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What to do about anti-vaxxers, anti-lockdowners, 5G mobile protesters and so on…

In Europe there’s a new phenomenon of groups protesting these issues, often violently. We sort of all know they are coming out of America’s far-right groups in an election year, but many people don’t really understand where they come from, what they mean or what to do about them. Most people think the only thing to do is ignore them, but by understanding them better there’s much more we can do to confront them.

Here in The Netherlands, there are groups who have appeared out of nowhere, and members who have been identified as cocaine users and people previously involved in violence related to football (soccer) matches. They don’t really have any spokespeople or figureheads, not a lot of organization or public debates on their issues and in general not a lot of sense in what they’re doing. They are well enough organized to apply for demonstration permits and pay fees, and estimate the number of people attending, but otherwise don’t seem to have the backing of any known organization. In general, they just seem like they’re out for a fight with the police. In a small country like The Netherlands, this really stands out. It’s not like they can just be strangers from ‘out of state’. They have to be locals, and someone should know who they are and where they came from.

The mainstream press, especially English language, is also playing a role here. The BBC for example had a sort of spooky infomercial article on this, with very little real news, but rather a video with strange people saying weird things, and completely lacking any point. This kind of article just gives legitimacy where there was none before. A local news website that mostly has translated news from Dutch outlets, had an article highlighting the difference in childhood MMR vaccination rates between 2019 and 2020. The suggestion was this was an indication of the anti-vaccination trends in the country, but what the article didn’t say is there was no MMR vaccination program in the country before 2019, as is the case in a lot of places outside of the US. There is also simply no need for an anti-vaccination movement here, because there are no mandatory vaccinations. The article also said the parts of the country where the vaccination rates were the lowest were the most religious, as if the people choosing not to get vaccinated were the least educated or most abnormal. It was a completely misleading cooked-up article, either a paid placement or someone completely unfamiliar with the topic just blindly translating a misleading press release.

The Difference Between Organic and Artificial Movements

The Black Lives Matter is a good example of an organic movement. It’s clear what the issues are, and there are sympathies worldwide. It comes from unarmed black people being killed by police, and the demands are clear. There are large numbers of people speaking very clearly about it on social media as well as the mainstream news. Disagreements that may exist in the movement are minimal and unimportant. There are also clearly no overriding business interests behind this movement.

Vaccinations, 5G mobile services and covid-19 lockdowns all have business interests behind them. I think most people would agree that none of these are really interesting enough to go out and demonstrate over, and hardly interesting enough to even have a discussion about them. In fact, if we have any position or opinion about these issues at all, it probably comes out of statements made by other people, and we probably take issue with some of these statements.

The fact of the matter is it costs huge amounts of money to ‘create’ movements like this, something only a billionaire could afford. It costs money to pay for misleading press releases, to create and run organizations that appear out of nowhere. You have to pay for lobbyists to cause politicians to react to the issues, for people to give misleading information on social and mainstream media, pay for trolls to disrupt constructive exchanges on social media, and so on. This is really a major amount of money, especially when you consider this is not just limited to a single country but movements being created worldwide.

Consider Vegetarianism as an Example

I think most people now know every vegetarian is different, with different reasons for not eating meat. Some are vegan, some eat fish on Fridays, some eat meat once a month or only at restaurants when they eat out. As long as someone considers themselves a vegetarian, they are. Furthermore there are no health risks, and as long as you are eating a fairly normal and varied diet, there is no risk of deficiencies.

As a vegetarian now for about 40 years, I’ve really seen the issue evolve quite a lot. If you’re young and reading this, you probably missed a lot of this. At the beginning it was more about needing to remind people, because the concept was a little bit new and there was some confusion. When someone gave you food, it was always necessary to look at it carefully to be sure. There was also the discussion of chicken broth in otherwise vegetarian soup and so on. For a long time it was always necessary to pay attention to quantity, because if a nicely prepared vegetarian dish is present in an otherwise all meat buffet, there often won’t be enough left for the vegetarian if others go first. It also isn’t possible for example to have a nice meal only eating a salad made from iceburg lettuce, and there needs to be a little variety and some starch or vegetable protein. Some people took this to mean all vegetarians were hostile, picky, greedy and wanted non-vegetarians to be forced to eat vegetarian food.

