Hawaiʻi Hosted 1,141 GE Field Tests to California's 172

0:00 Host: Let's give you a thank you to the chefs and all of her helpers. They're in the back there. Yeah. I also wanted to thank all of our sponsors, Center for Food Safety, Hawaii Farmers Union, the County of Hawaii, CTAHR, and Sustainable Island Products, the Waterman, Kohala Center, OK Farms brought that great hot coffee, Island Naturals, and all of our great presenters.

0:47 Thank you this morning.

0:48 Ashley Lukens: So aloha, my name is Ashley Lukens and I'm the director of the Hawaii Center for Food Safety. I also wanted to start with a few mahalos. First and foremost to Jackie and her team of amazing daughters, the Silversteins. Cherub is a very dear personal friend of mine and has been a part of my personal journey for a long time. I'm from suburban Houston, Texas, and Cherub grew up in Puna, so our childhoods were a lot alike. And I've spent a lot of our relationship kind of just in

1:37 awe of her connection to nature and the food system. And I think that connection that I've seen in her and her childhood, the way she was raised, has been a real point of hope and inspiration for me as a mom and thinking that I can also raise my daughter to really connect with the ʻāina in that way. So thanks, Cherub, for inviting me here. Cherub was also one of the instrumental people to help me kind of just map what was going on on Hawaii Island when we decided to open an office. And it was instrumental to the work that we're doing here and the partnerships

2:18 that we have. And then I also just wanted to shout out Vince Mina because early in my career, I was asked by Whole Foods to give a talk on Maui with a filmmaker Bob Bates who did a really great short movie called Ingredients Hawaii and Bob's like oh before we do the talk we're gonna go meet this farmer in Wailuku and he's doing this really cool urban farming project of course city girl I'm like oh Wailuku like there must be really tall buildings and a subway system and Vince started talking to me about soil. And this was maybe six years ago.

3:06 And I remember thinking, like, this guy is kind of crazy. Like, why does he keep talking about soil and the relationship between soil and the body? And through my work here in Hawaii, I've learned what a visionary Vince was, in my life at least. and now I mean I think we're all sort of standing in reverence to the complexity of what's beneath our feet and kind of realizing that all we thought we ever knew was just scratching the surface of what's happening and so I feel like I'm excited about all of you and those weird things you're going to say to me

3:48 today that five years on I'm going to be like wow they were really right My job, which I often call a dubious honor, is to do a little bit of the fighting. The Center for Food Safety is kind of deeply embroiled in the debate in our state around genetic engineering and pesticides. And that debate, that fight, I actually gave a talk on Kauaʻi last week, and there was a fight. So is incredibly draining sometimes. And you think about that reservoir within yourself that like inspires you to keep doing what you're doing every day.

4:34 And a lot of that reservoir is fed by what you guys are doing. And that's actively cultivating the alternative. And I don't think I could get up and do what I do every day and fight against, you know, just the newest iteration of industrial agriculture in Hawaii. If I didn't know that there were people on the ground investing their lives, investing their money, investing their families in actively building and creating a form of agriculture that honors the past and is really something that we feel proud to give our children in the future. So my final mahalo is to you

5:15 because you're the bright spot. You're the thing that's really symbolic and powerful to me, so thank you. So you've heard a little bit about me. The only reason why I'm doing this tour is because I want to circulate my headshot statewide, so now you all can just look at me. I have two different hairstyles, as you can see. So me. A lot of this debate around genetic engineering sometimes gets reduced to ad hominem attacks, right? Attacks against people. So I thought I'd share a little bit about who I am,

5:54 why I'm in this. I'm originally from Houston, as I said, but I spent most of my childhood in a rural town north of Houston called Montgomery. Incredibly rural, one grocery store on a big lake. I spent most of my days in the woods wandering alone. And I came to Hawaii interested in working on the food system in some way. And I started to kind of see the connection that food had between people, the economy, the environment. And it seemed like this really great, interesting space where people were engaging and affecting change in their everyday lives.

6:45 And through that, I started doing some what I call recreational lobbying at the legislature. And like all recreational activities, it was really fun. And I learned that there's this thing, this GMO debate, that was dividing the legislature. But I wasn't really, that wasn't what I was into. I wanted to see the state advance policies and programs that would help increase the production of local food and also increase access points. So that's how Vince and I originally met. I mean, I wasn't even working on GMOs. We were talking about let's support local food producers. We all hear the statistic.

7:25 We import a lot of our food. It's a problem. It's not sustainable for our economy. It's not sustainable for our environment. It's extracting wealth from our communities and our land. But when the Center for Food Safety came to Hawaii, they tapped me to become their inaugural director. And originally, I didn't want to get involved in the debate. I felt like I didn't, at that point, have a huge, I didn't have huge skin in the game on whether or not the technology of genetic engineering was a problem. It just wasn't something that got me really passionate.

