Badlands Journal

Badlands Journals  Bill Hatch  June 23, 2003    GMO Corn Dumped In Front of Steffens’ Home    A group of around 50 people, several of them farmers, gathered Monday afternoon in Sacramento across from the home of Lincoln Steffens (now the Governor’s Mansion Museum) and performed a ritual painstakingly negotiated with police, and, after a speech, dumped several bags of genetically engineered corn on a tarp spread out on a strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the curb of I Street several yards from the 16th Street intersection.  The ritual dumping was the protest of the National Family Farm Coalition against the conference being held in town, under the auspices of Californian Secretary of Agriculture, Ann Veneman, for agricultural ministers of the World Trade Organization to push for world acceptance of US agricultural biotechnology, a science in which several corporations, notably Texas-based Monsanto, are heavily invested.  The high priest of the ritual dumping was George Naylor, an Iowa corn and soybean grower and president of the coalition. Press agents for the event had been working the working press meandering through demonstrations all day to insure good coverage of the statement.

Sacramento Demonstration Against World Trade Organization Meeting

It was a cool day for summer and at first I thought there was an unseasonable fog bank over Sacramento as I drove down from the foothills. But, when I reached the county line, I saw it was brown. Walking toward the Capitol, where about 2,500 demonstrators against the World Trade Organization agricultural ministers’ meeting were gathered, I noticed, through the brown smog, helicopters dodging among tall bank buildings, like hawks among houses of cards.

Although I didn’t associate the demonstrators with the capitol, I enjoyed the social disjunction and was amused watching an overweight legislative staffer wend his way through the crowd, babbling cynically into his cell phone. I worked in the capitol before the invention of the cell phone. Later, I lived in Mendocino County, took an interest in the Timber Wars from Redwood Summer in 1990 to my arrest fro trespass at Headwaters in 1995, so the crowd looked to me as normal as a north coast Saturday night dance. And the cops looked as normal as martial law in Round Valley during the manhunt for Bear Lincoln.

The banners behind the speakers sported Rasta colors -- green, yellow, red -- and the signs were suitably belligerent to the situation: Globalization is a fraud, Corporate Agribiz=Poison for Profit, I was arrested for peace, The Christian Right and the Business Right: An Alliance Made in Hell.