California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Farming: Past, Present and Future

by John Lawrence, May 5, 2020

There are a lot of people in the world who still wake up each morning and worry about where they will get the food for today. They are subsistence farmers or, if they live in cities, they are subsistence eaters. Unfortunately, the pandemic has made the situation even worse. Besides that midwest farmers are suffering because their export market to China has been ruined by Trump's trade war. Throughout American history monocultural farmers have gone bankrupt due to market conditions. They have to borrow heavily to plant their crops, and, if interest rates go up or market conditions are unfavorable when the crop is harvested, they might not be able to repay their bank loans. Farmers like my Grandfather were in a lot better shape because they were basically self-sufficient. They grew their own food, and kept just enough animals whose slaughter fulfilled their own needs. My Grandfather had a small dairy farm which he worked himself. He didn't have a lot of fuel or equipment expense. He used a team of horses for which he grew their own food. He grew the hay for his dairy cows. He didn't have to borrow money for fuel, equipment and seeds every year like the midwestern monocultural farmers.

So he could sell his milk for whatever price the market was paying. He and his family were self-sufficient. My Grandmother made their clothes. They had a garden. She canned foods for the winter months. Very little was store bought. So they weathered the Great Depression with no problem because they had a self-sufficient farm. Today farmers markets are providing a more important service in the age of pandemic. Local farmers are providing fresh food that the industrialized agricultural food chain has not been able to provide. They have filled a niche. Industrialized agriculture relies on antibiotics for animals and pesticides and herbicides for crops. My Grandfather's farm was organic because every pre-World War II farm was organic by definition. Today the industrialized farm inputs like Monsanto's GMO seeds and weedkiller Roundup make farmers dependent on banks which are all too willing to foreclose on their property if they cannot make their loan payments. Not only was my Grandfather's farm organic, he didn't have any debts. He did not have to borrow money every spring from the banks, and then pay back on his loans every fall. He did not have any GMO crops for which he had to buy seeds every year from Monsanto and then buy the Roundup to spray them with.

I'm thinking the local farmers' markets are teaching us a lesson in this pandemic era. They can supply food that does not have to have a long supply chain to get it to the stores. It doesn't have to be trucked for miles. It does not have to be sprayed with cancer causing chemicals. It doesn't have to be cultivated and harvested with fuel intensive, greenhouse gas producing tractors. It is not as susceptible to food borne disease such as e coli, salmonella and listeria which come mainly from industrialized farms. Maybe local farming should be encouraged. People want healthy organic foods, foods devoid of GMOs. Local supply chains are more reliable and safer than industrialized food chains. I think that the agricultural industry should become more like my Grandfather's farm, more local, more organic. Farmers' markets are showing us the way.

GMOs Don't Result in Greater Crop Yields

by John Lawrence

They Just Increase Amount of Poison We're Exposed To

The controversy over genetically modified crops has focused on whether or not they were safe to eat. We have to ask ourselves what was the purpose for genetically modifying them in the first place. That was so they could be sprayed with Monsanto's Roundup and they wouldn't die. Only the weeds would die. But this leaves the crops, mainly corn and soybeans, with a nice coating of poison. It won't kill them, but it might kill you.

The next promise of the chemical corporations was that the use of GMO sprayed with weed killers would lead to a significant increase in crop yields, but that hasn't happened either. The promise was that GMOs would "feed the world". Monsanto and others pointed to the fact that the world's population was increasing so we needed a far more abundant food supply, and the only way to get there was by means of GMOs liberally sprayed with RoundUp, the main ingredient of which is glyphosate.

Twenty years ago the US and Canada embraced the use of GMOs while Europe rejected them. Now it's possible to compare results in the two regions to see if the use of GMOs actually produced higher crop yields. It didn't according to a recent study. The net result is that Americans have been exposed to significant doses of cancer causing chemicals in return for basically nothing. Europeans on the other hand have been eating better and safer including more organics in their diets as a matter of course, de rigueur!

The New York Times reported:

"An analysis by The Times using United Nations data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany."

The US has fallen behind France in decreasing the use of pesticides on crops like corn, soybeans and cotton. So you're eating food products liberally sprayed with poisons, and in addition you're wearing clothes which were sprayed with poisons. Is it any wonder that there is more cancer? In France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage — 65 percent — and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.

By the way, do you know what chemicals are in your clothes? The San Diego Union says on November 2, 2016: "What's in your jeans? A rogue's gallery of unpronounceable chemicals whose effects on humans are suspect. Perfluorochemicals, phthalates, and azo dyes are among the substances that are widespread in making clothes." Is it any wonder that cancer is so common? The article goes on to say that some American companies are taking a more European approach where more than 1000 chemicals are banned. In the US only fewer than 50 are.

Would You Like a Helping of Agent Orange With Your Breakfast?

The use of insecticides in US crops has decreased slightly because they can be "programmed in" to the GMOs. However, the use of herbicides has increased since the only way to get rid of weeds is to spray the whole kit and caboodle. And this hasn't really worked either since genetically adapted super weeds have taken over. Rather than get involved in an arms race with nature, it would make more sense to use natural methods of weed control and forget the spraying. But the US has to have a technological solution for everything. How else to employ all those chemists? After all they developed Agent Orange for use in the defoliation of Vietnam. Now with a slight modification they are using the same product to spray GMO crops in order to get rid of the weeds.

According to the New York Times:

Profound differences over genetic engineering have split Americans and Europeans for decades. Although American protesters as far back as 1987 pulled up prototype potato plants, European anger at the idea of fooling with nature has been far more sustained. In the last few years, the March Against Monsanto has drawn thousands of protesters in cities like Paris and Basel, Switzerland, and opposition to G.M. foods is a foundation of the Green political movement. Still, Europeans eat those foods when they buy imports from the United States and elsewhere.

Fears about the harmful effects of eating G.M. foods have proved to be largely without scientific basis. The potential harm from pesticides, however, has drawn researchers’ attention. Pesticides are toxic by design — weaponized versions, like sarin, were developed in Nazi Germany — and have been linked to developmental delays and cancer.

The companies that make the genetically modified seeds also make the poisons to spray them with. Now Monsanto, the largest seed manufacturer is in talks to merge with Syngenta, the Swiss pesticide giant. If they merge, their combined market capitalization would be around $100 billion.

Corporate Profits More Important Than Human Health

Dr. Martin Qaim a researcher at a German University said recently, “Currently available G.M. crops would not lead to major yield gains in Europe.” And regarding herbicide-resistant crops in general: “I don’t consider this to be the miracle type of technology that we couldn’t live without."

There is something to be said for the GMO products that reduce the need for pesticides. These products actually reduce the amount of poison that a consumer is exposed to. However, the use of herbicides increases the amount of poison a consumer is exposed to, and the use of such products has only been increasing in recent years. The goal of herbicide resistant seeds has been to sell more product, more RoundUp, more glyphosate.

As the use of RoundUp increases, weeds are becoming more resistant. This requires using more herbicides and different herbicides in order to get them under control. Growing resistance to Roundup is also reviving old, nasty chemicals. One is 2,4-D, an ingredient in Agent Orange, the infamous Vietnam War defoliant. Its potential risks have sounded the alarms for scientists and advocacy groups.

Despite the promised yield advantages from GMOs, data shows that there are none. For rapeseed which is used in the production of canola oil, Western Europe maintained a lead over Canada in yields. For corn, the trend lines between the two barely deviate. And sugar beets have shown stronger yield growth recently in Western Europe than the United States, despite the dominance of genetically modified varieties over the last decade in the US. Jack Heinemann, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand said that Western Europe, “hasn’t been penalized in any way for not making genetic engineering one of its biotechnology choices.”

Meanwhile the chemical corporations keep up their marketing efforts primarily directed at farmers who they say will be able to produce more with less effort by the use of their products. Monsanto has said that the corn seed of 2025 will have 14 traits and allow farmers to spray five different kinds of herbicide.

Organic GMOs?

Recent developments have suggested that there could be such a thing as organic GMOs. That is the purpose of the GMO would be  greater crop yields, but these crops would not be sprayed with herbicides or pesticides just like organic crops are not. There may be some possibilities along these lines. We'll wait and see.

Mischa Popoff, a former USDA organic inspector, wrote to me recently:

Not only will GMO Golden Rice alleviate the suffering of millions, it could also – in point-of-fact – be grown organically! So I joined with 11 scientists and wrote an article last year in The Daily Caller about producing the world’s first organic-GMO crop. I then wrote a brief follow-up immediately after Mr. Trump won the presidency.

Would you please help get the word out about this? GMO Golden Rice has been given to the world, free of charge, by its inventor, Dr. Ingo Potrykus. All that stands in its way is the lack of political will.

However, as previously noted pesticides, unlike herbicides, can be engineered into the GMO seeds. Are these GMOs really harmless as opposed to GMOs which don't have pesticides engineered in to the very seeds? Maybe not. More study is required before this kind of GMO could be considered organic. Show me a GMO whose only goal is to increase crop yields without being engineered for herbicides or pesticides, and I'll show you a GMO that could possibly be considered organic.

Monsanto Polluted San Diego with PCBs and GMOs

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

PCBs Pervade San Diego Bay

A San Diego group of attorneys is suing Monsanto to get millions of dollars for remediation projects to clean up San Diego Bay. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) have been linked to cancer, neurological damage, thyroid problems and reproductive complications. Monsanto is all about the profits even when it has knowledge that what it's selling is poison. Cases have been filed in Federal Court in San Jose, Oakland and Spokane in addition to San Diego. Dozens more cities across America may soon follow suit.

Municipalities have been forced to shell out millions to clean up rivers, creeks and bays. It has been established that fishing in such places and consuming those fish is dangerous to human health. PCBs have shown up in breast milk and sea lions among other places. They are ubiquitous in our environment.

Monsanto marketed the PCBs under the trade name Aroclor. The chemicals accumulate in fish that are devoured by humans with the result that almost everybody who eats fish has a certain amount of PCBs in their system. PCBs were used in electrical equipment, highway paint, caulk and many other products. Monsanto's position is that, if their product was improperly disposed of, it was not their fault. Under California's public nuisance laws, however, a company may be held responsible if it knowingly marketed a product even though it knew it was hazardous.

Monsanto officials knew as early as 1969 that Aroclor was dangerous, but decided to keep manufacturing and marketing it anyway in order to increase profits. Their official discussions went so far as to say that Aroclor was likely a "global contaminant." Monsanto employees had thrown fish into a heavily contaminated creek and discovered that they started bleeding and losing their skin in about 10 seconds.

The Oakland city attorney said that the chemical giant "chose profits over people, and American cities and citizens are still suffering the consequences."

Robert Reich Nails Monsanto's Modus Operandi

In an excellent book, Saving Capitalism (For the Many, Not the Few), Robert Reich has a great section on Monsanto. I, therefore, give over the rest of this article to a quotation from this book:

Monsanto, the giant biotech corporation, owns the key genetic traits in more than 90 percent of the soybeans planted by farmers in the United States and 8o percent of the corn. Its monopoly grew out of a carefully crafted strategy. It patented its own genetically modified seeds, along with an herbicide that would kill weeds but not soy and corn grown from its seeds.

The herbicide and herbicide-resistant seeds initially saved farmers time and money. But the purchase came with a catch that would haunt them in the future: The soy and corn that grow from those seeds don't produce seeds of their own. So every planting season, farmers have to buy new seeds. In addition, if the farmers have any seeds left over, they must agree not to save and replant them in the future. In other words, once hooked, farmers have little choice but to become permanent purchasers of Monsanto seed. To ensure its dominance, Monsanto has prohibited seed dealers from stocking its competitors' seeds and has bought up most of the small remaining seed companies.

Not surprisingly, in less than fifteen years, most of America's commodity crop farmers have become dependent on Monsanto. The result has been higher prices far beyond the cost-of-living rise. Since 2001, Monsanto has more than doubled the price of corn and soybean seeds. The average cost of planting one acre of soybeans increased 325 percent between 1994 and 2011, and the price of corn seed rose 259 percent. Another result has been a radical decline in the genetic diversity of the seeds we depend on. This increases the risk that disease or climate change might wipe out entire crops for years, if not forever. A third consequence has been the ubiquity of genetically modified traits in our food chain. At every stage, Monsanto's growing economic power has enhanced its political power to shift the rules to its advantage, thereby adding to its economic power.

The Fight to Label GMOs

Beginning with the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970, and extending through a series of court cases, Monsanto has gained increased protection of its intellectual property in genetically engineered seeds. It has successfully fought off numerous attempts in Congress and in several states to require labeling of genetically engineered foods or to protect biodiversity. It has used its political muscle in Washington to fight moves in other nations to ban genetically engineered seed. To enforce and ensure dominance, the company has employed a phalanx of lawyers. They've sued other companies for patent infringement and sued farmers who want to save seed for replanting. Monsanto's lawyers have also prevented independent scientists from studying its seeds, arguing that such inquiries infringe the company's patents.

You might think Monsanto's overwhelming market power would make it a target of antitrust enforcement. Think again. In 2012, it succeeded in putting an end to a two-year investigation by the antitrust division of the Justice Department into Monsanto's dominance of the seed industry. Monsanto has the distinction of spending more on lobbying—nearly $7 million in 2013 alone—than any other big agribusiness. And Monsanto's former (and future) employees frequently inhabit top posts at the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department, they staff congressional committees that deal with agriculture policy, and they become advisors to congressional leaders and at the White House. Two Monsanto lobbyists are former congressman Vic Fazio and former senator Blanche Lincoln. Even Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was at one time an attorney for Monsanto. Monsanto, like any new monopoly, has strategically used its economic power to gain political power and used its political power to entrench its market power.

It's useful to view the strategy of the new monopolists as integrating economic and political dominance. They acquire key patents and then spend vast sums protecting them and charging others with patent infringement. In addition, they use mandatory licensing agreements to require potential competitors to use whole lines of their products and prevent customers from using competing products, thereby creating de facto industry standards. Favorable court rulings, advantageous laws, and administrative decisions to forgo antitrust lawsuits or bring them against competitors extend these de facto standards to entire sectors of the economy. [end quote]

And so, dear reader, we live in a world in which large corporations feel free to pollute and despoil the environment including the food we eat because they have not only market dominance but because they have political dominance as well. The revolving door between government and corporations swings ever so easily, the hinges are well lubricated. Congresspersons and their staff have easy access to lucrative jobs once they have established their contacts on the inside. They just have to lobby their old friends on behalf of Monsanto and other large corporations giving them a free license to pollute and purvey dangerous products. The hallmark of these products is not that they will kill you immediately like the poor fish that Monsanto employees threw into a PCB polluted river, but that the symptoms will show up as cancer and other related diseases years later when Monsanto can no longer be linked to those outcomes.