8:01 I didn't really understand what was happening on all the different islands. And I was like, oh, it seems like really divisive. I want to work on the alternatives. I want to work on what's actively promoting the good things we all care about. And I had the opportunity to go to Kauai and visit with some moms who live in the community of Waimea. And there was a mom who approached me and told me the story about her seven-year-old daughter. I have a six-year-old daughter.

8:39 And she said that every day she sends her child to a preschool that literally shares a fence line with one of the large multinational agrochemical companies in our state. and then on a regular basis she picks her child up and her child smells like chemicals and she knows that her daughter is going to go to high school or to middle school at Waimea Canyon Middle School a school that's been evacuated two times because of pesticide drift um and I thought about myself I live and again in urban Honolulu I send my daughter to school

9:20 every day and I thought to myself, well, what would I do if that was happening? You know, what, would I step out of the debate or would I step in? And I started to really think about why people are stepping into this conversation. But in order to step in, in a way that I felt comfortable with, I had to do my due diligence. I had to do my research. And so this report is in some ways that process of learning for me. I wanted to figure out, you know, what is this industry that's emerging across our state? What are they doing? What's going on? Is it about the papaya?

9:57 Or is it about something different? Why are young mothers at the face of this fight on the streets, but when you get to the media, their stories are absent? Like, what's going on? So I'm going to walk you through some of the key findings of the report. I've learned over the past couple weeks of presenting this material that people really want to know where we got our data from. And so we're looking at three important publicly accessible bodies of data that ground this report. One is the economic stats released by the seed industry themselves on their footprint

10:37 in Hawaii, jobs, acreage, et cetera. The next is the USDA reporting system for GE field tests. So if you're going to develop a new variety of genetically engineered corn or soy, you need to register that with the USDA. So we really took a look at what kinds of genetic engineering are happening here in our state. I wanted to figure that out. And then we also looked at the pesticide use data that has been released on the island of Kauai through two citizen-led efforts. One is the effort for community members in Waimea who sued DuPont Pioneer because of property damage.

11:19 And through that litigation, there was discovery released which gave us access to the spray logs of DuPont Pioneer. So we look at that spray data. And then we also look at the Kauaʻi Good Neighbor Program, which is a voluntary disclosure program only on the island of Kauaʻi, where companies that purchase over five gallons of restricted use pesticides have to report on a monthly basis what they're spraying. That is the only restricted use pesticide application data that we have. Currently the island of Kauai is the only island that publishes that data to the public.

11:54 So that's the kind of data set that we're working with. And then we also spent a lot of time digging through medical literature. I wanted to see what doctors had to say about pesticide exposure. there's oftentimes a question about who has the right forms of expertise to weigh into this debate. Do you have to be a biologist? Do you have to be a scientist? And for me, I realize that the only experts who can help explain to me what happens when a chemical like chlorpyrifos enters into your respiratory system is a toxicologist, a medically trained doctor. So I wanted to move

12:33 away from the literature I think that's been cited about whether or not GMOs are safe to eat. And I wanted to say, what does the literature tell us about exposure to pesticides? We rely on over 150 peer-reviewed medical studies on pesticide exposure. And we really focus in on the chemicals that we know are being used in our state. So without further ado, our key findings. Oh, as an aside, we're passing around a sign-up sheet, not an obligation, but it really helps us with our reporting. If you fill out your name and let us know where you're from.

13:09 And then we also have copies of the report and an infographic, I think, in your bag. But we have more materials in the back. So our key findings. The first thing that we learned is that the GE seed corn industry is rapidly expanding across our state. It's actually grown in terms of acreage 10 times since 1982. And while the seed corn industry has expanded, the amount of acreage devoted to diversified agriculture, not including pineapple and sugar, has declined by more than 50%. So right now the seed industry occupies about 25,000 acres across our state of prime cultivated ag land.

13:56 Compare this again to fruit and vegetable production, 12,500 acres. Why? Well, a lot of these companies are taking over land that was formerly dedicated to other export-oriented commodity crops, namely sugar and pineapple. So they're taking over that land. They're taking over that infrastructure. We all know a lot of our water is diverted to old sugar and pine land. And the state actually is actively encouraging the industry. So they're directly leasing land to the seed companies to the tune right now of about 6,000 acres. Our tax dollars also subsidize these state leases.

14:38 For anybody who was awake last fall and you saw the vote no against the farming ban commercials, there was a lot of rhetoric about the contribution that the seed industry has to our job pool, but they actually only employ about 0.23% of all jobs in Hawaii. So it's not a labor intensive form of agricultural production. But we do know that they employ high percentages of people in certain niche communities. So Molokai and Waimea, they play a primary role in those communities in terms of providing jobs.

