Subject: Where's the devastation of crop loss?--------
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 10:26:15 -0500
From: Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State
of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation
cc: Carol Browner browner.carol@epa.gov
Dear Mr. Helliker, Linda J. McElver wrote me the
following: "This past weekend I saw grapes rotting on the vines in Kern
County. I assume the grower can't afford to pick them. It disturbs me to see
waste like that. Obviously, there
is no Glassy Winged Sharp Shooter (GWSS) emergency, if grapes are rotting on
the vine. There is an economic
emergency. I for one support sustainable agriculture in America, due to the
increasing threats on the purity of produce. Ann Maurice makes some excellent
points below.
I believe it is a matter of national security, when our
basic food crops are grown in foreign countries. Obviously, the luxury wine crop is not in this category.
However, should we allow Foreign American Corporate Wine Grape Growers
put their competition of California grown products out of business?
Why should we use tax dollars to risk the health and safety of
Californians by spraying their yards with pesticides to protect the economic
growth of the wine industry here in California, when loosing some vines is not
an emergency due to the glut on the market.
Remember, the spray program was created to give the industry time to
solve the Pierce's Disease Problem, which has been around for hundreds of
years. As Ann describes below,
soil is a possible factor. Also
the variety of grapes that are disease resistant is being investigated.
We have already abandoned Kern County and will not spray there, they
have too many bugs. Where's the devastation of crop loss, there is none.
There is no justification for spray.
What's the answer for the wine industry? Get more people
to drink more wine, in a nation that alcohol is one of the greatest threats to
our youth. I saw in one study
that 50% of the high school students consumed alcohol. Cigarettes and drugs
were much lower. Is this what we want for our nation?
There's something very wrong with capitalism, when our
corporations increasingly rely on overseas manufacturing/growing and we become
a nation of importers. Wasn't
that one of the causes of the
collapse of Spanish Empire, the richest in
the world a few centuries ago? American
Food crops should be protected from overseas glut, especially when it's our
own growers moving the crop production to another nation. It's one thing to
import something that can not be grown here or to have a balance of trade with
extra crops, or to produce food to feed other nations, or to help other
nations feed themselves, but do we want all of our food imported due to
economic reasons? I believe we
need to help our farmers keep their production here, create the highest
standards for the safest and hopefully someday the best pesticide/chemical
free produce in the world."
Linda J. McElver, Canary Foundation, Inc., PO Box 3253,
San Luis Obispo, CA 93403-3253, 805 -547-1568. advocating for the needs of the
chemically sensitive, because people can be as fragile as the canary in the
coal mine. NO SPRAY, NO
ACCEPTABLE RISK, NO JUNK CHEMICAL INDUSTRY SCIENCE
Ad Hoc Committee for Clean Water
P.O.Box 484 Occidental,
Ca. 95465 707 874-3855 phone/FAX
Grape Glut Collapses Price for Chardonnay from $1800
to $125 a ton! - by Ann Maurice - Ad Hoc Committee for Clean Water.
Ripples from the collapsing grape market -- caused by
overproduction -- have hit Sonoma County. A grape glut sent prices plummeting
in the Central Valley where the "spot" price of chardonnay dropped
from $1800 a ton in 1999 to a piddling $125 this fall! (See PD, 1/12/01,
Business section E, p.1) We told them that overproduction was a bigger threat
to the industry than the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter (GWSS) they hyped up to
excessive proportions.
We all knew the glut was coming, but this hard, this
fast? Grapes hang shriveled and
dead on vines in central and southern California because there's no market.
They can't sell them -- can't compete with Australia and Chile. Who's
producing down there in South America? Our very own wine guys. The same guys
pushing policies here in California to spray the public to "save"
the wine industry, have set up competing operations overseas that undermine
the very California agricultural industry they are supposedly so desperate to
maintain. How do they sleep at night?
Are you fed up yet? Our domestic food production is going
the way of just about every other manufacturing sector in the U.S. --
overseas. Are you scared by the prospect of all our produce coming from
abroad? I am. That's the multi-national solution to our more stringent
pesticide policies -- get out of
the U.S.! Go overseas where they can trample on the locals, drench them and
their land with chemical toxins and make us eat the outcome.
These international horsetraders (our legislators) who
supposedly care so much about California agriculture, are making deals to sell
American intellectual property (like electronic engineering, patents and
designs) in exchange for agreeing to flood our markets with imported
agricultural produce -- ag commodities becoming the pawns in international
trade. Other countries will buy our technology if we buy their avocados. If we
don't buy their avocados, they won't buy our pears. Sebastopol apple-growers
can't compete with the dirt cheap apple juice concentrate imported from China.
