From the Belly of the Genetically Modified Beast with Andrea Brower

May 7, 2014

This week’s episode of the Ecosocialist Horizons Hour examines the global struggle against GMOs. Joining us via Skype from New Zealand is activist-scholar Andrea Brower, co-director of the non-profit organization Malama Kauai in her native Hawaii.

A PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Auckland, Brower has been active for years in the movements for food sovereignty and global food justice.

Today she unpacks the history of agriculture in Hawaii, now the epicenter of the global scientific experiment in genetically modified organisms that has sparked outrage around the world and given birth to opposition movements led by peasants and farming communities around the world.

In recent years, Hawaii has become ground-zero in this struggle. A handful of biotech companies otherwise known as the Big 5 (Dow, Pioneer DuPont, Syngenta, Monsanto, BASF), operate on 25,000 out of Hawaii’s 28,000 acres of agricultural land.

According to one of Brower’s articles that appeared recently on the Huffington Post, “[…]Pioneer DuPont alone has used 90 pesticide formulations with 63 active ingredients in the past 6 years on 15,000 acres of prime agricultural land. They apply these pesticides around 250 (sometimes 300) days each year, with 10-16 applications per day on average. The amount of pesticides used on the island by these operations makes the corn fields in Kansas look organic.”

You’ll hear what we’re up against, and the forces converging on the Ecosocialist Horizon, from Hawai’i to India to the Occupied Territories of Turtle Island.

You can read more of Brower’s work here.

For further analysis and reporting from the frontlines of the fight against GMOs in the global South, visit the Inter Press Service (IPS)’s page on the topic

Some recent in-depth international coverage on GMOs:

Are pesticides linked to health problems in Argentina?

GMO producers should be punished as terrorists, Russian MPs say

Coming to your table? GMO crops resistant to ‘war herbicide’ 2,4D

Ecosocialist Horizons Hour is your frontline report on the global ecological crisis and the struggle for a livable world. EHH is the only source connecting the dots between Empire, Capitalism, Ecological Collapse, and the movements to rebuild humanity’s severed connection with the natural world.

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