Great news for everyone involved in the anti-genetically engineered food movement: Nelson, BC has passed a resolution at council declaring the city to be a GE-Free Zone. Nelson now joins Saltspring Island and Powell River as a place where genetically engineered crops cannot be grown. I am very proud to have worked on this campaign, and that my company, GE-Free Solutions, played a small part in sponsoring Percy Schmeiser to speak in Castlegar, a neighbouring city. As the Kootenay region liaison for Society for a GE-Free BC, I had the opportunity to meet many of the principle individuals who made this happen. I believe that this would not have happened without the two-year long efforts of Jon Steinman, the host of the radio show Deconstructing Dinner on Kootenay Co-op Radio, among so many others who dedicated their time to this cause.

Congratulation to everyone who was involved in this effort, and let this be a shining example of the power of the grass-roots to bring about positive change.

Its here. GE crops were not enough, the FDA has now opened the door for GE animals and fish. They have announced that they will begin accepting applications for commercialization of GE animals and fish. Please read the story at Food Democracy, especially the FAQ published by the FDA. It is incredibly disturbing.

This new regulatory process brings up a number of serious concerns.

• No labels will be required, so unless we buy organic or “non-GE”, we will end up eating GE meat. So basically, don’t eat at fast food anymore, or you will be eating some featherless chickens
• The major market for GE animals is for “biopharm” animals. Basically genetically engineered animal factories producing pharmaceuticals.
• Renderings from biopharm animals can be fed to other animals.
• Offspring of GE animals which are not considered to have inherited the GE trait, are not considered GE. This means that if a GE featherless chicken has a feathered offspring, it could be considered non-GE… and possibly organic? Hopefully organic regulations will keep up.
• I think the FDA’s approach to containment speaks for itself: “It also would be extremely unlikely for any GE animal to accidentally displace conventional animals. Most developers of the GE animals will likely control their breeding opportunities to further their business interests.” Free market environmental protection? Free market biodiversity protection? Free market bioethics?

The FDA is known to be controlled by the industry. They are acting in the interest of business profits at the expense of our environment, biodiversity, and human health and safety. Can you Americans ask Mr. Obama to overhaul the FDA, and the regulation of GE foods? I certainly hope the CFIA doesn’t follow suit, as the did with GE crops.

From left to right: Michael Doane, Monsanto; Maria Wellisch, Natural Resources Canada; McKenna Long and Alderidge rep; Terry McIntyre, Environment Canada. Photo Credit, Nigel Tunnacliffe.

The final session of the conference, called “Sustainable Development of Bioenergy and Biofuels Production Systems”, was the most representative of the relationship between industry and our government when it comes to biotechnology and biofuels. (more…)

As an attendee at this event, I will be covering many of the sessions on generic engineering, biofuels, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology.
As best as I can, I will be posting short snippets via my iPhone, and then I will do a more in depth report at the end of the conference.
Stay tuned.

Photo credit: Erin Collins

Alfalfa. Tasty sprouts. Hay. Straw. So much goodness. Thankfully, the US court of appeals upheld the ban on GE alfalfa, requiring more studies to be done on the environmental impacts. To celebrate, I’m going to go make myself a sandwich.

full article

Whether you are an American reader or a Canadian, I am certain that by now you have heard of the Listeria outbreak here in Canada. If not, here are the cliffnotes: so far 15 dead, 14 sick, and 31 more cases under investigation. The outbreak was centered around a macro scale animal slaughter and meat production plant owned and operated by Maple Leaf.

Why do I say that industrial agriculture is responsible? Blogger Lovable Liberal claims that meat production plants merely act as a vector, and that bacteria originates from an animal. While I agree, there would be no mass scale outbreak if it were not for the massive scale on which these food products are produced.

If we were still allowed to have micro-scale butchers, slaughtering and cutting up meat in their own shop, with a production capacity of only a few animals per day, this would never be a major issue. In fact, Listeria only affects the elderly, pregnant, and those with comparmized immune systems. Therefore it is likely that a single animal, or even a few animals that get infected in a small-scale facility could even go without harming anyone. It would go completely unnoticed. Is it any surprise that every serious outbreak occurs in macro-scale facilities? Yet government officials argue that production plants have to shoulder more responsibility for inspection (essentially privatizing food inspection). Greater requirements for industry self-regulation means that the costs are not economical for small scale producers.

The result is more of the same. More industrial agriculture, more mass-production of food, and more contamination outbreaks.

