Rachel Parent Recorded September 2015

Transcription

1 Rachel Parent Recorded September 2015 GMO crusader fights for kids right to know SILVER DONALD When Rachel Parent was 11 years old she had to do a speech for her class. She decided to talk about food. When she began to research the food she was eating the same food most of us eat, the standard fare of people in the industrialized world she was horrified. She was particularly concerned about genetically modified foods and by the fact that consumers don t even get to know that they re eating such foods because Canada and the United States don t even require that food with GM ingredients be labelled. She began her own one-person crusade to get those foods labelled so that people can choose whether or not to eat them. She created a website and a movement called Kids Right to Know. Since then she s reached literally millions of people around the world, speaking to enormous crowds debating business spokesman on national TV, being covered extensively in the media. Articulate and self possessed, impassioned and charming Rachel Parent has made a 1

2 remarkable impact on the global debate about the benefits and dangers of industrial food. She s 16 years old. RACHEL PARENT [01:10]: A GMO is a genetically modified organism and it s where they take DNA from one species and insert it in to another to introduce a new trait. Now of course it sounds really complicated but there in reality are only two main traits that are commercialized. So the two main traits are pesticide-producing and herbicide-resistant. Pesticide producing is where they actually insert a pesticide directly into the seed that way when a plant grows and a bug tries to eat the plant it s stomach will theoretically explode, and herbicide resistant is where the plant is engineered to withstand hundreds and hundreds of pounds of herbicides without killing the crop. I think a lot of people actually get hybridization and GMOs confused. Hybridization is something completely different. It can happen in nature [and] it s just the natural process of breeding plants, whereas GMOs is taking completely different species and combining them. So to give you an example, hybridization would be like mixing a dog and a dog whereas GMOs would be like mixing a dog and a cat, it just wouldn t happen. And what s the why, why would you do that? Well, the companies, because these seeds have been changed they can patent them and when they sell them to the farmers they can then make profits off of them. Not only do they make profits one year but the farmers can t save their seeds because they are patented and they have to continuously buy the seeds along with the pesticides, the herbicides, the extra fertilizers year after year after year making it much more costly for the farmers. So it s like a financial treadmill for the farmer. Why would the farmer do that? PARENT [02:21]: Well, there are many reasons. Some farmers are pro-biotech and other farmers are subject to crosspollination and this happens quite often. Plants in nature breed, they pollinate, bees carry pollen from one plant to another and that s how we have the plants that we have. Without pollination we wouldn t have produce, we wouldn t have our food, so naturally other farms that are non-gmo become contaminated and then Monsanto and the other biotech companies have to come in and they either sue these farmers or take away their farm and land. So that s often times what these farmers are subjected to. This is like the Percy Schmeiser case in Saskatchewan right? Touch on that one a little bit more because I think for most people this is quite outrageous, right? I mean here s Percy Schmeiser farming near a GMO field and what happens to him? Well, GMO pollen comes from one side of a different field and pollinates with his crops and of course then he ends up having to deal with the issues and getting charged for it and having his land taken away and having to go to court for it, and it s really not fair to the farmers. There s been many farmers 2