At some point there were enough vegetarians the meat industry started to notice. There’s big money in meat, and a drop in consumption of even a few percent gets noticed quickly. The food industry started investing in everything I mentioned above, like lobbyists to influence food policy, food pyramids in school to teach school children that meat and diary were some of the most important things to eat. There were ads on TV, and later on the Internet. Organizations popped up out of nowhere supposedly promoting vegetarian food, but actually just furthering the divisions and misinformation that already existed. It became necessary to establish exactly what kind of vegetarian each was, and it became impolite for example to not provide fish to a vegetarian who expected it, or eggs and dairy to a lacto-ovo vegetarian.

Now, thankfully, we are at a more normal situation with vegetarians. Vegetarians are free to choose what they do and don’t eat, and to be vegan if they want Most people understand it’s acceptable to serve vegan food to someone who says they’re vegetarian, or an all vegan meal to a large group of people when many dietary preferences have to be taken into account. Meat eaters are allowed to enjoy an occasional vegetarian meal, if they want. Living in The Netherlands where a great deal of the world’s meat is produced, I can also say people eating less meat has had a major impact on the environment. The long term damage of past meat consumption is also very visible here.

Anti-vaxxers, anti-lockdown, anti-5G mobile services

So back to the main point of this post. Why are these things an issue, and why are billionaires spending money trying to bring these things forward? The reason is there are financial and political issues behind them, and they are trying to create confusion and make anyone who may have legitimate arguments against them to seem like crackpots.

What can we do about them? There is a very simple answer to this. We can work backwards from the confusion they are trying to create, then understand what the underlying issues are and start a dialog over the real issues. Instead of the 40 years it took the world to do this over vegetarians, we can work together to do this in a far shorter time for vaccinations, the covid-19 lockdown and 5G services. If as a society we can be more effective at settling these issues based on truth, we will eliminate the reason for billionaires to cause this sort of disruption with fake news in our democracies. Indeed, if we learn how to work backwards from the issues billionaires try to create in this way, we can make it counter productive for the billionaires to try in the first place.

Working Backwards

Here are some of my ideas for working backwards from these issues. If you think I’m wrong, or extreme or whatever, rather than marching off in a huff I challenge you to do your own research and come up with your own ideas. Here are some of my thoughts.

Covid-19 Lockdown: Ending the lockdown benefits large companies depending on cheap labor the most. It’s also the billionaires who’s money is invested in these companies, who are both benefiting the most from the current government bailouts as well as have the most to lose from a prolonged downturn of the economy.

5G Services: Mobile services have become too cheap to be profitable. In order to be profitable a mobile subscription has to cost at least about $12/month. Companies that offer cheaper subscriptions are often doing so at a loss, hoping to keep you as a customer for future more expensive services. For example, I have a 4G subscription costing about $5/month with a reasonable package of calling and data. When 5G becomes available in my area, they are going to have to offer a lot more than a faster data connection and a larger package to up-sell me.

5G antennas are very large and ugly, and must be placed closer together than 4G. Setting up the system is very expensive, and requires a lot of energy and finite mined resources. I don’t think it’s very sensible that governments are allowing such a system to be built and clutter the landscape, as long as 4G continues to work well. At least at the moment, I’m not able to see any added value of 5G.

Vaccinations: Just like everything else in the world, all vaccines are different. There can be different reasons to be concerned about safety. There are many different ways of creating vaccines, including GMO and synthetic biology techniques, and there are different reasons for being concerned about the safety of these techniques. There is the much discussed issue of herd immunity, and many vaccines won’t work on their own but require some existing herd immunity. Does this mean the vaccine is faulty? Is it really the responsibility of the rest of us to provide this herd immunity for the vaccine manufacturers?

Many vaccine programs started in the 1960s. What have we learned? Are the vaccines given then still necessary today?

What about the survival rate for diseases like German measles? We know the basic method for treating a Covid-19 patient. Can these methods be used for measles patients, and will this bring the fatality rate down near zero? Clearly the measles vaccine isn’t working properly, because we still have outbreaks, and people who are vaccinated still contract the disease. Would we be better off if everyone was allowed to contract the disease as a child, and stop with the vaccinations? Why or why not — in detail please?

