by Joran Viers, New Mexico Organic Commidity Commission Agency Director

As I sit at my cluttered desk, reviewing various papers on regulations, processes, policies and laws relating to organic agriculture, I find that I need to take a step back.

I need to ask myself some fundamental questions, to remind myself of why
all of this bureaucratic hoopla is needed, even (dare I say) a good thing.

Many people raise concerns about the involvement of government in the organic movement, which in its birthing was anything but government supported, and whose early proponents were anything but eager for regulation.

Why should we, as consumers, pay more for organic foods? Why should we, as growers, bypass by the chemical shortcuts so blatantly offered to us?

Why should I, as a regulator, continue with the unromantic work of building this state's organic regulatory machinery?

These questions do not actually have easy answers.

That is to say, my reasons for doing any of the above may differ somewhat from yours, or may overlap them.

The point being, however, that many of us do pay more, take extra effort, and daily push that big rock further up the hill.

There must be a core motivation uniting us in these endeavors.

Two recent occurrences serve to illustrate the other side of the issue, which helps bring things into focus.

Both items relate directly to one of the fundamentals of organic vs. conventional agriculture: the use of synthetic materials.

First, however, my dictionary describes synthetic as: "…produced by synthesis, not of natural origin; not natural or genuine; artificial or contrived; prepared or made artificially…"

Most readers will be aware of these two events.

The first is the Starlink GMO corn debacle. This genetically engineered corn, not registered for human consumption, has now been detected in a number of distinct human food products (the FDA's list covers 300 recalled products).

Great quantities of tortilla shells, chips, etc. have been, and more will be, pulled of the shelves due to contamination with the questionable genes.

Of course, the questions arises: at some point between farm and factory, did someone purposefully and willfully allow known Starlink corn to be mixed in with other corn approved for human use?

Would someone do such a bad thing just to gain a little more profit?

The other issue is the recent prohibition blow dealt to America's favorite over-the-counter pesticide, Diazanon. This chemical appears in a multitude of home, garden and farm "remedies," apparently so widespread because of its effectiveness in killing insects.

Now, this organophosphate nerve poison is being banned due to health concerns, especially concerning children; just think of the pounds of toxins spread around schools every year as weed killers, insecticides, disinfectants…

Basic Ecology: Understanding Relationships

In order to get to the heart of my thesis, we need to call upon a basic scientific understanding of life processes.

From my background in biology, and especially in Ecology, I know that you need some level of understanding of an organism's environment to understand the organism, whether a corn plant or a human child.

This understanding is critical with regards to understanding genetics and the ultimate evolutionary success of different gene combinations.

Ecology, as a science, is both exciting and frustrating because it aims to look at the relationships between organisms.

These connections are not easy to precisely quantify, and are often, due to unexpected feedback loops, hard to anticipate.

This holistic approach contrasts greatly with the reductionist view of most of the non-life sciences, and those biologists who work at the sub-organism level.

In a reductionist view, the key to understanding is to isolate individual components of a system in such a way that it can be tweaked and the effects of said tweaking measured and analyzed.

Very seldom is an effort made to then link the observed effect to any higher level phenomenon.

I bring all this up only because I feel it is fundamental to the current discussion. I propose the following points as assumptions of fact:

Given the above, a logical conclusion is that humans have evolved eating natural biological things, from seal meat to tofu, from corn tortillas to ghee (clarified butter).

Our digestive systems have evolved breaking these items down, and then making the components available for the body to use.

When we introduce synthetic materials into our diets, unanticipated consequences can happen.

A good example is the Tryptophan scare of some years ago. Tryptophan is a naturally-occurring nutrient, so someone decided to make a cheaper, genetically modified, synthetic version for human use.

The problem, it turned out, was rooted at a sub-molecular level — the "spin" direction of the molecule.

It turns out that natural tryptophan spins to the right, while the synthetic version spins left.

This subtle difference, difficult for even molecular physicists to detect, made all the difference in human bodies.

For whatever reason, the spin matters, and the synthetic version ended up causing severe allergic reactions, some fatal.

Now, by my simple reckoning, natural (as opposed to GMO, which is synthetic in the sense that the kinds of cross-species jumps made and the methods used can only occur in a modern laboratory, not out in the garden patch on their own) corn has fed millions of people for untold millennia, performing pretty well in the process.

Why do we now see the advent of the GMO versions, at this point in time?

GMOs: It's All About the Money

Simply put, money. It's all about money, folks.

The proponents of these products will tell you it is about the farmer making more money because they get a higher yield; this despite the fact that yields are already at historic highs and the farmer's bottom line sinks lower and lower (something in there about supply and demand).

Mostly, it is about the rights of corporate stockholders to make profit solely off capital investment without regard to any other rights claimed by those not holding the stock.

It's about the right of American corporate CEOs to have salaries several hundred times greater than are those of the rank and file workers.

