Marcia Ishii Eiteman, Ph.D.

Why do you do the work that you do?

Well, I do this work because I’ve had a lifelong passion for the environment and for social justice. And those things come together, particularly now that I have kids, in wanting to do everything I can to be sure that we have a healthy, safe, clean, sustainable future for the next generations.

What is your expertise?

I have a PHD in ecology and evolutionary biology. The focus of my research has been pest management, particularly ecological methods of pest management.

Is there a problem with our nation’s current farm policy?

I think there’s almost nothing more fundamental to our health and well-being than food: after all, it’s what we put into our bodies every day. And our national farm policy has a huge role in determining what we eat, what is grown, how it’s grown, how and where it’s sold. And that affects all of us very directly, every day that we sit down to eat.

And yes, there are serious problems with our farm policy. We’ve got a new bill every five years, but we’re still stuck in old thinking. The farm bill of today is based on thinking from sixty to seventy years ago. At that time, the government was focused, obsessed really, on just increasing yields and maximizing production by whatever means necessary. The idea was to get as much out of the soil as you can, as cheaply as possible. And that brought us great amounts of cheap factory food. But what we’re realizing now, is that this extractive chemical-based approach to farming has come at a tremendous cost – to our soil, our water, the health of our children, farmworkers and farmers too, the functioning of our planet’s life support systems (just look at what’s happening to our bees, for example).

Why is our nation’s farm policy important to average citizens who don’t live in farm country?

Well, our farm policy affects what everybody in this country eats. And so, whether you’re in a city or rural area, when you sit down to eat, that’s the result of the farm policy. And what we’re seeing today, especially in urban areas, is a public health disaster. The skyrocketing rates of diabetes and obesity, and other illnesses actually come back to farm policy and the decisions our government has made and the governments before it, as to who should grow what, when, where, how and why. Even rural families are finding it incredibly difficult to access fresh, healthy food. That’s crazy isn’t it! I have friends in Iowa who are surrounded by miles of genetically engineered corn and soy — likely going to ethanol production or industrial cattle feedlots — who say they have to drive over an hour to get to a store carrying fresh organic fruits and vegetables.

As a rule at PANA, do you avoid speaking about cancer rates for kids or any other trends like that that might have to do with pesticides?

Actually, we address that head-on. It’s vitally important for rural communities to get the full story behind the harms to kids’ and mothers’ health of chemical pesticides. These harms are very well documented in the medical and public health literature. But all too often the chemical companies manipulate the data they provide to regulatory agencies, have countless closed door meetings with regulators and present blatantly false information about their products. Farm communities have a right to know exactly what the health risks and harms of these pesticides are, so that they can make fully informed choices about how they want to steward the land.

Everyone’s eating this food. What are the dangers?

Unfortunately, there are quite a great number of dangers that come right out of the industrial-scale agriculture that we have. Basically, what we have is a chemically-dependent agriculture, and it is addicted to hard drugs. And the hard drugs are the chemical pesticides, the chemical fertilizers and the cheap oil. So almost all of us have within us a toxic soup of chemicals.

Many of these are pesticides have been linked with cancer, rising rates of hormone disruption, neurological, reproductive and developmental disorders.

We’re seeing these effects in the farmworkers who are directly exposed — and they are in the front lines, as the people who grow our food for us. We’re also seeing the harms to rural communities, who experience pesticide drift from fields into their homes, schools and playgrounds. And consumers, who are eating food laced with pesticide residues, are also at risk.

So what this is, essentially, is chemical trespass. There are no fences we can put up to keep these chemicals out of our bodies, out of our air and water. The only way to really prevent this chemical trespass is to get off the drugs, detoxify our system and move towards healthy, safe and sustainable farming systems, like organic agriculture.

In Iowa, for instance, no one swims in the ponds anymore. Pesticides are in groundwater and wells. In the Midwest, ancient aquifers are ruined with pesticides and herbicides.  What’s your take on the threat to our water supply?