The issues surrounding vaccines are so varied and complex, there’s much more than I can go into here. The subject deserves open discussion, and those who want to discuss it deserve more than just to be shouted at and called an anti-vaxxer. It’s not just an issue for scientists, and the rest of us just have to trust what they say. This is a topic that needs to be explained in a way everyone can understand it, and from an independent perspective. Everyone needs to make their own decisions.

The same rules apply to comments on this post as others. In general everything goes, except spam or attempts to intimidate others. This is especially true when it involves repetition.

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A Seed for Change

Starting with the economic crisis of 2007-2008, Alex Ikonomidis wrote, produced, directed, shot and edited the film A Seed for Change. In total the film represents 7 years of work. It’s a very good representation of the seed movement of the time, with it’s passions and motivations. It includes interviews with some of Europe’s most important figures.

Alex has now released the film for everyone to view. On his website linked to above is the film with subtitles in 4 different languages; Greek, English, French and Arabic.

I hope readers of this blog will consider making a donation on his website.

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EU Plant Health Reg. 2016/2031

This new regulation came into force 14 December 2019. As of this date all plant reproductive materials that aren’t accompanied by a phytosanitary certificate will not be allowed into any EU country. The major exception to this is, maybe, in some countries, it will be allowed in passenger hand baggage, in ‘small quantities’.

This is a major problem for biodiversity conservation efforts in the EU. Since mostly it’s illegal to sell biodiversity related materials within the EU, importing it is one of the only options. Even if someone were to make the argument that plant materials are available in the EU, it’s often the case that specialist materials must be sourced abroad.

Understanding Science

Like with any measure along these lines, there’s lots of talk about science. As is also often the case, there’s precious little that is clear about what the underlying science really is. This video is a good example of what I found. Basically, plant diseases are bad, and trust me I’m a scientist. I’m not able to find any rigorous or clearly understandable arguments on why this regulation is necessary or what it hopes to achieve.

The targeted plant diseases seem to mostly already be established in Europe, and so would also spread from seeds distributed within Europe. I haven’t seen any clear or credible explanation as to why blocking foreign sources of these diseases would help tackle the problem. While still doubtful, a total quarantine might be a credible solution in some cases, but we live in a democracy and don’t have measures draconian enough at our borders. The EU also prides itself on it’s open internal borders. Besides, if you’re letting travelers carry plant materials in their luggage, how can you argue that keeping out plant reproductive samples sent by post could be effective?

The traditions of carrying plant materials when you travel, or farmers and plant breeders trading with others in different countries, has been around almost as long as civilization itself. How can you argue that now it’s suddenly a special problem?

My Own Experiences

I’ve certainly seen some signs of imported plant diseases in my garden. For example, I used to grow a lot of garlic, and like other plants that are cloned rather than propagated by seeds, viruses are common.

I used to grow rye grass, and had some ergot fungus that was probably introduced by the seeds. This is not so much a problem for the plants, but is poisonous for people who eat the grain. It’s easy to identify and remove by hand. Other than this, I’m not aware of any seed borne pathogens introduced into my garden.

All of these are fairly common and not serious pathogens, and not likely to leave my garden except for people I may share my plant materials with. It’s hard to understand why it would be a concern for anyone else. Anyone who wanted to avoid the pathogens would easily be able to.

Comparing it with Human Diseases

As I’m writing this a corona virus is spreading from China. It’s obvious why this should be a special concern, and why we would want to try to stop the spread. Likewise, there may be some plant pests we would want to try to control in a similar way.

Just like it’s not possible to lock down the entire world over the corona virus, or restrict people’s movements in general to prevent the spread of diseases, it doesn’t make sense to stop all movement of plant materials over fear of spreading diseases.

A much better solution is to raise awareness of plant diseases, and measures that can be taken to control their spread. If there are specific concerns over specific types of plants, these can be inspected, treated or rejected at international borders. If a true emergency exists, appropriate measures can be taken. If regional concerns exist, for example concerning a regionally important crop, these can often be locally addressed.

