Bill C-517

Recently a little bill called Bill C-517 was turned down in both federal and provincial parliament. People might be familiar with it since Greenpeace has been spearheading a campaign to have it passed along with a handful of other organizations however their efforts proved unsuccessful.

For now.

What’s the deal with Bill C-517? Well it called for mandatory labelling on genetically engineered food. For those of you who are unfamiliar, GE foods are food that have had their genes altered with (an example would be taking a gene from a seal to make your corn more resistant to the cold), which is a very simplified explanation. Passing the bill should be simple, right? Well it’s not.

Studies have shown that 85-90% of Canadians want to know if their food is GE and I personally helped Greenpeace hand over 22,000 signatures in support of the Bill before it was about to be voted on. Again however, this proved to be ineffective. When I wrote my MP asking what the deal was, he wrote back with this:

“Although I support labelling on GE foods, I don’t think this bill will accomplish that.”

A response that ridiculous doesn’t require me to elaborate.

With such overwhelming support of such that bill, you think politicians would jumping all over themselves to endorse it and take credit for it. But that’s not the case, why?

As always, there are giant corporations with big money involved and continuing with our current prime minister’s agenda, we are going to do whatever keeps the U.S. happy (see Bending Over for Bush post).Many people have heard of Monsanto, which is the largest or at least most public supplier of GE seeds to farmers. Older people will remember Monsanto as the creator of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. To quickly summarize, Monsanto eventually got into the seed business after the war and began manufacturing weed killer. However the product became so strong that it was killing not only weeds but crops as well. As a solution, Monsanto began selling GE seeds that would not be killed by their weed killer. Essentially if you sprayed your crops with this killer everything would die except for the GE crops, this is the only visible difference between natural crops and GE ones.

So for people that oppose GE foods that’s problem number one, I don’t want to ingest any food that has been sprayed with such strong fertilizer that it would be dead without changing the DNA of the seed. And it is estimated that around 70% of the food Canadians eat are either GE foods or contain GE ingredients.The next concern is an obvious one, with such a new product we don’t know the implications of eating GE foods. There are no long term studies. However most countries aren’t taking chances, China, Mexico and most of Africa are among nations that have banned GE Foods.

The next issue with labelling is that without it, there is no way to trace any health effects back to GE foods. If I have a violent reaction to something I ate and it had GE ingredients, there is no way for me or my doctor to document it without the labelling. So it is easy for opponents of the labelling to argue that GE foods are exactly the same when it’s impossible to link any side effects to it.

Organic farmers have a problem with GE foods as well, because it is almost impossible to avoid contaminations. Wind, birds, and pollination are all ways that natural and organic crops can be contaminated by GE foods.

And here’s where it gets really, really messy. For the first time in history, Monsanto and other companies are able to copyright their seeds. It used to be that no one could have a copyright on anything living, however now that GE foods are on the market this has changed. Monsanto has taken advantage of this by saying that farmers who buy their seeds can only use them once; forcing them to re-buy seeds every year or face a lawsuit.

So what happens if you are an organic farmer who has had their crops contaminated for one reason or another by GE seeds? Who owns the crops and who is responsible? A recent landmark case involving Percy Schmeiser was brought all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and it was decided that if your farm gets contaminated by GE seeds, it is your fault and your responsibility to pay Monsanto or whoever infringement fees. Unless you want to pay every year for new seeds, it is your responsibility to keep GE foods away from your land.

Another way to look at it is, if you have grown a tree on your land even for a hundred years and it gets contaminated by GE seeds, it is now property of Monsanto or whoever owns the right the GE seed.

The scary part about all this is not just the ramifications for Canadian farmers, but for farmers in third world countries. What happens when GE products inevitably end up contaminating farms in Guatemala for example? Most farmers don’t have the resources to keep GE foods out (which almost impossible anyways) or to pay settlement fees to buy their crops back.

Monsanto is a really powerful corporation however this doesn’t immediately mean that it can stop bills from being passed in parliament. Although it helps to have former Monsanto employees now working in parliament and former politicians working for Monsanto. It’s a little bit like Bush’s government, which is full of former oil company executives. (http://www.purefood.org/monsanto/revolvedoor.cfm)

This is all a very brief and simplified explanation of the facts involving GE foods and getting them labelled. Anyone looking for more information, I encourage you to click on the links below and check out the documentary “The Future of Food”.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805

http://www.gefreebc.org/gefree_tmpl.php?content=home

http://www.thefutureoffood.com/AboutFOF.htm