guybabineau.com
home / about / channel surfing in the sea of happiness / contact
Hanging by a Thread
by Guy Babineau
It takes a third of a pound of manufactured chemicals to
grow enough cotton for one T-shirt. In an increasingly
synthetic life, we buy cotton because we see natural on the
label, even though it devastates ecosystems around the
planet, using 25 percent of the world's pesticides and
siphoning off more water than most other crops. Rising
from a field of schemes, woven into a fabric of lies, cotton
has built empires and ruined lives, from the ancient world's
earliest urban civilizations to the Industrial Revolution to
the American Civil War. The 21st century, however, could
witness some dramatic, positive changes to the way cotton
is produced and traded. A revolution is sprouting.
So far, it's an unorganized clanking of pitchforks. In the
Middle East, India, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa,
desperate growers find themselves restricted by U.S. trade
barriers and threatened by the uncontrolled spread of
biotechnology, which is being promised as their salvation.
Closer to home, an alliance of fed-up American farmers is
rebelling against biotechnology too, along with a
continuing dependence on pesticides. Consumers across the
continent are demanding environmentally responsible
alternatives. Meeting this demand is a large Canadian
retailer spurred on by a vision that began right here in
Vancouver.
In the 19th century, poet William Blake imagined seeing
the world in a grain of sand. Now, at a time when science
can identify and sequence the threads of existence, we can
see our planet in a fibre of cotton. That view will come
sharply into focus in mid-September, when delegates
convene at the World Trade Organization's Fifth
Ministerial Conference in Cancún, Mexico, where
participants plan to challenge mammoth 2002 Farm Bill
subsidies to U.S. cotton farmers. Others intend to defy the
global spread of genetically modified cotton and other
crops.
CANCUN IS FAR from the small, family-owned fields of
West and Central Africa's two million cotton farmers, who
toil by hand, coercing the precious shrubs to strain upward
from the Sahel's temperamental soil.
"Benin lost twice as much money due to U.S. [cotton]
subsidies than it received in U.S. aid," said Mark Fried,
Oxfam Canada's Communications and Advocacy
Coordinator, from his office in Ottawa.
This is true for many other cotton-producing countries in
West Africa, particularly Mali, Burkina Faso, and Chad,
whose economies depend on the crop. The region exports
more cotton than anywhere else on the continent except
Egypt. According to Cultivating Poverty: The Impact of US
Cotton Subsidies on Africa, a report published by Oxfam
International last fall, world cotton prices have been
declining in inverse relationship to increasing U.S.
subsidies since the mid 1990s. But the 2001-02 harvest was
a whopper. Last year, the world's most ardent champion of
free-market competition gave US$3.9 billion in subsidies to
its own 25,000 cotton farmers. That was 30 percent more
than the entire crop was worth. (One Arkansas cotton
grower received US$6 million, equal to the combined
annual earnings of 25,000 cotton farmers in Mali.) It's also
more than the gross domestic product of several African
countries and three times the amount the U.S. spends on aid
to half a billion Africans living in poverty.
"The livelihoods of 10 million people [in Central and West
Africa] depend on cotton," Fried said. That doesn't count
the hundreds of millions affected tangentially. "Countries
have to borrow even more money, and can't develop."
Growers in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America are
prepared to take action. Blaming America for the
commodity's rock-bottom price--now at its lowest level
since the Great Depression--and for flooding the world
market with dumped cotton, about 20 African countries
have threatened to stall trade negotiations if the U.S.
doesn't end its alleged cotton monopoly. They're backed by
India and Pakistan. Brazil has submitted a separate
complaint, with Australia, another substantial cotton
producer, supplying third-party support. (China grows more
cotton than anyone else but sells all of it to domestic
manufacturers, so isn't concerned.) The stakes are huge for
all countries involved.
Does Fried, a development-and-trade-policy veteran, think
that Africa has any chance of altering U.S. cotton
subsidies? Silence at the other end of the line indicated a
weary shrug. "Well, I guess we can always hope."