3 go through this. There was a huge issue with Steve Marsh, who s out in Australia actually, and this was happening while I was in Australia there was a huge court case and instead of suing the biotech company he decided to sue the next-door farmer and unfortunately he ended up losing. But what this did was create a huge amount of awareness about this issue, and it affects hundreds and hundreds of farmers around the world. This is no longer just an issue of Canada or the US, this is global and that s why we all have to unite to fight against it. And the farmer who s actually the victim gets sued on the basis that he is infringing the patent of the seed company. PARENT [04:59]: That he is keeping seeds without buying them. And he did nothing, right? He did nothing. You would almost think that he could sue them for field invasion or something of that kind, right? Well exactly. It seems more logical. It does, doesn t it? It s an astonishing quirk in the law that a person can be the injured party and wind up being treated as the guilty party. So all of this goes on and the benefits are that either this seed produces its own pesticide and kills the bugs or it resists a sprayed pesticide and thus survives to be harvested. But that wasn t the original promise of it was it? The original idea was that it would be beneficial not just to the company, because I mean who cares about that, but beneficial to the world, to the people. What were those benefits supposed to be? PARENT [05:53]: Well, what they originally came out and said was that it would feed the world, and that s even part of their slogan helping to feed the world but in reality this is a complete myth. GMOs aren t engineered to have higher yields and to grow faster and to be draught resistant, in fact they require more water, they require more fertilizers, they require more pesticides. That goes in to our soil, that goes in to our water, that depletes the soil of it s nutrients then people need to use more fertilizers so it s more expensive. On top of that because GMOs are grown in monoculture where it s all one crop for hundreds and hundreds of acres, it would be more easier for it to get diseases. So then farmers not only have to deal with that but they have to deal with the fact that it s more expensive for them. Are we talking here about a failure, where they set out and tried to build a beneficial seed and failed to do it, or was it ever the intention to feed the world? I don t think the intention was really ever there to feed the world because if their intention was to feed the world the world would already be fed. This company makes billions of dollars a year and if they wanted to solve global hunger, I mean they could do it like that. But instead they ve invested in trying to make these seeds patented and making them different and making sure that in the end they re making 3

4 more profits. Now one of the things Kevin O Leary basically said to you in that quite wonderful encounter that you had with him he basically accused you of not caring about feeding the world but your response wasn t even to say that Monsanto could do it, you said in effect this is not the root anyway. Tell me what the root is. PARENT [07:53]: Well the root issue is lack of proper distribution and in reality if a country wants to solve a hunger issue within their country it starts with political issues that s huge: lack of distribution, lack of proper farming and irrigation, lack of helping or teaching farmers how to properly grow their seeds in sustainable and healthy ways for our environment so that it not only is good for them in the short term but it s better for them in the long term. It helps the environment, when you help the environment the environment helps you back. But the argument on the other side would be that even with all the best farming in the world it won t be enough if you don t have engineered seeds. But your contention was that poverty was really at the heart of it, right? Yes. Poverty is a huge issue and I mean in reality even if they were sending it out to feed people, let s face it GMOs one third goes to animal feed, the other one third goes to junk food and the last one third goes to ethanol and natural gas. None of this is going really to the people who need it and even if it were available for these people to buy it, if there s an issue of poverty they wouldn t be able to afford it anyways. So in reality it s a vicious cycle and these people are actually going into more and more debt by growing these GMO seeds and a huge example of this is in India and South America. These Indian farmers are investing in genetically modified seeds because they think that the yields will be higher and people have gone in and taught them about how the yields will be amazing and they ll make more money for their families. But then they grow these seeds and they get diseases, the yields fail, pests become resistant to it and they eat all their crops and the farmers end up with nothing. And by Indian law if a farmer commits suicide the debt isn t passed on to their family. And so we ve had 250,000 farmers commit suicide and that s about one farmer every 30 minutes. So just picture that: one farmer every 30 minutes every day for the entire year and GMOs have been out 20 years now. So, I mean this is a huge, huge issue and the issue with that is that without the main farmer often times these families go more and more into debt and this is just a vicious cycle of poverty. And the same thing is happening in Argentina and South America. People are being devastated by this. GMOs are actually one of the leading reasons for why our rainforests are being cut down. So we re having natives being dislocated and we have people who are going into more and more debt and it s just increasing the cycle of poverty. The story of the Indian farmers I was aware of and the irony is that they generally commit suicide by drinking pesticides, right? 4