More Bad News for Monsanto

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, joined by dozens of global food, farming and environmental justice groups announced December 4th, 2015 that they will put Monsanto on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide, in The Hague, Netherlands, next year on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.

Vandana Shiva, physicist, author, activist and founder of Navdanya, and member of the RI Steering Committee said: “Monsanto has pushed GMOs in order to collect royalties from poor farmers, trapping them in unpayable debt, and pushing them to suicide. Monsanto promotes an agro-industrial model that contributes at least 50 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Monsanto is also largely responsible for the depletion of soil and water resources, species extinction and declining biodiversity, and the displacement of millions of small farmers worldwide.”

Andre Leu, president of IFOAM and a member of the RI Steering Committee, said: “Monsanto is able to ignore the human and environmental damage caused by its products, and maintain its devastating activities through a strategy of systemic concealment: by lobbying regulatory agencies and governments, by resorting to lying and corruption, by financing fraudulent scientific studies, by pressuring independent scientists, and by manipulating the press and media. Monsanto’s history reads like a text-book case of impunity, benefiting transnational corporations and their executives, whose activities contribute to climate and biosphere crises and threaten the safety of the planet.”

Get set for an epic battle between a corporation that is destroying the planet and those who are pushing back against this monstrous corporate behemoth.

Congress Passes New Law: Obama Forbidden to Mention Climate Change

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

God Bless Our Fossil Fuels

In addition to repealing Obamacare for the 457th time, Congress has been busy with a new agenda. HR 4031 will officially make it illegal for President Obama to attend any more climate change conferences. In fact he won't even be allowed to mention climate change in his upcoming State of the Union (SOTU) speech. As part of the Fossil Fuel Enhancement Act of 2015, Governor Jerry Brown of California will be forced to abandon his plan to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Instead he has been ordered to increase greenhouse gas emissions and to give subsidies to automobile manufacturers as long as they don't convert to electric engines. As part of the Act, subsidies have been increased to ExxonMobil by $5 billion to further encourage them in the fine work they're doing promoting and selling fossil fuels.

The Fossil Fuel Enhancement Act of 2015 would insure that fossil fuels will always be used to generate electricity in the US. The Act specifically forbids any state or other jurisdiction from installing any solar or wind farm apparatus and mandates that any so installed at the present time shall be dismantled. Senators and Congressmen, when asked for a comment, chimed in together that we can't afford to have the American oil industry taken down by a bunch of environmentalists because that would entail losing so many jobs that we would never recover. Also Wall Street, which has invested heavily in fossil fuels, said that without them they might require another bailout. In short it is not worth the threat to our economy to proceed down the line of eliminating the production of energy with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel generating plants are the most reliable and dependable facilities when it comes to providing the American economy with the energy it needs to keep it humming. They keep going even when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. So there.

Mass Transit a Socialist Plot?

Congress has reduced monies for mass transportation as a socialist plot to take away our individuality as expressed in our cars. The American way of life is predicated on the internal combustion engine, and cars are an indispensable part of the American lifestyle. They express our individuality and freedom. The open road beckons - not the transit station. That's the European socialist way of life, and we don't want no part of it.

What would America be without Nasscar and drag racing which are a testament to the glory of the internal combustion engine? How could we be Ford Tough with an electric engine powering our pickups? Or  how could a pickup with an electric motor be built Like a Rock. Only an internal combustion engine can give you that thrill of excitement as you accelerate from 0 to 60 or pull an excruciatingly heavy load through mud, ice and snow? We want to discover the Guts & Glory of what makes Ram Trucks so tough. We want tough pickups with internal combustion engines not those namby pamby electric cars.

Mass Murders are as American as Apple Pie

In acknowledgement of the fact that there is more than one mass murder a day in the US, Congress will soon pass a bill regulating mass murders and gun control in the US. With regard to mass murders, the official response will be "thoughts and prayers" only if tomorrow's mass murder involves more than 7 killed. Less than seven and there will be no official response whatsoever. That's the new normal.

Regarding gun control: after every mass murder, a subsidy will be given to gun shops so they can increase advertising and give discounts to all those who will increase the demand for firearms just in case their Second Amendment rights might be taken away. The idea is that every man, woman and child in America should possess at least one gun and hopefully many more. It is suggested by the gun lobby that one room in every house be devoted to the storing of armaments and that every home have at least one rocket launcher and several grenades. That room should always be locked securely so that toddlers cannot gain access and shoot grandma .

Since terrorists are using cookbooks found on the internet to construct pipe bombs and other remote controlled devices, in order to combat this insidious development, the government will issue free of charge the appropriate literature that will allow every American family to construct their own pipe bombs and remote controlled devices on the grounds that the best defense against terrorists is a good offense in which every red blooded American plays a part. Let's face it: we're all part of a well regulated militia so let's get regulated! A well armed constituency will take out any would be terrorist before they can even think about perpetrating a heinous act. We need to fight fire with fire.

Donald Trump tweeted that every time there's a mass murder his poll numbers go up. He has put a new plank in his platform that, if he's elected President, more, not fewer, gun show loopholes will be opened up so that we can all exercise our Second Amendment rights without any noisy interference from the Federal Gubment.

In addition to Trump's sanguine assessment of mass murders, manufacturers of firearms have told Wall Street and billionaire investors that mass murders are good for business:

Behind closed doors, makers and sellers of firearms in the U.S. have told investors and Wall Street analysts that mass shootings are opportunities to make lots of money.

How does this happen? “Following a mass shooting, there is talk of gun control, which the National Rifle Association and other gun advocates attack as an assault on the Second Amendment,” writes Lee Fang at The Intercept. “Notably, gun and ammunition manufacturers often donate, either directly or as a portion of each sale, to the NRA. The fear of losing gun rights leads to panic buying, which brings greater profits to gun retailers, gun companies and their investors.”

So the sale of guns and ammo is a profit center essential to increasing GDP and supporting the capitalist way of life.

In other news all those on the 'no fly' list will be encouraged to buy more guns just in case a Democratic Congress far in the future might close the loophole and prevent those 'no flyers' from owning guns.

Labeling GMOs Would Just Confuse People

Congress has also taken up the GMO issue. The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act will prevent all states, cities, counties, and other jurisdictions from passing any law that results in the labeling of GMOs. It is thought that this will increase GDP because people will stop growing their own vegetables and raising their own chickens or even bartering for produce with local farmers. Let's make every transaction a cash transaction because that's the only kind that adds to GDP. If you raise your own chickens instead of buying them at the super market, GDP will go down and this could drive the economy into recession. So by all means buy, buy buy. This will expedite commerce and make sure that large agribusiness will be able to keep their share values up. Labeling GMOs as such would result in a downgrading by financial analysts with a resulting drop in stock prices.  

 Price Gouging is as American as Apple Pie

Congress has also given much thought to the issue of prescription drug prices which are skyrocketing. They have passed another bill which will make it much harder for generics to compete with patented prescription drugs and to increase the time limit for which patents are in effect from 20 to 50 years. At the same time, they have forbidden any governmental agency from informing the public when a cheaper version of a patented drug is available. It also prohibits the Department of Veteran Affairs, which heretofore could negotiate for lower drug prices, from doing so. This brings it in line with Medicare which was forbidden from negotiating lower drug prices in 2006.

A Congressional spokesman said that price gouging is as American as apple pie, and we can't afford for Big Pharma's profits to recede. If they did, their stock price would suffer and this would possibly lead to a sell-off in the stock market which could induce a repression if not a depression. Although European countries do negotiate with Big Pharma and end up paying half of what Medicare pays, they are socialists who are not doing their part to support research. They're merely parasites living off the noble efforts of US drug companies which have to resort to inversions like Pfizer did when it moved its headquarters to Ireland and merged with Allergan in order to avoid US taxes. Thanks to Americans who pay at least twice as much for drugs as Europeans, the US will lead the world in drug research.

Congress is set to repeal Obamacare for the 876th time next week. Obamacare has become too costly mainly because Medicare can't negotiate for lower drug prices. It must pay whatever the price gougers choose to charge. Congress has further strengthened this law to the extent that there can be no cheaper substitutions for drugs that doctors prescribe even if cheaper drugs are available. Doctors have been known to accept speaking fees and other perks from drug companies who encourage them to prescribe their non-generic drugs. Therefore, Medicare will end up paying through the nose even when cheaper drugs are available.

This was all music to the ears of Martin Shkreli and others who have raised the price of their drugs - in Shkreli's case from $13.50 a pill to $750. a pill for Dariprim. If doctors prescribe it, Medicare must pay for it. Shkreli became known as 'the most hated man in America' for his price gouging prowess. “I believe drugs should be priced relative to the value they confer,” he said. The value Dariprim confers is staying alive for those who need it. After much outcry, Shkreli said he would reduce the price of Dariprim, but then later backed off from that promise. Shkreli said that he should have raised the price even higher because his first duty was to make money for his shareholders.

Republican Congress Puts Presidential Decorum on Agenda

Congress will also next week take up the matter of Obama's dress in the Oval Office. In the 2015 Presidential Appropriate Attire and Decorum Act (PAADA), the President will be forced to wear a coat and tie at all times when he is present in the Oval Office. He will be forbidden from putting his feet up on the desk or from eating snacks. If they could do it and some say it is possible within the framework of the Constitution, they would forbid Obama from taking a shit in the Presidential bathroom which is just off the Oval Office. This is in light of the fact that a past President, a Democrat in fact, was involved in illicit activities there and a future Republican President should not have to have his hands sullied by wiping his ass in such a place. In due respect for future Republican Presidents, it is a known fact that people  of Kenyan descent carry a type of germ that is very difficult to wipe clean off a toilet seat even with the use of the strongest disinfectants. Hence the President Forbidden to Use Presidential Bathroom Act of 2015.

Trump in his quest to protect us from Muslims wondered aloud today why Tashfeen and Farook, the San Bernadino shooters, escaped detection as they were posting on Facebook their radical views for two years before the incident. The fact that they weren't on some terrorist list is beside the point. Doesn't the FBI, the CIA and the NSA have the capability of searching for the word "jihad" wherever it might appear on the internet?

On another note Trump said that, if he is elected President, the first thing he'd do is to give the American Medal of Freedom to Charles and David Koch for their tireless devotion and service to the nation.

 

The Fight Against GMOs and Toxic Food

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

While Other Countries Ban GMOs, US Congress Endorses Them

Scotland has banned genetically modified organisms (GMOs) within its country. "Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment—and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status," said rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead. Here in the US the fight is just for the right to know that a food product should be labeled as GMO, and that's not going so well.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1599, the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015. This is BS, of course, since the bill's real purpose is to preempt the rights of state and local governments to pass laws requiring the mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), to overturn GMO labeling laws already in place in several states, and to prevent the passage of any federal mandatory GMO labeling law in the future. So there is no free speech insofar as knowing what's in something we are eating is concerned. The law's attempt is to suppress truth in labeling.

GMOs were developed primarily to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup so that Roundup could be sprayed directly on crops and only the weeds would die. So whether or not GMO corn and soybeans are good or bad for you, the presence of poison sprayed on them can't be too good for human consumers when they eat such crops. Especially crops such as grapes and apples which have very thin skins and are vulnerable to soaking up the herbicides and pesticides sprayed on them.

The GMO process starts with the seeds only available from Monsanto which grow into the Roundup resistant corn and soybeans which must be purchased on an annual basis from Monsanto. Farmers who save seeds from the current crop are subject to lawsuits by Monsanto which claims the GMO seeds as their intellectual private property.

Food activist Vandana Shiva has been delivering a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world. She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive. Shiva contends that nothing less than the future of humanity rides on the outcome.

Ever increasing amounts of Monsanto's poison are being sprayed on crops that American consumers are eating as super weeds have adapted to the stuff and are growing bigger than ever requiring more and more Roundup to kill them. The only rational solution is to go back to natural organic ways of dealing with weeds and pests as Monsanto's GMO crops are not sustainable. The only rationale for using Monsanto's GMO seeds and herbicides is that the farmers can get a larger crop yield per acre and thus make more money. But quality rather than quantity is what savvy American consumers are demanding more and more. So the market for organic food is growing. Organic food is non-GMO food that hasn't been sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. With regard to animals they haven't been fed GMO corn or soy and haven't been given antibiotics or hormones.

San Diego Loves Roundup

San Diego is spraying Monsanto's Roundup (generic name - glyphosate) all over its freeways, public lands and waterways exposing San Diegans to this poison whenever they are driving or boating. In a letter to the editor of the San Diego Union, Susan Trump of North Part said this:

San Diego is liberally using Roundup, glyphosate, on public lands and waterways.

Entire countries such as France, Sri Lanka, Brazil and South Africa are banning the substance. We are past the age of ignorance. We understand the consequences and it is generally known that Roundup is not safe for humans, plants, insects or animals, yet its use continues to the extent that it is now in the food supply.

San Diego has just sued Monsanto for similar reasons. This must stop.

This month a French court confirmed Monsanto was guilty of chemical poisoning. Also in September 2015, Latvia and Greece Kicked Monsanto Out and Opted to Ban GM Crops!

San Diego Dr Robert J Rowen says:

What does your grocery shelf and San Diego’s bay water have in common? Monsanto and its poisons!

...

According to the French agency, glyphosate is used in more than 750 different herbicide products and its use has been detected in the air during spraying, in water and in food. Experts said there was "limited evidence" in humans that the herbicide can cause non-Hodgkins lymphoma and there is convincing evidence that glyphosate can also cause other forms of cancer in rats and mice. IARC's panel said glyphosate has been found in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, showing the chemical has been absorbed by the body.

Monsanto, which produces the glyphosate-containing herbicide, Roundup, strongly disagreed with the decision. "All labeled uses of glyphosate are safe for human health," said Phil Miller, a Monsanto spokesman, in a statement. (Did you know that this horrible stuff is routinely found in toxic screening on umbilical cord blood in our babies?)

And what did our own EPA say about this compound? “The EPA's 2012 assessment of glyphosate concluded that it met the statutory safety standards and that the chemical could "continue to be used without unreasonable risks to people or the environment."

