As you remember, last year I was hired by Penticton & Area Women’s Centre to work on a project titled From Discord To Action and a year ago we had a public forum at Oliver Elks Hall where we got a number of volunteers to continue working with me on bridging the gap between communities, farmers and farm workers.
FACTOS (Farm And Community Team Okanagan-Similkameen) became a working name of the group with Arlene Arlow as chair. After the project was completed, I continued working with FACTOS and in July 2013 it became a the Okanagan-Similkameen Farm Labour Society. We finally got all the paperwork completed so we can move ahead with seeking funding for projects related to education and promotion of farming communities.
When Arlene found out through Kevin Proteau of Local Supporting Locals that Dr.Thierry Vrain and Dr.Shiv Chopra will be in Kelowna on a Speaking Tour, we started working to organize forums throughout BC Southern Interior (Osoyoos, Grand Forks and Castlegar.) as well as a smaller venue event in Penticton.
Osoyoos event was attended by 100+ people at Watermark Beach Resort. (picture above)
Dr.Vrain was the first presented and he talked about GE foods from the genetic engineering aspect. He spent 30 years working for Agriculture Canada as a genetic engineer and soil biologist. Once retired, he started tending his own small herbal organic farm on Vancouver Island and became alarmed with all the concerns about the long-term safety of GE foods and their influence on our health.
Through several slides and graphs he showed us how the new DNA is developed, tested and inserted to the plants to make them herbicide resistant. As harmless as it individually appears, when combined, it can have long term bad effects on our environment and our health. At the same time, while we have all these new plants (corn, canola, soy and sugar beet in Canada) immune to herbicide, the weeds are building their own natural immunity to the same herbicide as well and Roundup is losing battle against them to the point that new “super-weeds” are fully immune to herbicide and are spreading over vast agricultural areas in USA and soon they will be in Canadian fields as well. The new herbicide has been introduced again but the predictions are that it will take only a several years before the weeds become immune to that as well. Meanwhile, to test the success of the GE crop, labs are using antibiotics as markers so those antibiotics became integral part of GE crop’s DNA. As we eat GE food, we also ingest the antibiotic and our bodies are becoming antibiotic resistant which might render them ineffective in medicine. Needless to say, as much as we knew or suspected about bad effects of GE on our health, we still got caught by surprise with how much more there is to it. All the claims about better yielding weed-free and safe to eat crop have been discredited one by one.
Dr.Chopra has been a former Health Canada senior scientific advisor. He blew the whistle on Bovine Growth Hormone and various other products endangering public health. He gave us the presentation from the Health Canada regulatory process point. His own story about the fight that started in 1988 and ended in 2004 by being fired for whistleblowing had audience so engaged that I failed as moderator to keep track of time. He told us about the regulatory phrases such as “substantially equivalent” that render any such new product entitled for patent approval without testing. Even when the testing is required, it is done by the laboratories and scientists at the very facility applying for the patent while European and some other countries have Government or independent research laboratories testing the product prior to recommending patent approval or not. I will definitely look up his book “Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower”
Both speakers made incredible impact on audience in Osoyoos and we went into over-time so I decided to forgo the panel that was supposed to happen at the second part of the evening. Because Dr.Chopra’s final remarks were related to Arctic Apple, I had to ask Allan Patton to say a few words about it. His speech fired up the house. Emotional and in plain language from a very personal experience as organic grower with justifiable fear that, if Arctic Apple is introduced anywhere in Okanagan, within a year there will be no organic fruit trees left in the valley. The winds and the bees will carry the pollen around and organic trees will be contaminated by GE pollen. Organic farmers will lose their status and their livelihood without having any choice. Once the GE plant is introduced, there is no way back. The nature takes its course and GE genes take over. Then bio-tech companies pound the last nail in the organic farmer’s coffin by suing him for “stealing their patent”.