5 Yes. But the missing link that you ve just provided is that I didn t realize that the reason for them to do that was the debt was in effect cancelled by their deaths. And so presumably you re not getting the same effect in other countries where presumably the debt would just keep going to the families. So in a sense there s no benefit to committing suicide, it s an awful way to phrase it. PARENT [11:17]: Yes. In South America we don t see as many suicides but we do see a lot of families in poverty and they just simply can t get out. They can t afford food anymore and again, it s just ever growing poverty because of the agricultural issues and it s become so industrial but people can t keep up with it. Especially when farming is your entire livelihood, if your crops fail, you re done. So that s what they re facing. The other area where there s considerably a big issue is testing right? So tell me how this stuff gets tested and who s responsible for that and what confidence you have in the tests. Alright, so neither Health Canada nor the FDA do any independent testing themselves and I ve actually verified that with them. I had a meeting with the Minister of Health here in Canada and we did talk about GMOs and GMO labelling and the meeting went very well but during the entire thing she did say, I m not a figure head but I m not responsible for this. I don t have the mandate to be able to label GMOs. So that was of course a huge eye opener and I asked, you know, Who is responsible if you re not? and she said, Well the Health Canada officials, so she passed me on to arrange a meeting for that and But don t they report to her? I mean the buck stops with her all the same, right? Yes and no. When I had the meeting with them they also said the same thing. They said they don t have the mandate to label GMOs either. So here I am, I m sitting here kind of confused going so who does have the mandate? If our Minister of Health doesn t and the Health Canada officials and scientists don t, who does? And they said, Well maybe the CFIA, which is the Canadian Food Inspection Agency but you know they probably wouldn t want to do that anyways. So in reality our system is all based off of what the corporations want right now and that s the truth. I mean the corporations are responsible for testing and our Minister of Health said that as well. She said that it s all based on the corporation s tests, the corporations do a maximum of 90 day testing so that s three months and that s not nearly enough to say whether there s health or environmental issues that could be happening long term and there have been no long term studies to prove that they are safe, but there have been long term studies to prove that there have been associated health issues. And how does that happen that they have no health or are you saying there have been a number of 5

6 long term studies, none of which have said these things are safe, some of which have said these things are dangerous, is that correct? Yes. Dangerous in what way, what are the adverse effects? PARENT [14:18]: That they ve been linked to allergies, digestive disorders, organ damage, even things like tumours, and of course I am no scientist and we know that I m 16 I don t have a degree yet. But I think the key part is that I grew up having allergies all my life and I know so many people that have allergies and it s hard to link or to find what s causing these allergies if we don t even know what s going in to our food. GMOs could be causing the allergies but because it s not labelled you can t link it back to that and that s a key part of why we want labelling is that for everybody who has allergies or health issues it would be really great for them to be able to track what exactly their food has in it and where it s coming from. And if I try not eating this kind of food for a while and the allergy just disappears then for me anyway I ve done a satisfactory test. And there seems to be a great deal more of that kind of allergies have to be an environmental illness; they re triggered by an outside phenomenon of some kind right? That brings us then right to labelling and a way going back to Rona Ambrose and it s quite startling that nobody there thinks they have the authority to do it and I suppose it would have to be the Prime Minister and the Cabinet directing the Health Department to do it, which doesn t seem like it s likely to happen. Well speaking of politics there is a motion called M480 and that is to label GMOs, it was brought forth by the official opposition, so the NDP and their Health critic, which is Murray Rankin and he brought this forth and as soon as the elections pass by they ll being it forward as a Bill and it will to be to label GMOs. So if we can get the parties to all be on board then we could possibly have GMO labelling as soon as possible. So where are the parties on this? PARENT [16:18]: The NDP are supportive of GMO labelling. Of course the Green Party is supportive. The Conservatives they have no interest and they have a lot of lobbyists within the party. I mean even look at the environment the Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has come out and said that you know he says he spends his days trying to debunk bad things about GMOs, things that say GMOs aren t safe. Well that s not his job as an agricultural minister. He s supposed to be ensuring that they are safe for us, looking at all the evidence. So that obviously they really have no interest in labelling GMOs. And I did ask the Liberals; I asked Justin Trudeau if he would label GMOs to support our Canadian right to know and he gave a very vague response saying that of course he supports the right to know but he didn t come out and say that he would label GMOs if he came into power. So he s still in question. 6