About 180 million pounds per year are dumped on your food. It’s a systemic poison for plants, meaning the entire plant takes it up. More is deliberately dumped on “Roundup Ready” soy, etc. They are literally drenched and drowning in the toxic soup. Monsanto engineered crops to be resistant to a chemical it can more readily sell. It’s a win-win for the most evil company on the planet. Make and sell seeds of crops resistant to a poison it sells. And buy the government so that you will not be able to be informed if what you buy is GMO, and where possible get these bought off cronies to spoon-feed the public that your wares are safe. Now an ignorant public will be forced to buy and ingest your Frankenfoods and all the cancer causing poisons that have been sprayed on them. What a tremendous and diabolical scheme.

In a major victory for  activists, it was announced last week that the California Environmental Protection Agency is planning to label Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide as a cancer-causing chemical.

Nathan Donley, staff scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco said that this is a major victory in the fight against dangerous pesticides.

“California’s taking an important step toward protecting people and wildlife from this toxic pesticide. It’s nearly impossible for people to limit exposure to this toxin because it is just so widespread. That’s why we need much tighter controls on its use,” Donley said.

“More than 250 million pounds of glyphosate are used each year in the United States, and the science is clear that it’s a threat to public health and countless wildlife species. It’s long past time to start reining in the out-of-control use of glyphosate in the United States,” he added.

Shop Organic for the Sake of Your Family's Health

So shopping organic and buying from local farmers makes more sense if you want to protect your family's health. GMO crops won't kill you immediately. Glyphosate won't kill you immediately. That's safe to say. But cancer rates are going skyward for all segments of the population as toxic chemicals permeate our diets and our lifestyles. There is no proven link between GMOs and cancer, but common sense dictates that unnatural chemicals as part of our diet aren't good for us regardless of the lower prices for such foods. It's better to pay a little more and protect your family's health. Like cigarettes, GMOs sprayed with glyphosate won't kill you immediately, but cancer will eventually get you. Monsanto's role is to deny the link between the two as long as they possibly can.

To be sure GMOs allow for more food production per acre if you want to call it food. It's actually Frankenfood. But the demographics of the growth of human population are indeed scary:

The global food supply is indeed in danger. Feeding the expanding population without further harming the Earth presents one of the greatest challenges of our time, perhaps of all time. By the end of the century, the world may well have to accommodate ten billion inhabitants—roughly the equivalent of adding two new Indias. Sustaining that many people will require farmers to grow more food in the next seventy-five years than has been produced in all of human history. For most of the past ten thousand years, feeding more people simply meant farming more land. That option no longer exists; nearly every arable patch of ground has been cultivated, and irrigation for agriculture already consumes seventy per cent of the Earth’s freshwater.

But we shouldn't panic and conclude that GMOs are the only way to go. There are natural methods to produce more food. One way is to reduce the production of beef and encourage a more vegetarian diet. Beef cows consume tremendous amounts of grains in order to produce one pound of meat. If humans consumed the grains directly, more could be fed and more water would be available for human consumption rather than the vast quantities required for animal production.

In addition beef cows are fed tremendous amounts of hormones and antibiotics in order to fatten them up and grow to maturity faster. Whatever animal protein humans consume should be organic for the same reasons that vegetables need to be non-GMO and organic if one's family's health means more than the slightly increased dietary costs. Money can be saved by not eating out which costs about five times as much as the same meal prepared at home, and what's more most restaurants are serving GMO and non-organic foods. Most restaurants are serving GMO foods and animals who have consumed them unless stated otherwise. Their whole trip is to make foods taste good without regard to whether or not those foods are good for you. So you pay through the nose and get a dose of poison to boot.

If you need more reasons to avoid GMO foods, here's a few:

1. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urges doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients. They cite animal studies showing organ damage, gastrointestinal and immune system disorders, accelerated aging, and infertility. Human studies show how genetically modified (GMO) food can leave material behind inside us, possibly causing long-term problems. Genes inserted into GM soy, for example, can transfer into the DNA of bacteria living inside us, and that the toxic insecticide produced by GM corn was found in the blood of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.

2. Between 1996 and 2008, US farmers sprayed an extra 383 million pounds of herbicide on GMOs. Overuse of Roundup results in "superweeds," resistant to the herbicide. This is causing farmers to use even more toxic herbicides every year. Not only does this create environmental harm, GM foods contain higher residues of toxic herbicides. Roundup, for example, is linked with sterility, hormone disruption, birth defects, and cancer.

3. Most of the health and environmental risks of GMOs are ignored by governments' superficial regulations and safety assessments. The reason for this tragedy is largely political. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example, doesn't require a single safety study, does not mandate labeling of GMOs, and allows companies to put their GM foods onto the market without even notifying the agency.

Their justification was the claim that they had no information showing that GM foods were substantially different. But this was a lie. Secret agency memos made public by a lawsuit show that the overwhelming consensus even among the FDA's own scientists was that GMOs can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. They urged long-term safety studies. But the White House had instructed the FDA to promote biotechnology, and the agency official in charge of policy was Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney, later their vice president. He's now the US Food Safety Czar.

Will the US be the Last to Ban Monsanto's GMOs?

Many other countries are not falling for Monsanto's corporate nonsense and are labeling or outright banning GMOs. As I wrote previously:

Russia is considering legislation to criminalize GMO foods describing GMO food producers as terrorists. France, the largest agricultural producer in Europe, is preparing to restore a GMO maize ban in their country. Twenty-six countries, including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy and Mexico, have a total or partial ban on GMOs. Significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

Why does the US insist on doing the opposite by passing legislation that prevents states from banning or even labeling GMOs?

Even supposedly healthy restaurants like Subway are purveying meats from animals that have been factory farmed. This means they have been fed vast quantities of pesticide and herbicide sprayed corn and soy. They have been given huge amounts of antibiotics and hormones. Then they are made into sandwiches that people eat.

This is from an article by Reynard Loki, How Subway Sandwiches Are Fueling a Major Public Health Crisis:

Subway's slogan is, "Eat fresh." But while the company may have established itself as the "healthy" fast-food alternative, many people don't realize that as the world's largest fast food chain, it is also contributing to a serious public health crisis, animal cruelty and environmental damage due to the company's use of meat from factory farmed animals. These filthy and inhumane operations cause an incomprehensible amount of animal suffering, poison our air, land and water, and give rise to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that impact human health.

...

"Every year, more than two million people in the United States get infections that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die as a result," according to a 2013 report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "In addition to the illness and deaths caused by resistant bacteria, the report found that C. difficile, a serious diarrheal infection usually associated with antibiotic use, causes at least 250,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths every year."

...

“Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda of WHO. “Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier, and benefit from modern medicine. Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating.”

The antibiotics used to fatten animals are hastening the day when they won't be effective against antibiotic-resistant bacteria and humans will die from minor infections as they used to before antibiotics were invented. And this is all so that factory farmers can make a few more dollars by bringing animals to market in less time.

Unless Americans wise up to where their food is coming from particularly restaurant foods, they are putting themselves at risk for diseases for which there aren't proven links to toxic substances in the food supply. These toxicities are put there so the corporate food giants and corporate farmers can make more money than they would have if they had supplied food products which hadn't been sprayed with toxic substances or had toxic foods fed to animals which are then butchered and fed to humans. As long as the link between these practices and actual human disease remains hazy, these corporations will continue to get away with it much as the cigarette manufacturers got away with selling a product that it took years to prove that it was cancer causing.

Glyphosate, Favored Chemical of Monsanto & Dow, Declared 'Probable' Source of Cancer for Humans

Published on

Monday, March 23, 2015

by

Common Dreams

World's most widely used herbicide ingredient shown to cause variety of cancers by research arm of World Health Organization

by

Jon Queally, staff writer

 

6 Comments

 

Monsanto’s popular weedkiller is mainly used on crops such as corn and soybeans, which are genetically modified to survive it. It also"probably causes cancer" in humans, says IARC. (Photo: Studioshots/Alamy)

In a determination that could have far-reaching implications for the agro-chemical giants like Dow Chemical and Monsanto, the research arm of the World Health Organization has declared that glyphosate—the key ingredient of widely-used herbicides such as Roundup—should now be categorized as a "probable carcinogen" for humans.

In a report published on Friday in The Lancet Oncology medical journal, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), based in France, announced its findings after a meeting of 17 oncology experts from 11 countries met to review the available scientific research exploring the connection between glyphosate, as well as several organophosphate insecticides, and various human cancers. Though sometimes such chemicals are lumped together as pesticides, glyphosate is technically a herbicide, which targets other plants, not pests.

"Consumers have the right to know how their food is grown and whether their food dollars are driving up the use of a probable carcinogen." —Ken Cook, EWGAccording to IARC, glyphosate is used in more than 750 different herbicide products and its use has been detected in the air during spraying, in water and in food. The panel of experts concluded that "limited evidence" exists to show the herbicide can cause non-Hodgkins lymphoma in humans and additional "convincing evidence" that it can cause other forms of cancer in both rats and mice. Researchers noted that glyphosate has been found in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, showing the chemical has been absorbed by the bodies of those who work most with it.

As the Associated Press explained, the research agency—which provides academic and scientific research FOR the WHO—has four levels of risks for possible cancer-causing agents: known carcinogens, probable or possible carcinogens, not classifiable and probably not carcinogenic. Glyphosate now falls in the second level of concern.

Though Monsanto immediately and predictably rejected the findings of the IARC, scientists who have long-warned of the public health impacts and wider dangers of glyphosate say the announcement should add urgency to the debate about whether or not such products should be allowed to dominate the world's agricultural systems.

"The widespread adoption of GMO corn and soybeans has led to an explosion in the use of glyphosate – a main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and Dow’s Enlist Duo," said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group. "Consumers have the right to know how their food is grown and whether their food dollars are driving up the use of a probable carcinogen."

Emily Marquez, Ph.D., a staff scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, in a statement on Monday, said, "Given glyphosate’s widespread usage with crops genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides, IARC’s finding comes none too soon."

"This increasingly dangerous pesticide treadmill calls into question the logic of genetically engineered herbicide technologies that rapidly lose their utility to farmers and put human health at risk." —Emily Marquez, Pesticide Action Network

Though the IARC's finding have no regulatory bearing on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determinations about glyphosates and the other compounds studied, they do add weight to the body of evidence showing how harmful such chemicals are.

According to Marquez and her colleagues at PAN, since Monsanto’s signature "RoundUp Ready" corn and soy crops were introduced in 1996, more than 500 million additional pounds of glyphosate and other herbicides have been used in the United States.

"It should be noted that in well over a decade’s use of glyphosate in GE crops, hundreds of millions of pounds of this chemical have been released into the environment," said Marquez. "USGS surveys document widespread water contamination, and — as documented in a recent Consumer Reports study — residues of glyphosate also show up in our food. Even though glyphosate is so widely used, the U.S. does not currently conduct biomonitoring for glyphosate residues, and USDA conducts only minimal testing for food residues."

What's more, the pesticides and herbicides on which farmers have now been forced to rely may no longer be working. As Marquez explains: "The dramatic growth in herbicide use in the U.S. driven by GE technology has resulted not only in increased human exposure to these chemicals, but also in the development of herbicide-resistant ‘superweeds.’ Farmers are offered more toxic mixes of herbicides as a so-called solution to this new problem. Dow’s recently approved Enlist seeds — designed for use with a mixture of glyphosate and the antiquated, highly toxic herbicide, 2,4-D — offer a case in point."

In other words, the more these chemicals are used, the less effective they become.

According to Marquez, "This increasingly dangerous pesticide treadmill calls into question the logic of genetically engineered herbicide technologies that rapidly lose their utility to farmers and — as IARC’s recent finding makes clear —put human health at risk."

As Al-Jazeera notes, scientists and farmers from around the world have raised other concerns over glyphosate and tried to ban its use:

Channa Jayasumana,with Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, published a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2014 on a possible link between glyphosate and chronic kidney disease in farmworkers. His research found that excessive heat and dehydration may weaken the workers' bodies, making them more susceptible to pesticides and heavy metals, which can lead to kidney disease.

Based on that research, the Sri Lankan government moved to ban glyphosate in spring of 2014. But Monsanto raised objections to the report's findings, and the ban was lifted. The chemical was, and continues to be, widely used on farms in the country.

The research also suggested a link between glyphosate and a mysterious kidney disease that has killed thousands of farmworkers in Central America. At least 20,000 farm workers have died of chronic kidney disease in Nicaragua in the last two decades, The Guardian reported in February. Researchers who have studied the disease in Central America say that it mainly affects agricultural laborers working under conditions of excessive heat and dehydration, but other factors, including pesticides, may play a role.

In addition, a peer-reviewed paper in 2014—titled "Genetically Engineered Crops, Glyphosate and the Deterioration of Health in the United States of America"(pdf)—linked glyphosate to a huge increase in the incidence of 22 chronic diseases across the United States.

China Halts US Grain Imports Due to GMO Concerns, Impacting US Grain Sector

by Elizabeth Renter

Natural Society       / News Report

 

Published: Saturday 2 August 2014

 

China is doing all it can to keep genetically modified corn from entering its borders. And they started by putting the brakes on U.S. grain imports. But when will U.S. farmers turn away from GM corn?

China has somewhat of a history when it comes to refusing GMOs from the United States. Now, due to fears that genetically modified grains will find their way in, China recently put the brakes on some U.S. grain imports, imports that amount to hundreds of thousands of tons per month. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the move by Chinese regulators is just the latest in an effort from the country to keep GM corn outside of its borders.

The grain in question is a corn product known as DDGS, or dried distillers’ grains. Used in animal feed production, it is essentially a leftover from when corn is processed into ethanol.

The concern is that MIR 162, a genetically modified strain of corn, will find its way in among the DDGS despite not being approved by the Chinese government. Their concern isn’t without cause. Of 613,678 tons that were reported at Chinese customs in April, 600,000 tons tested positive for MIR 162.

Almost half of all U.S. corn in made into ethanol, leaving plenty of DDGS to go around. China is the United States’ top importer of DDGS. Last year they bought 34 percent of DDGS exports, more than twice as much as Mexico, who imported the second-largest amount.“It looks like the government is determined to stop any form of corn imports from the U.S.,” said Sylvia Shi, from the Shanghai-based agricultural research company Shanghai JC Intelligence Co.

GMO Watch reports:

“This development did not come as a total surprise, following as it did China’s recent rejection of 1.1 million metric tons of Syngenta corn containing the unapproved GMO strain MIR162. Official news said that though Syngenta has repeatedly submitted the Lepidoptera-resistant GM corn for review and import into China, the documenting information and experimental data were incomplete and problematic. Thus the corn is still under assessment and has not been approved for import.”

And all of this isn’t terribly surprising. China previously destroyed a total of at least three genetically modified corn shipments with origins from the United States in a move that echoes the way in which the nation of Hungary actually went and destroyed acres upon acres of Monsanto’s GMO corn fields. The soveriergn state also refused over 887,000 tonnes of GMO corn shipped from the U.S. since just last November.