Cancún is even farther from Pakistan. Ten million
agricultural workers struggle to maintain that country's
economic anchor, a crop that has been commercially
cultivated there for 5,000 years. Seventeen million peasants
work the planet's most abundant acreage of cotton in
massive, magnificent India. Closer to home, farmers in
Brazil, South America's largest cotton producer, share the
developing world's collective alarm that poorer countries
are being shut out of the global cotton marketplace.
A deluge of trade disputes is just the beginning. The WTO
should batten down its hatches in preparation for a storm
over biotechnology, which hyperactive marketers say is
cotton's new saviour. The White House is rattling sabres
about the European Union's so-called moratorium on
genetically engineered, or transgenic, foods and other
crops. The U.S. is the largest cotton exporter and by far the
major producer of genetically modified organisms, not to
mention genetically modified acronyms.
Many of the world's farmers believe that GE cotton and
other crops will only make matters worse. They advocate a
return to traditional, organic practices. Behind them are
respected agricultural scientists and development analysts
like Devinder Sharma.
"India can grow many kinds of organic cottons that can
withstand local conditions," Sharma said from his home in
New Delhi. He is the author of In the Famine Trap (The
Ecological Foundation, 1997) and GATT to WTO: Seeds
of Despair (Konark Publishers, 1994), and the former
development editor of one of the subcontinent's largest
English-language dailies, Indian Express, as well as a
visiting fellow at Cambridge University and the
International Rice Institute in Manila. "I've spoken to five
different farmers' groups across India about this in the last
month alone. Chemicals and genetically modified cotton
aren't necessary. Indigenous cotton is adapted to regional
conditions, and there are ways to protect it from pests and
weeds."
These include bolstering indigenous cottons bred to tolerate
local water and weather conditions with friendly insects
who eat destructive pests, nonthreatening "weeds" that
create natural fertilizer when they die and decompose, and
crop rotations.
BUT THE WTO is a forum for profit, not sustainability.
Mark Fried pointed out that even the smaller, poorer
nations have self-interest at heart. America's claim that the
EU ban on GMOs is illegal has less to do with creating a
level playing field than it does with removing impediments
to its own economic growth. The EU is the one entity in the
world rich enough to play by the same subsidy rules.
Rhetoric is the game's key strategy.
The U.S. insists that GE strains provide a secure defence
against the axis of weevil. If you're not with them, you're
against them. Seventy-one percent of American cotton has
had a cellular makeover; 60 percent of the harvest shows up
in the food chain as cottonseed, which is used in cattle feed,
as well as in hundreds of items consumed by humans. The
fear of GMOs, they say, is based on bad science. In May,
during a highly publicized speech to those experts on
global agriculture, American Coast Guard graduates,
science whiz George W. Bush warned that the EU's stance
is causing world hunger.
Facts disagree. Argentina is a major food exporter and the
world's second-largest producer of GE crops. (Canada is
third.) This year the country saw the biggest grain harvest
in years, due more to good growing conditions than genetic
modification. Yet 60 percent of Argentines live in poverty,
millions are malnourished, and children are dying of
starvation. Cost-intensive cotton cultivation went down
because of the country's devalued currency combined with
the low world price, not weather or pests. In South Africa,
another net food exporter with GE crops, and in India,
where grain lockers are full, millions starve. There is
already plenty of food on the planet, enough to feed all six
billion of us, with leftovers. Can biotechnology cure social
inequities and political corruption?
Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (2002)
raises this question, and others concerning pesticides and
fertilizers. A passionate and convincing plea for sanity,
edited by Andrew Kimbrell and published by the
Foundation for Deep Ecology, the book echoes Sharma's
concerns. It argues that factory farming, with its chemicals
and genetic mutations, creates monocultures ill-suited to
variances in local growing conditions and practices, and
threatens sustainability. Where cotton is concerned--
especially when wed to U.S. subsidies--this monoculture is
potentially disastrous to economies that depend on the
commodity. However, some experts aren't quite so
fatalistic.
