Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  Gerry got his agricultural degree from UC-Davis, near where the Flavr Savr tomato was first developed, and then spent thirty years farming twenty-two acres in Mendocino. When I asked Gerry if he had ever tried a Flavr Savr, he smiled.

  “I tasted the Flavr Savr. It tasted like rubber,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, you guys are never going to sell this,’ and sure enough, it fell on its face.

  “If corporations develop a plant, they develop it for their own reasons. They don’t develop it for nutrition. They could care less about nutrition. That’s not the people you want growing your food.”

  Especially given Hawaii’s utopian weather and soil, Nancy and Gerry think that using the state’s precious land to grow GMOs—including Dennis Gonsalves’s papaya—is a travesty, and symptomatic of a farm system focused entirely on making money for exporters. Hawaiian farmers could provide close to 40 percent of the state’s fruits, but rather than sell them locally, companies ship them to the mainland. “We keep one percent,” Nancy said. “You can’t even find it in stores. By the time it gets somewhere else, it loses its taste and its nutrition—just like the food we import.”

  She pointed to my plate, brimming over with fresh-picked organic produce.

  “Nothing on that plate can you find in stores,” she said.

  Nancy and Gerry’s farm is typical of how most farming is done on the Big Island: 80 percent of the farms are under five acres. Their farm creates virtually no waste; the couple generates 1,500 pounds a year and puts all of it back into their soil. “You can think of this place as a mini experimental station for home producers,” Nancy told me. “It’s intended to be that. We don’t just grow what we know we can grow. We try all kinds of things. We have a lot of failures and a lot of successes. We’re also trying to be sustainable, trying to grow with only inputs from right here on the farm.”

  Except for GM papaya, the only biotech crop grown on the Big Island is a few hundred acres of corn, grown to feed cattle. None of the big companies have tried to push their experimental corn and soy operations. Yet.

  “We are a land of small farms,” Nancy said. “The biotech industry didn’t come here. We don’t have big, flat land they want to grow crops on. It’s not as good for them.”

  Imagine if the state reorganized its priorities and started buying food from its own farmers, Nancy said. Imagine if it started providing local schoolchildren with fresh produce from right here on the islands, rather than processed food from the mainland? Hawaii spends $470 million a year on obesity care and hardly anything on prevention—and it is imported, processed food that is making people fat. And consider this: virtually all of Hawaii’s food imports come through the ports of Los Angeles and San Francisco. If those boats stopped coming here—if there was an earthquake or a terror attack—“Hawaii would have one week before people started to starve.”

  “When you put chemicals into the ground, it wipes out all the critters—the fungus, the bacteria—that produce fertility,” Gerry said. “We had a hundred years of sugar, and now the soil is just loaded with toxins: lead, arsenic, DDE, Agent Orange. It’s just loaded. Now all your nitrogen producers are dead, and you have to buy synthetic fertilizer. It’s like an addiction, and after a few years, the land is burned out. The soil is dead. It’s a red powder. Even weeds won’t grow there.”

  Back in 2000, as the local GMO debate began to heat up, Nancy did some research and discovered there were 4,000 experimental field trials going on all over the state. What the companies were growing, and what they were spraying, was a complete mystery. “No matter who you asked, no one knew what this was,” Nancy told me. “The Big Five companies were all here. So we—five mothers of young children—started looking into it, and decided the community needed to know what was happening here.”

  Nancy turned to politics and found an ally in Margaret Wille, a Hawaii County Council member. Wille is as adamant about protecting farmers as Dennis Gonsalves and Nancy Redfeather, but when it comes to GMOs, she falls squarely into Redfeather’s camp.

  Especially given volcanic debates about GMOs brewing on Kauai and Maui, Wille considered herself a bulwark against industrial agriculture on her own island. “We look around and see what’s going on in other counties,” she said. “On Maui, a major section of agricultural land has been taken by these GMO corporations. Now we have dust storms because most GM corn is done with herbicide-resistant chemicals, which kills the soil, makes it sterile, and makes it unstable, so you get dust storms.

