GMOs and Your Health
GMOs, Human Health, and Food Sovereignty
Who has, and who should have, sovereignty over the food that we eat?
In 2014, local activists, farmers, and traditional people in Maui, Hawaii banded together to establish a moratorium on the planting of GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) in Maui County. To attempt to stop this local initiative, at ground zero in the fight against GMOs, trans-national agri-business spent $8 million USD, of which $5 million USD was provided by Monsanto. They out-spent local activists 100 to 1, and still lost. A Maui County Genetically Modified Organism Moratorium Initiative was approved in Maui County, Hawaii, on November 4, 2014: a victory for the people, the land, and the children. The initiative, however, was overruled in federal court, after being appealed by a consortium of agri-businesses, including Monsanto, and Dow Chemical. The judge who over-ruled the initiative stated that Maui County had gone beyond its authority to regulate GMOs since the state and federal government already did so.
Traditional Hawaiian farmer Alika Atay explains why the traditional people of Hawaii are fighting against the interests of trans-national agri-business. Alika explains: this is really about - is this living in the right way to protect the people and the land?
GMOs have been linked to both degradation of the gut biome, and ecological degradation of place, as this fertilizer and pesticide-intensive manner of farming has cascading negative consequences for the health of people and the earth. It transforms our living ancestral commons (seeds) , which are perenially regenerative into locked and patented intellectual property that can be owned and therefore monetized by private corporations. This is a quintessential enclosure move central to the logic of the domination paradigm.