"People are worried about the genetic traits [of new GE
strains] transferring to other plants [and causing mutations],
but agriculture has been tampering with nature from the
very beginning," Brian Ellis said from his Vancouver
office. "I don't think anything catastrophic is going to
happen."
The associate director of UBC's biotechnology lab is
cautiously hopeful about biotechnology's future. Ellis
cochaired an expert panel that authored a 2001 Royal
Society of Canada report, Future of Food Biotechnology.
The panel was worried about the secrecy surrounding GMO
testing, and advocated more stringent, independent,
noncommercial scientific research and testing.
Can GE plants infect others? In Canada, three separate
types of canola engineered to resist different kinds of weed
killers cross-transferred traits, creating new canola strains
impervious to a range of herbicides. Now they grow where
farmers don't want them; in other words, they're weeds.
Older, more toxic chemicals are required to kill them.
Around the world, unforeseen outcomes have occurred
where GE crops were planted. Migrating Monarch
butterflies have keeled over due to pollen from B-t corn. In
India, where GE cotton is loudly contested, fields of a B-t
variety resistant to a range of insects did just fine, until they
were felled by a leaf-curling blight. So far, no GE crop is
immune to everything, and pesticide use remains necessary.
New breeds of pests immune to chemicals may evolve
when GMOs are released into the environment.
"There really hasn't been enough time spent testing these
crops," Ellis said. "We don't understand enough about how
nature adapts to change."
So how are crops like GE cotton tested in Canada and the
States? Through corporate self-regulation. So far, Canadian
and American government agencies have only required
safety-assessment reports presented by the company that
created the transgenic plant. In most cases, that's Monsanto,
the fine corporate citizen that brought us Agent Orange,
DDT, PCBs, and NutraSweet.
The St. Louis, Missouribased company, a leading supplier
of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, with subsidiaries in
other product areas, produces 90 percent of the world's GE
cotton and other crop seeds, and has been buying up as
many traditional seed companies as possible to offset
competition. One ingredient of the many toxic pesticides
that Monsanto and other companies have sold is methyl
parathion, which is now a genetic component of a strain of
GE cotton. Methyl parathion was originally developed by
Third Reich scientists and used as a nerve gas in the Nazi
death chambers. In fact, most of these chemical agents
were first developed during the Second World War, with
biowarfare in mind.
In 1997, Monsanto hired a real farmer to be a happy
"mascot" for its brand-new GE cotton, positioned as a
healthy alternative to the company's own pesticides. His
smile quickly faded when the cotton bolls on his crop
withered and fell off before reaching maturity. He sued
Monsanto for damages. Nonetheless, Monsanto continues
to argue that GE crops are more productive, and friendlier
to the environment. So do their friends in high places.
Monsanto's links to the White House form quite the charm
bracelet. Linda Fisher, the Environmental Protection
Agency's deputy administrator, used to be a Monsanto vice-
president and the company's key Washington lobbyist. The
Supreme Court's Clarence Thomas, whose vote helped
Bush land the presidency, used to be a Monsanto attorney.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was once on the
board of G. D. Searle Pharmaceuticals, which is now
owned by Monsanto. Ann Veneman, Secretary of
Agriculture, was on the board of Calgene, a Monsanto
subsidiary that pioneered transgenic tomatoes. Monsanto
helped finance Attorney General John Ashcroft's election
campaign to the tune of US$10,000. This is a partnering of
government and agribusiness not seen since the last Soviet
potato was picked.
In India, pesticides and herbicides account for 60 percent of
a cotton farmer's expenses, and Monsanto India's GE cotton
seeds, which cost several times more than traditional
varieties, will add to the overhead, especially if strains that
produce sterile "terminator" seeds are introduced. Poor
farmers commonly save costs by sowing their fields with
seeds from last year's crop. Combined with small plots and
low technology, this makes cotton-growing practices in the
developing world sustainable. Costs are even lower when
traditional, organic methods of agriculture are employed.