7 Ok, so we ve got a spectrum here from no from the Conservatives, maybe from the Liberals, yes from the NDP and the Greens, right? Gerry Ritz actually, I have a quote here that I was absolutely startled by: Mandatory GM labelling is an ill-informed ideologically driven proposal that would increase red tape on businesses, decimate Canadian farmers and drastically increase costs for Canadian consumers right? Is any of that true? Of course not. A lot of people who are pro-gmo and who don t want labelling use the excuse that GMO labelling would cost a lot of money for Canadian consumers and this is completely false. In fact it would cost nothing. I mean look at when we had to label trans fats. We didn t see an extra cost. It was absolutely free and on top of that companies are constantly changing labels, new and improved, now with, omega 3 enhanced. They always have new packaging coming out, so adding an extra label costs nothing. And on top of that it s not about fear mongering or trying to scare the public into buying certain foods and not trying to buy certain foods. It s simply a reality of being able to choose as a consumer what we re putting in our bodies, because after all we live in a country where, thank goodness, we can choose our own elected officials but we can t even choose the simple right to know what we are eating. And so that s what has to change and it s not about scaring people it s just the democratic right to know what s in our food. Well you ve made the point elsewhere that this kind of label changing happens all the time and uneventfully, right, so what are they so scared of with this stuff? In other words why are they so I mean that s a really intemperate statement from [Gerry Ritz]. He s not saying, Well I don t really think so, or I don t really see it as a need. No, he s saying this is absolutely wrong on a whole bunch of levels and its quite bombastic. Why is he so fierce about it? Why is the industry so fierce about it? What are they really scared of? PARENT [19:50]: I think they re scared of their sales dropping and this happened in Europe the European Union has GMO labelling and as soon as GMO labelling was implemented people started to research because they saw the sign GMO and they go I wonder what a GMO is. So they start to research they find out more about it they find out what it could potentially do to their health, what it is doing to the environment and they try and cut it out of their diet and of course this means a drop in sales and I think what they re really scared of is they re already losing sales. Their stocks have been going down like crazy. They re stocks were at 126 they re at 85 now and they re seeing huge declines in stocks so I think the change is already starting to happen and they re becoming more and more worried about what will happen as soon as we do see GMO labelling. Do you think they re worried about that, at some point the nightmare for someone of my generation is DDT and thalidomide: those two are the big sort of scary stories. Do you think that they may be worried that there may be, not will be necessarily, but may be something like that in the offing and that ultimately they re going to wind up with people suing them for what they ve put in the food and for the impacts of it? 7

8 It s a possibility and I mean I think they re also a little nervous right now because the study from the WHO [World Health Organization] came out about glyphosate, which is the main ingredient used in their herbicide Roundup. And Roundup is used liberally on almost all GMO crops. It s huge and it s just come out from the WHO that it is a probable carcinogen and it s probably causing cancer in humans. And so now they ve really awakened a lot of people and people are starting to be more and more concerned about glyphosate and its long term impacts on us and its been on the market for 20 years now people have been ingesting this for 20 years, so what is it going to do to them in a few years down the road. So I think a lot of people are really upset about that and they re starting to really see the impacts of that. The GMOs are really glyphosate enablers right? I mean they re the things that call for and really evoke it, right? And it sounds like a really scary Tell me about the DARK Act [Deny Americans the Right to Know] because that s, again, I m really interested in this heavy resistance to doing something that seems very straight forward, you know. PARENT [22:40]: The DARK Act was put into place it was practically written by Monsanto, let s face it, and the other biotech companies and it s a lot like the Monsanto Protection Act, which was also a bill that came out a while ago, very similar. And so basically it doesn t allow a country or individual states to have GMO labelling, and it s to protect themselves because they really don t want people to be able to choose for themselves. And that s an American law that applies to the United States, right? Yes. Now on the other hand, a lot of countries you ve mentioned the European Union but there are quite a few countries now that do have this labelling right? Yes, there are 64 countries around the world, so it s huge and I mean Canada and the US are the only two industrialized nations in the entire world that don t require mandatory GMO labelling. Really. That has to say something you know. I mean just this week France banned GMOs, Russia banned GMOs, there s about five or six countries that completely banned them and they obviously know something that we don t. And so that s what we have to work towards labelling is definitely our first step. 8