Even more than food, water is essential for life. And we have mounting evidence, from the US Geological Survey and other sources, that we are contaminating our groundwater. And this is also one of the multiple ways in which chemicals are trespassing and entering our bodies.

Could you speak to the long-range sustainability of different approaches to agriculture?

Well, a couple years ago the prestigious UN and World Bank-led International Assessment of Agriculture took a long hard look at agricultural knowledge, science and technology — and its impacts around the world on food, farming, hunger, poverty and the environment. This was a massive undertaking over 4 years by more than 400 scientists and development experts from over 70 countries. I was a lead author on this report. The overarching message was incredibly simple: “business as usual is not an option.” The assessment looked at the effects of industrial agriculture — the good and the bad — and concluded that in order to feed the world and sustain essential life support systems on the planet  — in the face of climate change, water scarcity, dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, etc., we absolutely have to change what we are doing. Now.

The good news, the Assessment concluded, is that there’s another way. And the way forward is investing in ecological farming and in more locally and regionally based and equitable systems of food and agriculture.

Various policy-makers and lobbyists say what we produce is safe, abundant, highest-quality food supply at the lowest cost to our people.

Well, let’s unpack that a bit. Because that’s quite a large, bold claim. Safe? I hardly think that we can call our current food system to be safe, as we are seeing increasing cases of food contamination all the time. Just look at E-coli and the hamburger beef that is being processed through industrial facilities, and the number of recalls every year. And we are also facing the poorly understood effects of contamination of our food supply with genetically engineered (GE) organisms. Scientists are finding GE toxins in our bodies now —even in umbilical cordblood! — and no-one really understands what the short or long-term effects will be. As far as pesticides, we have enough scientific data to know that even extremely low doses or exposures to pesticides can have serious impacts, especially on infants and kids’ developing bodies. That’s why Pesticide Action Network put together a database with an easy-to-use iPhone app called “What’s on my food?” — to give consumers the information they want to have.

So “safe,” I don’t think so. Abundant? Well, we certainly have an abundance of commodity crops that are being produced in this country, namely corn and soy.

But, as to whether that translates into food is a whole other question. Basically, because we have policies that ensure massive overproduction of these crops in particular, we have cheap quality grain moving up the food chain, and that leads us to plenty of high-fructose corn syrup in our Coke, lots of soybean oil to deep-fry our potatoes, massive quantities of cheap, feedlot meat and ethanol for our gas-guzzling cars.

This is one part of what is creating the public health disaster that is now implicated with the diabetes and obesity that we are seeing.

They love to tell us it’s the lowest possible cost per-capita to Americans. Is it really the cheapest when you factor everything in?

Actually, the system we have now is one of the most costly that we could have. What people don’t generally think about, and certainly the agribusiness lobbyists don’t want to talk about, is all the other costs that are part of this food system. These include the health costs, from not only the diabetes and the obesity, but also from the rising rates of cancer and other health disorders caused by pesticides.

It’s the cost to the environment of having polluted our waters and needing to try and clean that up. It’s all the other labor costs that are borne on the backs of the farmworkers whose lives are pretty desperate, and who are daily faced with exposure to pesticides.

So, there’s a whole range of costs that aren’t reflected in the figures that the agribusiness corporations put forth, but that we, the people bear. And our environment bears. These are the broken promises given to us by the pesticide/biotech industry.

Many of these same lobbyists say organic farming is just a niche market. It cannot possibly feed the US or the world.

Well, it’s important to recognize that, for agribusiness, organic agriculture is not so much a myth, but a threat to their bottom-line. It’s also very important to know that organic agriculture is not just a niche or a marketing fad, it’s actually a well-established and sophisticated system of agriculture, based on sound science, that has proven exceptionally successful at producing abundant, healthy food, while, at the same time, maintaining the land’s capacity to sustain life.

How is it on yield? Do they compare?