15:26 So what are they doing? Industry rapidly expanding across our state, taking over older commodity crop leases. A lot of people ask me, you know, is the corn that I'm buying in the grocery store what's being grown here? Or are we growing the seeds that are grown in Iowa? Because it's safe there, so why shouldn't it be safe here? Hawaii actually hosts more GE field tests than any other state in the nation. So if you look at California, in 2014, California hosted 172 field tests. Hawaii hosted 1,141 field tests.

16:14 So you're seeing a much higher volume, about six times the amount of field tests, than a much larger agriculturally oriented state. And as many of us know, our agricultural land is nested in and around where we go to school, where we live, where our children play, downstream, I mean upstream of our oceans where our children swim. So the question then for me was, well, what is a field test? How is that different? Is what's grown in a field test available for you guys to buy at the farm store? Well, no. Field tests are

16:50 experimental in nature. It's for the development and testing of new varieties of crops, right? And You're testing the traits and the impacts that those traits might have on nearby plants, might have on the environment. It's an important thing if we're going to be introducing technologies into agriculture that we test them. So the field test as a sort of part of the deregulation process is good. But the question then becomes, well, what are they testing? I know that, again, when I got involved in this, I was wondering about the papaya and how that figured in.

17:27 And we hear a lot from the industry that it's going to save the world, that it's going to end world hunger, that it's going to help us create more climate resilient crops. So then we dug into the field test data. Because when they report the data, they don't just tell us what they're growing, but they tell us the kinds of traits that they're genetically engineering into the plants. So we dug through every single one of those records over 12 years, one by one. And what we found out is that, A, the vast majority are commodity crops. It's not niche applications like banana, tomato.

18:06 No, broad-scale commodity crops, soy and corn, which we know, once deregulated, will likely go to fuel and animal feed. So you don't actually even see crops like papaya or banana end up on the field test registry very often, maybe one a year. When we then looked at, well, what are they genetically engineering these crops for? The vast majority is for herbicide resistance. So what's happening here in Hawaii is that large-scale agrochemical companies are field testing new varieties of corn and soy, largely to resist the application of their signature herbicides.

18:57 They don't disclose to us a lot of data about the pesticides that they're making the crops genetically resistant to, but we do frequently see chemicals like dicamba, glyphosate, and then we do know that the companies are all seeking the deregulation of 2,4-D resistant crops. 2,4-D is an active ingredient in Agent Orange. So they're developing these crops to, again, resist the greater and greater application of the herbicides that they sell. So if they're developing herbicide resistant crops, if they're field testing them, right,

19:36 the question then becomes, well, is there increased pesticide use associated with these crops? Is it true that genetic engineering equals an increase in herbicides or insecticides? Do field tests involve an increase use of pesticides? Hawaii require these companies to increase their use of pesticides. So we looked at the spray data from the Kauai Good Neighbor Program, and we learned a couple really critical things. One we learned that these companies spray pesticides year round. Unlike the states that also host a high volume of field tests, Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska,

20:23 We don't get that winter respite in pesticide application. In fact, these companies, because they can take advantage of a year-round growing season, they're spraying pesticides on the same plots of land year-round. Again, we only have this data for Kauai, which is a problem in and of itself. We also learned that in our wettest months, our windiest months, our winter, that's when they're using the highest volume of some the most toxic insecticides. So I'll talk a little bit in the presentation about the insecticide

20:57 chlorpyrifos, which is an organophosphate. The medical literature is unequivocal in saying that this is a dangerous neurotoxin that damages the ability of kids to develop and learn, right? The literature is clear. We use more chlorpyrifos on the island of Kauai than any other state that currently discloses chlorpyrifos use. So incredibly high volumes in our winter months when things are windy and rainy and anybody who applies pesticides understands that that's when pesticides are most likely to drift. Also incidentally all of the school evacuations on Waimea happened during

21:40 these months when you see the high volumes of chlorpyrifos use and the Department of Agriculture tested did air and water sampling at the school in Waimea and they found chlorpyrifos every single time. So the other thing is that once you get the kind of menu of pesticides that are being used, we really focused in on three which raised red flags for most of the medical community. Paraquat, which has undergone a series of regulatory changes. It's been banned and then it's been been deregulated again, and then it's been banned. Atrazine, which there's an incredible

22:19 amount of literature on the environmental impacts of atrazine, and also its ability to persist in the environment. There was a stream study done by the Department of Health that found atrazine in almost every single one of our streams. And then again, chlorpyrifos, which I'll talk about later. For those of you who don't sort of understand the nomenclature of the EPA, we only have restricted use pesticide data. We don't know, for example, the amount of Roundup that these companies are applying to their land, nor the amount of Roundup, for example,

22:51 that the city and county uses. But a restricted use pesticide is a different class of pesticide, and it's classified as restricted use because it is highly toxic. It's highly hazardous. So although our pesticide report doesn't cover all pesticides, it is important to remember that restricted use pesticides are a class of pesticides that have already been deemed by the EPA as requiring increased regulation. So when we looked at the spray logs from DuPont Pioneer, we found out that the companies are spraying sort of, you know, complex formulations of pesticides, upwards

23:33 of 90 different formulations. And within those formulations, there were 63 different active ingredients, not per formulation, but we're talking about sort of a wide array of pesticides that are being combined together and applied on these field test sites. Why this is important, and I'll talk about this at the end of the presentation, is because the EPA only tests one active ingredient at a time. But we know that these active ingredients have the potential to combine and have different impacts than a single pesticide might have. Kind of like a prescription drug.