The import stoppage is seen as a “win-win” for China, who believes short-term losses of DDGS supply will eventually lead to gains when U.S. farmers see the value in turning away from GM corn. One can only hope it will be this simple.

Who Knew? Organic Foods Contain a Dose of GMOs

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

To be labeled as "USDA organic," 95% of the ingredients must be organically grown and the remaining 5% may be non-organic agricultural ingredients or synthetic substances that have been approved for use in organics by the USDA. The 5% of non-organic products are usually derived from GMO corn which is highly sprayed with Monsanto's Roundup. It's a little known fact that some organic packaged foods contain GMOs and pesticides thanks to the lobbying efforts of Big Organic corporations.

For example, consider a container of O organic Tomato Basil soup, a product of Canada, purchased at Sprout's. The ingredient list includes organic tomatoes, organic tomato pulp, citric acid, calcium chloride, organic tomato paste, citric acid, organic cream, a long list of other organic ingredients and finally citric acid. Why you might ask is there so much citric acid listed and is it organic? Evidently not or it would have been listed as "organic citric acid."

The fact is that citric acid does not even come from citric fruit like oranges or lemons. You might have envisioned workers pouring vats of freshly squeezed lemon or orange juice into the product. No, my good friend, citric acid is a product derived from GMO corn! Cheap corn permeates every facet of the American diet ... even organics! Its derivatives including citric acid are used as preservatives, taste enhancers and a whole variety of other things.

Citric acid is produced using a mold, Aspergillus niger. The mold is grown in the presence of a carbohydrate to produce citric acid. In order to get higher yields, genetically modified Aspergillus niger is employed. Besides the genetically modified mold being used, the carbohydrate "food" that the mold metabolizes is often genetically modified corn.

Why, you might ask, is an ingredient derived from GMO corn allowed to go under the name of "citric acid"? This is from cornucopia.org:

 

On September 26, 2012, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a rule that continues its policy of allowing the indiscriminate and illegal addition of synthetic nutrients to organic foods. Nutrients occur naturally in foods, and many are essential for good health. But organic consumers expect the nutrients in their foods to be naturally occurring rather than added synthetics that are mass produced in factories by chemical corporations, often using hazardous petrochemical substances.

 

So USDA policy allows the "indiscriminate and illegal use" of synthetic products such as those derived from GMO corn and they also allow the description of those products on the packaging in a deceptive manner as long as it is chemically identical to the real thing. Even if you buy organic, the citric acid in that organic food is most likely made with GMO products and processes unless explicitly stated to the contrary.

 

Why is citric acid used in foods? It sharpens taste and acts as a food preservative. That's why it's in so many organic packaged food products. Citric acid is found in a huge number of products and is used in numerous processes: from shampoo to soda to cheese to beer making to candy to medicine to varnish remover.

 

Citric acid has been linked to gastrointestinal problems and also to problems associated with the loss of dental enamel. In a study at the University of Bristol, UK, the increasing incidence of enamel erosion was causally connected to the high amounts of citric acid added to drinks and food.

 

It is important to check the nutrition list on the labels of packaged organic products to avoid exposure to GMOs. Citric acid is one of the worst offenders. It may be chemically identical to citric acid from oranges and lemons, but it was produced in an industrial process not involving any citric fruits whatsoever. In fact it was probably produced using a GMO mold and GMO corn.

 

It is better to deal with local farmers since most organic products found in stores come from food giants which have bought out what started as small organic operations. In 1995 there were 81 independent organic processing companies in the United States. A decade later, Big Food had gobbled up all but 15 of them. Many iconic organic brands are owned by the titans of junk food, processed food and sugary beverages—the same corporations that spent millions to defeat GMO labeling initiatives in California and Washington. General Mills (which owns Muir Glen, Cascadian Farm, and LaraBar), Coca-Cola (Honest Tea, Odwalla), J.M. Smucker (R.W. Knudsen, Santa Cruz Organic), and many other corporate owners of organic brands contributed big bucks to deny citizens’ right to know what is in their food.

 

Other Big Food operators who have found it lucrative to get into the organic market  are the following.  The amounts they've contributed to fight GMO labeling in California (Prop 37) and Washington State (I-522) are in parenthesis:

 

PepsiCo ($4.8M) - IZZE, Naked Juice, Simply Frito-Lay, Starbucks Frappucino

Coca-Cola ($3.2M) - Honest Tea, Odwalla

Nestle ($3M) - Gerber Organic, Sweet Leaf tea

Kraft/Mondelez ($2.4M) - Boca Burgers, Green and Black's 

General Mills ($2.1M) - Cascadian Farm, Larabar, Muir Glen

ConAgra Foods ($2M) - Alexia, Pam organic cooking sprays

Kelloggs ($1.1M) - Bear Naked, Gardenburger, Kashi, Morningstar Farms

Campbells ($980k) - Plum Organics, Wolfgang Puck organic soups

Smuckers ($900k) - R.W. Knudsen, Santa Cruz organic, Smuckers Organic

Hershey's ($880k) - Dagoba

Bimbo Bakeries ($560k) - Earthgrains bread

McCormick ($400k) - Simply Asia, Thai Kitchen 

 

On a positive note:

 

WASHINGTON, May 8, 2014 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced that USDA is making a historic $78 million investment in local and regional food systems, including food hubs, farmers markets, aggregation and processing facilities, distribution services, and other local food business enterprises.

“The 2014 Farm Bill has given USDA new tools, resources and authority to support the rural economy,” Vilsack said. “Consumer demand for locally-produced food is strong and growing, and farmers and ranchers are positioning their businesses to meet that demand. As this sector continues to mature, we see aggregation, processing, and distribution enterprises across the local food supply chain growing rapidly. These historic USDA investments in support of local food give farmers and ranchers more market opportunities, provide consumers with more choices, and create jobs in both rural and urban communities.”

Russia is considering legislation to criminalize GMO foods describing GMO food producers as terrorists. France, the largest agricultural producer in Europe, is preparing to restore a GMO maize ban in their country. Twenty-six countries, including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy and Mexico, have a total or partial ban on GMOs. Significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

On May 8, Peter Shumlin, Governor of Vermont, signed a historic bill requiring food manufacturers to label genetically engineered (GE) foods, and to drop the practice of labeling GE foods as “natural” or “all natural.” Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) has threatened to sue the state of Vermont. New research has found that glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, is actually found in the breast milk of women, leading to damage to underdeveloped human beings.

In 2014, half the states will likely consider placing special labels on food that use genetically modified organisms (GMOs), according to Pamela M. Prah at PEW’s Stateline. “Big Food” is ready for the challenge though and will use its influence and resources to protect profits gained from GMOs that are found in 80 percent of the food America consumes. 

'Tide is Turning' as Oregon Voters Overwhelmingly Approve Ban of GE Crops

Published on Wednesday, May 21, 2014 by Common Dreams

 

Ronnie Cummins: "These victories make it clear to agribusiness giants like Monsanto and Dow that the day has come when they can no longer buy and lie their way to victory."

 

- Lauren McCauley, staff writer

(Photo via Family Farms Coalition/ Facebook)

In a victory for sustainable food advocates everywhere, two counties in Oregon on Tuesday voted to ban the cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops.

Despite an onslaught of spending by agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Monsanto, voters in Jackson County and Josephine County overwhelming took a stand for measures protecting "seed sovereignty and local control" of food systems. The Jackson Measure 15-119 passed 66-34 percent, while the Josephine County Measure 17-58 passed 58-42 percent.

"It's a great day for the people of Oregon who care about sustainability and healthy ecosystems!" GMO Free Oregon wrote on their Facebook page after receiving the final tally.

“The people of Jackson and Josephine Counties have given the rest of the country a model – and the inspiration – to protect local communities."
—Rebecca Spector, Center for Food Safety

“Tonight family farmers stood up for our basic right to farm,” cheered Elise Higley, Jackson County farmer and campaign director for the Our Family Farms Coalition, in a statement following the vote.

Calling the bans a "tremendous victory" for the citizens and farmers of the counties, as well as for the national anti-GMO movement, Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), said the votes are further proof that, when given a voice, citizens will choose a sustainable food system over corporate-dominated agribusiness.

"These victories make it clear to agribusiness giants like Monsanto and Dow that the day has come when they can no longer buy and lie their way to victory," Cummins said. "By using the tools of democracy, such as ballot initiatives, citizens can overcome corporate and government corruption through honest campaigns, built on a foundation of truth, science and fair play."

In Jackson County, proponents of the ban raised only $375,000 compared with the nearly $1 million raised by the opposition, whose donors included Monsanto, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer. Spending in Josephine County was lower on both sides. According to OCA, the Josephine ban will likely be tested in court after that state's passage of the controversial law S.B. 863 in October 2013, stripping counties of the right to pass GMO bans. The Jackson County measure is exempt because it had qualified for the ballot prior to the passage of the law.

The Oregon counties now join a growing list of communities who have enacted similar bans including Santa Cruz County, Trinity County, Marin County and Mendocino County in California, and San Juan County in Washington state, as well as numerous cities nationwide. Hawaii’s Big Island and Oahu have banned GE taro and coffee.

Earlier this month, Vermont passed a landmark law which mandates that all GE foods sold in the state must be labeled. Unlike Conneticut and Maine, which passed measures that require a certain number of other states to also enact GMO legislation, Vermont's law has no such "trigger clause."

"Where the federal government has failed, local efforts like this are taking action," said George Kimbrell, Portland-based senior attorney for Center for Food Safety (CFS). "The tide is turning towards a sustainable food future and GE-free zones are a vital step.”

“The people of Jackson and Josephine Counties have given the rest of the country a model – and the inspiration – to protect local communities," added Rebecca Spector, who spearheads state labeling initiatives for CFS. "This is just the beginning.”

_____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Russian Lawmakers Want to Impose Criminal Penalties on Those Conducting GMO Business

by Christina Sarich

 

Natural Society/ News Report

 

Published: Tuesday 20 May 2014

 

In an act of lucidity and light that our own country should somewhat imitate, Russian lawmakers are considering equating GMO-related activities to a terrorist act or death threat, a criminal act that Russia says deserves the punishment which killers and creators of mass ecological and human genocide deserve.

A Russian newspaper, Izvestia, writes that criminal liability will be imposed on any act that involves producing, selling, or transporting genetically modified organisms, if Russian lawmakers get their way.

A bill supporting this ideology was submitted to the Russian State Duma lower parliament house by the Duma agrarian committee as well as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) (who claimed the parliament’s bill was too mild.) Those initiating the bill suggest that criminal responsibility should be applicable to companies and government officials, but not to farmers who were convinced that GMOs were safe to grow. They believe individuals should only undergo disciplinary action, and not criminal charges.

The bill would also heavily fine companies for distorting or concealing information about the environmental impacts of GMOs. If this bill were to pass in the US, I’m sure Monsanto would go broke paying all the fines they would be subject to. They’ve paid off scientists and entire institutions, as well as our own FDA and EPA to conceal evidence about both health and environmental damage that GMOs cause. Government officials  would be subject to a fine fine of 1,000-2,000 roubles, and legal entities like corporations to a fine of 10,000-20,000 roubels. Several of our Congress persons and Senators would be swimming in fines as well.

Kirill Cherkasov, the first deputy chairman of the State Duma agrarian committee, pointed out that tight regulation is needed since many GMOs have been insinuated into foreign market via the World Trade Organization. Cherkasov suggested that a package of amendments to the national laws regulating technical and economic aspects of GMO-related activities should be submitted by its autumn session.

Sometimes it seems our country has traded places with the cold war communists of days past. We may not agree with everything that Vladimir Putin does in the name of Russia, but at least he is willing to do what our President is not in the US – protect his people from genetically modified foods by keeping them out of the country.

The Great Boycott: Monsanto and the GMA

by Ronnie Cummins

 

Organic Consumers Association/ Op-Ed

 

Published: Thursday 15 May 2014

 

Defying repeated threats of a lawsuit from Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), on May 8, Peter Shumlin, Governor of Vermont, signed a historic bill requiring food manufacturers to label genetically engineered (GE) foods, and to drop the practice of labeling GE foods as “natural” or “all natural.”

 

Defying repeated threats of a lawsuit from Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), on May 8, Peter Shumlin, Governor of Vermont, signed a historic bill requiring food manufacturers to label genetically engineered (GE) foods, and to drop the practice of labeling GE foods as “natural” or “all natural.” 

On May 9, true to its word, the GMA confirmed that it will sue Vermont in federal court to overturn H. 112. 

Vermont is prepared to fight back. The state has already established a “food fight” legal defense fund. Legal analysts sayVermont will likely win. 

Vermont isn’t the only state up against the multi-billion dollar lobbying group. The GMA, whose 300-plus members include Monsanto and Dow, Coca-Cola and General Mills, is pushing a bill in Congress that would preempt all states from passing GMO labeling laws. 

It’s time for consumers in every state to band together to defeat the GMA’s full-on assault, not only on Vermont, not only on consumers’ right to know what’s in our food, but on states’ rights and on our basic freedoms to protect our health and our communities.

Here’s how we do it. We boycott every product, including the natural and organic brands, owned by members of the GMA. We flood their Facebook pages, tarnish their brand names. We pressure financial institutions, pension funds and mutual funds to divest from Monsanto and the other GMA companies. 

Our motto for Monsanto and GMA products must become: Don’t buy them. Don’t sell them. Don’t grow them. And don’t let your financial institution, university, church, labor union or pension fund invest in them.

As soon as the GMA files a lawsuit against Vermont, the Organic Consumers Association, joined by a growing coalition of public interest groups, will launch a boycott and divestment campaign directed against all of the 300 GMA companies and their thousands of brand name products—including foods, beverages, seeds, home and garden supplies, pet food, herbicides and pesticides. 

A new balance of power

Monsanto and the GMA have until now successfully blocked popular GMO labeling legislation in over 30 states. They’ve defeated, by a razor-thin margin, two high-profile ballot initiatives, in California (2012) and Washington (2013). And they’ve intimidated Connecticut and Maine into including trigger clauses in those states’ GMO labeling laws, successfully delaying their implementation. 

Funding for this anti-consumer, anti-right-to-know lobbying and advertising effort topped $100 million in 2012-2014, including $12 million in illegally laundered donations to I-522, the Washington State GMO labeling ballot initiative of 2013. All of that money has come from the 300 chemical, seed, supermarket, grain, pharmaceutical and food corporations, including Monsanto and the other Gene Giants, who make up the GMA. 

