Speech from 11/19/06

Speech given to Indian Association for Farmers

I am honored to address this body. And my address is about bodies: your body, my body and the body politic, that vast, complex and totally food-dependant organism composed of every man, woman and child in India who must eat to live. Let me take a moment to state the obvious: those bodies, and that body politic, are totally dependant upon food and fiber, the ancient, modern and eternal province of the farmer. Food and fiber define a society. Therefore, to my mind, farmers define India as they have defined every other culture in every age.

That is, until the advent of the modern Corporate State. Farmers, because they are local and often tied to the land, because they rarely have the top level privileges of those at the top of the social ladder (whose wealth is the wealth of the farmers’ skill and success), often do not partake of the wealth they create. Farmers, whose contributions are of the highest value, are often valued very little. But it is farmers who create wealth and farmers’ skills which build the bedrock –food and fiber- upon which every society is built.

No food, no fiber, no prosperity and, if things get bad enough, no survival. That is, until the advent of the modern Corporate State.

Farmers save seed to restore and improve their stock. That is, until the advent of the modern Corporate State.

Farmers work in harmony with their land and with their food and fiber crops. That is, until the advent of the modern Corporate State.

Farmers are integrated with, and know, their neighbors and their land. That is, until the advent of the modern Corporate State.

Farmers have a place in the society they sustain. That is, until the advent of the modern Corporate State.

The modern Corporate State produces commodities under whatever conditions and sells them under whatever price is good for it. Proud, independent and skilled farmers are not good for the modern Corporate State. You can be replaced, it believes, by huge tracts of land, greenhouses and pens where food is degraded by unnatural technologies, where seeds and their characteristics are patented property and where drug, fertilizers, chemicals and poisons degrade the quality of food and the environment to fatten up the bottom line. And if people and animals get sick? If the land is poisoned? Great! Drugs are even more profitable than chemicals. But drugs kill people and not every one can afford them. Fine. People who cannot afford them are no longer needed. Farmers and their wives and children are, for the modern Corporate State, expendable.

Some corporations, it is true, have a heart. It is called “Corporate Social Responsibility” and, where it exists, for whatever reason it exists, the beast I am describing has either been tamed or dressed for company. But at its worst, the modern Corporate State has no use for social fabric or ancient traditions. It gets dressed up for company, but, under the powder and rouge, under the fancy clothes, it is still a monster bound on destruction of everyone and everything that gets in its way, like a heartless, but alluring stranger with a disease you might meet at market. “Love me for a brief season, and pay no attention to the fact that I can kill you”

The modern Corporate State has no heart to sustain villages and traditions. It has no pride in quality, no honor in steadfastness, no link to its neighbors. When it lies, the lie can be hidden until exposed and then covered with distortion or more lies. If it exerts massive impact on vulnerable organizations and governments through greed and propaganda, its markets expand.

GMO. Agribiz. These are words of death and destruction for farmers. Every farmer should fear and loath them. Pretty, pretty faces with a deadly, deadly inner life.

What happens to you and your children when you eat GMO crops? These crops come, most often, from the United States Biotech industry and are made, as you know, by injecting genetic material from things that are not food, or are different foods, or are not part of the cotton plant, or the pig, or the bindi or whatever. But they come from the US so they must be safe, right? I am here to tell you that, in the US, our corrupt, corporate controlled Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture allow dangerous, and often deadly, food into the food supply without warning to farmers or consumers. These foods have undergone NO safety testing or have been shown to be unsafe but that knowledge is hidden by the corporations or the US agencies themselves. No one knows (or if the companies know, they are not telling), if a plant or animal is safe to grow, safe to eat, safe to release into the environment or deadly. No license is needed to put them into the ground, the pig pen or the market. None. Roundup ready plants, for example, promoted because they are resistant to the deadly poison glyphosate (“Roundup ©) have genes in them which, when eaten by you and your family actually produce the same poison in your digestive system that the plant is genetically engineered to resist in the field. Glyphosate is one of the deadliest herbicides known leading to infertility, cancer, autoimmune disease, birth defects, brain damage, etc., etc. Roundup © Ready plant seeds lead to an increase, not a decrease, in the amount of herbicide used, poisoning farmers and their farms. Eating “food” made from this deadly crop leads to direct poisoning of the people who eat them with the same poison that they are supposed to reduce the use of. Planting them contaminates nearby fields forever. Buying their seed reduces the viability of family farms. Mother Nature is not amused. She cannot be toyed with without her children paying a heavy price.

What happens to animals (which are a lot like people) who eat Roundup © Ready soy? Eighty percent of their offspring are stillborn, of those which live, they are 80% smaller than animals like them that ate the same diet made from non GM soy. Their kidneys are smaller, they have holes in their intestines and their immune systems are defective. What happens to animals that eat GMO potatoes? Their kidneys are smaller, they do not reach sexual maturity, they develop holes in their intestines, their immune system is defective, and on and on and on.

