Bob Dylan once sent a two-word lyric to Ben Harper, a talented songwriter he admired. “Well well,” was the lyric, and Dylan challenged Harper to make a song of it.
He did! By adding another “well” to the title, Ben wrote “Well, well, well” – a stinging lament about America’s clean-water well going dry, due to waste and greed. I thought of his song when I heard that a wheat farmer in Eastern Oregon had gotten an unpleasant surprise in May: Some of Monsanto’s unapproved, genetically-manipulated wheat suddenly cropped-up in his field. He had never planted any of these Frankenseeds, which have a foreign DNA spliced into them by Monsanto’s bio-tamperers. Field tests of the altered wheat were last done in Oregon in 2001, and the seeds never have been cleared for commercial use anywhere in the world. But there they are, sprouting like weeds.
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Well, well, well. Ever since Monsanto, backed by its political protectors, began messing with the very DNA of our food supply two decades ago, the company line was that it was all perfectly safe and under tight control. Farmers, however, warned that these corporate and political powers were a bunch of profiteering ignoramuses who knew nothing about such basic realities as pollen drift. Pollen from mutant plants can – and does – move many hundreds of miles across state and national borders to contaminate the crops of unsuspecting farmers living far away.
Ninety percent of the wheat grown by Oregon farmers is exported to Japan and other nations that do not let their consumers be lab rats for agribusiness hucksters. So the escape of Monsanto’s wheat into the wild endangers both wheat exports and the purity of organic corps – not to mention human health and our environment.
To follow the drift of this story go to Organic Consumers Association: www.organicconsumers.org.
“Modified Wheat Discovered in Oregon,” The New York Times, May 30, 2013.
“Monsanto Mystery Wheat Appears in Oregon, No One Knows Why,” www.alternet.org, June 4, 2013.
“USDA says unapproved genetically engineered wheat discovered in Oregon field,” www.washingtonpost.com, May 29, 2013.
“GMO Wheat Found In Oregon Field. How Did It Get There?” www.npr.org, May 30, 2013.
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