Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation · from Monsanto’s 90,000-square-foot...

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Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/can-gmos-help-feed-hot-and-hungry-world/[2/9/2017 3:41:30 PM] L ACTIVISM BIOTECHNOLOGY FEATURE SEPTEMBER 1-8, 2014 ISSUE By Madeline Ostrander AUGUST 13, 2014 E P Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? Not if activists succeed in making the genetic modification of food politically unsustainable. (Illustration by Tim Robinson)

Transcript of Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation · from Monsanto’s 90,000-square-foot...

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/can-gmos-help-feed-hot-and-hungry-world/[2/9/2017 3:41:30 PM]

L

ACTIVISM BIOTECHNOLOGY FEATURE

SEPTEMBER 1-8, 2014 ISSUE

By Madeline Ostrander

AUGUST 13, 2014

E P

Can GMOs Help Feed a

Hot and Hungry

World?

Not if activists succeed in making the genetic

modification of food politically unsustainable.

(Illustration by Tim Robinson)

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

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E duardo Blumwald’s geneticallymodified plants don’t look much like

“Frankenfood.” Filling four modestgreenhouses in a concrete lot behindBlumwald’s laboratory at the University ofCalifornia, Davis, the tiny seedlings, spikygrasses, alfalfa, and peanut and rice plantsin plastic terracotta-colored pots lookexactly like the ordinary varieties fromwhich he and his fellow researchers createdthem. Blumwald’s lab lies just ten milesfrom Monsanto’s 90,000-square-footvegetable seed building, a glassy edificelarger than the hangar for a 747. TheMonsanto facility is one of the largestcenters in the world for plant breeding andgenetic engineering. But in the fourteenyears that Blumwald, a professor of cellbiology, has worked here studying theDNA of crop plants, he has hardly everspoken to anyone from Monsanto.

Blue-eyed and round-faced, with a liltingArgentinian accent, Blumwald growsexasperated when he talks about the so-called “Big Ag” companies, which he sayshave been arrogant in dealing with thepublic, contributing to a distrust of biotech

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research. But he also doesn’t appreciate theactivists who’ve been challenging not onlythe Monsantos of the world but the entirefield of genetic engineering.

“You want to penalize the multinationals; Ihave no problem with that,” he tells me inhis office at the university’s plant biologybuilding. “But because of your politicalstance against multinationals, you are goingto condemn maybe the only viable solutionwe have for our future? It’s wrong—absolutely wrong.”

Blumwald means the hot future that weexpect by 2050—when a world populationof 9.5 billion people will scramble to putfood on the table, while at least thirty-sevenseparate countries face extreme watercrises. Blumwald thinks that part of theanswer is to genetically engineer crops thatcan better withstand drought, and so he andhis researchers are scouring the world forvarieties of fruits, vegetables and somebasic staples—rice, millet, wheat, maize—that grow well without much water. Then,using a device called a “gene gun,” whichinserts DNA on microscopic gold particles,or a soil bacterium capable of changingplant genes, they alter or silence parts of theplant’s genome, adjusting how and when

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

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the plant makes the hormones that let itknow when to grow and when to wither.The researchers say the methods are moreprecise and much faster than developingnew plant varieties by conventionalbreeding, which can take decades.

When I tour the rows of rice and peanutswith one of Blumwald’s assistants, apostdoctoral researcher from Madrid, theair in the greenhouse is soupy. About twodozen researchers work in Blumwald’s lab,many of them from hot parts of the worldwith swelling populations, including Brazil,China and the United Arab Emirates. In thegreenhouse, the researchers force the rice tocope with heat and deprive it of water justas it’s about to set seed. So far, thegenetically altered rice is outperforming thenatural kind—given less moisture, the non-engineered rice browns and wilts, but thenew plant survives. Blumwald’s goal is tocreate crops that won’t keel over as quicklywhen things get hot, dry and stressful—plants that will improve the odds that afarmer can produce food even in a drought.