What happens to the farmers who grow GM crops? Here in India no one needs to remind you what the real cost of those cheap seeds is after the first year.

Monsanto says that they will own the world’s food supply by 2010. It has won a patent on the pig. It is patenting the world’s food and fiber supply. GM trees create, according to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, sterile green wastelands. In the US, an internal audit of the US Department of Agriculture showed that there were NO protections to keep crops which produce drugs from mixing and mingling with virgin crops and, indeed, drug-producing rice mixed “by accident” with non GM rice and was then shipped by “accident” to Europe. I imagine that was the same type of “accident” which led to GM corn being shipped to New Zealand from the US for 3 years despite the fact that it was illegal in New Zealand. And I imagine that it was the same kind of accident that led GM rape seed to contaminate the land of an organic Canadian farmer who was then sued by Monsanto because their seed contaminated his field. Monsanto won and Mr. Schmeidler was driven off his land. Monsanto owns it now.

“Driven off the land.” Does that sound familiar? Think Indian GM cotton farmers. Think farms that crowd so many animals together that to keep them alive they must be fed dangerous and deadly antibiotics and drugs, kept in maximum stress conditions and fed what fattens them, not what makes them healthy animals and healthy food for India and the world. Is that what your fathers and mothers taught you? What do families of devoted farmers have to contribute to such demon farms? Not much. But if the modern Corporate State takes over our food production, that is where all of our food will come from: GM and Agribiz industrial “farms” creating food with a cheap price tag in rupees and the highest possible price tag in human health and dignity.

What can you do about it? First and foremost, remember that singly we are nothing. Collectively we are the world. Whatever petty differences exist in a community or region mean nothing next to the danger you face to your lives, your lands and your loved ones. Form collective organizations and, for the love of man and history, forget power and ego. Remember the common good and do not fight with each other. Instead, lean on each other to find, and implement, share and disseminate modern and ancient ways to:

1. Grow organic and form combines to market clean food and fiber at a premium.
2. Find and use Agricultural Enhancement Techniques (AET) which enhance food quality, fit in well with your farming practices, reduce water use and increase the amount of nutrition your foods bring the consumer
3. Avoid anything which increases chemical use and actively look for ways to reduce chemicals while increasing crop yield
4. Create political action units. Let your politicians know that you are watching them closely. Create your own political structures
5. Work together with sympathetic officials
6. Educate your children to understand that the corporate agenda is not necessarily the people’s agenda. If it is, embrace it. If it is not, reject it.
7. Be seduced by long term gains, not short term ones
8. Be skeptical about regulations and those who present them. If they are not good for farmers and farming, reject and replace them COLLECTIVELY.

Let’s talk for a moment about Codex Alimentarius, the world’s food code. As a physician who practiced natural, drug free medicine for about 36 years, I understand that the root of health lies in clean food and access to natural medicines, NOT drugs. Codex Alimentarius is an organization created by a marriage between the drug companies (which prosper only when you are sick) and the UN. Later, the chemical, biotech and Agribiz industries came along and asked to join the party. And what a party it is! As the Medical Director for the Natural Solutions Foundation, I attend Codex meetings as a public observer and travel to places where food and health still matter more than corporation bottom lines. My task is to alert people to the dangers Codex is bringing them. Codex sets standards which protect and promote whatever the US and the European Community want. And what they want is a degraded, industrialized food supply. What they want is access to health only through drugs and only those agricultural strategies which are industrialized ones under total corporate control. Our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org, tells the story more deeply than I have time to talk about it today. But be aware: Codex is there to lower your standards, make higher and higher drug and chemical use OK (with little or no regard for what that will do to your health and your family’s or the environment.) Remember that when you hear “Codex” you are hearing the rumble of under nutrition. You are hearing the corporate tread of the officer coming to dispossess you from your land. You are hearing the future echo of the diagnosis of cancer, heart disease, diabetes or another dread consequence of under nutrition for yourself and your loved ones. And you are hearing the death knell of all of your traditional medicines, herbs and remedies. All of them. Codex wants to allow ONLY drugs and degrade natural farming so that there is none left that means anything. Only things treated their way will be allowed to hit the international market and, eventually, the local and domestic market.

If that is fine with you, do nothing, buy GM seeds (or let someone “give” them to you. If that is not OK with you, say no to GM and make sure all your neighbors do, too. Say no to giving up your land. Say no to being an isolated, weak single voice. Become a great, roaring lion protecting your land, your families and your country.

In any way that the Natural Solutions Foundation, its President, Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III, its director of International Development, Miss Lacey Banks, Esq. and I can assist you, we will do so. Call upon us. We are here for the food and the fiber of India, the essential and central structure of dignified society. We are here for the farmer.

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director