  “My district is a breadbasket district. A lot of it is organic, and there is a whole culture of protecting the land, of planting indigenous crops and heirloom seeds. I’ve heard GMO people say, ‘We’re going to be everywhere so you won’t have any choice.’ It’s like having an invasive species or a virus: you can’t protect against it. As a culture—we have a big native Hawaiian population—we’re going in the opposite direction.”

  In a move that made international headlines, Wille introduced a bill in 2013 that would ban GMOs from being planted on the Big Island. Papaya plantations (and corn silage farms) would be grandfathered in, so there was no risk that Dennis Gonsalves’s brainchild was in any danger. But no other land would be available to industrial, experimental farms. Wille wrote her bill “to prevent the transfer and uncontrolled spread of genetically engineered organisms on to private property, public lands and waterways.” But the larger question was clear: voters on Hawaii should have a say in how their land is used and by whom.

  After a great deal of rancorous debate in the county council, the bill was approved.

  Big agricultural companies—worried that the decision would serve as another domino in the global anti-GMO movement—immediately sued to prevent the county from enforcing the law. Lawyers representing major industries—the Hawaii Floriculture and Nursery Association, the Hawaii Papaya Industry Association, the Big Island Banana Growers Association, and the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the world’s largest biotech trade association—claimed the bill lacked scientific evidence. In the two decades since Dennis Gonsalves began his work, genetically modified farming had become a “critical and generally accepted part of agriculture,” their complaint said.

  Industry also claimed that Wille’s law was invalid, since local ordinances don’t trump state or federal law, and in November 2014, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Kurren, once again, agreed: county law could not override state and federal law. The law banning GMOs was overturned: the county is appealing in federal court.

  Industry representatives were elated. “This is something to be thankful for,” one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys said. “This is really important to some of the farmers. It has a big impact on their lives and their livelihoods.”

  Nancy Redfeather scoffed at such statements.

  “The Big Ag industry says, ‘We’re a $270 million industry,’” she said. “We say, ‘What are your products? What do you sell here?’ The answer is: ‘Nothing.’

  “We want to be like Vancouver Island: lots of local organic farms,” Redfeather said. “That’s what I want: to create jobs, healthy food, more dollars floating through our own economy. That’s what a lot of people were thinking when we passed this bill. It was really arrogant of Judge Kurren to say, ‘It’s not the responsibility of the county to regulate what they want.’ That ‘the health of the land is none of your business, it’s the business of the state.’ When you look at the state budget for the Department of Ag, the appropriation for local agriculture is so small you can’t even see it on a bar graph. The state is not capable of protecting us from anything.”

  But industry didn’t stop there. Given their success in court, companies turned their attention to unseating Margaret Wille, their nemesis on the county council.

  “The super PACs all lined up against me,” Wille told me. “They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat me. They sent out fliers with a papaya on it, saying, ‘A vote for Margaret
is a vote against the community.’ They flooded mailboxes with massive mailings, they did phone calls, they went door-to-door leaving all kinds of negative stuff. They brought people in from Honolulu. It was really the first time that big money came in to defeat a local councilperson.”

  After a “tsunami of outrage and objection,” Wille survived the onslaught. “We are tired of having these lobbyists control things,” Wille told me. “The fact I can win against tremendous odds and money and manpower is very hopeful. This isn’t over yet.”

  The War on Maui

  Indeed it wasn’t. If anything, the skirmish on the Big Island was just a preview for the real fight, which was already under way across the water on Maui. This time, the global seed companies were not going to wait around for a vote to turn against them. They couldn’t afford to: their experimental fields on Maui were the very heart of their global GM seed business. A loss on the Big Island, where there were no experimental farms, was largely symbolic. A loss on Maui would be catastrophic. On Maui, the companies would have to use their muscle—more than $8 million worth—to convince island voters that GMOs were good for them.