Until now the GMA colossus has ruled, not only in Washington D.C., but in all 50 states. But now that Vermont has passed a trigger-free GMO labeling law, and Oregon is poised to do the same in November, the balance of power has shifted.

Monsanto, the GMA and their allies are in panic mode. Because they know that when companies are forced to label or remove GMOs, and also are forced to drop the fraudulent practice of labeling GE-tainted foods as “natural” or “all natural,” in one state, they will have to do it in every state. Just as they’ve been forced to do in Europe, where mandatory GMO labeling has been in effect since 1997.

GMA members and corporate agribusiness hate labeling, because it forces them to reveal all of the hazardous GMOs, chemicals and drug residues lurking in the billions of dollars of foods, beverages, seeds, grains and pesticides they sell. It’s no wonder that Monsanto and GMA’s bill in Congress--a bill they’ve named the “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2014—has been renamed the “DARK” (Denying Americans the right to know) Act.

Let the boycott begin

We absolutely must defeat the impending GMA lawsuit against Vermont. This will require us to raise money and provide legal help to the state. 

Equally important, we need to intensify our mass education, grassroots lobbying and marketplace pressure so we can defeat Monsanto and the GMA Big Food/Chemical lobby in the court of public opinion, too. If you would like to donate to this effort click here. 

But there are other ways we can use our dollars to defeat the GMA. We can refuse to invest, even indirectly through retirement and mutual funds, in those companies. We can pressure institutional investors like Fidelity, Vanguard and State Street to dump their stock in these companies.

And we can boycott all of the 300 GMA companies and their more than 6,000 brand name products—including foods, beverages, seeds, home and garden supplies, pet food, herbicides, and pesticides.  

Where to start? As part of this Great Boycott, pro-organic consumer groups will put a special emphasis on boycotting the “Traitor Brands,” those organic and so-called “natural” brands owned and marketed by GMA members.

Health-conscious and green-minded consumers often inadvertently support the GMA when they buy brands like Honest Tea, Kashi, Odwalla and others whose parent companies, all members of the GMA, have donated millions to defeat GMO labeling initiatives in California (Prop 37) and Washington State (I-522). (Take the boycott pledge here.) 

                                    

These Traitor Brands include, among others: 

 

PepsiCo ($4.8M) - IZZE, Naked Juice, Simply Frito-Lay, Starbucks Frappucino

Coca-Cola ($3.2M) - Honest Tea, Odwalla

Nestle ($3M) - Gerber Organic, Sweet Leaf tea

Kraft/Mondelez ($2.4M) - Boca Burgers, Green and Black's 

General Mills ($2.1M) - Cascadian Farm, Larabar, Muir Glen

ConAgra Foods ($2M) - Alexia, Pam organic cooking sprays

Kelloggs ($1.1M) - Bear Naked, Gardenburger, Kashi, Morningstar Farms

Campbells ($980k) - Plum Organics, Wolfgang Puck organic soups

Smuckers ($900k) - R.W. Knudsen, Santa Cruz organic, Smuckers Organic

Hershey's ($880k) - Dagoba

Bimbo Bakeries ($560k) - Earthgrains bread

McCormick ($400k) - Simply Asia, Thai Kitchen 

Why not just boycott the conventional GMA parent company brands?

Because those of us who support organics rarely buy products like Coca-Cola, Diet Pepsi, or Kellogg’s Genetically-Modified-Sugar-Coated Frosted Flakes, or a packet of Monsanto seeds or a spray bottle of Roundup or 2, 4-D. The only way to pressure Big Food and the Gene Giants is to get millions of conscious consumers to boycott the brands we actually buy. 

Let’s be clear. Junk Food and beverage companies who are members of the GMA are gobbling up organic and “natural” brands because they recognize the huge profit potential in the fast-growing organic and natural markets. They want our business. If we stop buying their brands, they know there’s a good chance we’ll find alternative brands. And we might never look back.

Seven ways to fight back

There are about 50 popular organic and natural “Traitor Brands” (owned by GMA members). It’s easy for most of us to boycott those brands. But how do we boycott the entire 6,000-product inventory of GMA member-owned brands, especially those of us who don’t shop for those brands in supermarkets?

Here are seven ways to fight back against Monsanto and all the Corporate Bullies of the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

(1)    Stop buying all non-organic processed foods. Even if they are certified organic, don’t buy any Traitor Brand processed foods or beverages. Ninety percent of the foods Americans buy or consume are heavily processed, deliberately laced with sugar, salt and unhealthy fats, contaminated with dyes, preservatives, pesticides, GMOs, and drug residues. If you want to be healthy, if you want to avoid cancer, heart attacks, or obesity, build your diet around whole foods, especially raw fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, (coconut oil, avocadoes, pastured meat, dairy, and eggs, nuts, and whole grains) and nuts.

(2)    Patronize grocers, coops and community restaurants that serve organic, cooked-from-scratch, local food. Many restaurants, especially chain restaurants (Chipotlé is a rare exception), sell many of the brands owned by GMA members. 

(3)    Cook at home with healthy organic ingredients.

(4)    Buy only heirloom, open-pollinated, and/or organic seeds.

(5)    Boycott all lawn and garden inputs (chemicals, fertilizers, etc.) unless they are “OMRI Approved,” which means they are allowed in organic production.

(6)    Read the labels on everything you buy. If a GMA member company owns the product, don’t buy it. Given the greed and reckless disregard for public health and the environment typical of GMA corporations, chances are these products aren’t good for you and the environment anyway.

(7)    Download the Buycott app for your smartphone and join OCA's new campaign, "Buy Organic Brands that Support Your Right to Know" so you can scan products before you buy them.

In this age of the Internet and social media, consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns and other forms of marketplace pressure are more powerful than ever. Please join and support the Organic Consumers Association’s “Great Boycott” of Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association today. Let’s show Monsanto and the GMA we mean business.

 

Most news sources are funded by corporations and investors. Their goal is to drive people to advertisers while pushing the corporate agenda. NationofChange is a 501(c)3 organization funded almost 100% from its readers–you! Our only accountability is to the public. Click here to make a generous donation.

 

                  

 

 

 

 

                                                   

ABOUT Ronnie Cummins

Ronnie Cummins is founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association. Cummins is author of numerous articles and books, including "Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers" (Second Revised Edition Marlowe & Company 2004).

Three Studies Proving Toxic Glyphosate Found in Urine, Blood and Even Breast Milk

by Mike Barrett

Natural Society/ News Analysis

Published: Monday 5 May 2014

Very recently, the Organic Consumers Association have demanded that U.S. regulators such as the FDA, EPA, and USDA ban glyphosate as many other communities and even nations have. Why? Because a new piece of research found that the toxic ingredient is actually found in the breast milk of women, leading to damage to underdeveloped human beings.

Approximately 1 billion pounds of pesticides are sprayed on crops in the United States alone every single year. Thanks to pesticide/herbicide-resistant GMO crops, that number is growing every year. Much of this pesticide spraying contains a toxic ingredient known as glyphosate – the primary poisonous active ingredient in Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide RoundUp. Regulators as well as Monsanto claim that this ingredient is excreted from the body, but numerous studies have shown that not only is it causing numerous health problems, but it is showing up in urine samples, blood samples, and even breast milk.

1. Glyphosate Found in People’s Urine

It has been revealed by numerous scientists that herbicides and pesticides bioaccumulate in the body, eventually leading to a toxic overload of sorts. One study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of glyphosate in all urine samples tested. The amount of glyphosate found in the urine was staggering, with each sample containing concentrations at 5 to 20-fold the limit established for drinking water. But this is just a single piece of evidence that pesticides are out of control.

Another more recent study found thatanimals and humans who consume pesticide-laden GMO foods have extremely high levels of glyphosate in their urine. What’s more, chronically sick people have higher levels than healthy people. Conversely, people who eat primarily organic foods, and animals that are given feed from non-GMO plants, have lower levels of glyphosate in their urine. The study was published in the Journal of Environmental & Analytical Toxicology.

Very recently, the Organic Consumers Association have demanded that U.S. regulators such as the FDA, EPA, and USDA ban glyphosate as many other communities and even nations have. Why? Because a new piece of research found that the toxic ingredient is actually found in the breast milk of women, leading to damage to underdeveloped human beings. 

2. Glyphosate Found in Breast Milk

Moms Across America and Sustainable Pulse found ‘high’ levels in 3 out of the 10 samples tested. The levels found in the breast milk testing of 76 ug/l to 166 ug/l are 760 to 1600 times higher than the European Drinking Water Directive allows for individual pesticides.

“The mothers tested are mostly familiar with GMOs and glyphosate. Most of them have been trying to avoid GMOs and glyphosate for several months to two years, so the levels of mothers who are not aware of GMOs and glyphosate may be much higher,” Moms Across America Founder and Director, Zen Honeycutt, stated.

3. Glyphosate Found in our Blood

In addition to being found in urine and breast milk, glyphosate has also been found in people’s blood in 18 different countries. A new study entitled, ‘The effect of metabolites and impurities of glyphosate on human erythrocytes (in vitro),’ explains just how RoundUp chemicals are invading our human blood.

Researchers exposed participants’ blood to different levels of glyphosate consistent with the ranges and concentrations which have already been well established in our drinking water, air, soil and food – between .01-5 millimolar (mM) for 1, 4, and 24 hours. What they found was that glyphosate and other ingredients in RoundUp lead to ‘slightly significant’negative effects on red blood cells. In other words, our blood is simply not ‘RoundUp Ready’.

It seems that regulatory authorities as well as the biotech industry can no longer claim that toxic ingredients such as glyphosate don’t bioaccumulate in the body and are excreted. As anyone may have guessed, these toxins really are doing some damage.

Vermont Senate Passes Mandatory GMO Labeling Bill

Ashley Curtin

NationofChange/ News Report

Published: Friday 18 April 2014

 

If approved by the Vermont House of Representatives, who initially passed the bill before it made its way to the Senate, the law would take effect on July 1, 2016.

Vermont is on track to become the first state to label genetically modified foods. On Tuesday, the Vermont Senate approved the GMO labeling bill, H.112, which will require mandatory labeling of all food products made from genetically modified crops without the dependency of other states.

Unlike Maine and Connecticut’s GMO labeling bills, which were passed last year and will only go into effect when other states pass similar laws, Vermont’s H.112 carries no such provisions. The bill doesn’t require other states to enact GMO labeling laws in order to share legal fees if the GMO labeling laws were challenged in court. Instead, Vermont’s Judiciary Committee chairman, Richard Sears, D-VT, said that he felt the state was in “good legal shape” and that the bill is “defensible” so “relying on other states was not in [their] best interest.” Sears also stated that the committee would rather "other states follow the course of Vermont."

If approved by the Vermont House of Representatives, who initially passed the bill before it made its way to the Senate, the law would take effect on July 1, 2016.

After a two-hour discussion among senators, the bill passed with a favorable 28-2 vote, according to the coalition, Vermont Right to Know GMOs. Backers of the bill said they weren’t questioning the “indictment of the science of genetic engineering,” rather they were supporting consumers’ right to know what was in their food.

“The question that this bill addresses is not the safety, or danger of genetically modified organisms, in any case,” Democratic Sen. Richard McCormack said. "The question the bill addresses is the right to know.”

While the majority of Vermont’s Senate supported the bill, only two senators opposed it.

Republican Sen. Norm McAllister, who used many GMO products through the years as a former dairy farmer, said that the public has been misinformed and mislead regarding the “possible health concerns” from genetically engineered organisms.

“This is the misinformation that the public has had,” McAllster said. “Even in our public hearing we heard from people who were making statements that we even knew were incorrect. It was a scare tactic as far as I’m concerned and that is why I don’t support it.”

The preliminary approval of Vermont’s H.112 has many supporters and activists excited to “set the course for Vermont to become the first state in the nation to label genetically modified foods,” according to Vermont Right to Know GMOs. And the Senate majority feels confident that Vermont’s House will approve the bill in the coming weeks since it is very similar to the bill the House initially passed last year. 

‘Big Food Ready’ for Costly Battle as States Consider GMO Labeling Bills

by John Deike

EcoWatch/ News Report

Published: Sunday 16 March 2014

In 2014, half the states will likely consider placing special labels on food that use genetically modified organisms (GMOs), according to Pamela M. Prah at PEW’s Stateline.

In 2014, half the states will likely consider placing special labels on food that use genetically modified organisms (GMOs), according to Pamela M. Prah at PEW’s Stateline.

“Big Food” is ready for the challenge though and will use its influence and resources to protect profits gained from GMOs that are found in 80 percent of the food America consumes. 

The fight has some state attorneys general worried if labeling laws would survive court challenges brought on by food producers. No matter the outcome, it would likely cost millions of dollars to defend them. 

“States are getting somewhat gun-shy about being the lead state that’s going to have to pay the attorney fees should there be a successful lawsuit attacking the statute,” said Vermont Attorney General Bill Sorrell at a recent gathering of attorneys general in Washington, D.C.

“It’s coming to a number of your states,” he added. “The politics are huge. Good luck.”

Some consumer and environmental groups vehemently disapprove of GMOs, calling them “Frankenfood.” They argue GMO crops, which include corn, cotton and soybeans, pose unknown health and environmental risks.

About 50 percent of the 169 million acres of U.S. crop land grew genetically engineered crops in 2013, said the U.S Department of Agriculture in a new report. GMOs can be found in most cereals, frozen foods, meat, dairy, canned soup and even baby formula.

Giant “agribusinesses,” including Monsanto and DuPont, contend the newest GMO technology is safe and allows them to produce more robust crop yields while using less water and pesticides. Labeling could increase the costs to consumers, they argue.

However, pesticide groups have rejected the claim regarding toxic chemicals, saying pesticide use has grown exponentially over the last 10 years and is only expected to multiply further given Dow AgroSciences’ push to approve new, pesticide-resistant corn and soybean crops. 

Regarding money, labeling itself would be “a tiny fraction of the costs” of complying with a labeling law, according to a 2013 report by the Washington Academy of Sciences. The actual costs would come from having to separate genetically engineered ingredients from other foods with those extra costs likely being passed on to consumers.

Washington’s state budget office stated it would cost roughly $3.4 million over six years for the state to enforce labeling requirements that voters considered, and rejected, last year.

“This is a national movement,” said Hawaii Attorney General David Louie at the recent attorneys general gathering. “Don’t think that it’s not coming to you.” 

Taking Action

Even though 64 countries have mandated the labeling of GMO foods, the U.S. has been slow to adopt such regulation. Connecticut and Maine have passed labeling laws, but the rules do not go into effect until at least three other states establish the same requirement.