24:11 You know, taken alone it might be fine, but increased toxicity if you combine it with something else. And we also learned that the companies spray often. They spray about two out of every three days. Up to 16 times a day on a particular plot. So year-round growing season, frequently during the week, frequently during the day. So then I flash back and I think to myself, okay, I think the data is telling us, is confirming for us what communities in and around these fields have been saying for years, which is enough already. We cannot continue to have

24:56 this level of pesticide use happen undisclosed and unregulated you know do we really want this happening right next to our schools um so why uh i'm from houston texas my dad was actually a part of the oil and gas industry and so i bring this up because you know we all i my dad was a great man even though he worked for an industry that made its bread and butter exploiting our natural resources in an unsustainable way. And I don't think it's actually about evil people. It's about a system of agriculture, a system of agriculture that has increasingly encouraged farmers

25:44 to rely on synthetic inputs, increasingly rely on extractive practices for short-term profit. And the companies that are engaged in GE field testing in the state of Hawaii not only make money by selling farmers genetically engineered seeds, which these farmers have to buy on an annual basis, they can't save, but they also manufacture the chemicals that the seeds are genetically engineered to be resistant to. And so what that means is that they get a kind of one-two punch. They get a profit on the seed sales, and they get a profit on the increased herbicide use.

26:22 A lot of people say, no, no, no, no, genetic engineering has reduced the amount of pesticides farmers are applying. The data just doesn't say that. In fact, Chuck Benbrook did a really good study. He looked at herbicide use over a 12-year period or a 14-year period, 16-year period, and he found that it actually increases herbicide use to the tune of 500 million pounds. So it's a part of a business model. It's a part of a way of seeing agriculture that allows people to make money growing crops. Again, largely that end up not on our table in very recognizable forms. So why does this matter?

27:07 Again, flashback to that moment when I'm thinking about taking this job and I'm meeting these moms who live in Waimea on Kauai. We took a look at this footprint of the seed industry And we found that there were actually 27 schools in the state of Hawaii within one mile of these GE field test sites. Why one mile? Why does that matter? Well, when you look at the medical literature, one mile is an explanatory variable. You really start to see the health impacts within that distance, within that radius.

27:39 So 27 schools, that's hundreds if not thousands of families that every day potentially unwittingly send their kids into a potential drift line of a GE field test site where pesticides might be sprayed upwards of 16 times a day, two or three days out of that school week. additionally again when you really look at the folks on the neighbor islands that are pounding the pavement and marching on these issues a lot of them the voices that aren't seen that aren't heard are those communities that are complaining about drift they're complaining about drift

28:18 incidences and they don't really have the opportunity to share their story in a public way where you and i might learn about it i mean i certainly was incredibly involved in state government and had never actually met a family that lived downwind of one of these fields. And so what then is our responsibility to these families whose stories aren't being told, whose stories are being misrepresented in the media? So if pesticides are being sprayed, if we know that communities themselves are communicating the impacts of drift,

28:50 is pesticide drift dangerous? So I really needed to know this. I mean, as somebody who comes out of the academy who has a PhD, I appreciate the research process. And I know that oftentimes my side of the movement, if you will, is accused of being anti-science. And so I really wanted to dig into the peer-reviewed medical literature on the chemicals that we know are being sprayed on Kauai near homes, schools, and hospitals. Just give me that medical literature. And we found 150 scientific and medical studies, many of which included

29:34 meta-studies. So those are studies of studies. They sort of accumulate all the literature, for example, on one class of pesticides like organophosphates and reviews the impact. And the great thing for me, the thing that allows me to do my job with a real sense of grounding, is that when you talk to doctors, and in particular toxicologists and pediatricians, they will say, absolutely, we have to keep these chemicals away from kids. We have to keep these chemicals away from pregnant women. And we really have to start monitoring the impacts of those

30:11 people who apply those pesticides on a daily basis, because long-range epidemiological studies have determined that these things are dangerous. Women who are pregnant, I mean, think about all the things that you can't do when you're pregnant. You don't get brie. You don't get to eat ahi. You don't use certain shampoos. We have an entire logic of consumerism around pregnancy because the developing fetus is incredibly vulnerable to chemicals and toxins. And so women exposed to pesticides while pregnant, you see up to seven times more likely incidences of autism and ADHD