Is the public aware of this? Hell no. Most of us don't even know what's in and
out of season anymore. It doesn't occur to us that fruits in the supermarket
bins in the wintertime are summer fruits from the Southern Hemisphere.
Who's waking up at 5 AM to watch agriculture programs?
They're dull as dirt, like "Fishing the West". But do we care about
our food? Hell yes! People don't want one ton of a kind cheap produce with no
taste or nutrition. "Organic" is on the rise. Everybody notices the
flat, bland, flavorlessness of conventional mass-produced fruits and
vegetables. When last did you swoon while spreading your lips over a juicy
ripe tomato, reveling in its smell, color and taste? Once upon a time it was a
sensuous experience. We want to go back to those days, when strawberries had
an irresistible aroma, cantaloupe flesh had a rich, warm glow, when fruits
ripened enticingly on your window sill instead of going from green to rot.
That odious mantra, "Better Living Through
Chemistry" is kaput -- dead, defunct, over; and the pesticide companies
know it. We're witnessing their desperate acts to keep up the sales of
pesticides and chemical fertilizers even though the stuff isn't working in the
long run and their house of cards will implode sooner rather than later. We're
just beginning to come out from under the chemical cloud and getting as smart
as our forebears who fought the arrival of the chemical age. Grandpa was
scared of aerial pesticide spraying and always planted according to the phases
of the moon. That wasn't "new age "woowoo". It was old age
smarts.
The Riverside County Temecula growers who first cried for
help with Pierce's Disease, are recognizing
the critical importance of the condition of their soils. They have been
essentially hydroponic farming, having planted in granitic soils with
admittedly little to no organic material. How could any plant build up an
immune system under such conditions? Those Temecula growers now have
eight-foot high piles of worm castings (worm poop that looks like deep, dark,
rich, delicious soil) and are working with "soils men", to see if
building up the soil is a more effective approach to disease cure and
prevention than the "nuke-the-bugs-mentality".
I am told that citrus growers in Ventura County last week
called fellow growers "neanderthals" who went after ants in their
orchards with Lorsban! Citrus guys tell me that you can get rid of ants with
shovels. The first year you dig them up, the ants re-build. The second year
the ants give up, get fed up, and go away. Only a farmer who loves his trees
and loves his life of farming and is a true steward of the land can find that
kind of solution. A scientist in a laboratory studying the anatomy of the
insect never will. You have to "engage" a perceived
"adversary" to understand him. You have to enjoy sitting in your
orchard watching ants to figure out how to thwart them. The farmer on the
tractor who knows each of his trees, or every cow, or every block of
vegetables is the one to bring to the discussion table. Our whole society, not
just our food producing sector, is oppressed by the "expert"
mentality, who thinks all answers are in books and whose arrogance is probably
the most dangerous ingredient in the public policy-making equation. Beware the
abstract theoretician who has never had dirt under his fingernails, like the
architect who has never picked up a hammer.
People all over the world are increasingly fed up with
our over-inflated "experts" who are the self-proclaimed protectors
of the world's food supply. Three hundred thousand souls at a seed conference
in India called the multi-national "expert" mentality with their
genetically engineered seeds the scourge, not the savior of mankind.
Our attitude towards agriculture parallels our attitude
towards health and our bodies in general. Good nutrition builds our immune
system and allows our natural, God-given bodily processes to function
properly. We don't expose ourselves in a weakened or stressed condition to
potential pathogens lest we get sick; and we don't plant highly susceptible
varietals in degraded soil in Pierce's Disease prone areas. Some of us don't
drink chlorinated water, so why feed it, for years, to grapes? How could there
not be serious adverse consequences from that practice?
The bottom line is for all of us to care more what is
happening to our food-producing land and land-management policies, and throw
the crooks and charlatans out, whether they are wearing "rags, tags or
velvet gowns"**; wingtips,
or birkenstocks. It's time to find allies among real people with real ideas
wherever we can find them, sometimes in unexpected places -- whether within
the government bureaucracy or industry or in the house next door.
** From the "old-time" nursery rhyme:
"Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town. Some in
rags and some in tags and some in velvet gowns".
Well Mr. Helliker, I recently have had several
California wine growers ask me for help in controlling their Pierce's Disease
Problem, fire ants, Black Goo and several other "unsolvable" pest
problems. While I believe that I
can safely and effectively solve these problems, I had to tell them that
according to you: "No
(unregistered) alternatives can be used in California on human or animal food
crops, only your "registered" POISONS may be used to 'protect'
foodstuffs." I believe this
to be a true synopsis, unless you have recently changed your mind and/or
policies. If you are now allowing the use of safe and far more
effective (unregistered) alternatives to actually control pest problems in
California, please let me know. Thank
you..
Respectfully, Stephen
L. Tvedten
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