Scientific data from independent researchers and universities around the world show quite clearly that organic agriculture is very competitive with conventional agriculture in terms of productivity and yields. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food recently came out with a report explaining how agroecological farming methods could double food production in the world in the space of a few years.

Is there an advantage with organic when it comes to one of the basic parts of a healthy farm, its soil?

One of the basic features of organic farming is its biodiversity and the integration of many different kinds of crop and animal systems together. And this also has a direct impact on soil quality. On organic farms, there’s a much higher level of soil organic matter. Soil rich in organic matter has a better capacity to hold onto water, retain moisture and even capture CO2 and hold it in the soil (this is called carbon sequestration). Organic farms do better under both drought and flood conditions, and are more ecologically resilient. They provide better habitats for beneficial insects and other predators of crop pests, creating the conditions for ecological pest management. All of this is a crucial advantage as we enter a period of increasing climate volatility and extreme weather events. In contrast, conventional agriculture — large monocultures of just one crop with exhausted and highly erodible soil — is terribly vulnerable to these kinds of environmental stresses. To make matters worse, it has also been shown to be responsible for upwards of 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions when you take into account the effects of land use changes driven by the conversion of forests and grasslands to industrial agriculture operations.

So, in an era where we’re looking at climate change and at the future of the planet’s food supply, organic agriculture provides one of the most robust and promising solutions.

Lobbyists say without these chemicals, two billion people would perish and America would not be able to feed itself.

Well, I think, without their products, and if we all transition to sustainable, ecological agriculture, the losses we’d see would be in the bonuses that they take home at the end of the year from their companies. The startling reality is that 70% of the world’s food is currently produced by small-scale farmers around the world. So it’s family farmers, not chemical companies, who are feeding the world.

In the end, the claims of the agribusiness lobby just come back to greed. Their corporations rely on pushing this package of products as lifesavers without which we cannot survive. But really, what’s in it for them are enormous profits, and that’s what they live by.

Who benefits from this farm policy? Why does Congress, year after year, crank out this farm bill that showers one type of agriculture with these immense subsidies?

Well, if you want to know who benefits from a particular policy, most of the time you just have to follow the money. And Congress people are just as susceptible as they’ve always been to the massive donations to their campaigns from the agribusiness lobbyists. The lobbyists are there every day in Washington, DC, writing out checks, taking legislators on fancy trips. And that’s, at the end of the day, what is motivating the people who are making our policy. In some cases, it’s actually the corporations who are sending people into our public agencies to set that policy. This is the revolving door: one year, an ex-Monsanto guy is in the White House setting policy on Monsanto’s products, and then the next year, that person is back out working for Monsanto.

But the subsidy question is not as simple as it’s often portrayed. Yes, it’s messed up — especially when large corporate farms get big checks from the government that they shouldn’t be getting. But a lot of family farmers’ survival depends on much smaller checks. Before we talk about abolishing subsidies, we need to have a serious conversation in this country about restoring farm policies that we used to have, that will give small and medium scale family farmers a fair deal; things like price floors and grain reserves to control wildly fluctuating crop prices are a good place to start.

Why would an elected official appoint someone from Monsanto to the USDA?

Well, whenever we want to look at who benefits from something in American politics, all we have to do is follow the money. And there’s a big river of money flowing right from the agribusiness lobbyists’ checkbooks into the hands of Congress and the other White House administrators who are setting the policy. Individuals in Congress depend on lobbyists’ money for their campaigns.

How do you think people from the industry, like Monsanto end up in the USDA?

Well, it’s a funny thing, because I actually have heard people in the US government talk about why they have people from Monsanto, say, setting policy that directly affects Monsanto’s products. And in their mind, or at least what they like to put forth and the argument they make is, well, these guys are already very experienced in this issue of biotechnology or in bovine growth hormone. So, we want the experts to be helping us set the policy.

But that’s a little bit like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Or an arsonist to help you set the policy on fire management. That’s what we’ve got.

Who’s not benefitting from this farm bill, in terms of what’s in the Rice Krispies and their salads?

