The public has a right to read emails exchanged between Hawaii state legislators and the agribusiness industry, Ashley Lukens, program director for the Hawaii Center for Food Safety told scores Thursday night in Kona.
Recently, the Hawaii Center for Food Safety unsuccessfully requested that Hawaii legislators present such emails to the public. Such public interest inquiry met with legislative denial could create fecund political momentum to influence pesticide policy, Lukens explained during her presentation “Pesticides in Paradise: Our Keiki &Aina at Risk” at West Hawaii Civic Center.
Disclosing the emails to the public provides better access to knowledge that might safeguard community health given that Hawaii hosts 1,141 test sites on 25,140 acres of prime agriculture land in the state to grow and experiment with genetically engineered seeds. The seeds, she said, are the exact ones used for commodity crops such as corn and soy that become animal feed or fuel. They are also not for direct human consumption.
By comparison, California has 172 genetically engineered crop test sites, Lukens said.
The same five agribusiness companies who make the genetically engineered seed — Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow Chemical, Dupont-Pioneer and BASF — also experiment with and create the pesticide (herbicide) for their plants. And they lucratively sow what they seed since these top five lock down profits from 58 percent of global seed sales and 72 percent of the world’s pesticide sales, she explained.
Still, Lukens positioned the agri-business companies not as evil per se, but rather as following through on their business model.
At the same time, “the purpose of government is to protect people from industry,” she said.
More than 100 Hawaii residents — among them pregnant women, parents with keiki ranging from toddler to teen, and silver-haired men and women — crowded the center Thursday evening, leaving some to stand while others sat on the floor. State Sen. Josh Green, D-Kona-Ka‘u, took a seat up front to listen to Lukens’ presentation.
Green reminded the audience they had “the capacity to change policy if the campaign was very forceful and extremely consistent.”
Lukens, who earned her doctorate from the University of Hawaii at Manoa researching how local cultures activate social change on the food system, carefully refuted in her presentation the agribusiness claim that she is anti-science by highlighting the key findings discovered after reviewing more than 500 articles in the medical literature.
Because research conclusively shows that low-level daily chronic exposure to pesticide spraying that occurs two of three days year-round, often at a frequency of spraying 16 times a day, the American Association of Pediatrics now advocates for buffer zones, she said. That includes around the 27 schools in Hawaii that are located within one mile of seed crop fields spraying Restricted Use Pesticides — chemicals toxic enough to warrant prior Environmental Protection Agency approval. Some countries have a zero-use law for the same RUPs.
More than once during the past 15 years, the Waimea Canyon Middle School on Kauai was closed as a result, most analysis now shows, of toxic chemical pesticides drifting from the Syngenta fields too closely situated nearby, she said. These closings happened in seasons when wind and rain carry the pesticide spray so effectively to unintended areas.
Well-documented in the medical science literature are the health consequences for those most vulnerable when exposed to pesticide drift: children in utero, keiki and farmers, Lukens said. Pregnant women can deliver children who experience autism, ADHD, reduced IQ and adverse birth outcomes. Children exposed to chronic pesticide drift can exhibit respiratory diseases, leukemia, asthma, brain cancer and poor mental development. And, farmers can develop bladder, colon and rectal cancer, Parkinson’s disease or Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma as a result of chronic pesticide exposure.
After a brisk 60-minute presentation, Lukens made the appeal that government truly has the ability to create policy change — so long as many people on a local level motivate diverse participants who “dig into the voices on the ground, listening to many people complaining about pesticide drift, to give voice to these stories that have not been heard.”