It's about the rights of agribusiness to force the family-owned farm out of business and the farm family out into the city street.

Consider the following bits gleaned from the Internet while researching for this article.

Item one: Aventis, the parent company responsible for the StarLink corn hybrid, is putting its Aventis Cropscience division up for sale.

Seems there is too little profit in GMO at the moment (similarly, other large biotech firms are facing financial struggles related to the anti-GMO sentiment that is still a minority point of view in our country, but not abroad).

There is no corporate commitment to these great technologies that can save the world from hunger and thus deliver a brand new day (their words), but instead a consternation strictly with bottom-line profits — the starving masses be damned, our shareholders want more dividends!

Item two: a report on the debut of transgenic chickens in Britain. The first paragraph introduces the topic, the second paragraph speaks exclusively about the stock performance of the firms involved.

Only after the all-important stock information is given do we get to find out any other details. Call me an ostrich-headed reactionary, but I think the stock market approach to the owning of the means of production has the least likelihood of taking into account the concerns and issues raised by anyone outside the stockholders' peer group.

People own bits and pieces of companies, focusing only on the bottom line, and if that means the exploitation of workers in other countries or if it means the devastation of small farming, so what?

But I digress. Back to the main storyline — along comes Aventis, promoting their great product as the missing link in the chain to foiling the insects' ability to evolve countermeasures (resistance) to plant-based chemicals in the same year that they hold a fire sale to dump their entire line of farming products (short list: Libertylink and StarLink GMO's, herbicides Liberty, Basta and Balance, and Temik and Regent insecticides).

The truth is that insects evolve resistance to plant-based chemicals rather quickly and rather well.

Constant exposure, especially to high levels, increases the selection gradient, weeding out the newly unfit faster. Sooner rather than later the shift occurs.

Meanwhile, a potential monkey wrench has been thrown into our food supply. Even if, as GMO backers say, there really is no health risk, I don't want that assumption made with my food. So I oppose GMO agriculture on a personal nutrition level.

I also oppose it because it does not, on the whole, provide one of its most promising promises— a reduction in farm chemical use. Of eight GMO corn lines banned by Europe, five have as their engineered trait a tolerance to an herbicide (Glyphosate or Glufosinate).

The point of these varieties is that the farmer can use even more chemicals!

Which brings us to that second event, the banning of Diazanon. For decades one of the more widely used organophosphate pesticides, Diazanon has recently been determined by the EPA to constitute too great of a potential threat to justify the cost of a thorough review, so they will instead just ban it.

This ban is immediate for indoor use, and the outdoor ban will follow in four years.

How many children were exposed to persistent, low levels of Diazonon, during the critical early years when their kidneys, nervous systems and immune systems where developing?

Why do we see tremendous increases in childhood diseases, from leukemia to attention deficit disorder?

The Promise of Organic Agriculture

What then is the promise of organic agriculture? Not a grand and great promise, like "feed the world," when obviously feeding the world requires as much political will and action as it does farming.

Instead, a more humble promise: to grow food and other agricultural products without adding directly to the environmental burden.

If it sounds wishy-washy, think of it instead as trying to be truthful.

Haven't we all had enough of grandiose promises that make us feel good but amount to no more than balloon loft?

Now, I'm not advocating a sudden and wholesale shift back to a pre-industrial society. It just won't happen.

What I do know is that we need to be a lot more selective in which, and how quickly, we adopt new technologies. We need to be more accepting of Nature's untidiness, whether in the form of bugs or weeds or even household germs.

We need to realize that in order for people to farm in a way that actually, at this point, adds to our environment's health, those people need to make a fair living from their labor.

And, we need to recognize our own imperfections, those tendencies in some of us to victimize others of us, and thus the need to have a societal-level oversight so that the cheaters don't keep cheating.

Which brings me back full square to the clutter on my desk. A good part of the mess relates to the imminent release of the federal standards, which though not out as of this writing should be out by the time you read this.

These rules will usher in a new era for the organic industry, as everyone, from farmers through certifiers and retailers and finally to consumers, digests the changes.

And though in an ideal world, none of this would be necessary because we would all be living more lightly upon the land, it is necessary at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

I did make a prediction recently, or maybe it was wishful thinking, that organic agriculture would be the mainstream within fifty years.

I do believe this is possible and it is certainly desirable.

And though I am not a purist and have been known to eat and even enjoy fast food and junk food, I also know that if we all do our part, we can push the chemical genie back into the bottle, and get the lid on tight.

In doing so, we can also give greater support to local farm families, helping to keep sprawl from devouring the last remaining farmable acres.

In doing so, we can support an agricultural model that has built-in water and wildlife conservation.

And those, folks, are much stronger goals than stock value growth. As we humans continue to pile-on to this finite planet, it has become absolutely critical that we assess our impact realistically, and work towards better ways to live on this Earth.