April’s issue of The Noise just hit the streets. View full schedule here.

It is safe to say that the majority of people reading this article know little about what it means to be really hungry, this writer included. I recall a few weeks during the fall semester of my first year in graduate school when I misjudged how my loans should be spent. I gave it all to my landlord and left little to myself to buy food. During the time between then and my first paycheck, I subsisted on nothing but apples I stole from my neighbor’s trees in the neighborhood on the north side of town. After a while I got creative: apples with peanut butter, fried apples, and apples and cinnamon, among others. This only lasted a couple weeks and soon enough I was back on my feet.

I do remember one homeowner who yelled at me because he enjoyed the apples as “ornaments,” to make his property look nice. I lashed back with something snippy, wishing him luck in explaining this to all the birds, squirrels, mice, bugs, and worms in his yard who will see the apples as a meal, just as surely as I did. “If I can’t eat them and you won’t eat them. Somebody will.” And for the record, I came back that night with a canvas bag and a ski mask.

Still, while I couldn’t run down to Safeway and buy food, I was never really hungry, and I knew my situation wouldn’t last long. Of course, I hear the statistics, but it’s hard to react to faceless numbers. Over a billion people in the world are undernourished. Over two million people die of starvation ever year. Ninety percent of the hungriest nations on earth are net exporters of food to rich nations. Meanwhile, 80 percent of harvested corn and soybeans in the US and Europe go to feed livestock. And the New York Times reported last May that in the US, over 30 tons of food goes to waste every year. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the global food system is seriously and fundamentally broken.

It is no easy task to make these statistics real to those that will probably never experience true hunger. There is no way I can relate to a coffee farmer in Guatemala who has sold his coffee at a loss for the last 5 years and will never climb out of debt. I don’t live in a village where I have to constantly fight off oil and mining companies who threaten my ability to be self-sufficient. I wouldn’t know what to say to a cotton farmer in Mali whose yields this year just might make it possible to get married, or a single mother in Mozambique whose corn crops were devastated by floods, crying as anticipated income is literally washed away. I will never know what it is like to destroy my own local environment, working my fingers to the bone, trying to get higher yields per acre in service of the corporation that bought my land years ago because my country took out a loan and the IMF says the best way to make a profit is by allowing foreign investors to set up shop.

Still there are organizations that are trying to make hunger more realistic to those who will probably never experience it. In 2004, Tony Hall, US Ambassador to the United Nation’s anti-hunger agencies in Rome, invited colleagues to his house under the pretense that a lavish Thanksgiving dinner would be served. If guests weren’t immediately suspicious of a large meal given by a man who works on global hunger issues, they soon became uncomfortable when asked to draw a card from a basket that assigned them to one of three categories of wealth based on the most current statistics from the World Development Report.

Fifteen percent of the guests were lucky enough to draw a card placing them in a high-income status. They enjoyed gourmet meals with a set table lit with candles and lined with fine silverware. Thirty-five percent were given rice and beans, while the remaining majority were given a handful of rice and were told to eat outside in a tent.

The meal, based on Oxfam’s famous “Hunger Banquet,” is a social experiment of sorts, where guests are forced to look beyond the statistics and experience the numbers first hand. It is a dramatization of the inequitable distribution of food and resources in today’s world.

And anything can happen. Maybe the rich will create a system of police to keep the poor away from their table. Perhaps the poor will work together to take food from the rich, or the corruptible rich will help to facilitate a black market, where food is exchanged under the table. Each of Oxfam’s “Hunger Banquets” turns out a little different depending on the level of participation and enthusiasm for the experiment.

After dinner, guests are invited to speak about their experiences. Did the rich feel guilty for eating so well knowing there were hungry people outside? Did the poor become spiteful? What about the middle class–can they eat their meal avoiding both guilt and spite? According to Oxfam, “few participants leave with full stomachs after the dinner, but all possess a greater understanding of the problems of hunger and poverty and will hopefully be motivated to do something about them.”

For more than three decades, this event has brought together students, teachers, community groups, faith congregations, and others to learn about world hunger, increase their awareness of global poverty, and raise money for Oxfam. The Oxfam Hunger Banquet will take place in Flagstaff on the last day of “Hunger Awareness Week” from April 6th to the 10th.

