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.