Mahatma Gandhi famously spun organic cotton as an
antimaterialistic symbol of agrarian self-reliance and a
common bond between India's Hindus and Muslims. Now
his spinning wheel sits idle, a museum piece in violent
Gujarat, a western-Indian state where angry farmers have
torched experimental GE cotton plantations and where,
over the past 15 years, many have guzzled pesticides, lying
down in their fields to die.
"Three thousand people died at the World Trade Center,
and everyone heard about it, but 10,000 [cotton] farmers
here have killed themselves in the last 15 years, which is
just as much a tragedy," Sharma said. "Where was the
world's media? No one was held accountable."
Reliance on industrial agriculture has created a vicious
cycle in his home country. Pests become resistant to
pesticides, chemicals leech the soil, and cotton farmers find
themselves with no crops, and no money, so they commit
suicide to escape shame--or loan sharks.
"In Indonesia, in the mid '80s, pesticides failed and the rice
crop was destroyed by something called a brown plant
hopper. Suharto sent out an SOS, which wasn't like him,"
Sharma said. Indonesia's military dictator got together with
scientists from the International Rice Institute. They
recommended an organic program. "The American
Embassy and pesticide companies protested, but it worked.
Crop yields went up and costs went down." He believes
that the same result is possible with cotton.
IN THE WEST, pocketbooks dictate social change. Clothes
made from organic cotton cost more, given its current
limited supply. Nike, which is not normally associated with
social responsibility, has implemented an organic-cotton
program, but right now it would take the world's entire
supply just to produce the company's T-shirt line for men.
Does organic cotton have a future in our brand-conscious
marketplace?
Vancouver's Mountain Equipment Co-op thinks so. The
retail cooperative, which has 1.8 million members and saw
earnings of $2.43 million on revenues of $162.7 million in
2002, is converting its lines of casual clothes, sportswear,
and outdoor apparel to organic cotton.
"Our customers want it. It's part of our overall plan for
environmental sustainability," said Denise Taschereau,
MEC's manager of social and environmental responsibility,
by phone.
The idea for going organic came from former Vancouver
buyer Anne Gillespie, who is now a freelance consultant
and a member of the international Organic Exchange, a
year-old, U.S.based international organization mandated to
build consumer confidence--and excitement--about
organic-cotton goods. "Her passion really drove things, but
we didn't just switch existing designs to organic cotton. We
developed new styles that we thought people would like."
According to Taschereau, sales are brisk. "If you're an
ethical consumer, there's not a lot out there. This has
created a great niche opportunity for us."
This niche appeals to companies around the world.
"We hope to have 10 percent of all cotton products using
organic cotton within a decade," said Rebecca Calahan
Klein, president of the Organic Exchange, from her office
in Albany, California. "Our members are companies
involved in growing, manufacturing, and brokering organic
cotton, and they represent all of the major cotton-producing
countries."
The rapidly growing membership of 60 companies is
expected to reach 100 by year's end. Current members
include MEC, Nike, Marks & Spencer, Patagonia, and
Timberland, as well as the Hong Kongbased Esquel
Group, a cotton brokerage that operates the only organic-
cotton farms and factories in mainland China, and the 200-
year-old Swiss spinning mill Hermann Bühler AG, among
others.
One of the Organic Exchange's most important members,
the Texas Organic Cotton Marketing Group, represents 20
percent of the world's organic cotton. Why are some cotton
farmers in the U.S., where bigger is better and the concept
of progress is tied in with new technologies, pursuing an
organic alternative?
"Well, maybe when one of your kids has become sick from
pesticide poisoning, or you yourself have, you want to
make a change," Klein said.
As with so many things today, change can only work if
consumers are willing to pay for it.
Cover story in The Georgia Straight, Canada's largest independent weekly
© Guy Babineau 2003-2004
< home