30:48 in their children. You see adverse birth outcomes, premature birth, spontaneous abortion. For children that are exposed to pesticides, again, the same indicators. You see higher rates of ADHD and autism. You see higher rates of brain cancer. A lot of the way that these insecticides work is they're neurological disruptors for the insects. So it's not a surprise that they have neurological impacts on children. Higher rates of cancer, brain cancer, and leukemia, and then increased respiratory diseases like asthma. And then finally, the rates of cancer among farm

31:28 workers is astounding. In fact, this week, the EPA just changed the rules on who can apply restricted-use pesticides and said you have to be 18, because these chemicals are incredibly dangerous. Farm workers that regularly apply glyphosate and 2,4-D were found to have, I think, 14 times the rate of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So these are incredibly dangerous chemicals that absolutely do impact the health and wellness of people who are exposed to them. And if you talk to a doctor, and I've actually spent the last six months, I think Malian was with me when we

32:10 met with Dr. Romy Quijano. And we were in Kau giving a presentation. And he sort of said to us, like, I do think it's important to engage the farming community. Do not get me wrong. But it's not farmers who can tell you about the toxicological impacts of chemical exposure. Like, where are the doctors on this? What are they saying? Why aren't they weighing in on the debate? And it turned out most of them didn't know what was going on. We've toured all of the major medical institutions in our state, and most of the doctors will say three things.

32:46 They'll say, A, we don't have many toxicologists in the state of Hawaii. So we don't have doctors that are trained in this specific set of literature. And we've shared the literature with them. All of them are shocked. We had Dr. Ryan Lee, the only pediatric neurologist in the state of Hawaii, testify at a buffer zones hearing this past spring. And the recording's on the web. You can see it for yourself. But the gist of his testimony was like, I had no idea that there was such a definitive linkage between pesticides and autism. And here I am, the lead autism expert

33:25 in the state of Hawaii, dealing with treating autism. And here we've identified a cause. the other thing that one of the lead pediatricians at the Hawaii Pacific Health which runs Kapiʻolani, Straub said to me was the logic of pediatrics is prevention you know we don't administer vaccines after somebody's exposed to the measles we do it before I mean that's the logic of pediatrics and so we need to start to build a regulatory apparatus around pesticides that shares that logic that says let's look at the most dangerous class of pesticides and the most vulnerable class of people

34:07 and let's do our best to make sure that they don't intersect correct so felt really good and in fact for those of you who who really want to dig in we produced an annotated bibliography of our pesticide report that has full copies of the key medical studies that we reference in the report And you can see the quality and tenor of the journals that are producing these studies and the process of peer review that it went through.

34:36 Audience: Ashley, are they, is that available electronically?

34:38 Ashley Lukens: Not yet, but it will be soon. I'm really looking forward to hand delivering that to every office at the Capitol. But we will. We're going to get it up. The other thing that we found out, and we're actually going to spend the next year really delving into this question, is that these pesticides pose a serious threat to Hawaii's biodiversity. In fact, we identified five endemic species, native species, only to Hawaii that share habitat space with the GE seed corn companies and therefore bear the risk of potential exposure.

35:18 So, dangerous chemicals being applied across our state, the industry is growing. There's currently no regulation on the books that protects vulnerable populations from potential exposure. So what does the industry have to say about this, right? Well, they say, well, we're already regulated. We're already regulated and we're regulated by the EPA. So first and foremost, we already talked about the EPA only tests active ingredients one at a time. So all of the safety studies that the EPA has released on these chemicals doesn't take into account the impact when they're combined.

35:57 Second of all, the EPA doesn't have a winning track record in terms of pesticide deregulation. In fact, many of the chemicals that they deregulate, they pull off the market after environmental and public health impacts start to emerge. And Hawaii actually has a really incredible history of pesticide contamination that most of the kūpuna I speak will say, oh yeah, you remember heptachlor? When that destroyed the dairy industry? Remember chlordane? Remember DDT on Maui and Lānaʻi? So our long history of industrial agriculture, particularly in the past 75 years, is something

36:38 we need to look to as we look to the future. Although the industry will say pesticides are critical to the long-term stability of the agricultural sector, that stability has sometimes come at the expense of the health and wellness of Hawai'i's people. And finally, take a chemical like chlorpyrifos. So the EPA determined in 2011, based on all the medical literature that chlorpyrifos is dangerous, particularly to children. And so what did they do? They banned chlorpyrifos in urban uses. So schools, homes, hospitals are not allowed to use chlorpyrifos because even the slightest

37:23 exposure has neurological indicators. But what that means is that my daughter, who lives in Honolulu, has protections that those mothers in Waimea don't have. Those companies are allowed to use chemicals that the EPA has said cannot be used around my kids. So urban children are safer than the rural children. And that is where most of Hawaii's children live, is in rural communities. The other thing that I have wanted to bring up is that the Department of Ag issued a memo of talking points during legislative session when we were pushing hard on buffer zones, and they said, you know,