  Before agreeing to meet with me, Alika Atay had to consult the moon. He checked his calendar. I’d be arriving on Maui in late March, during a new moon phase. He’d be planting, he said, but could meet me late in the afternoon.

  On my way to meet Alika, I stopped in a local Safeway supermarket to see what kind of fruit was for sale on an island that can produce virtually anything. What I found was the same fruit you would find in a Giant in Baltimore or a Kroger in Dallas or a Piggly Wiggly in Atlanta: Bananas from Costa Rica. Apples from New Zealand. Oranges from Florida.

  As far as I could tell, it was pretty much impossible to buy fruit grown down the street.

  For Alika, as for Nancy Redfeather, this is precisely the problem. In their eyes, the fight against GMOs is part of the much larger fight to loosen the stranglehold that large food companies have on their beloved local food economy. Despite unparalleled weather and growing conditions, the share of produce the state grows for itself has fallen by half since 1990; it now imports two-thirds of its fresh fruits and vegetables. In 2009, for the first time, Hawaii had more land planted for experimental seed crops than for growing fruits and vegetables.

  Hawaii’s agricultural experts have estimated that replacing just 10 percent of the island’s food imports with locally grown produce would create 2,300 jobs and $313 million in the local economy and generate nearly $200 million more in sales and tax revenues.

  “The state Department of Education serves 50,000 meals a day, and 90 percent of the food comes from imports,” Alika said. “I went over there once and asked to see their order sheet. The first two items on the list were five million pounds of apples and five million pounds of oranges.

  “I said, ‘You guys are part of the fucking problem! You say you want to be sustainable, and then you order ten million pounds of apples and oranges from the mainland? Why not order ten million pounds of tangerines and guava and papaya and star fruit that we grow right here?’”

  The day we met, Alika, as he is known, was dressed in jeans and a green “MauiThing” T-shirt adorned with a pitchfork. A camouflage baseball cap barely contained the white curly mane that cascaded down his leathered face and neck. As we talked, Alika’s cell phone continued to ring; fellow farmers were checking in about two issues on which Alika has become a charismatic leader: farming and politics.

  Alika is the president of the Hawaiian Indigenous Natural Farming Association and a leader in the anti-GMO group called the SHAKA Movement, named for the local hand gesture (a fist with thumb and pinkie extended) used to express cultural solidarity. He is both a grower (he plants, among other things, cucumbers, tomatoes, several varieties of sweet potatoes, and apple bananas) and an educator. He spends a great deal of time teaching sustainable practices to young farmers. He wants them to learn about “canoe plants,” the crops that Hawaii’s original settlers brought over in tiny boats as they crisscrossed the islands of the Pacific.

  “Our ancestors were pretty cool,” Alika says. “Generations ago, they selected particular plants, and for 1,700 years they survived and thrived. They fed millions. And their farming was 100 percent organic. Nothing was imported.

  “Now, we’re being asked to grow European seeds, and our soil doesn’t have the same geologic composition as it does in the Northeast or in Europe. The cattle and pigs raised here eat our crops, then get ‘finished’ on the mainland, where they shit out our minerals on someone else’s land.”

  Alika sees the struggle against industrial agriculture as far more than just trying to rid his island of GMOs, or pesticides, or global conglomerates: it’s about preserving aina, the Hawaiian term for “that which feeds us.” Aina represents a sacred bond between people and a place that, once broken, threatens to destroy both humans and the world around them. In their fight against GMOs, Alika and the SHAKA movement considered themselves, as their ancestors did, to be “aina warriors.”

  Forty or fifty years ago, the pineapple plantations sprayed DDT and it leached through the soil, reached local aquifers, and contaminated drinking water. Forty years later, they went back and tested it, and the same wells were still contaminated with DDT. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, heptachlor was being sprayed on the pineapples. The plants got cut up and fed to cattle as “green chop.” Then the milk was bottled and served to local kids.