9 But you re actually opposed to genetic modifications more or less across the board, right? I mean if genetic modification was good for our environment; if it didn t infringe upon nature; if you weren t patenting nature and re-changing it; I mean, if it could do positive for the world, then maybe. But at the moment it s destroying our ecosystems, it s destroying our health, other countries don t want it and I mean that s a huge warning sign. If other countries don t want it, including China and Russia, if countries like that don t want it then why are we taking it? So that s what we have to ask ourselves and is patenting nature and changing it the right thing to do? And I think it s a moral and ethical question that we all have to ask ourselves. It s a question Vandana Shiva has been very articulate about. So what s the situation with China and Russia? They ve now gone for labelling or banning GMOs? PARENT [25:10]: China is labelling GMOs and Russia just came out and banned it. Yes, what do they know that we don t? Thus far we ve been talking about plants and its major impact has been well, its entire impact has been in plants hasn t it? But now we re talking about GM animals. Tell me about that. Well a few years ago they had the enviropig. This was a pig that would produce less waste and a lot of people came out and stood up against it and we got rid of it; it never came to market, thank goodness. Now we re starting to see the GMO salmon and this is a huge, huge issue. With the GMO salmon there are so many environmental risks that could possibly ensue: like for instance, if a genetically modified salmon went out into our local streams or rivers and somehow bred with our normal fish there would be a chance of all these salmon becoming genetically modified. Now they do put them through sterilization but this only works for about 95 percent of the fish, so five percent are still fertile and that five percent can wreak havoc with all the natural fish. On top of that, they re more aggressive and they could out number the other fish. They could also go for food more than the other fish the natural fish fight for breeding spots more, so I mean there are a lot of environmental damages that could happen with this. As it happens Chris and I have done a film that you may have heard of called Salmon Wars and it s about aquaculture and open net pen salmon farming and what you ve described is exactly what we re actually seeing from the salmon that are in those pens who have been bred to been selectively bred, they haven t been genetically modified but they ve been selectively bred to prosper and thrive in this very odd circumstance and when they get out you described exactly what they do. They re more aggressive, they do interbreed, they dilute the genetic stock of the [natural fish] it s the same thing. But the GMO ones sound as though they are a much more scary kind of fish. 9

10 PARENT [27:27]: Oh they re big too. They ve been genetically modified to be growing much faster and they grow much bigger and with that of course they re more aggressive. They can fight for more food, they can fight for the breeding spots, they can kill off the other salmon, they can breed with it so then they re all genetically modified so it just it s a terrible issue to be faced with and I mean, nature is a beautiful thing, I mean we re all a part of nature it s not just the animals and the plants, every single one of us is part of a thriving ecosystem but by throwing one thing off you throw everything else off. This could affect natives, this could affect other animals such as bears who rely on salmon, so it s a domino effect. Where are we on that one? How close are we to actually seeing those salmon bred and delivered to our tables? It still has to be fully approved. It hasn t been 100 percent; it s on hold right now but it s probably pretty close and that s why it s so urgent that everybody gets out there, sign petitions, tell your friends and your family, call you local member of Parliament, get them to start discussing this issue because it really does affect us all on so many levels. So you think it could be headed off as the enviropig was, provided there was enough outrage about it? Yes. But of course pigs are sort of a little closer to us in a way; fish are, I think, for most people seem like they re cold blooded animals that live in an environment that s foreign to us and we really don t have very much in common with and its harder to rouse the troops over a salmon I think than a pig. PARENT [29:26]: I think why people are so outraged about it is more about what it could do to our ecosystems and how in the future we could have just all genetically modified salmon. My kids may never grow up with natural salmon; they may never be able to go out to a lake and see a normal, natural salmon that I would have been able to see; they ll see genetically modified salmon and I think that s really touched the hearts of a lot of people knowing that our lakes, our rivers, our oceans may never be the same again. And it s not the same as a product that got messed up and can be recalled. Once this is out in nature there s no recalling it and that s why so many people are becoming so outraged about this because yes, we may not be close with a fish, but this fish impacts so much more than just our diet. It impacts other fish; it impacts our entire ecosystem so that s really why people are outraged about it. Who s behind it, because there s a little company called AquaBounty that I think has been creating it in Prince Edward Island and growing it out in Panama. That s not a very big company but it feels like there s really big pressure behind it. Do you know anything about that? 10

