Food and Water
Two recent magazine stories have done an impressive job of exploring what's happening to our food and water supplies. In the May Vanity Fair, the incomparable investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele explain in "Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" how the giant corporation is transforming global agriculture through its genetically modified products. As usual, Barlett and Steele are able to show how complex topics affect ordinary people. Here they describe how Monsanto's lawyers squeezed Pilot Grove, a small Missouri grain elevator co-op:
Even after Pilot Grove turned over thousands more pages of sales records going back five years, and covering virtually every one of its farmer customers, Monsanto wanted more—the right to inspect the co-op’s hard drives. When the co-op offered to provide an electronic version of any record, Monsanto demanded hands-on access to Pilot Grove’s in-house computers.
Monsanto next petitioned to make potential damages punitive—tripling the amount that Pilot Grove might have to pay if found guilty. After a judge denied that request, Monsanto expanded the scope of the pre-trial investigation by seeking to quadruple the number of depositions. “Monsanto is doing its best to make this case so expensive to defend that the Co-op will have no choice but to relent,” Pilot Grove’s lawyer said in a court filing.
With Pilot Grove still holding out for a trial, Monsanto now subpoenaed the records of more than 100 of the co-op’s customers. In a “You are Commanded … ” notice, the farmers were ordered to gather up five years of invoices, receipts, and all other papers relating to their soybean and herbicide purchases, and to have the documents delivered to a law office in St. Louis. Monsanto gave them two weeks to comply.
Barlett and Steele conclude their article with a look at how Monsanto is affecting our milk supply. www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805
In another powerful story, Matthew Power's "Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping" in the May issue of Wired warns us of a growing shortage of safe drinking water:
Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they're quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest's half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea.
Power takes us from Arizona to London to Australia to investigate the problem and possible solutions. The photographs by Donald Milne and infographics by Travis Stearns are great. www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-05/ff_peakwater