  “For us, this is intergenerational oppression,” Alika said. “It’s the mentality of the plantation, but instead of plantation bosses, now it’s biotech corn bosses. How can you convince people to free themselves from the bonds of oppression?

  “There are two types of power: organized money and organized people,” he said. “With organized money, you see the long arm of corruption. They can pervade all levels of government. People make all kinds of decisions because of power and money. When you hear them say, ‘We’re here to feed the world,’ they forgot one word: ‘Well.’”

  —

  IT IS NOT JUST NATIVE HAWAIIANS who revere the Maui landscape and are willing to fight to preserve it. As on the Big Island, Maui has also been a magnet for back-to-the-land white farmers from the mainland who share the native resistance to corporate agriculture.

  Gerry Ross and his wife, Janet Simpson, moved to Maui in the 1990s to take over her parents’ farm in the middle of the island. Janet left a career as a coffee roaster outside Calgary; Gerry quit his job as a PhD geologist who worked in the Arctic for the Geological Survey of Canada. Today, Gerry is a trim man with a pair of studs in his left ear and two rattails dangling from beneath a dirty white baseball cap; his organic farm produces potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuces, kale, broccoli, beets, carrots—“anything you could possibly want to eat except strawberries or asparagus.”

  It was not always thus. When Gerry and Janet first took over the farm twenty years ago, the local agricultural extension agent told them the first thing they needed to do was fumigate the soil with fungicides and atrazine.

  “My father-in-law passed away fourteen months after we got here, from cancer,” Gerry Ross said. “The guy at the ER asked what he did for a living. I said, ‘Farmer.’ He said, ‘Yep. We see it all the time.’ I’d be willing to bet that most of the soil being used for GMOs is like what we inherited here.

  “These companies, it’s pesticides they want to sell, not food,” Ross said. “Theirs is not a farm system designed to feed the world, it’s a system designed to sell chemicals.”

  Ross takes his science very seriously. A member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, he applies to soil science the same research instincts he once used as a professor of geology. He pays intimate attention to soil bacteria, and erosion control, and the symbiotic relationship between nitrogen-fixing microbes and the nodules on the roots of plants like sun hemp. Once he figured out that increasing the organic matter beneath his crops by just 1
percent saved 19,000 gallons of water per acre, he started collecting and composting 25 tons of local food waste every year.

  “We’re sequestering CO2 like you wouldn’t believe,” Ross said. “If you’re an earth scientist, you understand that with systems, things work together. Plants and microbial rhizomes, that’s a 400-million-year-old relationship. Why would we trash that? Why not use 400 million years of evolution instead of fifty years of pesticides?

  “This is why I have such a big problem with GMOs—it’s not taking the time to understand natural systems,” Ross said. “There’s no freaking way a Bt gene should be in corn. There’s a certain element of human arrogance. We used to be told ‘one gene, one trait.’ Now we have epigenetics telling us that echoes can be felt four generations down the line.”

  Like Alika, Ross does a lot more than farm. For years, he taught sustainable agriculture at a nearby learning center for children whose lives, one way or another, had gotten off track. Six times a year, he brought them to his farm to learn science and farming: he taught them about the structure of seeds, how seeds make plants, how plants make food. Mainly, though, he taught them “to learn that they’re not stupid.”

  To generations of young people, Ross became known as Farmer Gerry. Years later, when the GMO debate started to get hot, these allegiances would prove critical. Young people would come out to vote, many of them for the first time in their lives.

  Who Cares for the Land—the Companies or the People?

  For indigenous farmers like Alika Atay and organic farmers like Gerry Ross, the GMO issue brought old legal debates over land sovereignty to the surface. Hawaii is one of the few states in the country with environmental stewardship written right into the state constitution’s “public trust” doctrine. When Hawaii held a state constitutional convention in 1978–1979, the land stewardship language remained.