Gonsalves has little patience for the GMO debate, especially when he hears people tell him that his beloved papaya should be grown organically. With 100 inches of rain a year, papaya plantations need no irrigation. But so much rain means an endless challenge from fungi—and the need for regular spraying with fungicide.
“Organic? Bah!” he said. “People live in a make-believe world. Organic is what, 2 percent of the food supply? I don’t eat organic. Can you grow organic with this rain? We have a fungus problem. All our organic produce comes from California, and it’s going to be that way for a long, long time.”
When it comes to the anti-GMO movement, Gonsalves told me, talk is cheap. “Farmers are not stupid. They will take the best way they can to make money,” he said. “You want us to do things organically and sustainably? Show us how to do it. Don’t talk about it. Do it. I’ll clap my hands. Wonderful! But do it. Don’t just talk about it. Do it.”
Gonsalves now serves on a science advisory board for the Gates Foundation, which is coordinating a great deal of research funding for projects in the developing world. He also continues to consult with global food conglomerates. It’s true, the big seed companies have terrible PR, he said; Monsanto continues to pay for its past sins of arrogance, like forcing GM corn on people in Europe.
“Companies always come to me and say, ‘What can we do about our bad PR?’ I say, ‘Do something that will help the people.’ Everything about the big companies, this technology—it’s not designed to help small farmers. It’s designed to help big companies. If Monsanto had come out with a resistant tomato first, instead of corn, things would have been different. But the company knew there were only millions there, not billions. There was no way they were going to do the tomato.”
To be fair, he says, Monsanto has put $80 million into a cassava project in Africa, but does not get enough credit for it. This is the same company, he reminded me, that owned a number of patents on the papaya, but “gave them all to us.”
It’s important for people to realize how important GMO technology can be for small-scale farmers whose livelihoods face collapse without them, Gonsalves said. Monsanto will never get into niche markets like papaya; there’s just not enough money in it. It’s up to publicly funded, university researchers to work on crops that help small farmers and poor consumers. Many researchers have become too comfortable doing work—often funded by the big companies—on crops that flow into the industrial food system. This sentiment has been echoed by the National Academy of Sciences, which cited the lack of biotech work on specialty crops as one of farming’s most pressing problems.
There are signs that Gonsalves’s message is getting through. Last year, federal regulators approved a GM plum, developed by USDA scientists, that resists a deadly European pox. Blight-blocking peanuts are under way. In Florida and Texas, scientists are working to develop what is almost certain to become a flash point for consumers: oranges, which are under siege from a bacterial infection known as huanglongbing, or citrus greening. Building on the work Gonsalves did with papaya, and Roger Beachy did with tobacco, scientists are now scrambling to develop GM oranges to block the disease. Public scrutiny, not to say outrage, is sure to follow.
And if China starts buying his papaya, the greatest beneficiaries, Gonsalves knows, will be his beloved plantation workers. “People come to Hawaii to see paradise. They have no idea,” he told me. “You know how much people here get paid? Ten dollars an hour. You know how expensive food is?
“If you don’t like the companies, say, ‘Break them up like they did with the oil companies!’ But don’t say, ‘It’s not safe.’ Once the Supreme Court said you could patent everything under the sun, that became the law. If you don’t follow the law, how are you going to operate a democracy? You want things to be different? Take them to court!
“I’m for the underdog, the poor people,” Gonsalves continued. “All I know is that farmers here were suffering. The human side of biotech is missing. This is not an industrial crop. It is family farming. All we were ever doing was trying to help farmers. That’s all we wanted to do.”
5.
Trouble in Paradise
The island of Kauai is so beautiful it can make you twitch. The great green slabs thrusting up from the central mountains look like they could be hiding another Machu Picchu; the island’s lush, rolling piedmont drops into beaches so famous for their waves that locals have been known to remove uninvited surfers with their fists.
Kauai is also a place where you can see a guy dressed up as the Grim Reaper—black cape, flaming red death mask—standing by a major intersection with a sign that says “Monsanto Sucks!” It is an island where anger at giant chemical companies is so intense that a man who is both a professional surfer and a professional mixed martial arts fighter recently ran for mayor on an anti-GMO platform and got 40 percent of the vote.
Tiny Kauai, perched at the far western edge of the United States, has become ground zero for the global debate over genetically modified food and the spraying of their attendant chemicals on cropland. It is a place where, for years, multinational agrochemical companies have developed the GM seeds that circulate around the globe, but kept their experiments—especially their use of pesticides—secret from the people who live just down the road. And it is a place where a ragtag group of activists have fought these companies to a draw. Like other communities around the world that have fought the agrochemical conglomerates, the people of Kauai feel they are bearing a chemical onslaught their bodies and their beloved island ought not to have to bear. They argue that their land is being used for the good of company profits, that GMOs are really just a vehicle for chemical companies to sell the world more pesticides, and that their fight is a microcosm of the global GMO battle itself. Indeed, when it comes to the global food system, with all its perils and promises, the rest of the world is watching Kauai. Because just as GMOs and their attendant pesticides can spread around the world, so can resistance.