In about forty years, relentless dry spellsmay be more frequent across theSouthwest, say climate scientists, andCalifornia may have more dry years like

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

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this one, in which a drought has crippledthe agricultural sector. But the state, one ofthe most fiercely contested battlegrounds ina worldwide fight over the use ofgenetically modified organisms (GMOs),isn’t the most inviting home for researchlike Blumwald’s. Since the 1980s, activistshere have run a series of campaigns torequire the labeling of GM products and anoutright ban on GMO cultivation.Blumwald says the controversy over GMOshas made it more difficult to pursue hisresearch and obtain funding. And even ifhis GM plants could be an important part ofthe solution to climate change, they maynever make their way into the hands ofcommercial farmers. Who will invest in hisplants, test them in the field and marketthem if they attract boycotts, protests andlawsuits that make business difficult andconsumers skittish?

Many biotech researchers and agronomistsargue that a combination of bad willgenerated by Big Ag and misdirectedpublic outrage is stifling importanttechnological advances in agriculture—innovations that could help prevent famine,fight crop diseases and cope with climatechange. But countless activists disagree.The Organic Consumers Association, a

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nonprofit agricultural watchdog group, saysgenetic engineering will never deliver onpromises to feed a growing population andisn’t a trustworthy technology. “The dirtysecret of the biotech industry is, after thirtyyears, they haven’t done anything forconsumers,” said Andrew Kimbrell, thefounder and executive director of theCenter for Food Safety, in a speech at anational heirloom-seed fair in Santa Rosa,California. “No better taste, no morenutrition, zero benefits,” and a number of“potential risks.”

Over the past several years, the politicalfight over GMOs has becomesupercharged, and much of the controversyhas been driven by a distrust of bigbusiness—and of any of the novelbiotechnologies it might produce.

“The same corporations that brought usDDT and Agent Orange now want to denyus our right to know what’s in our food,”argued California Right to Know during a2012 campaign that brought together acoalition of organic farmers, environmentalorganizations, grassroots groups like MomsAdvocating Sustainability, and companieslike Clif Bar and Dr. Bronner’s Magic

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Soaps. Two years ago, this coalitionattempted to pass a statewide referendumthat would have required the labeling offood containing GMOs. The anti-GMOactivists were vastly outspent: Monsantoalone invested $8 million in efforts todefeat the measure. But the pro-labelingcampaign helped launch a movement. Thisyear alone, a series of similar initiativeshave been proposed in twenty states,according to the Center for Food Safety;this past April, Vermont became the firststate to pass a GMO labeling law. TheGrocery Manufacturers Association andseveral other trade groups have filed alawsuit to overturn it.

The California campaign’s messages were ajab at Monsanto, in part. Since the 1940s,the company has been manufacturing andselling chemicals, including DDT, the now-banned herbicide that contributed to thenear-extinction of bald eagles in thetwentieth century. In the 1960s, thecompany distributed a brochure mockingRachel Carson’s seminal work, SilentSpring, the book that first broughtwidespread public attention to the dangersof pesticides and launched the modernenvironmental movement. Around the sametime, Monsanto was producing Agent

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Orange, the chemical weapon used to stripvegetation in Vietnam war zones—and laterlinked to birth defects and cancers there andin the United States.

In 1997, Monsanto partly reinvented itself,transferring most of its chemical businessto a company called Pharmacia, which laterbecame part of Pfizer. Today, the onlychemicals that Monsanto produces areagricultural, including Roundup, anherbicide that the company invented in1970. It has marketed genetically modifiedseed since the 1990s; its premier products,among the most common GM crops on themarket, are “Roundup Ready”—varieties ofsoybeans, corn, alfalfa, cotton, canola andsugar beets whose DNA has been modifiedto keep them from dying when doused withRoundup. In the big grain-growing regionsof the United States, such as the Midwest,Roundup Ready is the industry standard. Asa result, Roundup, which also goes by thechemical name glyphosate, is the mostcommonly used herbicide in the country.

Because the DNA of Monsanto’s GMplants is patented, the company hasenormous control over the US food system.It has brought 145 suits against Americanfarmers for patent infringement—i.e., for

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

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intentionally or, according to at least onefarmer, accidentally (since grain DNAtravels along with pollen in the wind)growing Monsanto’s GM varieties withoutpaying for them.

