•Preserve your beaches •Consumers reject GMO food •Start over Preserve your beaches As visitors to the beautiful island of Kaua‘i, we were completely blown away to learn that you people are talking about putting a bike path on Wailua Beach.
•Preserve your beaches
•Consumers reject GMO food
•Start over
Preserve your beaches
As visitors to the beautiful island of Kaua‘i, we were completely blown away to learn that you people are talking about putting a bike path on Wailua Beach.
And now the mayor is going along with this? Are you crazy?
You guys need to get out more. Maybe you’ve forgotten why people from all over the world flock to your islands. Tell you one thing, it’s not for the bike paths! We ride our bikes at home, we can jog anywhere. In Hawai‘i, we go to the beach!
Are you so spoiled that you have beaches to burn? For people like us, who live in cold places nowhere near a coast, who dream of tropical beaches with turquoise water and save our money for the few trips in our lives when we’ll stroll along those shores, we’re shocked that people in Hawai‘i don‘t appreciate what they have.
Maybe you don’t care about tourists, and you’re trying to be like the Mainland or something. Bad idea, Kaua‘i. Do what you do best: be a beautiful tropical island with white sandy beaches.
Scott and Kimberly Cranston, Minneapolis, Minn.
Consumers reject GMO food
After seven years of educating consumers and politicians, drumming up community support and organizing volunteers, Hawai‘i SEED is achieving the goal towards halting the introduction of any new GMO crops in Hawai‘i.
This year, Hawai‘i County and Maui County passed laws creating a wide-reaching ban that covers all aspects of taro experimentation, importation and development (laboratory, field and markets) on their islands. Hawai‘i County and Maui County also passed laws against pre-emptive legislation (protection of home rule). We hope for Kaua‘i and O‘ahu to pass similar laws, to ensure the purity of taro throughout the island chain. Big Island has also banned GMO coffee and passed a GMO food labeling law for their island.
Hawai‘i has the infamous distinction of having more permits for GMO test fields than any other place in the world. The biotech crops being researched in Hawai‘i are corn, soy, cotton, sunflower, papaya, rice, tobacco and sugar. Engineered plants are herbicide tolerant, and pesticide producing. These plants contain viral promoters, and they are antibiotic resistant. The current trend is modification to resist multiple pesticides. These “stacked trait” field tests mean multiple applications of chemical cocktails, to find upper tolerance levels. All of this agricultural pollution is making its way into our ground water and ultimately our oceans.
Farmers, parents and health conscious consumers find this unacceptable. People aware of the open air testing, the lack of human health data, the patenting of life forms, and the corporate control of seed, are appalled to see the hidden changes in our food supply. Our sentiments are being echoed all over the world.
The surge in local food production has helped our movement, it speaks to solutions. The models of crop diversity and sustainable farming practices are being exemplified daily. Farmers are teaching each other, sharing seed, and building produce distribution opportunities.
We support the protection of farmers’ rights in the courts with the help of Earth Justice and the Center for Food Safety.
Hawai‘i SEED will continue to promote a vision that embraces food sovereignty, pure food, healthy soil and water, and the traditional freedom to save your seed.
Jeri Di Pietro, Koloa
Start over
It’s so hard to believe that the “best” landfill site offered was in the middle of a viable, producing agricultural entity. It most certainly would seal the doom of the Kaua‘i Coffee Visitor Center and not do any good for the image of Kaua‘i Coffee.
If this is the best choice, what was the worst choice? What would have been the decision of a managerial form of leader? Was the final decision arrived at from a personal or political standpoint? Why didn’t the mayor just reject all the options and require a whole new list of possible sites?
The county is having to trim albizia trees in Kalihiwai, so why not just put the new landfill in the middle of that huge forest of albizia near the tree tunnel? I don’t really want it there either, but it makes about as much sense as in a coffee plantation.
The coffee visitor center is a great place to take family and friends to sample free coffee, choose from the two dozen different types available and enjoy it at home. It is also a great place to walk around in a coffee field. It would most certainly lose it’s allure if it smelled like garbage instead of fresh brewed coffee. The search should start all over again.
Jack Custer, Lihu‘e