38:06 there have been drift incidences where schools have been evacuated, but none of them are because of the GE seed corn companies. So they're not the problem. It's everyday home users. And one, I think many people in the community of Waimea would beg to differ. The Department of Ag has said that those school evacuations happen because of stinkweed, but we know that there's stinkweed that continues to be grown around schools. In fact, it's growing right around Waimea again, and schools aren't being evacuated for that reason. But our current reporting system

38:44 is only set up to talk about acute exposure, right? So those incidences where you get a waft of a chemical in your face, and you feel faint, and you report that. So you, here in the state of Hawaii, unfortunately, in your pesticide-drifted state, have to make two phone calls, You've got to call the Department of Ag Pesticide Branch and tell them, you know, somebody's inappropriately applying pesticides and it's drifted onto my property or my person. And then you've got to call the Department of Health and have them come and investigate the potential health impacts.

39:15 They actually outsource that reporting to Denver, where there's a toxic substance and hazardous defense sort of operation set up. So you have these sort of two regulatory bodies that one is dealing with, you know, slapping the wrist of the pesticide applicator and the other is there to determine the health impacts. But that's just acute exposure. All of the medical literature actually doesn't look at acute exposure incidences. What it looks at is chronic, low-level exposure.

39:49 It says, what happens when undetectable amounts of these chemicals end up in the air, in the water, in the dirt, in people's homes? A level that would never trigger a call to the DOA or the DOH. I mean, it's that chronic low-level exposure that should incentivize regulation, not those acute incidences where schools have been evacuated because of pesticide drift. And again, we don't have the monitoring at all to tell us whether or not pesticides are drifting onto our schools, into our homes. The Department of Health will say we do not do air sampling.

40:28 We've done a one-time, one-shot water sampling of streams. So doctors got together, the American Academy of Pediatrics. They looked at the medical literature. They reviewed all the studies, and they said, well, there's some really easy policy options that we can pursue to prevent pesticide exposure, one of which is buffer zones. You know, create space around homes, schools, so that people aren't threatened by pesticide drift. So there are policy options out there that have been endorsed by doctors who have had the debate themselves and concluded that this is the best way to go.

41:08 and you know I think taking seriously that recommendation is what we've really been trying to do at the legislature at the different county councils is figure out you know what regulatory options make sense because you know a lot of people talk about the labeling of GMOs you know and then they think that that's what we work on here in Hawaii and that we're fighting for GE labeling. And as a mom, I think it's an incredibly important thing to fight for. Everybody has the right to know what's in their food. But that's actually not what we're dealing

41:45 with here in Hawaii. Here we're dealing with the environmental and health impacts of testing and developing new varieties of GE crops. And where me as a mother, I can get an app on my iPhone. I can educate myself so that when I go through the farmers market I know the questions to ask of the farmer I know the questions to ask of the food producers so that I give my daughter safe food no family in the state of Hawaii can declare their yard a pesticide-free zone no school can say actually we're gonna be free of pesticide drift here only the government

42:23 can do that. I mean, this is a type of problem that only governmental regulation can fix. Because again, it's outside of our individual capacity as families and as communities. So I wanted to end with sort of my take, again, over the past 18, 19, 20 months, kind of flying by, of being with the Center for Food Safety. And I've been a professor in the UH system for eight years, and I'm very inspired by millennials and what they're doing. I think they have a sense of hope and creativity and vivacity, particularly when it comes to food. And I really love the hashtag #LuckyWeLiveHawaii.

43:10 I think it captures the ethos of that generation. Have any of you ever used the hashtag Lucky We Live Hawaii? None of you use smartphones over here. Well, lucky for you, if you search the hashtag on social media, these are the kind of pictures that you get. Hawaii's amazing beaches, our mountainscapes, our farms. Those moments when we're feeling incredibly lucky to live here. This is not what you see. you don't see those spaces where there there's no room for local people anymore you don't see pictures like this um you know large economic interest paving over our agricultural land

44:01 to make room for houses that many local people can't afford and when you look at the hashtag on instagram you definitely don't see this um the overwhelming burden of that kind of expanding economy. So I started to think, well, you know, maybe this idea of lucky we live Hawaii speaks to a much broader cultural framework, which I think many people who live in Hawaii, regardless of whether they're born here or flown here, share, which is that they not only feel incredibly grateful and honored to live in a place that is so beautiful, but they feel responsible for it.