When I arrived in Kauai, the guy at the rental car agency asked me why I had come to visit. “I’m writing a book about GMOs,” I told him.
“Huh,” he said. “Good idea. Lots of pesticides being sprayed over on the island’s west side. A guy I work with just lost his dad over there. It’s strange how many people are telling stories like that. I’m glad I work inside.”
When I pulled into my hotel, the woman at the check-in desk also asked me why I had come. I told her.
“My husband works for a fertilizer company, and he says all this stuff about GMO companies is nonsense,” she said. “Closing these companies down would be taking food right out of people’s mouths. I just try to keep quiet.
“Be careful who you talk to—you might end up starting a fight.”
A few hours later, I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a beat-up Toyota pickup truck being driven by Jeri DiPietro. We had bumped along an endless series of potholes down a long dusty road, finally pulling up next to an abandoned sugar mill, its exterior walls overgrown with trees and weeds. A pair of rusted-out truck chassis sat rotting in front. Behind them, a squat conical building had been emblazed with a line of graffiti: “It all started here.”
Behind us, across the dirt road from the abandoned mill, a series of squat plastic silos filled with a yellowish liquid sat baking in the sun.
DiPietro had come to this place—an experimental farm operated by the agribusiness giant DuPont Pioneer, to see if she could figure out what the company was spraying on its fields. She carried with her a series of maps showing the locations of company fields, amended with thick lines of Magic Marker that showed acreage and field boundaries (Pioneer 4,500; BASF 900; Syngenta 3,000; Dow 3,500 + 500), as well as their proximity to local rivers and towns and the pesticides being used there.
“There is a field in Kamakani on the west side—all we have is Google Earth to see where the fields are,” DiPietro told me. Chemical companies have f
ields “within 450 feet of a preschool, and one of the chemicals they use is paraquat, which has been banned in thirty-six countries. Right on the label, it says that paraquat is fatal if inhaled.”
DiPietro has been involved in the anti-GMO fight on Kauai since 2002, long before most people on the mainland had ever heard the term. Because the companies running these experimental fields are not forthcoming about their locations, or what crops they are growing, or what they are spraying on them, DiPietro had to create the maps herself. She assembled them from her explorations driving the island’s dusty red back roads and looking for the tiny spray sheets the companies post alongside their fields. She has seen plenty of signs noting the chemicals being used: atrazine, lorsban, “other.” (As toxic as atrazine and lorsban are, she says, it’s the chemicals marked “other” that bother her the most.)
“It’s supposed to be against federal law to spray lorsban in winds over ten miles per hour and to spray any restricted-use pesticides in windy conditions,” DiPietro said. Here on Kauai, “it’s always blowing like this.”
Because the fields themselves are shielded from public view, the spray sheets are plainly not intended for the public either. They are posted to advise company workers to stay off the fields for twenty-four to forty-eight hours after a spray. This is serious business: the EPA recently announced it is considering banning chlorpyrifos, another commonly used chemical on Kauai that has sickened dozens of farmworkers in recent years, including at least ten Syngenta workers who were hospitalized in Kauai in January 2016. The workers had walked onto a cornfield twenty hours after it had been sprayed—just four hours earlier than recommended.
DiPietro had driven me by the Grand Hyatt Kauai and the Poipu Bay Golf Course, within easy drifting distance of the experimental farm. Did the golfers know what was being sprayed across the street? Would they care if they did? How about the surfers? The retirees drinking piña coladas or doing yoga on the beach? It is this lack of available information—about chemicals that are well-known health hazards being sprayed in close proximity to places where people live, work, and play—that has driven DiPietro and a host of others on Kauai to take their fight straight to the companies themselves.
A notably gentle woman, DiPietro shielded her dark hair and dark eyes beneath a baseball cap that read “Kauai Has the Right to Know.” She had been to this experimental farm many times before and was not, apparently, a welcome presence. As we sat in her cab chatting, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw a white four-by-four coming up fast behind her. She sat tight. “Looks like we’ve got a visitor,” she said.
A white pickup pulled up next to DiPietro, and a bull-necked man with fury on his face glared out from beneath a ball cap.
“Get the hell out of here and don’t come back,” he seethed. “And no more pictures!” The man was enraged, his voice was full of threat, and DiPietro did not try to argue. But she did not seem intimidated so much as resigned. She’d been through this ritual before. She pulled off down the road.
—
LAND USE ON KAUAI has a long and complex history, one that is tied up with centuries-old sugar plantations and an enormous cultural and economic gap between wealthy landowners and native and immigrant laborers. In 1920, several hundred Filipino workers staged a strike against the sugar plantations, protesting wages that amounted to less than a dollar for twelve hours of work. As they gathered, policemen climbed a nearby bluff and fired on the crowd. In what came to be known as the Hanapepe Massacre, sixteen Filipino workers were killed as they fled into a stand of banana trees. The workers were later blamed for the violence: 130 were arrested; 56 were found guilty of rioting and were imprisoned.
A few decades later, chemical companies began testing defoliants for use in the Vietnam War. “We’ve been a place for Monsanto to experiment for fifty years,” a woman named Fern Rosenstiel told me. “They tested Agent Orange on this island right near where I was born.”
