"Cold Evil" Threatens National Organic Standard
By Will Stockwin |
Andrew Kimbrell's name may not head industrial agriculture's list of activists it would most like to silence, but it's a safe bet he's in the top five.
After 17 years of fighting genetically modified organisms (GMO) in food, and now as executive director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C., Kimbrell's voice has only gotten stronger. The alarm he sounded for the approximately 1,300 attendees at the 2002 Ecological Farming Conference in Asilomar was also a call for environmentalists and family farmers to join forces under an agrarian ethic that sustains organic farming, farm laborers and wild native species.
"The national organic rule is under the threat of being tampered with right now by the U.S. Department of Agriculture," he warned. "Despite some 280,000 public comments to the contrary, the use of genetic engineering, irradiation and sewage sludge can still be allowed under the organic standard at the secretary of agriculture's discretion.
"Right now they are not prohibited other than as market considerations and if Secretary Ann Veneman decides the market is ready to accept any or all of them, she can simply order it done."
Pressure on Veneman, a known biotechnology proponent, from what Kimbrell called the "cold evil" of industrialized agriculture is unrelenting. Cold evil, he said, is what people and cultures do to one another at a great psychological distance that they could never do face to face.
"It's the industrial mindset's artificial ethic of efficiency," he said. "They've gotten away with it for some 50 years because we've had a rapidly urbanizing population that is getting farther and farther from its food base and farmers.
"Do we treat anything we really care about, such as family, friends, even our pets on an efficiency basis?" Kimbrell asked. "Why then should we treat the land and our food production on that basis alone? Industrial food systems make ethical eunuchs of us all."
When the focus shifts from efficiency to productivity, however, Kimbrell said USDA's own numbers undermine the agency's bias for large industrialized farms.
"According to the 1992 USDA agricultural census, farms of 27 acres or less are more than 10 times more productive than farms of 6,000 acres or more," he said. That same report also noted the loss of 32,500 family farms between 1987 and 1992.
"Ecological and agricultural activism are the tools for saving farms and closing the psychological distances created by industrial farming," Kimbrell said. "We have to preserve organic if we intend to get beyond it. That means maintaining strong national standards while promoting farming that is local, family operated, bio-diversive, humane and socially just."
He suggested abandoning the "consumer movement" for a "creator movement. "There's very few places left where we can still take control in the system we call democracy, where we have less and less control over just about everything," Kimbrell said. "Buying locally produced food gives us back control of our food system by letting us create a face-to-face relationship with what we eat and take responsibility for how it's grown and produced."