The explosion of the Roundup Readymarket may have environmental upsides.One biotech researcher I spoke with notedthat the use of Roundup Ready seed hasreduced reliance on even more toxicagricultural chemicals, and US Departmentof Agriculture data concur. Roundup isconsidered more benign than manyherbicides: it tends not to linger in the soiland is sometimes used even in places likenature preserves to beat back aggressiveweeds. But few chemicals intended topoison plants or pests are entirely harm-free, and new research indicates thatRoundup could be more damaging thanpreviously thought: it may contribute tomiscarriages and interfere with fetaldevelopment. And around the country,weeds that are resistant to Roundup areproliferating. Dow Agrosciences, a divisionof Dow Chemical and another major playerin agribusiness, is about to release a newgeneration of genetically modified cropsthat tolerate a more powerful and persistentherbicide—2,4-D, a potential neurotoxin.

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According to Robert Fraley, Monsanto’schief technology officer and executive vicepresident, his company has been studyingthe impacts of climate change since 2006.But it has created only one line of GMplants designed to deal with environmentalstress—a type of corn called DroughtGard.Like Blumwald’s plants, DroughtGarddoesn’t die back as quickly when theweather is dry, though the mechanismdriving this trait is different: it relies oninserting bacterial DNA into the plant. Infield trials in the Great Plains, DroughtGardperformed modestly better than othervarieties of corn. Monsanto has now madeit available commercially to farmers, andChina has approved the seed for import.

But even if such technologies prove usefulin mitigating the impacts of climate change,Monsanto’s tarnished history, heavy-handed dealings with the public, lawsuits,and sheer size and might have made it afavorite villain. To a certain segment of thepublic, everything that Monsanto does issuspect, and genetic engineering looks likea strategy for pushing the company’s brandof herbicides and manipulating the foodeconomy—not a way to a feed a world incrisis.

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It can be easy to forget that geneticengineering has an existence and a historybeyond Big Ag. Monsanto’s website creditsRobert Fraley, then a researcher for thecompany, with producing the first GMplant in 1982, but there were at least threeother institutions working simultaneously—two universities in the United States andone in Belgium—to grow the first plantswith spliced genes that year. In the decadessince, scores of university researchers,small research and development venturesand even a few nonprofits have usedgenetic engineering to try to stop diseasesfrom decimating citrus plants, createmustard plants that can clean up toxinsfrom mining and industrial sites, and growfood that can better survive in heat,drought, flooding, freezing and otherextreme weather conditions that may getworse in the next several decades.

But almost none of these plants have evermade it beyond a field-testing stage. As of2010, though 260 genetically engineeredtraits have been tested in seventy-sevendifferent “specialty crops” (foods that areless profitable and produced on a smallerscale than field corn, cotton, soy, wheat andrice), just four varieties—including

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insecticide-resistant sweet corn, disease-resistant papaya and squash, and anornamental purple carnation—are on themarket, according to a review by JamieMiller and Kent Bradford, researchers withthe Seed Biotechnology Center at UCDavis. That’s nothing near the scope ofinnovation one would need to confront aproblem as vast as climate change orfamine.

When I spoke with Bradford, he blamedanti-GMO activists, in part, for makingR&D difficult: “Those groups have drivenall of the biotechnology work into thecompanies they hate,” he said. “They’vemade it impossible for anybody else byraising a stink. Even if the regulatory barsdon’t seem so high, [activist groups] willsue.” Only big companies like Monsantocan afford the legal and regulatory costs totest GM varieties and bring them to market,Bradford argues.

Neither biotech researchers nor GMOopponents think the current regulatoryprocess is working well. Anti-GMO groupsinsist that the Food and DrugAdministration’s approval process is tooopaque and leaves GMO testing in thehands of food companies. Biotech

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researchers counter that, in practice, theFDA insists on exhaustive and expensivetesting far beyond what has been requiredfor any other kind of food crop, eventhough years of research suggest that thetechnology of genetic engineering is safe.The American Association for theAdvancement of Science, for example, hasannounced that “foods containingingredients from [GM] crops pose nogreater risk than the same foods made fromcrops modified by conventional plantbreeding.” Bradford and others insist that itdoesn’t make scientific sense to single outGM crops for special testing when other,far less precise methods of cropdevelopment—including blasting plantswith radiation—aren’t subject to suchrigorous scrutiny.

