Pubdate: Sat, 23 Sep 2006
Source: Capital Press (OR)
Copyright: 2006 Capital Press Agriculture Weekly
Contact:  http://www.capitalpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/834
Author: Angela Eckhardt
Note: The author writes on freedom and farming issues from her home in
Lostine, Ore. Her web site is www.freedomsolutionsnw.org.

FARMING FOR LIFE, OR PHARMED TO DEATH?

What role should farmers play in medicine? That's a good question to 
consider as the biotech "pharming" industry develops.

If it weren't for America's foolhardy War on Drugs, there would be no 
question at all. For eons, herbs have been successfully cultivated 
for a wide variety of medicinal uses.

The line between farmer and healer - or shaman - should be blurry. 
More than any other factor, what defines the traditional farmer is 
not the size of his land, but his role in life and death.

Prior to the advent of biotech seeds, artificial insemination and 
rules preventing on-farm processing, farmers had a hand in the entire 
life cycle and a front-row view of life's lessons.

Woe to the farmer who fails to learn respect, who misses how the one 
life is connected to the whole of life. Where once he might have felt 
like a God of creation, he'll soon be humbled by the spread of 
disease and infertility across the land. And once death is advancing 
- - on his own farm, in his body, his family, his country or the world 
- - what is the farmer to do? What kind of medicine should he practice?

In "Epidemics, Bk. I, Sect. XI," Hippocrates offers advice that's 
more to the point than either the original or modern versions of the 
Hippocratic Oath:

"Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; 
practice these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things: to 
help - or at least to do no harm."

Traditional farm-medicine wisdom might then go like this: Life has 
not been respected. Disease is rampant. Infertility will spread 
unless we support life by growing healthy things and stop poisoning life.

 From this vantage, biotech pharming is exactly the wrong prescription.

Biologics, which describes a class of drugs derived from biological 
material, makes up a growing percentage of pharmaceuticals. Currently 
they are produced through genetically engineered animals, but the 
expense and inefficiency of this production method has spawned 
plant-derived biologics instead.

In "Biohazards: The Next Generation? Genetically Engineering Crop 
Plants That Manufacture Industrial and Pharmaceutical Proteins," 
Brian Tokar says concerns go beyond the familiar cross-pollination 
issues: "We may soon see biologically active enzymes and 
pharmaceuticals, usually only found in nature in minute quantities - 
and usually biochemically sequestered in very specialized regions of 
living tissues and cells - secreted by plant tissues on a massive 
commercial scale."

By now we have an all-too-long list of failures to contain 
genetically engineered crops. And though plant-derived 
pharmaceuticals aren't even on the market yet, their containment is 
already a problem. In 2002, ProdiGene's pharma-corn, containing an 
experimental pig vaccine, contaminated soybeans in Iowa and Nebraska. 
New regulations were then put in place, prompting Monsanto to 
announce its departure from the biopharming industry.

Then just last summer, Monsanto subsidiary Calgene received a patent 
for technology that allows the production of human biological 
proteins from the plant plastid. According to investors, the genes 
expressed in plastids "are not pollen disseminated" and therefore 
would not pose cross-pollination risks. But that assertion, too, is a 
matter of great debate.

Controlled Pharming Ventures is now biopharming a 60-mile mine in 
Indiana, also with the hope that underground containment might allow 
the industry to bypass regulatory hurdles and appease a concerned public.

Traditional farmers might contend that all these pharmaceuticals 
would not be needed in the first place if there were not so many 
toxins intentionally put into our air, soil, water and food.

I'd go a step further. Drug prohibition has allowed the lucrative 
pharmaceutical industry to flourish while biotech corporations try to 
dangerously re-engineer and patent natural medicinals in the hopes of 
selling once-free life forms back to the by-now desperately unhealthy 
and drug-addicted consumers.

Yes, farmers should certainly play a renewed role in medicine. But 
they should farm for life, not pharm us to death.

Angela Eckhardt writes on freedom and farming issues from her home in 
Lostine, Ore. Her web site is www.freedomsolutionsnw.org.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine