Bitter Greens responds to Monsanto

As I reported Friday, Monsanto contacted me to "request" that I cease using the headline "Roundup, ready," a title I use for an occasional feature that rounds up food-politics news. Below find Monsanto's letter followed by my response.

Dear Mr. Philpott,
I am the trademark and copyright attorney for Monsanto Company, the owner of the Roundup Ready(R) trademark. The attached link is to the Bitter Greens Journal which features the name "Roundup, ready" as the title of one of its features. Roundup Ready(R) is a well known trademark which is registered by Monsanto not only in the United States, but in many countries throughout the word [sic]. As you have pointed out in the column, Roundup Ready(R) is famous in the agricultural industry.

While you have stated in your column that you chose the name "Roundup, ready" in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds, we must object to this use and request that you change the name for the following reasons:

1) You are using our trademark without our consent. This use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal.

2) You are using our trademark in an incorrect manner (with a comma and in a way that genericizes the mark). This weakens our trademark rights.

I would appreciate your confirmation that you will change the name of this column and cease using "Roundup, ready" or any form of our trademark as the name of a feature or in an incorrect manner in your journal. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/

Very truly yours,

Barb
Barb Bunning-Stevens
Monsanto Corp.
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks

Dear Ms. Bunning-Stevens,
Although it's comical for a corporation with upwards of $5 billion in annual revenue to harass an obscure blogger who helps run a 2.5-acre farm, the tone of your letter is earnest; so I will reply earnestly.

Your arguments seem specious to me, and I therefore I must refuse to cease using "Roundup, ready" as the title for an occasional feature on my Web log.

You write that "[t]his use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal." Yet my journal clearly presents itself as a "running critique of industrial agriculture," and from its first post on has made no secret of its distaste for Monsanto and its particular style of industrial agriculture.

I doubt you will be able to dig up a single reader who, after perusing a "Roundup, ready" post, will think to himself, "Now this fellow must be on the Monsanto dole!"

To further clarify my position on Monsanto, and to underline my institutional, financial, and ideological independence from it, I'm considering placing a new feature along the left-hand side of my blog. Titled "Bitter Greens on Monsanto," it would be a compilation of clickable headlines to the 15 or so posts that have mentioned your company. Would that go some way toward distancing our two entities?

Nor am I persuaded by the claim that my use of a comma in "Roundup, ready" somehow "weakens [Monsanto's] trademark rights." If I were in the business of genetically altering seeds so that they could withstand copious applications of herbicides, and I were marketing my product under the brand "Roundup, ready," cheekily trying to leverage Monsanto's marketing might and hoping the comma would protect me from copyright troubles, I would certainly tremble in fear on being contacted by a Monsanto attorney. And I would immediately cease and desist that dubious practice.

However, I am selling nothing. I am a polemicist employing (in the case of "Roundup, ready") satire to advance the cause of locally based, organic agriculture. If I'm able with my writing to stop a farmer from buying your product, then it will be due to the force of my arguments, not to any confusion regarding your trademark.

With all due respect, it seems to me that rather than protect your trademark from any serious threat, what you're really trying to do is intimidate a political opponent into ceasing what is surely Constitutionally protected speech. And so, as I stated above, I must decline your request. And I will redouble my efforts to study and write about the practices of your company.

Respectfully,
Tom Philpott
Bitter Greens Journal

Monsanto to Bitter Greens: "Cease" and Desist

Yesterday the farming project I work for, Maverick Farms, received the following extraordinary e-mail. I don't have time to respond now, as we're scrambling to put on our monthly farm dinner. Given Monsanto's record of suing farmers, I suppose I should stifle guffaws and take it seriously. For now, though, I'll delight in having tweaked a transnational corporation valued in the marketplace at a cool $17 billion. Here's the letter. I will respond when I get a chance. (Readers should also note that I'm putting the finishing touches on a post about the current oil crunch.)