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EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy

Almost everything wrong with biodiversity conservation comes down to the EU Biodiversity Strategy. The EU Biodiversity Strategy is reflected in the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), which is the privatizing of life on the planet and the individual genes inside every living organism. This is the very heart of the reason why biodiversity continues to decline all over the world, an issue closely tied to climate change.

The Rush for Ex-Situ Storage, Classification and Gene-Mining

The EU has invested huge amounts of money and political capital into squirreling away all of the worlds genetic resources into storage in places like the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard. Not only are these seeds no longer available in a practical sense anymore, but this has come at the cost of destroying most other conservation efforts.

With seeds coming out of the seed vault in Svalbard being for sale, this has created a very strong business model for destroying other seed collections around the world. For example taking over the US based Seed Savers Exchange, or the bombing of the Iraq seed bank during the Golf Wars, in an apparent effort to leave Iraqi farmers dependent on other seed sources.

Initiatives like the Open Source Seed Initiative and new rules for organic certification have left the genetic conservation movements in the US and Europe in total disarray. They have imposed genetic tests and written contracts where there were none before, and created distrust between almost all parties.

If you’re going to sell biodiversity, you work with a mentality that says everything has to be identified, documented, traced and owned. If some part of it is to be sold, this has to be quantified, and the buying party needs to be able to negotiate the price and have the opportunity to choose a cheaper alternative. This is completely at odds with how conservation efforts have traditionally taken place.

This mentality creates a ‘rush’ for the magic gene that everyone wants and is willing to pay for, which has nothing to do with conservation of biodiversity. This generates a huge and unmanageable administration, and lack of clarity as to how genetic material can be traded or sold.

This way of thinking is everything the seed saving and biodiversity conservation movements stands against. Traditionally the movement of seeds has followed the movement of people around the globe. People took seeds with them when they traveled, and farmers around the globe traded seeds with one another. The CBD effectively strips the right of people and farmers to spread biodiversity in this way, leaves everyone dependent on official and documented sources of seeds, that can only be moved across borders with permission and for a cost.

Failing Genebank Maintenance and Reproduction

The cost of maintaining a genebank is very high. There are many cases in history where decisions have been made to allow genebank materials to die. This was because it was too costly to maintain, the material did not represent a profitable investment and because the material could still be used for research and a source of genes for genetic engineering. For example the IRRI has allowed many of it’s rice accessions to die. Another example is the small number of bean accessions in genebanks worldwide, because in the 1970s beans were determined to not be profitable enough to maintain so many varieties, so a large number of stored varieties were destroyed to save money.

Even though the seed vault in Svalbard has been presented to the world as a safe place for our world’s biodiversity, there are signs some of the material is dying, and it’s probably a logical conclusion that this was planned from the very beginning.

There are recent reports from users of genebank materials that they are not being reproduced correctly. Very cheap and low quality methods are being used to propagate samples, that are not true reproductions of the original materials. In addition, since the materials are not being maintained in their natural environments, they are not being kept up to date for diseases and changes in climate.

Many of these problems had been avoided in the past with many independent genebanks maintaining duplicated materials. If independent genebanks have different conservation methods, the chances of important materials being lost to a single failure is much less.

Undemocratic Playground for the World’s Wealthy Families

The names of wealthy American families appear all over issues of biodiversity. Rockefeller, Goldman-Sax, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, just to name a few. In Europe members of royal families are often involved in biodiversity issues.

Many of these wealthy families and individuals put themselves in the media spotlight, for example with pictures taken with attractive and genetically diverse melons, and other fruits and vegetables. The Bill and Melinda foundation isn’t shy with their gene drive technologies, abusing their relationship with the CBD, and trying to push through approval for environmental deployment of this.

Not just the big names, but the presence of money is undeniable. Well funded university programs, well known and funded charities like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are heavily involved. Well funded lobby organizations are active in Brussels and elsewhere. All of these organizations represent their big donors, and are completely unresponsive to civil society. There is virtually no civil society representation when CBD issues are dealt with.

Fake News and Misleading Claims

Almost everything in the current EU biodiversity strategy is based on either fake news or misleading assertions that somehow privatization is going to solve problems that it can’t. For example, even though we live in a world that produces twice as many calories as it needs to feed itself, there’s the suggestion that we need to grow ever more increasing amounts of food, because not only is the world’s population increasing but it’s demanding more meat. More recently, the suggestion that because people are more healthy and sometimes overweight, more calories will be needed to provide healthy diets for them.

