Sonoma County is following Mendocino and Marin counties to prohibit GMO's for ten years while the dangers of cross-pollenation by GMOs are studied.

Three years ago Project Censored reprinted an underreported story: third world countries like India and Pakistan exhanged their people's right to save and replant ancestral seeds in exchange for loans from the International Monetary Fund. Instead, they must buy GMO seeds.

This year, one of Project Censored's top ten underreported stories covers the new rules used by Paul Bremmer to engineer Iraq's economy as prior restraints on Iraqui democracy. One rule requires local farmers to purchase and to plant American seeds.

As Percey explains, "We were worried about killing off the wildlife." So at first farmers on the prairies of Western Canada in 1996 welcomed the concept of pesticide resistant plant engineering. The experiment has backfired in several ways. For one, "Canadian soybean production decreased by 15%."

In order to collect rent from all farms cross-pollenated by GMO, private police (Pinkerton in the US, retired RMCPs in Canada)can legally test any farmer's field. GMO crops eliminate older varieties in a few seasons, partly because one gene in the engineered plant tolerates much higher dosages of weed-killing Roundup, Monsanto's most profitable single product.

Percy says that such agricultural practices harm small farmers while profiting agribusiness and chemical corporations. He also says that the product, compared to organic, or even "conventionally grown" produce is both less nutritious and, in the long run, potentially harmful to humans.

Called "the green revolution" in the sixties, the heavy use of herbicides and pesticides increased grain supplies faster than populations could consume them. According to Smeiser, "the program to feed a hungry world" when coupled with genetic engineering has only deepened the dysfunctions in global food system. Abroad hundreds of millions starve abroad. In North Americans 20% of the youth are malnourished. Frogs and other predators up the insect branch of the food chain (foxes, geese) are dying off. "And so on..." the grandfather farmer says. In answer to a question by local food activist Sasha, Percey says voting for a GE free county you can do something about it."

The educational story will be posted here in several parts. Today we present "Patenting Life." By the October 26, we will have DVD's of his discussion available.