Dear Mr. Philpott,
I am the trademark and copyright attorney for Monsanto Company, the owner of the Roundup Ready(R) trademark. The attached link is to the Bitter Greens Journal which features the name "Roundup, ready" as the title of one of its features. Roundup Ready(R) is a well known trademark which is registered by Monsanto not only in the United States, but in many countries throughout the word [sic]. As you have pointed out in the column, Roundup Ready(R) is famous in the agricultural industry.

While you have stated in your column that you chose the name "Roundup, ready" in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds, we must object to this use and request that you change the name for the following reasons:

1) You are using our trademark without our consent. This use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal.

2) You are using our trademark in an incorrect manner (with a comma and in a way that genericizes the mark). This weakens our trademark rights.

I would appreciate your confirmation that you will change the name of this column and cease using "Roundup, ready" or any form of our trademark as the name of a feature or in an incorrect manner in your journal. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/

Very truly yours,

Barb
Barb Bunning-Stevens
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks

Roundup, ready

"Roundup, ready" is an occasional feature of Bitter Greens Journal. Named in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds genetically engineered to withstand its herbicide Roundup, this feature will give a brief overview of recent news, trends, and topics in the food-politics world. Each of them is a candidate for expansion in the days and weeks to come.

Bush, cotton, and free trade
GW Bush claims to view free trade as a sort of all-healing panacea--similar to the way he has talked about accepting Jesus Christ as one's Lord and Savior. Here is what the president declared last week on signing Cafta, or the Central American Free Trade Agreement:

By leveling the playing field for our products, CAFTA will help create jobs and opportunities for our citizens. As CAFTA helps create jobs and opportunity in the United States, it will help the democracies of Central America and the Dominican Republic deliver a better life for their citizens. By further opening up their markets, CAFTA will help those democracies attract the trade and investment needed for economic growth.

My purpose now is not to debunk those faith-based banalities--I partially did so a while back here--but rather to establish that this is a president with a strong rhetorical commitment to what he calls free trade. What follows will show that this commitment is purely rhetorical--it evaporates when the dictates of free trade conflict with big-money U.S. industrial interests.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran an astonishing piece about US cotton farmers' efforts to win favor with their counterparts in Africa, who for years have been undercut by US agriculture subsidies.

Between 1995 and 2003, US cotton farmers received more than $14 billion in federal handouts. Last year alone, the Journal reports, the government doled out $4.5 billion in cotton subsidies.

That means that US cotton farmers can afford to sell their wares on global markets at a fraction of the cost of production. African farmers, who produce cotton much more cheaply, are therby squeezed out of world markets and into misery. It's important to note here that global institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization have for years prodded African farmers to produce for the global commodity markets--it helps their governments earn foriegn exchange to pay back debts run up by national elites.

As it stands now, the Journal reports, US cotton farmers, whose production costs are among the world's highest, export three-quarters of their produce and own 40 percent of the global market.

Clearly, here is a situation that violates the tenets of free trade. Forced to compete without government support, the US cotton industry would likely collapse--what the free traders hail as "creative destruction." To a zealous free trader, the situation described above is tantamount to thundering the Lord's name in vain during Sunday service (or, to allude to recent news item, flushing a Bible down the toilet).

So how does our White house-enthroned Adam Smith acolyte react to these desecrations being committed by his government at the service of big cotton farmers?

Rather than kick them off the dole like a bunch of welfare mothers, he's sending USDA flacks out to Africa, accompanied by worthies from the National Cotton Council, to sweet-talk African farmers into not challenging US subsidies at the World Trade Organization.

The Journal article opens:

WEREKELA, Mali -- Drummers and dancers greeted Jim Butler when he arrived at this settlement of dirt roads and mud houses in January. The deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture met with local cotton farmers and promised American help to boost productivity. He presented the village headman with a pewter paperweight embossed with a USDA seal. The headman, who has neither a desk nor paper, hid it for safekeeping.

