Musings: Food Injustice

The Food Justice/Food Sovereignty agenda now being peddled in Hawaii, and elsewhere, is missing several key ingredients.

First and foremost among them are the concepts of justice and sovereignty. Just so we're all on the same page, let's start by defining those terms. Justice: just behavior or treatment, fairness, impartiality, objectivity, neutrality, honesty, righteousness and morality. Sovereignty: a self-governing state; personal control.

The Food Justice Summit — a series of statewide talks culminating in a “convergence on the Capitol” for Wednesday's opening of the Legislature — is sponsored by the anti-GMO groups HAPA and the mainland-based Pesticide Action Network.

These groups, in their dogged determination to ban GMO crops, are working to deny millions of farmers the right to choose what seeds they want to grow. How does preventing farmers from exercising personal control over their own production advance sovereignty?

Clearly, it doesn't.

Many of these farmers are small-holders in developing nations who are finally earning enough money, through the cultivation of GMO seeds, to send their daughters to school, buy a two-burner propane stove so they no longer have to cook over dung fires. Denying them access to the technology of their choice — good seeds — returns them to a life of poverty. How is that just?

Clearly, it isn't.

Self-serving groups like HAPA and PAN — both are making money off their anti-GMO stance — refuse to accept that peasants and small-hold farmers willingly choose these “corporate seeds” because they deem them superior. It's so patronizing — and so steeped in Western colonial thinking — to believe these farmers have been duped or forced to purchase GMO seeds. No, they all made free choices, based on what they determined to be the most productive, and thus the most likely to turn a — gasp — profit.

Because you see, farmers want to earn profits, too. Though they may feel good about doing work that feeds others, I haven't met one who is in it for pure altruism. Much as elite Western activists love to romanticize about the simple, bucolic lives of brown-skinned peasants and campesinos elsewhere, small-holder farmers want to make money so they can have mobile phones, air conditioning, medical care and educated kids — you know, all the stuff that privileged Western activists take for granted.

In fact, some of these farmers want GMO seeds so badly that they smuggle them into countries where they're banned. A Chinese reporter at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul told me that's how China got into biotech crops: its own farmers smuggled in Bt cotton seeds, so the government had to get on board to meet farmer demand.

Andrea Brower,  a HAPA board member, recently wrote a Huffington Post blog in which she railed against corporations and hailed the group La Via Campensina, whose work she described thus:

They are defending against land grabs, "free trade," enclosure of seed and genetic commons, corporate power, human rights violations, environmental degradation, and policies that create hunger.

Mmm, shouldn't Andrea and her comrades be applauding the Chinese and South Asia peasants who bootleg GMO seeds for thwarting the corporate system of patents and seizing the seeds they wish to use? Shouldn't they be championing small-holder farmers who choose GMO seeds that produce higher yields with fewer pesticide applications and less tilling, thus thwarting hunger and reducing environmental degradation?

Yes, they should. But that reality does not fit with their anti-GMO dogma. So instead, the anti-GMO activists pretend that the millions of farmers who are exercising free will and practicing true food sovereignty either do not exist, or do not matter. Boy, talk about marginalizing the poor under the guise of "justice."

Andrea and the other anti-GMO activists, in their rush to demonize the seed companies for supposedly taking all the good land and stymying local production, also fail to recognize that there is ample fallow land to practice food sovereignty in Hawaii. If they were truly serious, activists could begin right now to "restore a fairer, more healthy food system." 

What's missing, however, are actual peasants to do the work. Which is why the big taro farms import Micronesian to labor in the loi, the seed companies bring in Filipinos and the large vegetable growers on Oahu use Southeast Asians.

That leads to us what else is missing from the Hawaii Food Justice Summit — farmers. Not one of the four people flown in to lecture us about food production in the Islands is an actual farmer. They're all activists.

And as we've already seen in Hawaii, while activists are good at pointing out what's wrong with ag, and blaming the seed companies and sugar plantation for all woes, they have yet to provide us with viable alternatives, much less demonstrate they know what they're talking about or are willing to do the work.

Heck, HAPA President Gary Hooser recently admitted he can't even keep up with the yard work on his own small Wailua Homesteads residential lot. Yet he is leading a movement whose primary purpose is dictating how others should farm.

Though my kanaka friends say nation-building could start today through occupying — by which is meant cultivating, not camping — loi on state-managed lands, they can't find people willing to do the work. Folks might show up for a day, but then they're gone.

Posting simplistic, distorted memes on social media, marching and blaming others is so much easier than actually hoeing or tilling.

Just like it's so easy, when ensconced in an echo chamber, to rhapsodize and rhetoricize about an agricultural Utopia, where everyone is given free land and water, and they grow crops collectively, with no thought of profit, following a formula prescribed by non-farmers who don't get their hands dirty and banish anyone who questions the dogma.

But creating and implementing workable plans that actually feed billions? Well, that's quite a bit harder. Which is why the Hawaii Food Justice Summit, with its token kanaka, imported activists and Maoist jingoism, is essentially a charade hosted by poseurs.

Andrea ended her post with a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?"

There's much to ponder in the words of Dr. King, whom I deeply admire, and few would argue that the world is full of injustice and inequities — including those perpetrated by misguided, self-righteous "food activists."

Meanwhile, Andrea and the rest of the HAPA-crites might also wish to reflect upon the words of another famous man:

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We'd all love to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

We'd all love to change the world

But when you talk about destruction

Don't you know that you can count me out

Don't you know it's gonna be all right

All right, all right

You say you got a real solution

Well, you know

We'd all love to see the plan

You ask me for a contribution

Well, you know

We're all doing what we can

But if you want money

For people with minds that hate

All I can tell is brother you have to wait

You say you'll change the constitution

Well, you know

We'd all love to change your head

You tell me it's the institution

Well, you know

You better free you mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow

Tomorrow, I'll address the inherent hypocrisies of the supposedly "anti-corporate," anti-GMO groups behind the Hawaii Food Justice Summit.