Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  For the benefit of present and future generations, the State and its political subdivisions shall conserve and protect Hawaii’s natural beauty and all natural resources, including land, water, air, minerals, energy sources, and shall promote the development and utilization of these resources in a manner consistent with their conservation and in furtherance of the self-sufficiency of the State. All public natural resources are held in trust by the State for the benefit of the people.

  Alika considered Maui’s anti-GMO movement to be directly connected to this tradition. “For land and water to be protected as a public trust, for animals and birds and fish to have rights, and most importantly for kids and elders to have health—if you were raised here, you’re bound to those core values,” he said.

  Autumn Ness was not born or raised on Maui, but she knew a threat when she saw one. Ness had spent twelve years living in Japan, where, in 2011, she worked for tsunami relief efforts and set up testing facilities after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. When she became pregnant, she sought a home away from the radiation and chose Maui.

  It was a safe bet, she thought, until she came across photographs of handwritten company pesticide spray logs. July 10, 2014, 10 a.m.: Permethrin. July 15, 2014, 10 a.m.: Lorsban. July 15, 2014, 10 a.m.: Penncap. August 5, 11:30 a.m.: Malathion.

  “When I saw the spray logs, my heart sank,” Ness said. “That’s when I said, ‘Okay, I’m all in.’ Those logs came from the least secure fields. Other fields are triple barb-wired, like you’re crossing the border between Israel and Palestine. What they were doing on fields you can walk to makes you wonder what they’re doing behind all that barbed wire.”

  Ness turned to every authority she could think of to find out more about the chemicals being sprayed on the experimental plots and—as people had on Kauai—always came up empty. “Overshadowing all the issues is the fact that the corporations have hijacked every level of our government,” she said. “That’s a way bigger issue to me than the spray thing.

  “The cards are institutionally stacked against us, and it’s done in a really dishonest way,” Ness said. “Everywhere we turned—looking for spray records, or birth defect records, or records of companies spraying near schools—we would get told by every level of people—the workers, the city council, the Department of Health, the Department of Ag—they would all say, ‘I understand your problem, but there’s nothing I can do for you.’ I have to wonder: Who the hell is running the show here? Everyone is giving the companies the keys. Even the judges—we hear, ‘I can’t do anything for you.’ I mean, come on! You’re a judge!”

  Together with Alika’s SHAKA Movement, Ness became a central figure in a campaign to get a measure on the county ballot that would put a moratorium on all GM farming until the companies performed full health and environmental safety tests. The original draft included page upon page enumerating the reasons GMOs and their associated pesticides were unwelcome on Maui. The experimental plots were not farms but “an outdoor laboratory” that promoted intensive pesticide spraying on Maui and encouraged “527 million pounds of additional herbicides on the nation’s farmland.” The overuse of pesticides damaged soil, wildlife, and drinking water, all of which have “cultural and spiritual significance” to the island’s indigenous community. GM crops constituted an “invasive species” that threatened the island’s delicate balance of native plants and animals, and the pesticides used to grow them posed health risks to both consumers and farmworkers.

  The petition also urged voters to consider the “Precautionary Principle” that the U.S. Supreme Court articulated in 1986: federal law mandated that states could not “sit idly by and wait until potentially irreversible environmental damage has occurred or until the scientific community agrees on what [environmental risks] are or are not dangerous before it acts to avoid such consequences.”

  Autumn Ness got busy knocking on doors. As part of her signature-gathering campaign, she carried along the pesticide spray logs, both as she talked to voters and when she was interviewed in the press. She published them on Facebook and in the newspaper. She circulated satellite images of the island, with experimental fields outlined in red and dramatic yellow and blue arrows indicating the direction in which chemicals would drift into towns through the air or in creeks and rivers. The images, intentionally or not, resemble military target maps, with the arrows passing directly over elementary schools and wildlife refuges.