Hunger Awareness Week is being organized by both graduate and undergraduate students from the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, under the guidance of Dr. Geeta Chowdhry, who is teaching courses on Hunger and Food Security this semester. Hunger Awareness week will also feature many events throughout the week: a panel discussion, a talk by Bill Aal from the Community Alliance for Global Justice, a film, and a benefit show. The goal of the week-long events is to introduce the Flagstaff community to hunger and homelessness issues from around the world, and inspire individuals toward active participation in ending these injustices.

“We’ve been studying the way U.S. corporations have huge influence in developing nations,” says Katie Sullivan, an undergraduate student helping to organize the Oxfam Hunger Banquet and the keynote speaker. Because a country might be in debt or need money to build infrastructure, corporations are invited and contracts are signed. “They have the power to tell people what to make. It’s a sad story that happens all over the world.”

When I asked Ms. Sullivan if she thinks the majority of Americans are familiar with these issues, she said that from her experiences, most people keep a self-imposed distance between the source of food and how it arrives on your dinner plate. “I’ve become more aware of where my food comes from. Once you start digging, it becomes more personal.”

I spoke with Bill Aal, one of the founders of the Community Alliance for Global Justice in Seattle, who will be speaking on Tuesday night during Hunger Awareness Week. CAGJ took off on the coattails of the famous 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which successfully shut the meeting down. “Before the WTO protests in ’99, we organized across different issues like fair trade and NAFTA. Afterwards we realized there is real power in the interconnectedness of all the different groups and we knew we needed to create a vision to move toward.”

While many groups organize around a particular issue, they often fail because of a lack of clear and specific goals. The mission statement for CAGJ is: We aim to transform the global economy by identifying local and global impacts of trade and monetary institutions, by using education, grassroots mobilization, media and legislative strategies, and by building solidarity across diverse movements. “Our goal is to work together to strengthen local economies every where. Strong local economies provide food security, justice for farmers, and strong connections between small farmers across borders,” he said.

There is another group that works on global hunger issues that are also headquartered in Seattle: Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mr. Gates, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, privately fund the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. Because Mr. Aal and CAGJ were interested in what the Bill Gates Foundation is doing to address the same issues, they decided to attend a meeting. “We were horrified by the contrast of their stated goals and their practices. While we were looking at ‘biodynamic agriculture,’ which develops markets within the context of a particular region and has been shown that it allows communities to be resilient, AGRA pushes industrial farming techniques and genetically modified seeds.”

You mean Monsanto? I ask. “Yes, I mean there are others, but Monsanto has been at the table throughout all their planning. And of course they have a huge history of trying to control the seed people use,” he said.

And it’s all done in the spirit of philanthropy, which is an efficient way to, as Mr. Aal explains, “use private money to push public policy.” So CAGJ started “AGRA Watch,” which was formed to “challenge AGRA to be as transparent as it says it is and be more accountable to it’s stated goals.”

CAGJ attempts further to frame the discussion around the reality of the issue. There are, after all, more overweight people in the world than there are undernourished people. One of the major problems with AGRA is that it frames the issue as “an African production problem rather than a food distribution problem.” The ‘Third World’ tag originally signified a third way of doing things, an alternative to the Cold War division of Western capitalism (the First World) and East Bloc communism (the Second World). But recently the term took on a negative connotation, as in third class.

Now we also use the term, “developing world,” but one could easily argue that many “third world” countries have become much worse off when they began to “develop.” So what does “development” mean anyway? And, perhaps more importantly, given the state of the world today, when is a country “over developed?” Ultimately these terms are misleading at best. These labels suggest that everyone on their respective side—first world/ developed and third world/ undeveloped—must be equal and we know that is not true. There are poor people in “first world” countries, just as surely as there is a rich elite in “third world” countries.

Community Alliance for Global Justice looks at hunger as a world problem, a food system problem, rather than an “African problem,” as the issue is often framed. “What we need is a diversity of farming systems, farming techniques, and food distribution system. Farmers, people everywhere, need to be able to choose how they will live without the corporations and banks telling them.”