The trip was part of an extraordinary effort to lend a hand to African cotton farmers. But the prime motivation wasn't altruistic. West African nations, newly assertive in global trade negotiations, are agitating for the abolition of subsidies essential to the prosperity of many American farmers. By offering tips on improving mills, analyzing dirt and chasing away bugs, the U.S. cotton industry is hoping to win some regional goodwill and maintain its domestic privileges a little while longer.[Emphasis not in original]

I find it remarkable that neither the Journal reporters nor their editors saw anything odd about the conflation of the USDA and the US cotton industry. Sure, the USDA exists to promote the interests of domestic farmers. But it has clearly gone to extreme lengths to promote a single kind of farming--the vast-scale sort that's more interested in conquering foreign markets than feeding and clothing people.

Not surprisingly, the USDA/cotton industry's African charm offensive has largely fallen flat among the continent's cotton farmers. Here is the Journal again:

Several months after Messrs. [Cotton Council official John] Pucheu and [USDA official] Butler visited Werekela, the villagers' enthusiasm had dissipated. "If we all go to the market together, the Americans have no problem with the low price, because they get subsidized support," says Mr. Traore, who is missing his front teeth. "But for us, cotton sales are all we have."
He's sitting under a big shade tree with five other farmers escaping the afternoon heat. Chickens scratch in the dirt at their feet. "The Americans," he says, "promised they would help us develop. But they never mentioned subsidies."
Adds fellow farmer, Niantili Fomba: "The only thing we've gotten since is lower prices [for their cotton]."

••••••

The joys of industrial dairy
It's a little-known fact that California recently passed Wisconsin as the nation's most prodigious dairy-producing state.

California's San Joaquin Valley alone boasts 2.5 million dairy cows--about a fifth of the nation's total herd. It also ranks right up there with Los Angeles and Houston among the areas with the country's most polluted air.

Coincidence? As this LA Times article shows, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District says no. After a recent study, the agency concluded that "the average dairy cow produces 19.3 pounds of gases, called volatile organic compounds ... [these] gases react with other pollutants to form ground-level ozone, or smog." Multiplying 19.3 by 2.5 million gets us about 50 million pounds of cow gas wafting into the Valley's atmosphere each year.

"The dairy industry will be forced to invest millions of dollars in expensive pollution-control technology in feedlots and waste lagoons, and may even have to consider altering animals' diets to meet the region's planned air-quality regulations," the paper reports.

Aha! Here is an attempt to charge the dairy industry for what are known as "externalities"--costs that are normally pushed off the ledger of industrial farming and onto that of society as a whole. (Right now, citizens of the Valley are bearing some of those burdens in the form of an extremely high asthma rate, the Times reports.) If industrial farming had to pay for the messes it creates, I think we'd see a huge push toward valuing small-scale, sustainable-minded farming.

In the Land of Arnold, however, the industry stands an excellent chance of rebuffing this bold attempt to hold it responsible for its reaking, hazardous mess.
•••••

Cheap labor, cheap food, Part I: A farm labor crisis?
Bitter Greens Journal has long argued that US society relies on a cheap, plentiful supply of labor from points south to maintain its beloved cheap-food system.

No good nativist should enjoy a $5 lunch from McDonald's without reflecting on the contribution illegal immigrants make to delivering such a hefty dose of calories for so scant a price.

Are these patriots on the verge of delivering a decisive blow to the American way of eating? Are their efforts to "secure our borders" going to spark a rise in food prices?

It's way too early to tell. But as this well-researched, nuanced article from the Fresno (California) Bee shows, trouble is brewing in Big Ag's trenches. Once again, San Joaquin Valley, that (evidently quite aromatic) epicenter of vast-scale West Coast farming, displays industrial agriculture's logical extremes.

Here is the Bee:

The supply of farmworkers is shrinking in the San Joaquin Valley, and some farmers are concerned it will take longer for workers to finish picking crops this summer.

They also worry the labor shortage will intensify in the coming years.

Farmworker crews are typically made up of 20 to 25 people. But on some farms this year, there are as few as 13 workers per crew, says Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League.

The article cites the California Institute For Rural Studies for this startling fact: "More than 400,000 farmworkers toil in San Joaquin Valley fields, and more than 40% of them are illegal immigrants."

