GMO: A Metaphor for Corporate Engineered Corruption?

Editor’s Note: Philip Damon brings an extensive background of cultural, spiritual and literary experience to his “Just Thinking” column, which debuts in our pages this month. Active in civil rights in his twenties, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia and spent the summer of ‘64 among anti-apartheid radicals in South Africa, and was then offered a teaching and writing fellowship at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was a protégé of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. After joining the University of Hawaii English faculty in ‘68, he was a widely published fiction writer (Best American Short Stories 1977) and columnist-at-large (“The Toy Department”) for the Honolulu Advertiser.

Disenchanted by the ‘70s with social solutions, he turned to spiritual philosophy and introduced Mysticism in Literature and similar courses to the university curriculum, then in the early ‘90s combined the principles of spirituality and autobiography to create the Living the Story workshops, a “narrative path to self-understanding.”

Retiring to Bellingham in 2002, his column “Dancing on the Brink” appeared for several years in the Weekly and Organic Press, and in ’2009 he was drawn back into social activism as an early member of the Living Democracy group. He also writes the “Sacred Democracy” column for readthedirt.org and living-democracy.org.

Recent headlines1 inform us that revelations of genetically engineered wheat found growing in a field in Oregon have resulted in the immediate announcement by Japan that it is canceling its importation of American white wheat — at potential losses to American farmers of well beyond hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the biotech engineers at Monsanto were quick to assure us that this isolated field in our grain-rich northwest is nowhere near any of the sites where, since 1994, 179 field tests of “Roundup-Ready” wheat have been tested in sixteen states on over 4,000 acres of open American farmland. These tests were undertaken with the approval of the US Department of Agriculture, even as official national policy prohibited the cultivation of GMO wheat, and as our burgeoning markets in Asia and Europe consistently refuse to allow the stuff to enter their countries.

Yet beyond the bizarre, almost comical way in which the modified wheat was discovered (there it was, growing apparently naturally in a field intended to be fallow, and after numerous sprayings of Roundup — whose main ingredient glyphosate, according to Global Research, “can be dangerous to embryonic and placental cells even in very dilute formulations,” plus being implicated as well in bee colony collapse disorder — and its stubborn refusal to simply give up and die, the only explanation was…genetic engineering), the lesson seems to be not so much how great is the threat we all face from Monsanto. That part of it seems by now to go without saying. The real lesson lies in how the burden falls totally on the USDA, the regulatory agency that allowed and abetted it.

“None of this would be possible,” according to journalist Colin Todhunter of Countercurrents.org, “without the ability of the GM sector to corrupt state machinery in order to further its commercial interests.” 2 He cites the fact that “top people from the GM sector have moved with ease to take up positions with various U.S. government bodies, such as the USDA.” Indeed, this easy movement is the notorious “revolving door” — between Congress and the free-spending lobbies, and between corporate offices and the agencies tasked with regulating the very industries to whom they’ve become beholden.

Consider the words of Don Westfall, vice-president of Promar International, as reported by the Toronto Star on January 9, 2001:

“The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded (with GMOs) that there’s nothing you can do about it. You just sort of surrender.”

So, as we look beyond genetic engineering to the engineering of the entire emergent corporate state, does it seem to be such a reach to look at the seeds of Monsanto as the seeds of conspiracy, with GMO as a toxic metaphor for the corruption of the many fields of a once flowering society? And is all that is left us a sort of surrender?

Just thinking….

Endnotes

1. See http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/05/30/187103955/gmo-wheat-found-in-oregon-field-howd-it-get-there or http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57588150/how-did-genetically-altered-wheat-end-up-in-oregon-field .

2. http://www.countercurrents.org/todhunter030613.htm