11 I don t know as much as I would like to but as far as I know it is AquaBounty and of course I m sure they have the support of Monsanto and the other biotech companies, I mean they re all in it together. They may be competitors but anything genetically modified is right up their alley. So, yes I m sure that they have enough funds themselves and the support from the other biotech companies. You talk about your children and that s a nice segue in to the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is, you started on this when you were in grade six? Yes. I know you ve told the story before but would you tell me again? PARENT [31:30]: Yes sure. I had to do this speech when I was in grade six and I didn t know what to do it on and it was a class project and everybody was doing it on things like my trip skiing, my dog and how I got my dog or why I named my dog the name is has and I just I wanted to do something a little bit deeper; I wanted to do something that would touch everybody in the audience in the way that the name of someone s dog couldn t. And so I decided to research our food system. I actually had a whole list of topics that I was really passionate about ranging from deforestation to poverty, animal cruelty, and of course our food system and through researching our food system I found out about GMOs and when I found out that none of my peers knew what a GMO was and that there were so many health and environmental issues, at that point I was shocked and I knew I wanted to do something because I figured that something had to be done; someone had to do it and through realization I realized that I could be that person; I could do something and I didn t have to wait for somebody else to take action because if I waited nobody else would. So it all started with a twitter account and at first I was completely opposed to social media; I was like No everyone wastes their time on it, they just post selfies and it s just pointless, but I realized that it could be a very valuable tool to reach people, not only in Canada but around the world for support, and that s such an incredible tool that we have access to right now [and] if it s used in the right way it s amazing; it s not the solution but it can help. Then it moved on to doing a march, my first march was a Kids Right to Know march, [it] got about 400 people out, which was very exciting for a 12 year old you know, to get 400 on they re first try. A little bit before that my first speech for public was for a huge audience of 12 people and you know things just grew and grew. I was invited to speak at the March Against Monsanto there were 4,000 and then We Day, which was 22,000, then debated Kevin O Leary, which has about 5.5 million views on YouTube right now and so things just blew up and I ve definitely been blessed with this opportunity and it really touches my heart knowing that there are so many kids out there who possibly might have health issues or the environment that they live in might be effected because of this and that s why I think it s so important that people get out there and try to make a difference. There s two kind of key points there, kind of key moments there, one of them is when you realize how 11