Hunger Awareness Week will kick off with a panel discussion regarding homelessness and food scarcity in Flagstaff. Among panel members will be Mayor Sara Presler, City Council representative Coral Evans, a representative from Food Not Bombs, Eric Wolverton from St. Mary’s Food Bank, Brett Ramey from Urban Lifeways, Stephanie Boardman from Hope Cottage, and Mik Jordahl, a local human rights lawyer. Bring your questions.

From I Blame the Patriarchy:

Fulton is sponsoring one of those wackaloon anti-abortion bills requiring that women seeking abortions undergo an ultrasound procedure and be forced to view the resulting fetal image.

To rationalize this outrageous invasion, Fulton opines that subjecting a woman to an ultrasound will convey unto her “information about the reality inside her womb.” Fulton says that this “information” will “reduce the number of abortions.”

My comment on the issue:

“You know, I’m totally fine with this as long as the bill also requires manufacturers to display a photo of sweathshop workers alongside clothing, pictures of men holding guns to the heads of slaves in the congo as they dig for colton alongside cell phone ads; then images of children in Ghana who suffer from cancers and unexplainable rashes from breaking down the metals from our e-waste alongside sales of laptops. While we’re at it, lets put pictures of factory farms on packages of chicken and eggs. Lets show pictures of mutilated cows in fast food restaurants.

I’m all for showing people the reality of their actions, but requiring women to look at the fetus in their belly is really stupid. It is growing inside them, women know it is there. While the things we should feel guilty about remain hidden.”\

UPDATE: I got a email asking about colton. Here is an article, “How the Mobile Phone in your Pocket is Helping to Pay for the Civil War in Congo.” Related articles here.

This video is pretty amazing news. Electrical trash is increasingly a big problem because of all the nasty metals and chemicals inside. What caught my ear was the bit about electrical trash being masked as “donations.” There are a lot of programs out there dedicated to taking your old computers and giving them to less priviledged societies to be utilized. How do we know who to trust?

It’s happening in China too.

I heard The Noise (check out the site redesign!) hit the streets today, and finally, I’m in it again. I’m sitting here with strep throat, Yogi “throat comfort” tea, and a huge wool blanket.

eeeer it is.

On my knees, I part the leaves of my garden looking for the perfect ripen tomato. Today is one of those propitious September afternoons in Northern Arizona where the sun is bright above my head while storm clouds build and grumble in all directions. I find two tomatoes, one for now and one for later, and gently twist them off their branches.

I roll one of them into my shirt in a half-assed attempt toward removing the dirt. It’s more of an empty gesture really, as I secretly enjoy the complementary taste of rich earth in the food that comes from my garden. As I puncture it’s soft skin with my teeth, I slurp and swirl and savor. Only seconds after removing it from the plant, the fruit is warm; if I close my eyes, I swear I can taste the sun.

This is my second successful attempt at a garden in Northern Arizona and it has quickly and dramatically altered my understanding of food. Tomatoes from the grocery store, even organic tomatoes, seem bland and lifeless. Still, it isn’t so much the taste of the tomatoes from the store that turn me off, as it is my lack of a relationship to them. While I am overjoyed to directly experience such a beautiful gift from the land, I do not rely on my garden to live and therefore, I will never fully understand the value of this gift.

There is an ever-shrinking population of people on this planet who know and understand the true value of food. In fact, the poorest two-thirds of humanity live in what can be appropriately called the biodiversity-based economy: corn farmers in Mexico, subsistence farmers in India, and indigenous populations throughout the world. Still, I do not aim to illustrate the lives of these people as idealistic. In 2008, those people who rely on the land to live lead increasingly despondent lives, through dismantled communities, impossibly large debts, and uncertain futures, where fields of cotton function more like giant prison cells and stocks of corn function more appropriately as enclosing iron bars.

It may seem impossible to ensure a harvest is stolen before it is planted. There is, however, one transnational corporation that has figured out how to achieve this while maintaining an increasingly desperate supply of workers.