There is also the suggestion that somehow creating a seed vault like the one created by the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Svalbard, privately owned, is somehow a benefit to mankind. This is a business venture, designed to make the world dependent on the genes owned by the Crop Diversity Trust, and has nothing to do with biodiversity.

Before this vault was created, the sharing of biodiversity worked on the principle that biodiversity was a commons. The maintenance of collections had to be paid for by the agricultural companies that profited from it and with public funds, but everyone had access to the materials because it was a public commons. This wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was something everyone could agree on and generally worked. It only became a problem when those behind the current EU Biodiversity strategy decided it was a problem, and saw the opportunity for a more profitable arrangement.

There are many more claims like these. There is simply no good science behind any of them. They are simply fake news with a lot of money behind them to promote them.

Patents on Life

The CBD makes patents on life possible. An unintended consequence of this are patents on conventionally bred seeds. According to the supporters of the CBD, patents on conventional seeds are the only problem, but this is not true.

The EU implementation on patents covering life is very undemocratic and causes problems for everything from medicine to agriculture. By design it’s ‘immune to political interference’, with the EU patent office even existing outside the physical control of the EU.

There needs to be an end to all patents on all forms of life, not just for conventionally bred seeds. The issue of patents and the systems behind them need to be addressed in a more democratic way.

Protocols Behind the CBD

Beyond the treaty itself there are also some very important protocols, the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols.

The Cartagena protocol deals with biosafety and for example the release of microorganisms into the environment. This has been in the news recently because the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is basically using this protocol to justify the public acceptance of it’s gene drive technology. Obviously the world needs something to regulate this sort of thing, but it needs to be done in a more democratic way and not just to push through and justify public acceptance of unwanted technologies.

The Nagoya protocol deals with the transfer and sale of genetic material. This protocol is currently causing a crisis in everything from agricultural biodiversity to natural science museum collections to health care and vaccine research. It creates a system to transfer genetic material that’s so complicated that not even experienced lawyers can sort out the contracts. Violating this protocol is potentially a crime punishable by incarceration, and the solution for these problems as presented by the backers of this protocol is to trick people into signing a contract promising to share the materials with others regardless of the consequences. This protocol is currently the biggest threat to biodiversity.

Biodiversity Movement Restrictions

While most common plant seeds represent very little disease threat, there are restrictions on the movement of all plant material in the process of being imposed internationally. These restrictions require unreasonable administration, and effectively prohibit the international transfer of plant materials for people and small businesses.

These restrictions have the mentality that a disease exists independently, is bad, and must be identified then quarantined or destroyed with chemicals. This mentality is only compatible with conventional industrial agriculture and will wreak havoc with initiatives relating to organic agriculture or biodiversity.

Interestingly, there is one major exception. Travelers can carry anything in hand baggage. This exception makes a mockery of the whole meaning of these restrictions.

These measures effectively prevent gardeners and others working with biodiversity from ordering any materials online or trading over the Internet. This is critical to be able to do in the modern world, and in order to work with biodiversity.

Our House is on Fire!

The EU biodiversity strategy and the Convention on Biological Diversity have nice names, but are directly responsibility for destroying a great deal of the world’s biodiversity. As a matter of urgency, major changes are needed. There are a lot of people currently working hard on these issue with good intentions, but major structural changes and a general change of direction are needed.

It’s time for politicians to take the matter as seriously as climate change. It’s time to stop denying the battle to save biodiversity is being quickly lost, and that a different approach is badly needed.

The EU should abandon the CBD, with the possible exception of provisions prohibiting the release of potentially dangerous organisms into the environment (i.e. Cartagena protocol), but then this has to be made more democratic.

The pretense that in order to save biodiversity you have to privatize and monetize it is seriously flawed, and has caused serious damage to existing conservation networks around the world.

Major investment into biodiversity is needed, but not to squirrel it away into centralized collections with conditions for use that make it inaccessible to most people. Before any investment can make an impact on biodiversity conservation, the basic principles of the CBD must first be abandoned.

Compensation should be made available for those whose work has been disrupted or destroyed by EU Biodiversity policy.