Yet the number of illegal immigrants streaming into the Valley has decreased for five years running, as it has in the nation as a whole. The article states that annual illegal immigration into the US peaked at about 750,000 people in the late 1990s and now stands at about 700,000. (This reflects the number of people who sneak in each year, not the total number living in the US).

The reason: "Fewer migrant workers are crossing the border illegally because of more border patrol agents, human smugglers raising their prices and the Minuteman Project that put civilian patrols on the U.S.-Mexico border, workers and federal officials say."

And the ones who do make it in are increasingly spurning agriculture in favor of higher-paid fields like construction and landscaping, the article states.

Farmers tell the Bee that they've been able to harvest their crops despite the labor shortage. Long-term, however, they fear they'll have to pay more to attract more workers.

That could spark a crisis. As grocery retailing consolidates--and Wal-Mart gobbles up more market share in the industry--the number of large-scale buyers falls. That gives buyers like Wal-Mart tremendous leverage to demand low prices from farmers. Thus farmers in place like the Joaquin Valley will find themselves squeezed between rising labor costs and stagnant prices for their goods.

One possible scenario is that the Wal-Marts of the world will simply buy more and more produce from countries like Mexico and Chile. That will mean farm closings on in the Joaquin Valley.

Another, more likely scenario is that the US government will ease up on patrolling the border. That has been its traditional response to labor shortages within industrial agriculture.
•••••

Cheap labor, cheap food, Part II: Bitter chocolate
Have Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Nestle been knowingly buying cocoa beans from farms that utilize slave labor?

That's what a lawsuit filed by three people from Mali claims, according to this AP article.

The lawsuit charges that:

[T]he plaintiffs were each forced from their homes in Mali in 1996 while still in their teens to toil without pay at cocoa bean plantations in the neighboring nation of Ivory Coast.

The plaintiffs, who worked in separate plantations, claim they worked 12 hours a day or more, were barely fed and were subject to beatings if they didn't work properly or attempted to escape.

All the while, the deep-pocketed transnationals knew of these conditions in the cocoa fields and looked the other way, the suit claims.

"It is unconscionable that Nestle, ADM and Cargill have ignored repeated and well-documented warnings over the past several years that the farms they were using to grow cocoa employed child slave laborers," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs told AP. "They could have put a stop to it years ago, but chose to look the other way. We had to go to court as a last resort."

Down and dirty: the fate of soil in industrial society

"Common as dirt," goes the old insult. Despite its antique nature, the saying may sum up industrial (and post-industrial) society's take on soil: low, squalid, filthy, annoyingly abundent, beneath dignity and respect.

Consider the zeal to clean, to wash, to sterilize and scrub. Claudia Hemphill, a doctoral student in environmental science at the University of Idaho, has been doing some interesting work on the recent social history of soil. As US society mutated from primarily rural to overwhelmingly urban and suburban in the span of less than a century--today about 3 percent of the population engages directly in agriculture--dirt came to be demonized, Hemphill argues.

By the dawn of the 20th century, when immigrants (many of them former farmers) and our own displaced rural populations flocked into US cities, they found themslves confronted with a stark public-health slogan: "Dirt, Disease and Death.”

A society washing its hands of agriculture didn't want dirt clinging to its trousers. Hence the cult of detergent.

“So dirt became the major symbol of disease,” Hemphill says in a recent University of Iowa press release. “Anyone who was considered socially inferior--such as immigrants or different ethnic groups--was called dirty. Dirtiness was a huge insult. Housecleaning became an obsession. Even outdoors, dirt is eliminated--backyards are turned into concrete patios or covered up with gravel or bark-mulch. Dirt is so intrinsically bad, we don’t even want to see it outdoors.”

It's a well-known irony that the campaign against dirt delivered dire health consequences of its own. Modern parents who essentially sterilize their children with "anti-bacterial" soap, and forbid them to play in the dirt, have managed to wreck their charges' immune systems. It turns out that after all "we need to have some dirt in our lives," as Hemphill says. All along, it's been our metaphor for disease that's helped shield us from disease.