The high cost of GMO field-testing mayexplain why the only genetically modifiedcrops that have made it to market are, in thewords of environmental scientist JonathanFoley, “very disappointing” and “comewith some big problems.”

“GMO efforts may have started off withgood intentions to improve food security,”Foley wrote in a column in the sciencemagazine Ensia in February, “but they

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ended up in crops that were better atimproving profits.”

* * *

Whether Blumwald’s plants—or thehundreds of other GM crops designed to bedisease- or climate-change-resistant orotherwise useful in feeding the world—evermake it to farm fields may depend a lot onwhether food activists, the public andpolicy-makers can be persuaded that thetechnology is able to produce worthwhileresults.

The heart of one GMO battle is roughlyfifty miles west of Blumwald’s lab, inSonoma County—a land of wineries,towering redwood groves poised at theedge of rocky coastal cliffs, and some ofthe most innovative organic agriculture inthe country.

Much of the opposition to GMOs here hascome from organic farmers, partly out offear that their crops will be tainted bycross-pollination by GM varieties. Underorganic certification rules, farmers aren’tallowed to grow GMOs, and theircustomers often refuse to eat GM food. InMarch 2004, Mendocino County, just northof Sonoma, became the first jurisdiction in

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

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the nation to pass a law regulating GMplants, making it illegal to “propagate,cultivate, raise, or grow” them, in order tostop what it called “genetic pollution”;Marin County, to the south, passed asimilar ordinance the following November.A grassroots group in Sonoma County isnow actively pushing for a countywide banon GMOs.

Here, on a plot of forest in the tinyunincorporated town of Occidental, severallongtime environmental activists run acenter for sustainable agriculture researchin a cluster of yurts and wood cabins thatform an intentional community called theOccidental Arts and Ecology Center(OAEC). Its leader, Dave Henson, co-founded Californians for GE-FreeAgriculture, a coalition that ran campaignsagainst GMOs between 2002 and 2008. Butwhen I asked him how he felt about geneticengineering, his answer surprised me. “Ifthis is public research at a university, Ithink we will see some really interestingpotential solutions with recombinant DNAthat could show all kinds of benefits inhealth and agriculture and other things,” hesaid. “So baby and bathwater are separate.”Henson added that he’s even guest-lecturedto classrooms of biotechnology graduate

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students at UC Berkeley.

When I described Blumwald’s research,however, Henson was skeptical. “Thebiotech solution is to change out onevariety of one crop with another singlevariety that’s somehow more adapted bygenetic engineering,” he said, while theapproach to climate change, drought andother related issues “should be about thewhole farm system.”

And that’s the major area of disagreementbetween food activists and the farmindustry: people like Henson believe theentire system of modern agriculture needs aradical makeover to rely less on fossil fuels,irrigation, and the chemical fertilizers andweed killers that are fouling water sourcesfrom the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.Tweaking a gene won’t fix all that, Hensonargues: “The solution has got to be a returnto a more sustainable, soil-focusedagriculture.”

Five years ago, Henson, OAEC, and severalother groups and individuals involved withthe GE-Free coalition partnered withorganic and family farmers to form a neworganization, the California Climate andAgriculture Network (CalCAN). Their

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intent was to involve farmers inCalifornia’s new climate-change law, themost comprehensive policy on globalwarming in the country. At the time, thegroup was also responding to Monsanto. “Itwas informed by the advertising campaignthat Monsanto was doing…around itsdevelopment of GMO crops that theyclaimed would respond to a number of[environmental] issues,” says RenataBrillinger, who now heads the group. In2008 and 2009, Monsanto placed ads inpublications like The New Yorker and TheAtlantic Monthly and on the radio programMarketplace arguing that its biotech seedswould be necessary to feed the world’sburgeoning population. “We saw a need forother solutions,” Brillinger adds.