Sixty-seven GMO labeling bills have been introduced in 25 states. In 12 of those states, at least one legislative committee has approved a GMO bill.

Other states with pending legislation on GMO labeling include California, Missouri, Minnesota and Rhode Island, according to Prah. In Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii and Oregon efforts are in motion to put the question on the ballot.

However, the future is less than certain given the food industry’s powerful pro-GMO lobby, which helped defeat previous GMO labeling bills in California, New Hampshire and Washington. In Washington alone, the GMO label bill was the most expensive ballot question in the state’s history, costing activists and the food industry a combined $40 million. 

States Face Daunting Legal Costs

Prah reports:

Before Maine acted, state Attorney General Janet Mills said she warned lawmakers in a 10-page memo that the GMO bill would certainly face significant legal challenges if enacted and that defending it would be costly. “Without even reading my memo, they went into the back room, caucused 10 minutes and came back out and unanimously passed it. That is how effective I am in my legislature,” she said. 

Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen cautioned that he had to be careful what he said because he might be defending his state’s labeling law enacted last year. “I will defend its constitutionality with every effort. But let me put it this way: The year before (it was passed) there was very, very healthy, strong opposition to the bill,” he said.

Pushing for Congressional Action

Critics and proponents of GMO labeling are asking Congress to act, but they are pressing for very different legislation.

A campaign led by the Grocery Manufacturers Association supports a federal labeling requirement, but only if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determines there is a proven health or safety risk to GMOs.

But consumer and advocacy groups have derided the duplicitous initiative, saying it undermines state and federal legislation meant to grant consumers the right to know about the types of foods they’re consuming.

“Attacking state labeling laws does nothing to address the increasing call from consumers for transparent (genetically engineered) food labeling,” according to a Center for Food Safetystatement.

The U.S. House added a provision to the federal farm bill that would have overridden state GMO labeling efforts, but the measure was cut from the final version of the legislation.

Gaining Ground Against GMOs

• Whole Foods has announced by 2018 all products sold in its stores in the U.S. and Canada will need to divulge whether or not they contain GMOs. 
• Recently the non-profit Green America mobilized 50,000 people to post comments on Cheerios’ Facebook wall and prompted more than 35,000 consumers to write in and telephone General Mills asking the major food producer to stop using GMOs in popular cereal brands. The initiative worked, General Mills complied and Post Cereals followed suit, agreeing to phase out GMOs from Grape Nuts, Chipotle, Ben & Jerry’s and Kashi.
• Kroger and Safeway have made commitments not to sell GMOs.

France to Tell GMOs ‘Au Revoir’ by Restoring GMO Ban

by Christina Sarich

Natural Society/ News Report

 

Published: Wednesday 19 February 2014

 

Only five states wanted GM corn, but the way the weighted voting system is set up in the EU, the Commission is now obliged to pass the GMO crop initiative.

 

The French are preparing to restore a GMO maize ban in their country just before farmers prepare for Spring planting. A Senator of the currently ruling socialist party is calling for a ban to counteract an anticipated swell of activist upset over genetically modified organisms.

Formerly, France banned Monsanto’s GMO maize called MON 810, which was then the sole maize crop allowed to be grown in the European Union. Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto was effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace. This is even more true when you consider the fact that France is the largest grower of crops in all of Europe, making it an agricultural behemoth of sorts. 

Now the new ban would target all GMO maize in the country, including any new strains that would be developed and introduced to the public in the future. This would block biotech companies like Dow Chemical and DuPont who were hoping to introduce their own versions of GMO corn later in the year. The ban is of even more significance since Dow and DuPont Chemical companies have been given a seal of approval by the European Union to grow their GMO corn. The vote which took place that could have vetoed the proposition lost 19 to 28, with 4 member states abstaining from voting. This means only five states wanted GM corn, but the way the weighted voting system is set up in the EU, the Commission is now obliged to pass the GMO crop initiative.

In Germany, they are already planning to abstain from voting to approve the cultivation of 1507 maize. The draft legislation in France calls for all GMO maize to be inspected and destroyed if found. “We do not want to have the cultivation of [TC1507] in Germany,” Friedrich told Bayern2 radio.

France is currently the largest EU grain producer, so its decision will affect surrounding countries as well. Right on the heels of Russia considering a complete GMO ban, this would be a double-hit for biotech should both countries follow through with their draft propositions.

'Agent Orange Corn': Biotech Companies Are Waging a Chemical Arms Race on Our Food Supply

Food Revolution Network             /               By John Robbins          

Instead of protecting the American people from a poison, the USDA is acting as a salesman for Dow.

 

Photo Credit: © igor.stevanovic/ Shutterstock.com

              

January 16, 2014  |  

 

 

Like this article?

Join our email list:

Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.

          

 

The Obama administration announced last week that it expects to approve corn and soybeans that have been genetically engineered by Dow Chemical company to tolerate the toxic herbicide — 2,4-D. They are planning this approval despite the fact that use of this herbicide is associated with increased rates of deadly immune system cancers, Parkinson’s disease, endocrine disruption, birth defects, and many other serious kinds of illness and reproductive problems.

Weed ecologists are unanimous in warning that approval of these crops will lead to vast increases in the use of this poisonous chemical. Researchers at Penn State say that in soybeans alone, planting of crops resistant to 2,4-D would increase the amount of 2,4-D sprayed on American fields to 100 million pounds per year — four times the current level. The researchers predict a cascade of negative environmental impacts, and add that the increasing use of the herbicide would actually worsen the epidemic of superweeds it is intended to address, by causing weeds to become resistant to multiple herbicides.

A coalition of 144 farming, fishery, environmental and public health groups have asked the USDA not to approve the 2,4-D resistant crops. Citing studies that predict dire consequences to both human and environmental health, they add the concern among farmers that 2,4-D would drift onto their property and kill their crops, causing serious economic damage in rural communities.

But you have a chance to prevent this from happening. We have now entered a 45 day period during which the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is inviting public comments.

The biotech industry continually reassures public officials and the public that genetically engineered foods reduce the amount of pesticides applied to our crops. Is this claim scientifically valid? Or is it just a myth propagated for PR purposes?

A recent study, conducted at Washington State University, provides a conclusive answer. The study was authored by agronomist Charles Benbrook, a former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences. Using official US Department of Agriculture data, he and his team of researchers looked at the effect on pesticide use of the first 13 years (from 1996 to 2008) of GM crop cultivation in the United States.

Their conclusion?

“Genetically engineered crops have been responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of herbicide use in the U.S. over the first 13 years of commercial use of GE crops.”

Total Herbicide Volume Applied…

There may be controversy over whether GMO foods are safe for human consumption. But there is virtually no controversy over the fact that herbicides, like all pesticides, are dangerous. The enormous increase in herbicide use that has occurred as a direct result of the planting of genetically engineered crops has not only poisoned the air, the water, the soil, and farm workers. It has also been directly responsible for the development of the super-weeds that now plague 50% of our agricultural acreage. The biotech industry’s answer to these super weeds — their new corn and soy seeds that have been genetically engineered to be resistant to 2,4-D — would only make our food production systems even more tightly tethered to the pesticide treadmill that has produced the problem in the first place.

Monsanto and Dow Chemical company refer to their new 2,4-D-resistant seeds as an “innovation that works for tomorrow.” They call it “the future of farming.” But these genetically engineered seeds would actually take American agriculture back more than a half-century.  2,4-D was introduced in the 1940s, and became notorious during the Vietnam war for its use as part of the chemical weapon known as “Agent Orange.” This is why the 2,4-D-resistant crops developed by Dow AgroSciences are frequently referred to as “Agent Orange crops.”

Agent Orange, the defoliant used as a weapon of war in Vietnam, is a mixture of equal parts 2,4-D and another related herbicide, 2,4,5-T. The aircrews charged with spraying Agent Orange used a sardonic motto – “Only you can prevent forests,” a shortening of the famous forest service warning to the general public – “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

But of course, Agent Orange was — and is — no joke. The Vietnamese government estimates that 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects, as a result of the U.S. military’s use of Agent Orange in that country. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that even all these years later there are still a million people in the country disabled due to our use of Agent Orange.

The biotech industry says that referring to crops that have been genetically engineered to be resistant to 2,4-D as “Agent Orange crops” isn’t fair. They acknowledge that 2,4-D was one of Agent Orange’s primary ingredients. But where is the evidence, they ask, that 2,4-D, by itself, is dangerous?

There is in fact considerable evidence linking the weedkiller 2,4-D, by itself, to cancer, lowered sperm counts, birth defects, neurological damage and other serious health harms. Dozens of studies in humans have reported an association between exposure to 2,4-D and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells that can be fatal.

Convinced by such research, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and parts of Canada have banned 2,4-D. But instead of protecting the American people from this poison, the USDA is acting as a salesman for Dow. If we don’t stop this, we’ll soon be spraying massive quantities of 2,4-D on our fields and farms. That’s why it’s so important that you make your voice heard during this crucial 45 day window.

Monsanto, Dow, and the other corporations that stand to profit enormously from the use of these crops say that they are necessary to combat the epidemic of superweeds. But these superweeds have come into being precisely because of the overuse of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide on crops that have been genetically engineered to be Roundup-resistant.

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GMO technology was designed to enable farmers to weed their fields by spraying them with Roundup, killing the weeds but not the genetically engineered Roundup Ready plants. But what has happened, as many scientists warned it would, is that weeds have increasingly become resistant to Roundup, which has led to farmers using more and more of Monsanto’s weedkiller. This skyrocketing increase in herbicide use has been a disaster to biological diversity in our fields, for instance nearly wiping out milkweed, thus causing a severe decline in Monarch butterfly populations.

Meanwhile, the number of weeds resistant to Roundup has grown to epidemic levels. Weeds that can no longer be controlled by Roundup now infest roughly half of farmers’ fields. The biotech industry says the solution is their next generation of genetically engineered crops that are resistant to 2,4-D and other herbicides. But many scientists are warning that we’ll only see the same sad thing again. The effect will be to generate still more intractable weeds resistant to multiple herbicides. And then we’ll need even more toxic pesticides to address the problem.

It’s a chemical arms race. Fortunately, you can do something about it.

Here’s how to make your voice heard:

1) Click on this link.

2) LET THEM KNOW HOW YOU FEEL.

3) Don’t buy meat from factory farms. The primary use of genetically engineered corn and soy are as livestock feed in factory farms.

John Robbins is the author of many international bestsellers, including Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, that have collectively sold more than 2 million copies and been translated into 27 languages. John has received the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award, Green America's Lifetime Achievement Award, and countless other accolades.

Cheerios To Go GMO-Free

by Ashley Curtin

NationofChange/ News Report

Published: Saturday 4 January 2014

While General Mills said the decision was their own, the company has been under pressure from anti-GMO activists

 

Under pressure from activists and consumers alike, General Mills announced that Cheerios, its longstanding legendary breakfast cereal, is now a GMO-free product.  

The Minneapolis-based company will begin sourcing ingredients free of genetically modified organisms. While the oats used to manufacture Cheerios weren’t genetically modified, General Mills said that it switched from using beet sugar in its original recipe to non-GM cane sugar and corn starch. The announcement was made on Thursday in which General Mills confirmed that the change was made to the product a few weeks ago, but that its other products weren’t affected by this change.

A spokesperson for Cheerios declined to comment on the exact date the change went into effect, according to USA Today.

The new boxes of Cheerios will bare a non-GMO label that reads, “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients.” General Mills said the decision was made despite the fact that it acknowledges that there is no evidence that current varieties of biotech crops pose any health or safety risk to people,” according to the website, Reasons.com.

 

While General Mills said the decision was their own, the company has been under pressure from anti-GMO activists, such as Green America—a non-for-profit membership organization campaigning to create a “socially just and environmentally sustainable society.”

In a campaign aimed to provide tools and resources to help verify non-GMO and alternatives to genetically engineered foods for people to make better food choices, GMO Inside took action against General Mills in “No GMOs, Cheerios!”  The Green America campaign, which began a year ago, called on General Mills to “make a fresh start and align its actions with its declared core values,” according to GMO Inside’s website.

The No GMOs, Cheerios! was an ongoing and successful letter-writing campaign to General Mills CEO Kendall Powell. GMO Inside not only pressured the company to remove GMOs from all its manufactured products starting with Cheerios, it continued to ask General Mills to stand up and become a leader in its industry by testing for and labeling all GMO ingredients in all its products. The campaign also encourages General Mills to end its opposition against GMO labeling and instead start to encourage the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) to push for state and federal labeling initiatives.

As General Mills announced its phase-out of genetically manufactured ingredients in the manufacturing of Cheerios, many activists, consumers and industry experts wait to see if this change would create a ripple effect in the food industry.

USDA Needs More Time to "Review" Monsanto and GMO Crops?

by Christina Sarich

from Nation of Change, May 21, 2013

Since the USDA seems to need some help in making their decision, let’s have a gander at just some of the studies coming out in the past months about the negative impact of GMO on the environment as well as our health.

The laughable insistence by the Department of Agriculture this past Friday that it needs more time to look at the data for Monsanto and other biotech companies who are poisoning our food supply is further evidence that our government institutions are bought and paid for with corporate cash. And instead of keeping a watchful eye over the public’s food supply, it was recently detailed by Anthony Gucciardi how they specifically use our tax dollars to push Monsanto’s agenda.

As Dow pushes for its new corn called “Enlist” to be approved by regulatory bodies, the USDA is saying it needs ‘more time’ to conduct environmental studies. It will come down to a battle of the public’s insistence verses the coffers of mega-billionaire companies, and we will either see new GMO alternatives or regulatory action. It’s more than this one crop that hangs in the balance, though. Dow first wants to roll out Enlist corn, followed by soybeans and cotton to be used in combination with its new Enlist herbicide that combines the weed-killers 2,4-D and glyphosate.

 

Since the USDA seems to need some help in making their decision, let’s have a gander at just some of the studies coming out in the past months about the negative impact of GMO on the environment as well as our health. I encourage you to share this article with as many people as you can to get the word out, as well as March on Saturday, May 25th in the March against Monsanto to help convince our government agencies that we’ve had enough of GMOs . Whether it’s from Monsanto, Dow, or anyone.

 

Here’s but some of the latest:

• The US Environmental Protection Agency has recently been slapped with a lawsuit because GMO agricultural practices and pesticide use is killing off our bees, a viral part of the ecosystem that helps to pollinate crops.

• GMO corn and the high fructose corn syrup which it is often used to make is killing us at staggering rates. Diabetes and cancer rates as well as obesity can all be traced back to GMO crops.