  “These guys were spraying many times a day,” she said. “It’s not farming, it’s chemical testing. As soon as the companies found out those photos were a central part of our campaign, they went back and ripped down the board where they had posted the spray records.”

  Ness needed to work quickly. In order to place the measure before the county council (which could either vote on the referendum directly or pass the measure on to voters instead), organizers needed to gather 8,000 signatures within six months.

  By the end of May, with Alika organizing farmers and people in the indigenous community, and Ness knocking on doors, they had collected more than 11,000 signatures in just six weeks.

  The ball was now in the county council’s court. During a series of “excruciating” hearings on the measure, people from both sides of the debate showed up to pressure the council. Monsanto organized a rally in front of the Maui County Building. Workers showed up wearing neon yellow hats and T-shirts and carrying signs emblazoned with “Save Ag Jobs” and “Save Farmers.” “I think the initiative will threaten not only agriculture, but a lot of great jobs for the people of Maui,” a worker named Lowella Oasay told a local reporter.

  A Monsanto employee named Carol Reimann appeared on a video delivering “over a thousand pages of weighted studies and documents and research papers that attest to the health and safety of our products and farming practices in Maui County.” A man wearing a neon yellow shirt with a Monsanto emblem on the breast said, “I love the research, I love what I do, I love working in agriculture. I’ve been doing it for seventeen years. It’s still what drives me. I know what we do here has an impact around the word, you know, and that’s important to me. That’s why I do it.”

  Another Monsanto employee, Dan Clegg, said the documents were evidence of the company’s “transparency.” “I don’t want to speculate, but I would say there is a group of people that have signed that petition that are thoroughly confused,” Clegg said. “They don’t have all the information. Now is their opportunity to step back, think about where they want local agriculture to go, get all the information before they make a decision. This is one-stop shopping, okay, for a global round of information.”

  Autumn Ness was impressed—and embittered—by the company’s tactics. “Workers were bussed in from Monsanto and Dow—and they all said, ‘If this passes, I’ll lose my job,’” Ness said. “They all had their testimony written on Monsanto letterhead. For many of them, English was their second language, yet they all used the same colloquialisms. It was obvious that the same person had written their speeches.”

  In the end, the council declined to vote on the bill outright. The GMO ban became the first voter initiative in Maui’s history to make it onto a ballot.

  For the industries confronting the ban, things suddenly got serious. Stopping the GMO ban was no longer a matter of twisting a few arms on the county council; now the companies’ global business model would be up to the whims of the people of Maui themselves. The companies “didn’t have any idea we would get as far as we did,” Ness said. “They ignored us for a while. There wasn’t a peep. Then right about when it became clear we were going to get on the ballot—it’s really hard in the state of Hawaii to do that—the companies were like, ‘Oh, shit! Now we have something to deal with!’”

  The Counter Campaign

  The companies reacted swiftly. Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences were determined not to let Maui become another Kauai. Monsanto vowed to mount “an aggressive campaign against this initiative,
” company spokesperson Dawn Bicoy said. Banning GMOs would “devastate our county’s fragile agricultural economy.” The initiative, Monsanto claimed, was based on “false claims that are not supported at all by the overwhelming body of scientific evidence.” GM crops are “critical to making food available and affordable to the world while also protecting crops threatened by disease, like Hawaii’s own papaya.”

  Rather than try to convince Maui voters of the safety of GMOs, the companies tried to change the debate; instead of talking about pesticides or land rights or local produce, they would talk about jobs. The bill was not a ban on “GMOs,” it became a ban on “farming.” Monsanto and Dow said they employed more than six hundred workers on the island and said the GMO ban would put local farmers out of work. But they also returned to the old playbook: GMOs were necessary to feed the world. “With almost 18 million farmers worldwide growing genetically engineered crops—90% of whom are small farmers in developing countries—the SHAKA Initiative would stop Maui farmers from taking advantage of modern technology to help address some of the most pressing problems facing agriculture today,” the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, an industry group, said.