Today, CalCAN has no formal position onGMOs, but simply says that it wants, inBrillinger’s words, “shovel-ready”solutions to deal with the drought rightnow. Most of these are about managingsoil. Rich, organic soil—the kind that canbe developed by using manure and compostmore and tilling less—holds water betterthan poor soil. In a drought, plants grown inrich soil are less thirsty; in a deluge, suchsoil absorbs and slows the flow of water,thereby decreasing flooding and erosion.

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Organic matter is also high in carbon, andstoring it in the soil keeps it out of theatmosphere, helping to address the problemof climate change itself. CalCAN hasfocused on statewide policy, includingefforts to wring funding from the Californiabudget to promote soil- and water-conservation practices and climate-changestrategies for farmers. To Brillinger, GMOresearch looks costly and difficult;managing the soil is immediate, cheap andmuch easier.

Down the road, in Sebastapol, I found asmall organic farm that made thisconvincing. Paul Kaiser drove up to meetme in front of his barn in a small greentractor, then walked me through the denselyplanted rows spanning his two acres of cropfields, filled with roughly 150 varieties ofvegetables. “We earn over $100,000 percrop acre per year,” he says. (By contrast,the average revenue from an acre ofCalifornia cabbages or cucumbers in 2012was about $6,000 to $8,000, according tothe state’s Department of Food andAgriculture.) Kaiser credits his soil-management practices for his financialsuccess.

Before farming, he worked in agroforestry,

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

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restoring fields in the tropics that were soovergrazed they could barely grow grass.To Kaiser, the question of engineering anysingle plant is unimportant compared with alarger picture involving soil, water, bees,and the various other insects and birds thatcan thrive on an organic farm and providenatural pest control. Kaiser supports the banin Sonoma County: “Unless we can provethat a GMO crop is fully safe and beneficialto everything that it touches—thepollinators, the soil it’s grown in, thewatershed and our body—we shouldn’t beusing it,” he says.

* * *

At its core, nothing about the science ofgene splicing precludes good soilmanagement and other sustainablepractices. Pamela Ronald, a UC Davis plantpathology professor, and her husbandRaoul Adamchak, a farmer and formerboard president of the group CaliforniaCertified Organic Farmers, insist that it’snot only possible but necessary to combinetechniques like soil conservation withgenetic engineering. They’ve also written abook on the subject called Tomorrow’sTable.

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Ronald argues that those who object toGMOs are focused on the wrong questions:“It would make a lot more sense to evaluateall crops and all farming practices based onwhether they are sustainable, not on theprocess of developing the seed. We knowthat the process itself is no more risky thanany other kind of genetic process.” GMcrops will never be a silver bullet, she adds,and we can’t confront a food crisis withoutalso dealing with the other shortcomings oflarge-scale agriculture. Even so, geneticmodification does offer help, and in a crisis,even a small fix can be worth a lot. Ronaldand her colleague, David MacKill, used acombination of genetic engineering andplant breeding to create a variety of ricethat can withstand the flooding that hasinundated much of Bangladesh and Indiaand devastated the rice fields, a disastermade worse by climate change. Last year,the rice was grown by 4 million farmers.

Ronald doesn’t point fingers at any oneparty for the public relations difficultiesfaced by biotech researchers. But she doesnote that the solution to a world food crisiswon’t emerge only in the lab: “There seemsto be a communication gap betweenorganic and conventional farmers, as wellas between consumers and scientists. It is

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E P

MADELINE OSTRANDER Madeline Ostrander is a contributing editor toYES! Magazine and a freelance writer based inSeattle.

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time to close that gap,” she and Adamchakconclude in Tomorrow’s Table. “Scienceand good farming alone will not besufficient.”

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SJOURNALISM

. THENATION IS

SPORTS ANTI-RACISM ACTIVISM DONALD TRUMP

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Super Bowl Winners

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T he champagne had not even dried inthe Patriots locker room last Sunday

when New England tight end MartellusBennett restated that there was no way hewould be visiting Trump’s White House tocelebrate the Super Bowl victory with histeammates. He said this even though noteam in sports is as identified with Trumpas the Patriots, because of the president’sfriendship with owner Bob Kraft, coachBill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady.When asked if he was concerned about theresponse from Kraft, Bennett said, “I’m notreally worried about that. I’m not worriedabout it at all…. It is what it is. Peopleknow how I feel about it. Just follow me onTwitter.”