• The funky DNA in GMO crops is creating super bugs that then warrant more and more chemical fertilizers. When will it ever stop?

• GMOs are hiding in all kinds of foods since our government won’t support labeling, so the cereals you eat, the meals you dine on in restaurants, and even the ‘health’ food you consume is often laden with GMO.

• Organic farming can feed the world, even though we’ve been told otherwise.

The list goes on, ad infinitum. What other proof does the USDA need?

 

GMO Cops: Biotech Giant Hires Former Cops to ‘Enforce Patents’

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Friday 30 November 2012 in Nation of Change

A new private force of former police officers which I have dubbed ‘GMO Cops‘ will now be hunting down any farmer who is replanting biotech giant DuPont’s GM seeds to save their failing genetically modified harvest. That’s right, they’re literally seeking farmers who replant Roundup Ready soybeans who are in violation of DuPont’s patent. And as the second largest seed company in the world (second only to Monsanto), DuPont is hiring dozens of former cops and sending them across the entire continent of North America to track down farmers who haven’t paid up.

GMO Cops or The GMO Mafia?

Another term to describe these individuals may also be the ‘GMO Mafia‘. Literally sent to ‘protect sales’ and essentially shake down struggling farmers who may actually be replanting DuPont’s ‘patented seeds’ without paying the company in licensing fees, the GMO Cop Mafia’s mission statement is to ensure that “illegal beans” do not get planted. After all, if a farmer were able to replant these beans, then it may slightly make up for the horrible yields produced from the crops. The same yields that have been a major factor — if not the factor — in over a quarter of a million farmer suicides.

Farmers who lost everything after signing on to deceptive deals with the likes of Monsanto and other biotech companies.

The GMO Cops Mafia news also comes literally just 24 hours after it was revealed that GM cotton crops fell by at least 40% according to mainstream government reports. Similar news has been making the headlines about GM corn, which is being absolutely ravaged by heavily ‘mutated’ rootworms that are resistant to the pesticide-producing capabilities of the GMO crops. Pesticide producing GMOs that ultimately end up in your stomach.

It should come as no surprise that DuPont also fell 5.6% this year in the stock market.

So perhaps DuPont has realized that they better start shaking down their clients now before their empire ultimately collapses along with Monsanto. And if it’s not resistant rootworms, horrendous failures to yield, or a disturbingly high rate of farmer suicide, its the numerous country-wide bans on GMOs that continue to be announced each month. From Russia to Peru (which passed a monumental 10 year ban), GM crops are effectively being phased out of the international food supply.

The bottom line, it seems, is that DuPont is out to get every last penny before the company faces serious resistance. As one research professor told Bloomberg:

 “Farmers are never going to get cheap access to these genetically engineered varieties… the biotech industry has trumped the legitimate economic interests of the farmer again.”

But regardless of the GMO Cop Mafia, DuPont will not be able to weather the mass opposition to GM crops that is continually mounting on a grassroots level. Like their cohort Monsanto, even all of the political brute force in the world cannot save the bastards.

Anthony is an accomplished investigative journalist whose articles have appeared on top news sites and have been read by millions worldwide. A health activist and researcher, Anthony’s goal is informing the public as to how they can use natural methods to revolutionize their health, as well as exploring the behind the scenes activity of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA.

Prop 37 and Corporate Lies in the Post Truth Era

Published on Saturday, November 3, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Zack Kaldveer

As a historic vote with profound implications for the future of our food system nears, the question becomes whether a campaign with limitless resources and a disdain for the truth can defeat an overwhelmingly popular idea supported by a grassroots army, and over 3000 public interest organizations: the right to know what's in the food we eat and feed our families.

Poll after poll showed 90% of Americans (and Californians) favored labeling foods that have been genetically engineered (GMOs) and nearly a million signatures were gathered by California volunteers in just 10 weeks - easily qualifying Prop 37 for the ballot. And as of the first week of October, the Yes on 37 campaign enjoyed a 2 to 1 lead in the polls.

This broad statewide (and national) support - across party lines - made perfect sense. Prop 37 posits a simple question: Do we have the right to know what's in the food we eat and feed our children, or is that a decision better left to the pesticide and junk food companies bankrolling the opposition campaign?

Prop 37 isn't a referendum on genetically modified foods. It's not a ban, or a warning, it's a label.

The debate over the efficacy of genetically engineered foods should and will continue. In the meantime, Californians have a right to know, and for good reason.

A growing body of research links GMO foods to potential health risks, increased pesticide use, biodiversity loss, the emergence of super bugs  and  "super weeds" and the unintentional contamination of conventional crops.

Prop 37 simply adds a line of ink to a label -- as is currently required for 3,000 other ingredients -- so consumers know which products have been altered in a laboratory. 61 other countries have provided their citizens with this right, and choice, it's time we do the same.  

Corporate Backlash Against Our Right to Know

In response to this growing outcry for food transparency a who's who of the world's most notorious corporate bad actors, with long histories of deceiving the public, polluting the environment, and endangering public health, converged on California to convince us we don't deserve this basic, human right. A right that nearly half the world's population already enjoys.

The No on 37 campaigns two largest contributors are pesticide giants Monsanto ($8.1 million) and Dupont ($5.4 million) - who for decades assured us Agent Orange, DDT, and Tobacco were safe. At the same time, Monsanto has actively advocated for labeling in Europe

So how do companies like these go about persuading us that we don't deserve the right to know what they're doing to our food?

The Only Recourse: An Unprecedented Campaign of Deception

The campaign against the right to know has relied on three essential components: unlimited resources, a willingness to repeatedly lie, and a willingness to double and triple down on those lies-even when they are debunked by independent fact checkers.

Seriously, when was the last time giant, out-of-state pesticide and junk food companies spent $45 million to improve your health, protect the environment or save you money?

Spoiler Alert-they never have.    

The No On 37 campaign knows that the less you know about your food, the more money they are likely to make.  Their goal is literally that simple, even though their campaign of deception is far more elaborate.

They've set up phony AstroTurf groups, misrepresented spokespeople and embellished their credentials, and misrepresented leading science, government, professional and academic organizations-including (but not limited to) the National Academy of Sciences, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics,US Food and Drug Administrationand World Health Organization. They've bankrolled demonstrably phony "economic studies," made repeated false statements in advertisements, deceived voters with mailers sent by obvious front groups, and repeated one falsehood after another---hoping somehow that no one would ever notice.

Well, someone just did. We filed a complaint to the Department of Justice about the potentially fraudulent use of the FDA seal in No on 37 campaign propaganda, and the DOJ has referred the matter to FDA to look into.

The No on 37 Campaign and the "Post Truth Era"

After four weeks of million dollar a day advertising by out of state pesticide and junk food corporations, No on 37 shrunk a 40 point deficit into a lead.  Not because they were right on the facts-because they don't care about the facts.  

No on 37's red herring arguments around common sense exemptions, phony lawsuit scares, bogus "big bureaucracy claims", and "cost increase hysteria", has been painstakingly documented.

Ultimately, we believe that "No on 37's" financially motivated corporate "sting operation" constitutes a profound disdain for the democratic process and the citizens of this state.

Why Spend $45 Million To Prevent A Simple Label?

Just follow the money: If we know what's in our food, and what's being done to our food, many of us will seek alternatives, and that would reduce the profit margins of companies like Monsanto and DuPont.

Their fears are well founded: since Europe instituted labeling 15 years ago, only 7 percent of its food now contains genetically engineered ingredients - compared to approximately 70% in the United States. Imagine what that would mean to these corporations if a similar shift in purchasing habits took place in California?

Multi-billion dollar pesticide and junk food companies believe there is no greater threat than an informed consumer - and with transparency comes accountability.

Prop 37 threatens their monopoly of our food system - which prevents small farmers, the organics industry, and truly natural food producers from competing on an equal playing field.

Whose Side Are You On?

On Tuesday more than a label is on the ballot. Democracy itself is. Will voters allow out of state, multinational pesticide and junk food corporations tell us what we can and can't know about the food we eat, and what they're doing to that food? Are we going to allow television ads based on one demonstrable lie after another convince us that information is somehow a radical concept that we don't deserve?

This right to know movement began with a farmer, a grandmother, and former midwife, organizing women across the state two years ago toward a 2012 ballot drive.  

Prop. 37 is about one and only one thing-- our right to know what's in our food, and make an informed choice about what we eat and feed our children.  

We can't allow our democracy to be hijacked by unscrupulous corporate interests willing to say and spend anything to protect their profits at the expense of real people, and our rights as free citizens.

We must ask every voter that will take the time to listen a few simple questions:

• Who do you trust with the health of your family: Pesticide and junk food companies and the $45 million they've spent lying to you, or Prop 37 supporters like the California Nurses Association, the Breast Cancer Action Fund, the California Council of Churches, and the American Public Health Association?
• Who do you trust when it comes to protecting our natural environment and food supply: Monsanto and DuPont, or Prop 37 supporters like the Sierra Club, California League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council?
• And finally, who do you trust to make decisions about what you know about the food you eat, pesticide and junk food companies or Prop 37 supporters like the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, and Public Citizen?

Prop 37 is not just about our health and our environment, and the future of our food supply. It's also about the health of our democracy, and whether something so simple, so popular, and so "people driven" can be stomped out by giant out of state corporations polluting our state with $45 million of lies to protect their profits, at our expense.

Say yes to democracy. Say yes to your right to know. Vote Yes on Prop 37. And please tell everyone you know to do the same.

Zack Kaldveer is the assistant media director for the Yes on Prop 37 campaign.

Monsanto's Lies and the GMO Labeling Battle

Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

by John Robbins

You may have never heard of Henry I. Miller, but right now he is attempting to determine the future of food in this country.  And he has enormous financial backing.

Mr. Miller is the primary face and voice of the “No on Prop 37” campaign in California.  At this very moment, Monsanto and other pesticide companies are spending more than $1 million a day to convince California voters that it’s not in their best interest to know whether the food they eat is genetically engineered.  And Henry I. Miller is their guy.

If you live in California today, he’s hard to miss.  You see him in TV ads, hear him in radio spots, and his face is all over the expensive fliers that keep showing up uninvited in your mail box.  Initially, the ads presented Miller as a Stanford doctor.  But he isn’t.  He’s a research fellow at a conservative think tank (the Hoover Institute) that has offices on the Stanford campus.  When this deceptive tactic came to light, the ads were pulled and then redone.  But they still feature Miller trying to convince the public that Prop 37 “makes no sense,” and that it’s a “food-labeling scheme written by trial lawyers who hope for a windfall if it becomes law.”

Actually, Prop 37 makes all the sense in the world if you want to know what’s in the food you eat.  It was written by public health advocates, and provides no economic incentives for filing lawsuits.

Who, then, is Henry I. Miller, and why should we believe him when he tells us that genetically engineered foods are perfectly safe?

Does it matter that this same Henry Miller is an ardent proponent of DDT and other toxic pesticides? Does it matter that the “No on Prop 37” ads are primarily funded by pesticide companies, the very same companies that told us DDT and Agent Orange were safe?

I find it hard to avoid the impression that Henry Miller is a premier corporate flack.  He was a founding member of the Philip Morris backed front group that tried to discredit the links between tobacco products and cancer.  After the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, he argued that exposure to radiation from the disaster could actually provide health benefits.  He argues that drug companies, not the FDA, should be responsible for testing new drugs.  And he is a board member of the George C. Marshall Institute which, funded by oil and gas companies, is notorious for its denial of climate change.

Now he’s telling us that we should vote No on 37 because, he says, the labeling law contains exemptions included “for special interests.”  As if the corporations he fronts for weren’t the biggest “special interests” of all.  And by the way, the exemptions in Prop 37 conform to those found in GMO labeling laws in the 61 other nations around the world, including the European Union, that already require labeling for foods that are genetically engineered.

Miller and the No on 37 campaign say that labeling would increase family food bills by hundreds of dollars per year.  Interestingly, the study they cite to justify this claim was paid for by the No on 37 campaign itself.  It was the work of a Maine public relations firm, Northbridge Consulting, that has no economic expertise, but has worked on behalf of Coke and Pepsi against laws that would require the recycling of soda pop bottles.

Would the passing of Prop 37 actually raise the price consumers pay for food?  Henry Miller adamantly proclaims that it would.  But according to the only fully independent economic analysis of Prop 37, prepared by researchers at Emory University School of Law, “Consumers will likely see no increase in prices as a result of the relabeling” required by the bill. 

Somehow I keep getting the feeling that Henry Miller may not be the man you want to listen to when your health is at stake.  But Monsanto and its allies are seeing to it that this man’s face and beliefs are everywhere in California today.  One television viewer in San Francisco reported seeing ads featuring Miller no less than 12 times in a single day.

Other “No on 37” ads feature a physician, Ronald Kleinman, dressed of course in the obligatory white coat.  Though the ads don’t mention it, Dr. Kleinman’s ethical principles don’t seem to hamper him from being a highly paid voice for the interests of the junk food companies.  While working for Coca-Cola, he advocated for “the safety…of sugar, artificial colors and nonnutritive sweeteners in children’s diets.”

Not content with misrepresenting Stanford University (three times), the pesticide and junk food companies behind No on 37 have also:

1. Misled voters in the state voter guide by claiming falsely that the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, believes GMO foods are safe.
2. Illegally affixed the official US FDA seal to their campaign propaganda, and attributed a fabricated quote to the FDA, falsely implying that the FDA has taken a position against Prop 37.

Regrettably, this deluge of deception seems to be having an impact.  Although polls originally showed that more than 80% of the California public want genetically modified food to be labeled, more recent polls are showing a virtual dead heat on Prop 37, with the advertising deluge only increasing in intensity.

Some daily newspapers in California are contributing to this unhappy trend by coming out against Prop 37, with editorials that use entire paragraphs directly from the “No on 37” press releases.  Might this have anything to do with the fact that processed foods companies are the primary source of advertising revenue for newspapers today?  And that the lobby for the processed food companies, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, has called the defeat of Prop 37 its single highest priority for the year?

The famed food author Michael Pollan wrote recently that Proposition 37 is the litmus test for whether or not there is actually a food movement in this country.  Public health activist Stacy Malkan adds that it also may be the litmus test for whether there is democracy left in this country.

These are good points.  There is no food movement if Monsanto has its way with us.  And there is no democracy without an informed citizenry.

The question now is whether we are going to allow special interests to dictate what we are allowed to know about the food they sell us.

In this case, ignorance is not bliss.  It’s subservience to the agenda of Monsanto and the other pesticide companies.  Without labeling, we are eating in the dark, with potentially disastrous consequences.

