No Milk Today

On the first night of July, Sainsbury’s five biggest chilled-goods depots in the country were simultaneously shut down. The aim: to halt distribution of dairy products from cows raised on GM feed, and celebrate the powerful new alliance between farmers and environmentalists.

There’s nothing like the taste of one victory to raise the apetite for another. After winning the battle to prevent all domestic growing of genetically-modified crops, the sights are now set on the last remaining source of GMOs in our food system: imported GM animal feed. Rallying around the last push to make Britain entirely GM-free is a broad coalition of groups, in which farmers and environmentalists are discovering unprecedented solidarity and mutual support.
The bad guys in this story are the large supermarket chains. GM-fed milk is currently unlabelled, and the effects of GM feed on both cattle and people who eat their dairy products have never been tested by independent scientists. At the same time, the retail giants’ growing stranglehold on food production conspires with a rigged global economy to force an unfair choice on UK farmers: import GM feed, or run backrupt. One of the outstanding culprits is Sainsbury’s, which pledged to phase out the use of GM in animal feed three years ago, but is now claiming it cannot do so for “economic reasons”. Read: paying farmers properly for non-GM milk is bad for profits. But already farmers are getting a scandalously unfair deal, being paid 5p a pint for milk sold at 29p a pint to consumers. “Sainsbury’s suppliers now pay farmers less than their production cost for their milk.. says John Sherell, a farmer from Devon, “If this doesn’t change soon, thousands more small farmers will go under. Buying GM animal feed contibutes to the devestation of farmers in places like Argentina. We don’t want to use it, and we need Sainsbury’s to pay us a fair price for non-GM milk”.

And so, farmers joined enviromental activists to force Sainsbury’s to keep their pledge. Across the country the same quick operation took place: protesters locked on to the distribution centres’ main gates, and used arm-tubes and tripods to block the access roads. Within minutes lorries were forming long queues on the motorways, and turning back without delivering their payloads. In North London, Sainsbury’s vast state-of-the-art distribution centre at Waltham Point was shut down for over two hours. As workers at the depot got over their shock, some had time to express support for the action before heavy-handed Essex police moved in to arrest the arm-locked protestors. South Yorkshire’s distribution center in Rotherham was successfully blockaded for nearly six hours. In Birmingham and Bristol, activists arrived to discover the depots heavily policed, but after some cat-and-mouse manoeuvres both were blockaded all the same - with a bonus shut-down of the Birmingham headquarters of BMW and Nestlé. Near Liverpool, a successful four-hour blockade was undertaken by a thirty-strong posse from Manchester, Leeds, Hebden Bridge and Lancaster. “We got loads of support from Sainsbury’s workers and from drivers, due to get paid overtime for as long as we delayed operations”, reports one participant, “the atmosphere was great - no rain, a great support crew, and Radio Merseyside keeping us entertained. The police turned up after an hour, clearly unprepared to deal with the technical difficulties in removing us, and we left at our agreed time of 3am”.

The actions came at a time finding Sainsbury’s more generally in trouble. On the same day, shareholders forced chairman Sir Peter Davis to resign over a £2.4m bonus that he;d been awarded, at a time when profits and market share were falling. At the same time the company angered its workers by scrapping the £100 Christmas bonus they had been receiving for the past 25 years. It is estimated that every hour of stoppage at each depot was costing Sainsbury’s between £100,000 and £150,000. With pressure on supermarkets mounting, farmers and activists are beginning to smell the final victory against GMOs in Britain.

Farmers for Action: http://www.farmersforaction. org
Genetic Engineerign Network: http://www.geneticsaction.org.uk
FARM: http://www.farm.org.uk
Grassroots Action on Food and Farming; http://www.gaff.org.uk