  A letter, composed on letterhead from the Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban, went out to all registered voters. A petition was circulated asking voters if they supported a ban on farming. Ads began appearing on television and the radio, never mentioning GMOs—or that the funding had been provided by Monsanto or Dow.

  The companies also flexed their muscles on the wording of the ballot initiative itself. Ness and the rest of the ban’s supporters assumed the bill’s ambitious language (with its references to the “spiritual significance” of the island’s water and land) would be what voters would see on the ballot. This proved to be naive. By the time the ballot measure emerged from the county clerk’s office, its language was so muddled that even supporters could barely understand what they were being asked to vote for.

  VOTER INITIATIVE: GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ORGANISMS

  Should the proposed initiative prohibiting the cultivation or reproduction of genetically engineered organisms within the County of Maui, which may be amended or repealed as to a specific person or entity when required [for] environmental and public health impact studies, public hearings, a two thirds vote and a determination by the County Council that such operation or practice meets certain standards, and which establishes civil and criminal penalties, be adopted for Maui County?

  “When I read it, even I didn’t know if I was going to vote for it,” Autumn Ness said. “There was no mention of the moratorium. They changed ‘GMO’ to ‘GE.’ They did everything they could to make people not understand the question on the ballot. They said if we didn’t like the wording, we could sue, but then we would have had to wait until the next election. So we said we would just take it. In the end, we realized we were working against our own government. We just decided we would go out and educate people.”

  To Gerry Ross, the influence the big companies had on local politics became clear during a meeting of the Maui County Farm Bureau. Ross had served on the farm board for fifteen years, and relationships between small organic farmers like him and the “corporate guys” had usually gone pretty well. But one evening, about eight months before the GMO vote, the corporate guys started talking about how the anti-GMO people are all “anti-science.” Even the mayor parroted this line, saying that people had been “genetically modifying food for 10,000 years.”

  This did not sit well with Ross.

  “I said, ‘Wait a minute, Mr. Mayor,’” Ross told me. “‘We’ve been selecting seeds for 10,000 years. We’ve only been genetically crossing for forty years. What would you do if you learned in 1959 that a chemical like atrazine actually turned out to be much more dangerous, and at lower levels, than you first supposed? You really need to study how safe this stuff is.’

  “That’s the kind of stuff a small-town mayor doesn’t understand.”

  Ross agreed to add his voice to television and radio spots supporting the GMO moratorium. He went back into character as “Farmer Gerry,” hoping to reach his former students—now grown up and ready to vote—to get their friends and families to show up at the polls.

  Autumn Ness helped organize some four hundred volunteers and set out again to talk to her fellow islanders. There was a lot of ground to cover, especially since it was clear the companies were about to drop a lot of money on the campaign. Going door-to-door, it became clear to Ness that “nobody knew what a GMO was,” she said.

  “Right out of the gate the companies turned this into a farming ban,” Ness said. “We were out in the community talking to people, and they thought there were two things on the ballot: GMOs and a farming ban. People told me they were going to vote yes on the GMO ban and no on the farming ban—and there was no farming ban.

  “People at the door would be a strong no, then we’d have to talk to them at the door and tell them the info they had was wrong—even if the ad was on TV. We could flip a no to a yes at the door in five or ten minutes. All they needed to know was the truth.”

  Ness figures she alone spoke to 3,000 people. She and her team handed out fliers, reminding voters that the moratorium was intended to stop just GM experimentation, not traditional farming. GM farms represented only 1 percent of Maui’s 852 farms (and just 6 percent of the island’s 54,500 acres of cropland), and almost all the locally grown food people actually ate had nothing to do with GMOs. Local produce farms—farms that produced food that local people actually ate—would not be affected.

  Controlling the Airwaves

  In September 2014, the companies’ multimillion-dollar media wave crashed over the island. Legally, Monsanto and Dow could buy only four radio commercials per hour, so that is what they did: four per hour, every hour, per station, Ness said.