King Sugar, as the industry was known, dominated the island’s economy for 150 years, placing great wealth in a very few hands but also creating a plantation culture that many say remains in place today. Descendants of the sugar workers from Japan, Portugal, Polynesia, and the Philippines remain in sizable numbers throughout the state. Crippled by foreign competition, Kauai’s sugar industry began to collapse in the 1980s and 1990s, and many companies picked up and left. Big Agribusiness has more than stepped into its ample footprint. The companies still hire descendants of the people who worked on the plantations—Chinese, Japanese, native Hawaiians—and these people are happy to have the work. But they also hire a lot of temporary workers from places like Malaysia.
“Their ancestors were brought here to divert rivers for the benefit of the white people who ran the pineapple plantations and the sugarcane plantations,” Rosenstiel said. “Forty million gallons of water still goes out of the Waimea River through diversion, straight out into ocean, because they’ve never restored the diversions.”
Some 14,000 acres of Kauai’s land are leased to the global agrochemical conglomerates DuPont Pioneer, Dow, Syngenta, and BASF. The corporations chose Kauai because its tropical climate enables them to work their fields year-round. Company workers can plant experimental fields three seasons a year, which can cut in half the time it takes to develop a new genetically altered seed.
The “experiments” taking place on these fields consist of planting genetically engineered seeds—primarily corn—and then dousing the fields with a variety of pesticides to see which plants survive. The chemicals will kill all the weeds and some of the corn plants themselves. Between 2007 and 2012, DuPont Pioneer sprayed fields on Kauai with ninety different chemical formulations with sixty-three active ingredients, and sprayed as many as sixteen times a day, two out of every three days during the year. Statewide, Hawaii leads the nation in the number of experimental fields, with more than 1,100. Studies show that companies use seventeen times more of the highly toxic “restricted use” pesticides on experimental plots than do farmers on traditional fields.
The use of these chemicals has become necessary, at least in part, because softer, “general use” pesticides like glyphosate have begun to lose their effectiveness. Chemical companies must now engineer new seeds that will resist other, more intense chemical compounds. Dow, for example, has used its Kauai fields to develop new corn and soybean seeds that are resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D—once an active ingredient in Agent Orange that’s been linked to reproductive problems and cancer.
If a corn plant can survive the chemical sprays—and if the sprays successfully kill every other plant on the field—the resistant seeds will be moved along the development pipeline; one day, this corn’s progeny might end up spread across the vast cornfields of Iowa, and Nebraska, and Illinois. More than likely, the harvest from these plants will end up sweetening soft drinks or feeding the millions of cattle and pigs that supply the country’s bottomless appetite for inexpensive meat.
Because GM crops have been legally declared to be the “substantial equivalent” of conventionally farmed crops, the island’s farms are not required to file Environmental Impact Studies. And because of a variety of legal loopholes, including the shroud wrapped around “proprietary information,” companies are not required to tell the public much of anything about what they are spraying, or where, or when.
Since they lease their land from the island’s handful of large private landowners (Steve Case, the founder of AOL, owns 38,000 acres of former plantation land known as Grove Farms), the companies are largely shielded from public view. Because the companies get their spraying permits from the federal government, and not from the state or the county or the local planning boards, they do not feel obliged to answer to local complaints. And because their work is regulated by the federal government, the companies say that local laws do not apply to them. They stick to this logic even when their research takes place on thousands of acres of state land.
For the people who live on Kauai, however, the fight over GMOs and pesticides is just another chapter in a long struggle over the use and misuse of their land. They say the companies have refused to divulge what chemicals they use on their fields. They say that when people complain to the companies, they get no answers. When people complain to their elected officials, and the elected officials complain to the companies, they also get no answers. By fighting even basic disclosure laws, the companies are shutting down any possibility of understanding what consequences their chemical sprays might be having on the health of the local community. Activists, doctors, local politicians—they all want information, and they aren’t getting any.
“For me, this is about the impact on our community, not on whether Doritos have GMOs or not,” Gary Hooser told me. For years, Hooser, a county councilman (and thus one of the island’s highest-ranking public officials), has tried to extract information from the chemical companies. He has had very little success. “I have issues with corporations controlling the food supply, but that’s also not what this is about. This is about industry causing harm. I asked them politely, and in writing, for a list of the pesticides they used, and they said no, they were not going to give it to me. They were very polite.”
If chemical companies on Kauai are outwardly uncooperative, their behind-the-scenes influence on the regulatory agencies charged with overseeing their work is virtually complete. Pushing states (and the federal government) to cut regulatory staff has long been a primary industry objective. Here’s what this looks like in Hawaii: because of budget cuts, the state Department of Agriculture has only one employee assigned to review pesticide inspection reports. Although the department is responsible for overseeing the federal Clean Water Act, it has no statewide program for testing pesticide use in soil, air, or water. The single position on Kauai meant to monitor toxins in agricultural dust has been vacant for a year. Meanwhile, the state’s health department has no programs to test for pesticide contamination in the soil, air, or water.
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