44:39 They feel like this is a place that they want to protect and preserve. And it's not just that they feel responsible, but if you look at the people working in that loʻi, they're seeking opportunity to express that sense of responsibility, to really engage and actively protect what they love. in 2011 I went to an awards event on the north shore and the north shore of Hawaii is one of those places where people feel really lucky to live it's they've really fought to maintain the rural character and my daughter that little one right there got up in front of a group of 500

45:27 people and did a solo dance in front of Jack Johnson. So it's Jack singing and it's my daughter like no does not skip a beat she's just stealing the show. And so this event was not just special because it gives me an excuse to show you all a video of my daughter. But I learned about a woman named Cora Sanchez. Now Cora has spent her entire life fighting to keep the country country and And she's pursued a variety of efforts to do that, to really maintain all the things about the North Shore of Oʻahu that make people feel lucky to live there.

46:07 And I realize that Cora, just like all the people that are on the front lines fighting this debate around pesticides, share this history of resistance. Hawaii is a place that we feel lucky to live in because of the people who have fought to protect it. the people who have fought, who have stand up and said no, to forms of development, to forms of agriculture, to forms of colonialism. And I really do think when I meet the people that are dedicating their lives to this movement, that's what they're fighting for.

46:40 They're fighting for something that they feel incredibly proud of and honored to be a part of. And it's not just about kuleana, right? responsibility to keep Hawaii a place where we feel lucky to live. But I think for me in particular as an urban haole living in Honolulu, my daughter is protected, it's a question of justice. Who are the communities that are being exposed to pesticide drift and who's standing up and speaking out for them? And then if it is a question of justice, of course we have to engage the government because the government is that is all the only entity that can

47:18 ensure that all people are safe from the potential threats of industry. We're going to continue doing this work and we're going to continue sharing this story. We're headed across the state speaking wherever, so if you guys want to schedule a presentation, we'd be happy to do it. There's no group too small. And I think it's really actually critical that we start to ask, you know, what is our government doing? What kind of agriculture are they promoting and what kind of agriculture and what sort of responsibility are they displaying for

47:56 the people of Hawaii? We're working on a buffer zones and disclosure legislation but I actually have some news which I feel really proud of and I think it speaks to the integrity of the man in the office but Scott Enright has agreed to put in place a disclosure program for all islands. So soon all islands will have access to the restricted-use pesticide data, and I think that he's coming to the symposium, and I think you all should give him a pat on the back because I think he's done a really good job of holding the line and really trying to listen to the concerns of the people

48:34 and do it in a methodologically sound, sort of slow, steady way. And I think that disclosure data is going to be incredible, but we got to work to make it mandatory. It can't be voluntary because if they're lying, then we can't sue them. There's no recourse. And we're also fighting for buffer zones. There's absolutely no reason. There's actually not one person in the state I have ever met in the industry or outside of it who said we should spray restricted use pesticides near schools. So what that tells me is that that directive is coming down from people who don't

49:06 live in Hawaii, who are demanding that we not be a model for regulation for other communities that are dealing with pesticide drift. It's not people here in our state that want to see pesticides sprayed near our homes and schools. We're also really encouraging people to engage the system themselves and run for office. I know you guys are all a bunch of off-gritters and anarchists and libertarians, but the value of a partner in office cannot go understated. I wouldn't have to do a one-hour presentation on stuff that seemed so obvious and intuitive if we had more elected

49:50 officials in office that governed with their naʻau and not with favors. educate your community i mean hosting presentations like this but also engaging in conversations i think as a movement i was telling Jackie this today we've done a really good job of having these like massive speaking tours where we bring in like celebs from the mainland who tour and tell us all about how this is a problem um i think we got to go small we're not going to change people's mind in an auditorium we're going to change people's mind across a table where we're really getting down to the basics

50:27 and having a conversation about the future of our state and the future of the environment, frankly, that we're all going to share. So figuring out ways to educate your community and engage those conversations, I think, is really important. And I don't think it's going to happen in big venues. I think it's going to happen in people's tables, in people's homes. And then finally, you know, we're really encouraging people to engage youth. I gave a presentation at a middle school on Oahu. who my favorite age range of people to present to, not to hang out with, but just to present to.

51:01 And all these sixth to eighth graders, you know, they're like all kind of going through puberty and they're annoyed. I was feeling like I was getting pimples, like just being in the room. And during the Q and A, it was every single person had their hand up. The kids were like, how could this happen? What's going on? They wanted to know. And I looked at them and I was like, one kid said, you know, I don't understand how the government could let this happen. And I said, okay, well, you know, guys, let's go back. You know, civics 101. What kind of

51:33 government do we have? And 30 of them shout out, a bad one. And I was like, no, no, no, that's not right. It's a democracy. I think that children are feeling alienated from the institutions that were built for them, and they want to figure out ways to plug in to opportunities that give them a meaningful sense of impact. And I think about an experience I had with my politics of food class at UH Mānoa, where I had this student who thought I was full of shit. She'd come into class every day and be like, oh yeah, industrial food's a problem. I love my

52:15 McDonald's. You don't know what you're talking about. And I took her to MAʻO Farms, which is an organic farm on Oahu that employs kids from high school and college that are traditionally at risk for things like drug use, teen pregnancy. It employs them on the farm. They grow food. They learn to be farmers. The farm pays for them to go to college. And it also has a savings program where every dollar that those kids save matches. And it gives them the life skills and the competence to pursue a career in agriculture, but also a life of cultural pride as Hawaiians.

