In Boulder County, Colorado, county commissioners are slated to decide whether to ban GMO crops on publicly-owned land, reports Harvest Public Media. The county started buying up agricultural land in the 1970s to lease to farmers at low cost and save it from development. Of the more than 100,000 farm acres under county control, about 1 percent is planted in GMO corn and sugar beets each year.
While a thousand acres may not seem like a lot on a national scale, the ban would carry heavy symbolic weight in a place where many organic companies make their headquarters and the alternative-health community is strong. Two of the three current county commissioners were elected in 2012 on no-GMO campaign platforms.
For many locals, the GMO debate points to a larger rural and urban divide. Mary Smith, an independent health consultant, told Harvest that as long as they’re planted with GMOs, these public lands “are not being utilized for the benefit of the people of this community. Instead they are being mined by conventional agriculture for commodity crops that are sent outside this community.”
Sugar-beet farmer Jules Van Thuyne sees things differently. “These aren’t corporate farms. These are farm families that have been here for several generations whose livelihood is very much affected by this decision,” he said, adding that a GMO ban could undermine his business. He would have to cancel his contracts with buyers, and he isn’t even sure he could purchase enough non-GMO seed.
When Harvest asked proponents of the ban what worried them the most about GMOs, they listed pesticides, the consolidation of power by agribusiness companies, and the disappearance of small farmers in the marketplace—none of which depend on whether a seed is genetically modified.
“All of those are issues in their own right, but they’re more tangentially tied to seeds that have been genetically engineered, not necessarily a direct result of the 1,000 acres of GMO corn and sugar beets on county open space,” says Harvest.
Will Toor, a former Boulder County Commissioner, would rather see people organize around better water efficiency, cleaner soil, and climate change. “Those are the interesting questions, and they have almost nothing to do with GMO or non-GMO or even organic and non-organic,” he says.