Editor’s note: This op-ed is by James H. Maroney Jr., who has a master’s degree in Environmental Law & Policy from Vermont Law School and is a former farmer.
An overwhelming number of Vermonters, in concert with people all across the nation, are expressing anxiety about the health hazard posed by GMOs. They ask their government to protect their right to know what’s in their food. Legislators are hearing conflicting testimony on whether GMOs present a real or a perceived threat.
The anxiety centers upon GMOs, but GMOs are a shibboleth. The issue is whether conventional agriculture, of which GMOs are but an extension, produces food that is safe to eat. That is a protection neither the federal nor the Vermont state government can or will provide: both are complicit in a generations-long policy to abet the adulteration of America’s soil, water and atmosphere at the hands of conventional agriculture.
Conventional, i.e., chemical and petroleum intensive, agriculture was invented after World War II, to raise farm yields and lower costs. It works by replacing the traditional costly practices of maintaining soil fertility, controlling weeds and hiring labor with cheap, toxic chemicals. Consumers were assured that these chemicals would be applied in dilute concentrations and that residues would dissipate harmlessly.
Conventional agriculture is predicated upon externalizing its wastes into the environment, the tangible effects of which are overproduction, low farm prices, farm attrition, rural economic decay and lake pollution. These are not incidental side effects of the protocol to be managed or ignored; they are the protocol’s fundamental, economic precepts. Evidence abounds that the protocol cannot be applied without inviting these results.
GMOs may or may not be a health threat; if they are, a label would seem a pretty weak response.
In the 1960s, we learned that the “miracle” of American agriculture was purchased at the cost of a vibrant agricultural economy and a clean environment. Rather than disrupt the agent known to be producing these effects, the Vermont Legislature passed a series of laws intended, on their faces, to save agriculture and protect water quality. The effects expanded. The Legislature then allocated hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars ($140 million in just the last 10 years) to compensate for what these statutes consistently failed to do: since World War II, Vermont has empirically lost 93 percent of its family dairy farms and Lake Champlain is empirically polluted with the residues of conventional, agricultural chemicals.
The Vermont Agency of Agriculture has for four decades provided implicit and explicit support to the agent responsible for the damage caused by conventional agriculture to Vermont’s working landscape, its water, soil and atmosphere. Even now, as the federal government presses Vermont to finally comply with the Clean Water Act (Vermont has consistently refused to comply with the CWA, passed in 1972), the agency dithers in its commitment to clean water, which Vermont cannot ever achieve while supporting conventional agriculture.
GMOs may or may not be a health threat; if they are, a label would seem a pretty weak response. But without doubt, GMOs are an extension of conventional agriculture, a known threat, and that is what Vermonters and food consumers all across the nation overwhelmingly ask their legislators to arrest.