  “The TV and radio commercials started, and they were just relentless,” Ness said. “There was no limit to airtime on TV, so they bought up every available space on TV. So even if we did raise money for ads, there wasn’t any space available. By the time we got some money together, we could only buy spots at eleven p.m.”

  Industry advertisements—typically attributed to the Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban—flashed photographs of farmers working in cornfields. Voice-overs from the head of the local farm bureau emphasized that farming helps “contribute to the economy, provide jobs, pay taxes, and maintain the land in an environmentally friendly way.” The companies simply “bring in supplies” that help local farmers “reduce their cost of production.”

  The ads “never once mentioned the safety of GMOs, they never talked about toxic chemicals. What they did talk about was a farming ban, and what agriculture means to Maui,” Ness said. “The companies got older people, who remembered the plantation days, and told them if the moratorium went into effect, their families would lose their jobs. These Dow and Monsanto reps don’t go on TV. They got local people to go on TV and tell their sob stories. It was crazy—really, really intense how emotional it got. They really pulled the heartstrings. They put a Filipino girl on TV saying, in tears, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to pay our rent and our kids doctors’ bills.’ It even got to me.”

  Weeks later, when campaign finance reports came in, the financial power of the companies became clear. The industry group Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban received $5.1 million from a “citizen” named Monsanto; $1.7 million from Dow AgroSciences; and $1 million from the pro-industry Council for Biotechnology Information.

  The campaign finance reports themselves were absurdly opaque. The companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct mail and millions of dollars on media advertising. But they also spent thousands of dollars on “media training” and a “Maui County Farm Fair” and “committee meeting prep” and “sign waving.” During a parade at the Maui County Farm Fair, Monsanto employees showed up in large numbers, waving signs; sever
al told Alika the company had paid them $200 to march behind a tractor.

  All told, companies and their lobbying arm spent more than $8 million on a county ballot measure. “For all the money they spent, they could have done the safety studies and the soil testing and the water testing, and been back in business for way less than that,” Ness said.

  To Alika, the tactic of using workers to push a political agenda was doubly distasteful.

  “The companies always dangle the carrot of money,” Alika told me. “For me, when you step away and look at it, the real issue is this: There are those who live here, and those who just sleep here. A large majority—maybe 80 percent—of the workers on these farms are immigrant Filipinos or Micronesians; they’re international migrants. Yeah, they have families, but they’re here on work visas. So when I ask them, ‘Where are you from? Where is your home?’ the Filipino guys say, ‘I send all my money home’—meaning back to the Philippines. But then they get paid by the companies to show up at rallies. They had two hundred of them show up at a rally at the county fair, and the guys told me they were paid to be there. They show up at county council hearings, same way.

  “The same thing is true for these big, burly tractor operators from Nebraska. They just sleep here. They come and go. They come here when it’s snowing back home, go back when it’s warm. Even the scientists—they come from places like France, so they just sleep here too. All these people saying that GMOs are so good—this isn’t their home. For us, this is our home. I ask the Filipinos: ‘If they sprayed five times a day in your county, what would you do? Why is it okay to poison us?’ I don’t blame the workers, I blame the economic system that has them working here in the first place.”

  Lorrin Pang, a Maui physician and a consultant to the World Health Organization, maintained throughout the campaign that he was “very concerned” with the experimental GM crops, especially because of the chemicals they required. “You may know the effects of each chemical individually, but each new combination could have stunning effects,” he wrote. “The minute you combine then, all hell can break loose. We’ve only recently learned that, on Kauai for example, they are regularly spraying seventy to eighty different chemicals to kill everything in the soil, the microbes, the viruses, the fungi. That represents ten to the twenty-third possible combinations, a trillion trillion, more than all the drops of water in the ocean. And they certainly haven’t cleared any of this with the people who have to live with the risk of being exposed to whatever is being tested. This is all quite unethical.”