Sure enough, on the lacerating, loopy, andat times relentless Twitter feed of Martellus

New England Patriots player Martellus Bennett speakswith a reporter after Super Bowl 51. (AP Photo /Gregory Payan)

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Bennett, his feelings have been crystalclear. On January 28, he said of Trump,“Surprised the president dude didn’t bancelebrating Chinese New Year inAmerica!!”

When Kanye West went through his short-lived infatuation with Trump, Bennetttweeted, “So Kanye didn’t take the time tovote. And now he holding on to Trump’scoattail like Peter Pettigrew to LordVoldemort. Kanye Pettigrew.” (Bennett,who also writes acclaimed children’s booksand is a proud Harry Potter fan, iscomfortable with a good Hogwarts burn.)

As uproar over his decision to not visit theWhite House bubbled, he tweeted, “Mediamakes me seem like I’m Katniss Everdeen.Lol.” (Katniss Everdeen, is of course theprotagonist of the young-adult HungerGames series, who leads a people’srevolution against a despotic, swinish,bizarrely coiffed despot).

Now his teammate Devin McCourty hasalso come forward to say that he will notattend any kind of ceremony with Trump.“I’m not going to the White House,” he toldTime in a text message. “Basic reason forme is I don’t feel accepted in the White

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House. With the president having so manystrong opinions and prejudices I believecertain people might feel accepted therewhile others won’t.” Patriots linebackerDont’a Hightower has also said he will notgo to the White House, saying, “Been there,done that.”

They won’t be the only Patriots players toskip, but it’s not surprising that they are thefirst. Bennett and McCourty also raisedtheir fists during the anthem during theopening game of the season, as part of thegroup of NFL players who took part in pre-game protests against racism and for BlackLives.

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provincial world of Boston sports radio tomake some kind of argument that skippingthe White House is objectionable, sincequarterback Tom Brady didn’t show up atthe White House with the team to meetPresident Obama two years ago, although itwasn’t what anyone would call a principledpolitical decision. As Deadspinremembered, “[Bennett and McCourty]appear willing to own their decision, unlikeTom Brady, who two years ago claimed a‘prior family commitment’ when heskipped the Patriots’ White House visitwith Barack Obama, and instead spent hisday working out and shopping at the AppleStore.”

While the team is a favorite of infamouswhite-supremacist Richard Spencer becauseof its identification with Trump and “greatnumber of white wide receivers,” the fact isthat this is still a team that is 67 percentAfrican American. It is also a team withwhite players like Chris Long who spokesympathetically about the Black Lives

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

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Matter protests during the season and justannounced that he will not be attending thereception at the White House.

That puts the number of players committedto skipping up to four. The question mightend up being who, other than Kraft,Belichick, and Brady, shows up at all. Thisis a president who keeps a whitesupremacist as his “strategic adviser” andappointed an attorney general who was tooracist to become a federal judge. He mockscivil-rights leaders of the past, and seems tothink that Frederick Douglass is some guyliving in the United States who “is anexample of somebody who’s done anamazing job and is being recognized moreand more.”

The Patriots will end up showing twodefinitions of patriotism on the day of theirvisit: one defined by fealty to the WhiteHouse, and another that stands up to allenemies foreign and domestic. But let thelast word go to Martellus Bennett, whotweeted earlier this week, “I’m going tospeak my mind because guess what…for alooonngg time my ancestors didn’t have avoice.… Your favorite athlete stands on hisplatform to be seen. I stand on my platformto shout. To be heard.”

Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/can-gmos-help-feed-hot-and-hungry-world/[2/9/2017 3:41:30 PM]

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DAVE ZIRIN Dave Zirin is the sportseditor of The Nation.

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Can GMOs Help Feed a Hot and Hungry World? | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/can-gmos-help-feed-hot-and-hungry-world/[2/9/2017 3:41:30 PM]