Photo credits: liberals.ca, Flickr user slightly-less-random, barackobama.com

This fall will be an exciting season for politics. CBC’s The House will be busy. With a Federal election about to be called, municipal elections in BC this November, and of course the Presidential election in the United States. If thats not enough, a few short months later we will be back to the polls for the provincial election. However, I seem to be continually running into people who don’t vote. And I am disappointed to say these are young people. (more…)

After spending a few days in Toronto, I couldn’t help but engage in some lively discussions with a couple investment-banker type friends of mine about the ethics of investing. We went back and forth a few times about who decides what stocks to buy, how that decision is made, and what ethical framework those decisions are made in. I will outline what I believe to be the way stocks are bought and sold by fund managers, and then discuss why I think one should be more considerate with their investments.

1. Fund managers operate under a mandate, making buying and selling decisions based on that mandate
2. The mandate is set out by whomever the money belongs to
3. That mandate is usually “make money”, and does not include an ethical framework under which to make buying decisions
4. Fund managers analyze a stock’s value, and if they believe it is undervalued in the market place, based on financial statements an such, they will buy some of that stock
5. If the mandate the fund manager is working under only says “make money”, the fund manager would be going against the mandate if he chose to not purchase a stock for ethical reasons

Why does this matter? Well, by my rudimentary understanding of finance, the more demand a company’s stock is in, the lower the cost of capital is for that company. The lower the cost of capital, the more competitive and able to expand that company will be. Therefore, especially when buying large quantities of stock, by buying a company’s stock, you are not only attempting to make money for yourself, but you are helping that company grow and be successful.

What do I mean when I say buying stocks based on ethics? Well, if one was to buy stocks in a company that produces tidal power stations, we would not only be trying to make money, but we would be supporting a company that is helping to provide alternatives to fossil fuels. If, on the other hand, we were to buy stocks in Monsanto, we would be supporting a company that bribes government officials, falsifies scientific documents, knowingly pollutes water supplies, and sues hundreds of farmers for collecting their own seeds. It is true that Monsanto stock has doubled in the last year, but is the money that could be made from the increase in stock price worth being partially responsible for catastrophic environmental damage?

A common excuse for corporate misconduct is that the CEO was trying to increase shareholder value. If you were a shareholder when any misconduct occurred, the CEO would have been working on your behalf. That essentially means that if you hold stocks in Monsanto, or any other corporation that engages in criminal activity, you are ethically an accessory.

One argument is that it is not industry’s place to regulate their own ethical activity, that is the role of the government. However, our government is scaling back on regulation in favour of privatization (for example, the privatization of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency). Whats more, the Canadian government fully supports the actions of Monsanto, regularly promoting their GE foods. We cannot wait for the government to act on our behalf, we have to act ourselves instead.

My advice: when considering an investment, find out what that company does and be sure you support it. Create a set of ethical criteria for your RRSP manager, and know what is in your portfolio. You might even want to choose a financial institution that has ethical criteria for accepting clients (.pdf), and invests in companies it deems to be having a positive impact (such as Vancouver City Savings). You don’t have to sacrifice making money, just make sure you are not accidentally supporting a company you have morally opposition to through your investments.

According to a documentary on homelessness aired on CBC’s Ideas last night, a program put in place last fall in the UK uses CCTV cameras to analyze peoples walk. They program identifies people who are walking in an abnormal way and raises an alert. The purpose of the system, as far as I can gather, is to single out the homeless, drunk and thieving from the general population so they can prevent crime. What you really end up with is a Ministry of Silly Walks. Monty Python was ahead of its time.

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved had harsh words for corporations, governments, the WTO and the World Bank in an interview with CBC that aired today on a program called “Diet for a Hungry Planet”. That interview can be heard by downloading the podcast from iTunes. According to Patel, who worked at both the WTO and the World Bank, it is official policy of these two organizations to drive the poor from farming areas into the cities, and to encourage chemical industrial agriculture to dominate instead.

(image credit: food_for_action on flickr)

I think there are few readers of this blog that would disagree with Patel’s assessment with that policy decision. He states that small scale organic or at least low chemical-intensive farming which relies on crop rotation and crop diversity (which he implies is the most common method of farming among the poor in developing countries) is the most sustainable form of agriculture being practiced in the world today. The decision by these two major organizations to encourage the use of agricultural methods which use toxic chemicals, erode topsoil, and reduce biodiversity is an enormous step in the wrong direction, and I can’t say I disagree. That being said, the WTO and the World Bank are not exactly organizations which have been known for choosing to help people and the planet over the profits of corporations.

I think if we are going to provide a place to live for our grandchildren, we need to be providing micro-finance loans to the impoverished farmers of developing countries. We should be promoting people to live in smaller communities rather than contributing to urban sprawl. And most of all, we should be encouraging local food economies based around organic farming methods in both developed and developing countries to reduce our dependency on petroleum and toxic chemicals.