The Monsanto Corporation was founded in 1901. A recent Vanity Fair article noted that it’s founder, John Francis Queeny, was a “tough, cigar-smoking Irishman with a sixth-grade education.” He named his company, Monsanto Chemical Works, after his wife’s maiden name. Queeny originally went into business selling an artificial sweetener called saccharin, which was then imported from Germany. After the German cartel that controlled the market dramatically lowered the price of saccharin, Queeny nearly went out of business. In fact, if it weren’t for the steady business of a new soft drink company in Georgia called Colca-Cola, it is likely that Monsanto would have gone under.

After the U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to ban saccharin after questions about it’s safety, Monsanto began to add more products like vanillin, caffeine, and drugs used as sedatives and laxatives. Monsanto also became the world’s largest producer of aspirin and after World War 1, it’s legacy as a leading global chemical manufacturer was secured.

Just before Queeny ironically died of cancer in the 1920’s, his only son, Edgar, became president. Under Edgar’s watch, Monsanto was built up like a toxic empire, producing plastics, resins, rubber goods, fuel additives, artificial caffeine, industrial fluids, vinyl siding, dishwasher detergent, anti-freeze, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Through out the sixties and seventies, Monsanto was perhaps best known for its production of an extremely toxic chemical used during the Vietnam War. This chemical, which instantly and painfully seared the flesh of any southeast Asian who was unfortunate enough to come in contact with it—and there were millions who did—was known as Agent Orange.

During this chemical boom, Monsanto produced some of the deadliest chemicals known to man. Among the worst of these chemicals, dioxin and poly chlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, reign supreme. Dioxin is one chemical among many listed by the U.S. Government as a “known human carcinogen,” that is, a cancer causing agent. Even in small amounts, dioxin has been linked to heart disease, liver disease, human reproductive disorders, and developmental problems. Dioxin is a substance that remains and accumulates in the environment and the body. Recent studies have found significant traces of dioxin in mother’s breast milk.

PCBs are classified as a group of chemicals that act as hormones and have been linked to damage to the liver and irreversible damage in the neurological, immune, endocrine, and reproductive systems. Though Monsanto no longer produces these toxins, there are places such as Nitro, West Virginia and Aniston, Texas where spills and chemical plant explosions left an environmental legacy that continues to kill people to this day. Further, the Environmental Protection Agency has listed Monsanto as being a “potentially responsible party” for 56 contaminated sites in the U.S. And today dioxin is released into the atmosphere every time a flame is put to plastics.

In an effort to change it’s tarnished image and secure a legacy of future profits, Monsanto rebranded itself, no longer as a chemical manufacturer, but as a “life sciences” company, thus it began pooling more and more of it’s resources into biotechnology. In 1981, Monsanto scientists became the first to genetically modify a plant cell. Earnest Jaworski, the director of Monsanto’s Biological Sciences Program at the time noted “It will now be possible to introduce virtually any gene into plant cells with the ultimate goal of improving crop productivity.”

Under the guise of productivity, Monsanto has since introduced the hormone supplement, rBGH, also known as rBST, a hormone that increases the output of milk in cows. Though, the growth hormones are banned in all of Canada and Europe, Monsanto’s independent scientists insist that it is safe. They have even unsuccessfully tried to sue dairy farmers who label their products as being “growth hormone free” stating that it sends mixed signals to consumers. Even if it is safe, the artificial growth hormone speeds up the metabolism of cows and increases their chances of contracting illnesses, which causes great pain and shorter life spans among those cows unfortunate enough to be injected.

Today, 15 years after the Food and Drug Administration’s (F.D.A.) approval of the hormone, no long-term studies have been done regarding the safety of the milk from cows injected with the hormone. And Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for Consumer’s Union told Vanity Fair that the only data that does exist all comes from Monsanto. “There is no scientific consensus about the safety,” he added.

The fact that this hormone is widely banned throughout the world, yet was approved by the F.D.A. in the U.S. says more about Washington’s “revolving door” than it does about the safety of Monsanto’s products. Former Monsanto employees such as Clarence Thomas, Michael R. Taylor, Ann Veneman, Linda Fisher, Michael Friedman, and William D. Ruckelshaus, currently hold positions in U.S. government agencies such as the F.D.A., E.P.A. and even the Supreme Court. Even Donald Rumsfeld who used to be chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co, reportedly gained $12 million in increased stock value after Monsanto acquired the company in 1985.

