To them, the fight against GMOs resembled similar fights not in the United States but in the developing world, where indigenous people and political activists had struggled against global conglomerates for years. They were fighting to protect land they considered sacred. They were fighting to break a long history of colonial oppression. They were fighting for the right to feed themselves.
The Battle on the Big Island
Even as Dennis Gonsalves traveled the world trying to persuade farmers to adopt his beloved papaya, his neighbors back home on the Big Island were working just as hard trying to ban GMOs altogether. In a way, the anti-GMO activists took the same line as Dennis Gonsalves: they wanted to protect farmers. It’s just that the farmers they wanted to protect were of an entirely different sort.
Nancy Redfeather is not particularly interested in whether GM papayas continue to sell in China or anywhere else. She wants her island to grow food for itself. All this technology, all these companies, all this talk of a globalized food economy—it all just gets in the way of growing nutritious food for people who live down the road.
The day I met her, on a stunning 70-degree day, Nancy poured me a glass of tangelo juice her husband, Gerry Herbert, had made from one of the thirty-six varieties of fruit trees the couple grow on their one-acre organic farm. Nancy offered me a cup of coffee, ground from beans they roasted from the twelve varieties of coffee they grow at home. She offered me a plate of fr
uit—apple bananas, yellow dragon fruit, navel oranges, blush pink grapefruit, star fruit, Tahitian pamplemousse, avocado—all just picked from their farm. Had I stuck around for dinner, we might have eaten a meal made from kabocha pumpkin with cloves, turmeric, ginger, and garlic. Plus wild chickens or wild pigs. (In six months, Gerry caught thirty-nine feral pigs in a trap. Their meat is exquisite, he says; given their proximity to his crops, the pigs eat better than most people.)
Nancy and Gerry run a small organic farm near Kona. Nancy moved to Hawaii from California in the mid-1970s, when the back-to-the-land movement sent many mainlanders looking for places to set up sustainable livelihoods. They built their timber-frame home themselves. They have a kitchen inside the house, and another one outside the house. Three-quarters of the food they eat they grow themselves.
After lunch, Gerry gave me a tour of his gardens. Here is a sample of what he grows in a single acre: There were trees called jaboticaba (Tupi for “fat of the flesh of the turtle”) that had strange black berries growing straight from the bark. The berries resemble hefty Concord grapes and yield beautiful pink juice. Gerry freezes this juice, then uses it to make banana bread.
There were four varieties of black beans, lychee trees, a Rajapuri banana tree that produces 500 pounds of fruit a year. There was an eighty-seven-year-old mango tree that still drops 250 pounds of fruit a year (“We eat as much as we can and feed the rest to the chickens,” Gerry said). Black-capped raspberries. Star fruit. Pigeon peas. Dragon fruit growing along a stone wall; coffee bushes that produce 1,500 pounds of beans a year; 120 pounds of macadamia nuts. Five different kinds of avocados, including 180 pounds from a single tree. The Yama avocado, Gerry says, makes Hass avocados “seem like something you’d only feed to the pigs.”
“I’ve lived all over the States and all over the world, and this is the best growing climate I’ve ever lived in,” Gerry said.
Food Fight Page 14