12 serious this problem is and the second one is when you realize that you could be the person, and you re 11, you could be the person that actually does something about this. I m curious you re family is in the food business, do you think you were particularly sensitive to this because of the environment you grew up in around the non-modified dinner table? I get asked that a lot actually and not at all, honestly, I ate GMOs up until I was 11 or 12, completely. We were the typical family: shopped at Costco, eat all the samples there, you know, go there for lunch or dinner and just eat everything and I think that s why it was such an eye opener I had no clue about it before and knowing that only about 20 percent of Canadians at that point knew about GMOs was a huge eye opener because I didn t have anyone to teach me about it. And what I actually later found out, which was really neat is that my grandma in the early 1990s had been involved in trying to stop GMOs, and then that topic was never passed onto the rest of my family: we never talked about it, we never learned anything about it, I had never heard the word until I was 12, and that was simply because I decided to research our food system and it came up. That s fascinating. So it s a revelation about your own behaviour among other things, right, that you were just as much enmeshed in this as anyone else? Yes. So how come you made that second step because I think that s you know we are always being told that young people are apathetic and they don t feel engaged and all the rest of that stuff but every now and again somebody comes along who does take that extra step and says, I may not be an adult but it doesn t mean I don t have influence, authority, power, you know, the ability to make a difference. Where does that come from? Any idea? PARENT [36:28]: I don t think personally that any youth is apathetic towards any issue. I think that everybody does have a deep sense of what s right and wrong, no matter what your age. You could be three or you could be 50 or you could be 80 or 90 or 10, it doesn t matter what your age is. I think we all have a deep sense of what s right and wrong and everyone wants to make a difference in the world; everyone wants to do what s right for our planet. I think the issue is that a lot of us don t know how; don t know how to make the first step or how to get involved or they think, I m too busy, you know, you can t make a difference because, I have too much homework right now but you don t have to go out and start your own organization or you don t have to go out and sign petitions all the time. Even just making small choices from home, that makes a huge difference. Growing your own garden can change a lot of things, I mean that not only changes your diet but that reconnects you with nature and our soil and our water and what we are truly meant to do and so I think fundamentally everybody has that sense of I have to make a difference, it s just about actually getting out there and taking action. There s got to be a large component of I think, fear too. You know, I m scared that if I kind of got out in front or if I make a fool of myself and I don t know enough not to make a fool of myself, and so forth. 12

13 How do you get over that because it must still come up for you, right? [Laughter] I ve gotten to the point where I don t care what people think anymore. I do what I do and if they don t agree, they don t agree. But I mean we got so many letters of support around the world; for every negative comment we get a hundred positive comments and I think for everybody out there who may be watching this, don t ever feel like you re going to make a fool of yourself. Go out there and try something new. Try standing up for what you re passionate about because that s so key not only for yourself but for us, the future generations we have to stand up for our future because after all we may be making mistakes now in our generation but us, and the future generations are the ones who are going to have to deal with these consequences. So that s why we have to make a difference now while we still can. I often think of that that for someone my age, I don t have a whole lot I m not on the edge of the grave but I also know I ve got a lot more time behind me than I do in front of me and so I recognize that it s your generation that s really going to have to live with the consequences of what we do now and you d think it would motivate younger people as they look around and see. But it seems to drive a lot of them into a kind of a, I m too small, we can t make a difference, and so on and so forth, and I agree with you, [that s] absolutely incorrect but I can understand that. PARENT [39:45] Yes, I can totally understand it and we live in a world with so many issues right now that it s overwhelming and I think that s why people are driven into apathy and it s not necessarily apathy but it s almost like, I don t want to hear it because it s too much. I just don t want to hear it, and I ve seen that. A lot of people say, Just don t tell me what s in my food because I just want to enjoy it. [Laughter] But what they re not realizing is that every bite they take is making an influence on the world because they re not bridging the gap between where their food came from and where it was grown. Every time I take a bite of food I think about, Okay, so this had to be shipped from let s say, California, and there s a farmer there and the farmer had to grow it and if it s organic, if it s not organic, if they used pesticides, if the pesticides are contributing to the dying off of our bees and our butterflies. I mean there s so much more than that one bite of food that we take that we have to think about and I often use this line is that, Every morning when we wake up we do have an opportunity to make the world a better place or a worse place and whether that be through the choices that we make, through food or clothing, we all have that opportunity. But it s up to you to decide what side you re going to choose. So that s a key component I think. So once you ve got the ball rolling though, you ve obviously had a lot of people that have come forward to support you one way or another, tell me a little about how that works. I mean a website as sophisticated and effective as yours doesn t happen by accident. No, it started off with almost like a blog style website and through the years we ve slowly gathered small amounts of funds we re still very, very low but enough to kind of recreate our website. It still needs work but we, what we want to do is get the best information and the most information out there possible, not only about the issue of GMOs but the solutions and what each and every person can do 13