Despite all the atrocities committed by Monsanto in the name of progress and productivity, it is the tight stranglehold it has on the distribution of genetically modified seeds that has garnered the most attention world-wide. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since the 1980’s, Monsanto has acquired 674 biotechnology patents, taking advantage of a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1980 that broadened the definition of a patent to include “live human-made microorganisms.” Monsanto’s patents cover herbicide resistant corn, wheat, rice, cotton, sugar beet, rapeseed, canola, flax, sunflower, potato, tobacco, alfalfa, poplar, pine, apple, and grape among others.

Traditionally, when farmers planted seed and grew food, the best, strongest seeds were selected and saved to ensure an even stronger crop for the next growing season. In the late spring, when I go to Warner’s Nursery & Landscaping or Flagstaff Native Plant & Seed, either to buy seed or budding plants to make their home in my garden, I am reaping the benefits of thousands of years of this selection process. When I bite into a delicious tomato, I have thousands of years of poor farmers and desperate seed savers to thank.

Through the use of genetically modified “terminator” seeds and their patented Round-up Ready seeds, among other patented seed products, Monsanto has systematically undermined one of the oldest, life-sustaining traditions in our history of life on this planet.

Monsanto has aggressively entered the corn market in Mexico with their patented genetically modified seed. The trouble comes when Monsanto seeds cross-pollinate with the native seeds. When this happens, the results are what Mexican farmers refer to as “monster plants,” which are corn stocks that branch off in freakish ways, shooting 5 or 6 stocks in all directions from a single plant. Co-opts warn farmers to destroy these plants as soon as they are sighted. Farmers are increasingly finding themselves in a loosing battle because when the seeds cross-pollinate, Monsanto’s plants dominate and destroy the native seeds. Thus Monsanto slowly dominates the market.

Northern Arizona University Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Tom Whitham, has argued in many high profile journals, concluding that “community and ecosystem phenotypes of genetically modified organisms need to be evaluated as part of the approval process.” Company’s like Monsanto and Dupont, Dr. Whitham continues, “need to have their products evaluated at higher levels than is currently standard…to avoid the problems that have arisen or are likely to arise with unregulated GMOs”

The biggest tragedy is taking place in India where Monsanto owns the two biggest seed distributors available to subsistence farmers. The real danger of patenting seed lies in the “terminator” technology, which was created to prevent farmers from saving seed. When these seeds are planted, the seeds that are reproduced are sterile. Farmers are given little information on the seeds they are purchasing, just promises of higher yields, fewer weeds, and less hassle. Then after farmers have purchased and planted the seeds, which can cost up to four times more than the native seeds, they are locked into a system where they quickly discover that they need to purchase patented herbicides that are necessary to ensure the success of the harvest.

In debt to Monsanto, and because of the subsequent shame that comes with an inability to feed their family, subsistence farmers in India are committing suicide in astonishing numbers.

From this writer/gardener’s perspective, the gravest injustice is the ethics, or lack thereof, of patenting life. The biggest fear in journals, documentaries, and those working on these issues revolves around the issue of control. By controlling the means of food production, Monsanto is systematically controlling the world’s food supply under the guise of ending food shortages.

I am reminded of a famous line coined by the 19th century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “La propriété, c’est le vol!” or “property is theft!” The Latin root of private property is privare, which means “to deprive.” By patenting the means of food production around the world, Monsanto, is depriving the poorest two-thirds of humanity of their human right to self-determination.

Technologies are not social forces unto themselves, nor merely neutral “tools” that can be used to satisfy any social end we desire. Rather they are products of particular social institutions and economic interests. Once a particular course of technological development is set in motion, it can have much wider consequences than its creators could have predicted: the more powerful the technology, the more profound the consequences.

In her essay “Biotechnical Development and the Conservation of Biodiversity,” Vandana Shiva states that “during periods of rapid technological transformation, it is assumed that society and people must adjust to change instead of technological change adjusting to the social values of equity, sustainability and participation.” She further described a view of technology that places it as a “a process that is shaped by and serves the priorities of whoever controls it.” Monsanto needs to be stopped.