Frankenwheat crops are sprouting
like weeds in Oregon.
Bob
Dylan once sent a two-word lyric to Ben Harper, a talented songwriter he
admired. “Well well,” was the lyric, and Dylan challenged Harper to make a song
of it.
He
did! By adding another “well” to the title, Harper wrote “Well, well, well” — a stinging lament about America’s
clean-water well going dry due to waste and greed.
I
thought of his song when I heard that a wheat farmer in Eastern Oregon had
gotten an unpleasant surprise in May: Some of Monsanto’s unapproved, genetically manipulated wheat suddenly cropped up in his field. He’d
never planted any of these Frankenseeds, which have a foreign DNA spliced into
them by Monsanto’s bio-tamperers.
Field tests of the altered wheat were last done in Oregon in 2001, and the seeds never have been cleared for commercial use anywhere in the world. But there they are, sprouting like weeds.
Well,
well, well. Ever since Monsanto, backed by its political protectors, began
messing with the very DNA of our food supply two decades ago, the company line
was that it was all perfectly safe and under tight control.
Farmers,
however, warned that these corporate and political powers were a bunch of
profiteering ignoramuses who knew nothing about such basic realities as pollen
drift. Pollen from mutant plants can — and does — move many hundreds of miles
across state and national borders to contaminate the crops of unsuspecting
farmers living far away.
Ninety
percent of the wheat grown by Oregon farmers is exported to Japan and other nations
that don’t let their consumers serve as lab rats for agribusiness hucksters. So
the escape of Monsanto’s wheat into the wild endangers both wheat exports and
the purity of organic corps — along with human health and our environment.
To
follow this story’s drift go to Organic Consumers Association:
www.organicconsumers.org.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He's also editor of the
populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org