52:53 And we took her to MAʻO Farms. She thinks I'm the worst professor ever the whole semester and eats a MAʻO sassy green salad. And she's like, Miss, I get it. I get it. And I had this moment, I was like, maybe our mouths can teach us what our minds cannot. And maybe we need to have those experiences where we actively are the change, connect with what you guys are doing, connect our youth with what you're doing, so that they feel like they have an impact. They have the power. And we're not holding them in a holding pen until they're 18 when they can finally vote and

53:33 quote-unquote affect change. So connecting youth to this conversation I think is critical because I think they have a lot of wisdom and imagination that we all need moving into the future. You can check out our report. We have what I call Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Baby Bear, and the fetus all on the website. So we have a two-pager, an eight-pager, a 30-pager, and a 100-pager versions of the report. We also have really great tools for you to engage. and we also have a website, protectourkeiki.org, which is where we're going to be doing a lot of our legislative work during the session.

54:10 And I wanted to end with this quote, and I use it all the time, and it just means so much to me. And it speaks, I think, to this question of justice, right? Why are we engaging the government? Why are we engaging the state when we can be the change too? And Arundhati Roy writes, It's important to remember that our freedoms, such as they are, were never given to us by any government. They have been wrested by us. If we do not test them from time to time, they atrophy. If we do not guard them constantly, they will be taken away. If we do not demand more and more,

54:48 we will be left with less and less. And if anything, I think what's going on in our state is the people starting to demand more and more from the only institutions that can protect our health and safety and pave the way for the future of a sustainable, healthy, local agriculture. Anybody got a question? Sure, maybe I'll do like, what's, give me a time. 10, 15 minutes. Okay, in the back. Hi, aloha.

55:19 Audience: Hi, I just wanted to know what state, what department in the state is leasing out these lands to GE corn?

55:27 Ashley Lukens: Oh, that's a great question. So it's a sub-department of the Department of Agriculture called the Agribusiness Development Corporation, or the ADC. One cool legislative agenda item that might happen this summer is that, you know, for the leasing agencies of our state who give state land, shouldn't they prioritize local food production? So, you know, they have to dedicate at least 85% of their portfolio to growing food for local consumption. But it's the ADC that leases the land, and the land is primarily on the island of Kauai. Yes?

56:02 Audience: Remind them how much land Kamehameha Schools leases.

56:07 Ashley Lukens: Okay, this is a question about Kamehameha Schools. They actually don't lease that much. They lease about 100 acres on the north shore of Oahu. What's that? In Puna. So one of the things that's really interesting about Hawaii Island is there are no GE field test sites for agrochemical companies here on Hawaii Island. So that's why if you look at the regulation that was put in place here, it's different than Kauai. Because what people said here is we don't want to see those companies enter into our ag market. We don't want to see them buying up our agricultural land. So let's just ban all future

56:47 GE field tests. So I think your elected officials were really wise in crafting a kind of regulation that actually only makes sense for Hawaii Island. Somewhere in this deck, I have the maps of where all these companies are. I don't know if it's in the lineup, but this is in case people have questions about health impacts. So the question about Kamehameha schools, it's absolutely a problem, particularly for a land trust who has at its core the health and future of Hawaii's children, and particularly Native Hawaiian children. So it doesn't really make sense

57:23 that they would be leasing even an acre to these companies. But they are, and it's happening in and around communities on the North Shore. I went to a North Shore meeting on Tuesday night. Senator Gil Riviere had a community public meeting about pesticides. And that community is organized. I mean, they had 200 people there. They lined up. They were on their talking points. Every time the Department of Agriculture or the pesticide branch came back with a, you're just being too fearful, we're already regulated, they were like, no, this is the EPA code that says that you're only testing this.

58:01 And no, this is the budget line. This is the number of pesticides. They were prepped. And I mean, I go into a lot of community meetings and feel like I need to bring the data into the conversation. And I didn't need to do anything there. I mean, they were ready. And they are organized.

58:16 So I think you're going to see not only heavy pressure on Kamehameha Schools on the island of Oahu, but I think because those communities live on the island where the legislature is, and I know how difficult it is for folks from the neighbor islands to really authentically engage the legislative process, I think you're going to see more and more people just absolutely saying enough already at the Lege this session. And that's why I feel pretty confident. I mean, the companies are already agreeing to disclose their pesticides statewide, and

58:47 they're not doing that because they thought it was a good idea. They're doing it because they know if they don't agree to do it, we're going to ask them for way more. And unlucky for them, I'm still going to ask them for way more.