Most Americans today are not benefitting from the farm bill  — neither family farmers who are being squeezed by the powerful agribusinesses and who are losing their farms in droves, nor “consumers” who are presented with shelves of unhealthy highly processed food-like products. And our kids are not benefitting. Childhood cancers are on the rise. We don’t exactly know why. But we do know that in almost all of us, there’s a rising level of a whole mix of chemicals in our body that shouldn’t be there. No one can tell us exactly what those mixtures of chemicals are going to do to ourselves or to our kids, but we have enough information to act, and to say no to more chemicals in our children’s bodies.

The lobbyists say that using pesticides is the most cost-effective way to grow our food. What’s your take, when it actually comes to the fact that it’s creating a dead zone?

We now have over 400 coastal dead zones, large bodies of ocean where nothing can survive. And these zones have been created by chemical nitrogen fertilizer runoff from our agricultural systems. Pesticides are wiping out amphibians in our streams and honeybees, which are crucial for pollinating major food crops. How can that be cost-effective?

Do you think the farm bill is supplying enough money to make the transition to organic?

We’re seeing a very important shift, and a small amount of money is now finally being redirected towards supporting an organic transition. But it’s nowhere near enough for the job that remains to be done.

So, you’ve been seeing these farm bills every five years showering these chemical-intensive commodity operations with the bulk of our taxpayer monies for farm. What’s it going to take to steer it in the right direction?

Well, I think we know what we really need to do to make a transition in this country to a healthy, sustainable farm system. To do that, we need good, strong leadership that’s committed to making that transition happen —  for example, by providing farmers with high quality extension services killed in state-of-the-art ecological practices, and by ending some of the disincentives that currently make it harder and more expensive to run an organic farm or get product to market and onto store shelves. Perhaps most importantly, we need to break up the giant agribusinesses that dominate the farm landscape and that make it so hard for family farmers to farm they way they want to.

What’s it like for you, hearing this mantra from the people that you deal with?

It’s very frustrating. It’s infuriating many times, when you know that things can be done differently, in a way that is genuinely healthy and good for the people. And then you hear these industry guys, repeating the same old mantra about how the world needs their products. And you know the reason they want to push their products is for their own profits. It has nothing to do with the good and well-being of the country, our farmers or our kids. So, that does really get to me. And I want to see that changed.

Being a mother?

Certainly as a mother with two small kids, I take this very seriously. I look at the planet, I look at this country and the state we’re in, and I want to see things change. And I want us all to get together to make sure that things are different for when my kids grow up and your kids grow up.

Do you feed your kids organic?

Yes. I do. We are members of a CSA, a community-supported agriculture run by a local organic farm. So we get nearly all of our produce from this farm every week. It’s wonderful to know the farmers who are growing our food, to be able to take our kids out to visit the farm, and to eat fresh, delicious produce – whatever’s in season. We have to supplement for certain things, and we don’t always have the money to buy organic at the store all the time. And so, often, we buy the organic milk for the kids because I don’t want them drinking the stuff that’s in the conventional milk. We buy the organic this-and-that just for the kids, and when we have the extra money, we buy it for the rest of the family. But, I think it’s really important both to support the farmers and to do all that I can to help our kids to grow up healthy and free from chemical pesticides trespassing into their bodies.

Do you think if there were more organic farms, it would be less expensive?

I do; and if the costs of organic certification or the challenge of getting a bank loan weren’t so high, that would also help too. The important thing is that all of us should be able to have healthy, organic food, not just a few who have more economic resources. That’s why we need better food and farm policies.

Do you think a farm bill that really served the people would make it possible for organic to be cheaper?

I think, if we really got our priorities straight, and we made the changes that we need to do, we could be doing agriculture in a completely different way in this country. We could be feeding the country with real, fresh food, family farmers wouldn’t be going bankrupt but would be thriving, our air and streams would be clean, and we could keep our kids healthy and safe. We can make this happen.

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