14 to get in touch with nature and to help the GMO labelling issue so that s what our whole website is built on and we ve also built up quite the social media over the past couple of years, which has been amazing. It s an incredible tool, it really is and I m glad that we have it. If it s used the right way it s amazing [but] I know a lot of people don t use it the right way and that s okay but it ll come a time when they will use it and it makes such a difference: you can contact hundreds and thousands of people in an instant and it could be in Africa, to South America, the US, anywhere and you can spread that message. When you say, we you re talking about the Kids Right to Know group, right? How big is that group? PARENT [42:50]: We have a core team of about 12 people. We re a very small organization with a big reach and yeah, so we all work on our own little parts and we all pitch in our best. We re all volunteers and yeah, it s been great. I m so thankful for all of them. It s a brilliant phrase too. I mean I think that has got to affect more or less any kid who see it, Kids Right to Know, yeah, I have a right to know. That s a motivating sort of phrase. Yeah, for sure. One last one. You ve been all over the world now and you ve met all kinds of inspiring people. Any experiences of that kind that stand out for you, that you d want to share with other people? I love Vandana Shiva and she s an incredible mentor of mine. I ve had an amazing opportunity to spend a week with her and we often speak at different events together and going to India I went there for a course of hers and it was all about earth democracy and our food democracy and really living the life of Gandhi and making a difference and I think one of the key things I learnt on that trip was that fighting for global peace is very important but the key steps to achieving that are being in harmony with our soil and our water, our ecosystems, our local communities and that s the first step to achieving peace, so that was definitely something that really stood out for me. Another thing was, another person that really inspired me was Patch Adams who I had an amazing opportunity to spend four days with him and he s an amazing guy he s so funny and what he taught us was that happiness and joy and laughter is so healing and through those four days I never felt better. He made us all laugh to the point where we were crying because we were laughing so hard and he s just an incredible person so I really held on to that throughout these years. You have a wonderful, sunny demeanour. You obviously must have resonated with someone like Patch Adams very strongly. Oh yeah, for sure. 14

15 The other thing that occurs to me from something you ve just said is we ve now done about 80 of these interviews and we ve done them with people like Vandana Shiva and we haven t done Patch Adams, but a lot of really outstanding people and if there s one figure that lies behind a whole range of them that comes up in conversations I was startled to hear it coming up again here it s Gandhi. Gandhi is just such a towering presence in so much of what s positive about the world [and] it s quite stunning. I think he s a role model for all activists. He got out there despite everything to make a difference no matter what anybody thought about him. He went out there and did his best and I think that s so key is that, yeah, individually we all have incredible power to make a difference but what he brought forth was just to try your best, and to stand up for what s right and I think that s so key because I think we re all socially responsible, we all have to become socially responsible and take action on these issues. He s left us with some lovely little aphorisms like, First they ignore you Then they laugh at you Then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. PARENT [46:51]: Exactly, and we re at the fighting stage now. They re fighting us so I guess we re close to winning. [Laughter] Rachel Parent, an internationally-recognized food activist who has achieved more in her first sixteen years than most people do in a lifetime. It turned out, however, that my excitement about understanding the suicides of Indian farmers was premature; I learned later that this terrible epidemic apparently has many causes, GMO seeds and pesticides among them. And, too often, also, the debt does survive the farmer, and lands squarely on the family. It's a complex continuing tragedy but it's heartening to see that a Canadian teen takes this faraway scourge so much to heart. If you're also concerned about our food supply, and about the environmental impact of industrial agriculture, you may want to look at our interviews with Mohamed Hage, developer of the world's first rooftop commercial farm; Brian Brett, poet and author of the book Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life; and Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya, a movement created to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, and to oppose what she calls the colonization of life itself. For The Green Interview, I'm Silver Donald Cameron. Thanks for watching. 15