Yet despite better recent press, dirt still gets short shrift. Hemphill points out that even environmentalists tend to neglect the ground beneath their feet, focusing their energies on water and air.

The fragmentation of the broader society cleaves environmentalism and subverts it. Groundwater runoff from chemically fertilized fields is a significant source of water contamination; industrial agriculture's addiction to fossil fuel contributes to air pollution and global warming. Yet mainline environmentalism is curiously silent on the question of agriculture and soil stewardship. (There are a couple of proud exceptions, including Greenpeace's bare-knuckled fight against genetically modified crops.)

I think even consumers who try to shop locally for sustainably grown produce don't think enough about the soil and what it means. Every apple you eat, every carrot and every clove of garlic, represents nutrients leached from the soil--nutrients that must be replaced one way or another for agriculture to sustain itself. Same with meat. Whether a cow feeds freely on meadow grass or has field corn shovelled into its tiny hovel, soil somewhere is being leeched of nutrients.

I wonder if many vegans ponder the ultimate source of their nutrition. Small-scale farmers who reject synthetic inputs have essentially two options for replenishing the nutrients they pull out of their soil: animal manure and what's known as "green manure," plants capable of leeching nitrogen out of the air and depositing it into the soil. (Compost could be considered a third option, but farm-scale composting typically relies on a heavy dose of manure--not the green kind.)

Most small organic farms use both methods. Green manure by itself would be a tricky option. First, the seeds tend to be expensive (for example, hairy vetch), and small-scale market farming is a notoriously seat-of-the-pants proposition.

Second, using green manure as the only fertility strategy imposes opportunity costs. Say a farmer wants to use the same bed to grow several different crops in succession over a single season. Green manuring would require her to devote parts of her fields all season to growing cover crops for the sole purpose of tilling them in. Again, that's tough to pull off on a typical small farm, where there's intense financial pressure to produce as much as possible for market. In the heat of the season, it makes more sense to simply work in some well-composted manure before planting the next bed.

Thus vegans who shop at the farmers market are faced with a stark fact: that beautiful carrot you just enjoyed likely spent its growing life swaddled in a rich bed of decomposed animal shit. Try as we might, we can't shake off the scatological origins of life, any more than we can meaningfully win any war against dirt.

I mention this not to take a poke at the vegans, but rather to remind them of the importance of animals in the nutrient cycle of farming.

And this points up another vexation of small-scale farming in an industrial-scale world. Fertilizing by manure is less difficult than a purely plant-based strategy, but not by much. Industrialization has rent farming in two. For the most part, there are animal farms and meat farms; few do both. Thus vegetable farmers tend to spend a lot of time wrangling and making deals to get tremendous loads of manure delivered to their farms. And since small-scale meat and dairy production has collapsed in most areas, even the most conscientious organic farmers end up using manure from industrial farms.

Vegans and anyone else interested in organic local vegetables thus have an interest in supporting humane, pasture-based animal farming in their areas.

Scientists, too, have tended to neglect dirt. Hemphill conjectures that they recoil from the inherently murky nature of the stuff. Water can be filtered to its elements: two hydrogen atoms linked to one oxygen. No such luck for soil. Hemphill puts it well:

If you take a sample of water from the stream and filter out the leaf bits and twigs, insects and impurities, you’re left with pure water. If you take a handful of soil and remove the rock particles, pollen grains, decomposing wood bits, water and microorganisms, you’re left with nothing. Philosophically, this makes it cognitively unmanageable because it bypasses our tendency to want to sort things out into little piles that are all the same.

Healthy soil literally lives and breathes; it's made up of decomposing matter and live organisms, from tiny bacteria to earthworms as big as your finger. Healthy soil is like a decadent poem: fevered activity, death, life, rebirth, green leaves and lovely flowers rooted in a bed of seething scatology.

A society that fails to study that poem risks extinction. Consider that field corn--the fodder that's fed to confined animals and makes its way into food-proccessing factories and ethanol plants, not the sweet stuff you eat off the cob--is the number-one U.S. crop, heavily underwritten by federal subsidies. No crop erodes soil faster than field corn.