What remains to be seen is whether Californians will, come November 6th, allow Monsanto and its allies to control what you are allowed to know about the food you eat.

Find out more and get involved here.

Sign a petition to Congress calling for labeling of genetically engineered foods here.

John Robbins is cofounder of the Food Revolution Network, which provides information and inspiration to help you heal your body and your world with food.  He is the author of many bestsellers, including The Food Revolution, No Happy Cows, and Diet For A New America.  He is also the recipient of the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey’s Courage of Conscience Award, Green America’s Lifetime Achievement Award and many other accolades.

Pesticide Industry Backed Opponents of GMO Labeling Get Criminal in California

Published on Friday, October 19, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Zack Kaldveer

The $36 million No on 37 campaign, bankrolled by $20 million from the world's six largest pesticide companies, has been caught in yet another lie, this time possibly criminal.

These companies and their allies in the junk food industry know that their profit margins may suffer if consumers have a choice whether to purchase genetically engineered foods or not.  And that's why opponents are spending nearly a million dollars per day trying to make Prop 37 complicated. But really it's simple - we have the right to know what's in our food.

To date, the No on 37 campaign has been able to repeat one lie after another with near impunity. But has this pattern of deceit finally caught up to it?

Yesterday, the Yes on 37 campaign sent letters to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting a criminal investigation of the No on 37 campaign for possible fraudulent misuse of the official seal of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  

The No on 37 campaign affixed the FDA's seal to one of the campaign's mailers. Section 506 of the U.S. Criminal Code states: "Whoever...knowingly uses, affixes, or impresses any such fraudulently made, forged, counterfeited, mutilated, or altered seal or facsimile thereof to or upon any certificate, instrument, commission, document, or paper of any description...shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

The letter also provides evidence that the No on 37 campaign falsely attributed a direct quote to the FDA in the campaign mailer. Alongside the FDA seal, the mailer includes this text in quotes. "The US Food and Drug Administration says a labeling policy like Prop 37 would be 'inherently misleading." The quote is entirely fabricated. The FDA did not make this statement and does not take a position on Prop 37.

In addition, the three identified authors of the "Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Proposition 37" include a Dr. Henry I. Miller, who is identified solely as "Founding Director, Office of Biotechnology of the Food & Drug Administration." Dr. Miller in fact, does not currently work for the FDA in any capacity - as millions of California voters have been erroneously led to believe.

This is not the first blatant act of deception that the No on 37 campaign has been caught perpetrating on the citizens of California - particularly relating to their "top scientist" Dr. Henry Miller.

Consider Miller's growing "rap sheet":

• On Oct. 4 the No on 37 campaign was forced to pull its first ad off the air and re-shoot it after they were caught misrepresenting Miller as a doctor at Stanford University  when he is actually a researcher at the Hoover Institute on Stanford's campus, as the Los Angeles Times reported.
• Last week, the campaign was reprimanded by Stanford again for misrepresenting the university in a mailer that went out to millions of voters. And this week, the campaign was caught sending out yet another deceptive mailer involving the University.

In addition to allowing his university affiliation to be repeatedly overblown, Miller has a sordid history of parroting the talking points of some of the world's most notorious corporate bad actors: he's a founding member of a now defunct tobacco front group that tried to discredit the links between cigarettes and cancer, he's repeatedly called for the reintroduction of DDT - known to cause premature birth, fronted for an oil industry funded climate change denial group for Exxon, claimed that people exposed to radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster "may have benefited from it", and attacked the US Food and Drug Administration's efforts to ensure proper vetting and testing of new drugs safety while urging it to outsource more of its functions to private industries.

This is the man the No on 37 campaign has portrayed to voters as an arbiter of good science and promoted as an expert worthy of our trust. In reality, Miller is nothing more than a corporate shill that will say whatever his paymasters ask him to, be it Exxon, Phillip Morris, Monsanto, or DuPont.

Does the No on 37 campaign stand behind Miller's fringe views on tobacco, climate change, nuclear radiation and DDT?

But this pattern of deceit doesn't end with Miller:

• On Oct. 5, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the nation's largest professional association for nutritionists and dieticians, accused the No on 37 campaign of misrepresenting its position and misleading voters in the official California Voter's Guide that went to 11 million voters.
• And the anti-Proposition 37 ads that are now blanketing the state have been described as misleading by the San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Perhaps these latest revelations will prompt the mainstream press to begin focusing their attention on the No on 37 campaign's pattern of deceptions - including a potentially criminal act - rather than on easily discredited pesticide industry Prop 37 "red herrings" like common sense exemptions, phony lawsuit scares, bogus "big bureaucracy claims", and "cost increase hysteria".

So who should we trust?

Who should we trust when it comes to our right to know what's in the food we eat: Monsanto, DuPont, and Henry Miller or the millions of California consumers and leading consumer, health, women's, faith-based, labor and other groups; 61 countries that already require GMO labeling; and a growing stack of peer-reviewed research linking genetically engineered foods to health and environmental problems?

Who has our best interests at heart, the pesticide and junk food industry, or Prop 37 supporters like Consumers Union, California Nurses Association, California Democratic Party, California Labor Federation, United Farm Workers, American Public Health Association, Consumers Union, Sierra Club, Whole Foods Market, California Council of Churches, Organic Consumers Association, Center for Food Safety, Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen, and Food Democracy Now!?

Zack Kaldveer is the assistant media director for the Yes on Prop 37 campaign.

Prop 37: Vote Yes for Labeling GMO Foods

by John Lawrence  from the San Diego Free Press

The French prime minister announced on September 15, 2012 that France would maintain a ban on Monsanto's MON810 maize, the only genetically modified organisim (GMO) currently allowed in Europe. Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace. This is even more true when you consider that France is the largest agricultural producer in Europe.

But that's not all. Following the ground-breaking French study that graphically linked the lifetime consumption of Monsanto’s GMO corn in rats to massive tumors and direct organ failure, Russia’s premiere consumers rights organization has suspended both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn within the nation’s borders.

Also in March, 2011 the Mexican States of Tlaxcala and Michoacán each passed legislation banning the planting of genetically modified corn to protect natural plants from further GMO contamination.  Together, both states produce about a third of all of Mexico’s corn. GMO corn can cross-contaminate ancient strains of Mexican maize.

Meanwhile, the "No on 37" ads are proliferating. They are saying that Prop 37 is arbitrary because it doesn't call for labeling alcohol, restaurant food, meat or cheese. However it does call for labeling all fruits and vegetables which are GMO products. That's certainly a worthwhile start. Since all animal products in the grocery stores have eaten GMO corn, labeling animal products as GMO because they ate GMO corn when they were alive would result in blanket labeling of all meat products except those who were fed organic grass or corn, a minuscule quantity.

Also labeling GMO foods on restaurant menus would result in every item on the menu being labeled as GMO. This would be a little extreme to start, and would guarantee massive infusions of lobbying cash into the battle for GMO labeling by the other side. Alcoholic drinks contain GMOs, but again it would be impractical at the present time to require a bartender to inform you that the drink you just ordered contained GMOs. It is better just to consume organic products insofar as possible. Organic wine is already labeled as such. There are GMO grapes, but the larger issue is the fact that grapes are heavily sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, and grapes aren't grown from seed making GMO grapes a non-issue. 

Bourbon by definition must be made with 51% corn. Nearly every distillery uses GMO corn to make bourbon. However, at present there are two organic, non-GMO choices: Four Roses and Wild Turkey. However, even those whiskies are not committed to using non-GMO corn since there is little of it available these days. Jack Daniels is ending its commitment to using non-GMO corn. In 2000, a number of their consumers, particularly those in Europe, expressed a preference for non-GM ingredients, and  they opted for only 100% non-genetically modified corn. But now they are going to GMO corn because of availability issues. I guess they will lose the European market. Here is a marketing opportunity for someone!

It is not only concern about GMO corn that calls for caution.

Colin O’Neil, regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, says he hasn’t seen any science pointing to genetic material passing through the distillation process. But, as he sees it, that’s not the only cause for concern.

“To assume that the only real risk is contamination of genetic material ignores the fact that these crops by and large either produce an insecticide (which has been shown not to break down in the human gut) or they are engineered to withstand exposure to herbicide.” And farmers are spraying an increasing amount of Roundup and other weed killers as a result of herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” he points out.  

“I don’t know what types of pesticide residues are on the corn that goes through the distillation process,” O’Neil adds, “but residue in any form presents an increased exposure to consumers.”

So bourbon aficionados will have to take their chances or demand organic whiskey because Prop 37 will not protect them. Beer drinkers should import European beers now that GMO maize, which had been previously used in beer manufacturing, has been banned there.

Major U.S. companies have dropped genetically engineered foods in Europe, citing consumer fears. There is a survey which says that Kellogg, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, Heinz, and others comprise a growing list of companies going GMO-free - but not in the U.S. Some of these companies are behind the "No on Prop 37" campaign here in California. If enough people in the US demand GMO free foods and beverages as they have in Europe, they will have to provide them here as well.

Here are 8 reasons you want Prop 37 to pass, and why we're asking for your support.

1. GMOs have never been proven safe. The FDA conducts no independent testing of GMOs, but instead claims that they are "not substantially different" from non-GMO foods.

2. The biotech industry is not required to conduct long-term safety studies on GMOs, and it keeps researchers from conducting those tests by claiming the right to protect its patented seeds and technologies.

3. GMOs are everywhere. Today, most non-organic US corn, soy, cotton, and sugar beets - which are used in most of the sweeteners and additives used by food processors - are genetically engineered. So is the feed fed to the animals you eat. In fact, 75-85% of the processed food in your grocery store contains unlabeled GMOs.

4. The companies who want you to believe GMOs are safe are the same ones who lied to you about Agent Orange and DDT.

5. GMO crops are responsible for super weeds and super bugs, soil degradation, and a lack of diversity - which makes crops and humans more susceptible to disease.

6. The only folks who don't want you to know what's in your food are huge corporations like Monsanto, Dow AgriScience, BASF and food conglomerates like Pepsi and Coca-Cola - who along with other biotech, pesticide and processed food manufacturers have donated nearly $33 million to defeat Prop 37.

7. This is our best - and perhaps only - shot at labeling GMOs and ending Monsanto's monopoly of our food supply and destruction of our health and environment. Nineteen other states have tried - and failed - to get a GMO labeling law through the state legislative process. Prop 37 takes GMO labeling direct to the voters so Monsanto's lobbyists can't kill it.

8. If this law passes in California, food manufacturers have admitted that it may as well be a national law. They won't want to put "this product contains GMOs" on their labels, so they will reformulate their products. And if they reformulate for California, they may as well do it for all of their products.

Early voting on Prop 37 begins on October 9. By November 6, this historic initiative will have passed or failed.

New Study Confirms GMO Crops Causing More Pesticide Use, Superweeds

By Lisa Garber

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Saturday 6 October 2012 from Nation of Change

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) require more pesticide use on crops, say the authors of a 16-year study published in Environmental Sciences Europe. According to the researchers, 527 million pounds of a toxic herbicide have inundated farmlands since 1996. What’s more, this abhorrent amount is much greater than that promised by Monsanto, which claims that GM crops require smaller doses of herbicides like the company’s best-selling Roundup Ready.

This study found, however, that although farmers did reduce Roundup Ready use by 2 percent between 1996 and 1999, herbicide use resurged with a vengeance thereafter. This was a result of the emergence of “superweeds” that resist herbicides, requiring farmers to use more of it with each application.

Herbicide and Pesticide Use Damage Humans, Environment

These “superweeds” have become resistant to glyphosate, a chemical found in Roundup Ready. Rootworms, too, may be becoming resistant according to ongoing research by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

 Additionally, a recent French study by the University of Caen found glyphosate and herbicides like Roundup to be actively toxic to human cells—findings which led to Russia’s suspension of Monsanto crop imports. Earth Open Source, a nonprofit organization with volunteers as well as several international scientists and researchers, has linked glyphosate with birth defects. Worse (but predictable) is that in 1993 Monsanto knew “visceral anomalies such as dilation of the heart could occur in rabbits at low and medium-sized doses,” but did nothing to curb the chemical’s or Roundup’s use in agriculture.

Glyphosate also causes moderate to severe liver damage in fish and aquatic life, since herbicide runoff can reach both groundwater and seawater. This water pollution has been found to affect even city dwellers, in whose urine researchers have found glyphosate.

Farm Bill to Deregulate GMOs

Meanwhile, there is a provision lurking in the new Farm Bill which would further deregulate genetically modified (GM) foods in America. Monsanto has spent millions (over six, in fact) of dollars winning friends in Washington, DC. With the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already deep in Monsanto’s pockets, we can only hope members of Congress take note of these studies and of recent anti-GMO activity in Europe and Russia.

Is the End of Monsanto Near? Prop 37 Succeeding as Nations Ban GMO Crops

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Saturday 29 September 2012 by Nation of Change

“After the study not only did France call for a potential worldwide ban on GMOs pending the results of their in-depth analysis, but Russia’s major consumer rights organization announced a ban on both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn.”

Is the end of Monsanto within reach? It has certainly been a rough couple of weeks for the mega corporation as the real dangers surrounding GMOs are being brought to the attention of consumers on a global scale like never before. It all started with the monumental French study finding a serious link between the consumption of Monsanto’s Roundup-drenched GMOs and massive tumors. Being called the ‘most thorough’ research ever published on the real health effects of GMOs, the study led to even larger victories.

After the study not only did France call for a potential worldwide ban on GMOs pending the results of their in-depth analysis, but Russia’s major consumer rights organization announced a ban on both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn.

Prop 37 Can Label Monsanto Out of Existence

And now, the Proposition to label all GMOs in the state of California is showing massive success. If Prop 37 passes, it won’t just affect California. It is very likely that other states will not just take note, but adopt similar legislation. Through this legal mechanism, we can essential label Monsanto out of existence.  This is possible when considering that the average consumer is actually opposed to GMOs and heavily in favor of proper labeling.

In a major Los Angeles Times poll, registered California voters in favor of labeling outnumber pro-GMO voters by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Altogether, a whopping 61% of those polled reported supporting the Prop 37 labeling initiative. Only 25% reported opposing it.

If GMO-containing products are properly labeled, the simple fact of the matter is that less people will buy them. As of right now, very few people are even aware of what they are putting in their mouth. In fact, if the public knew that they were consuming GMOs which were linked to massive tumors and organ failure, the overwhelming majority would abandon such products. Without labeling, however, they have no idea. The same can also be said for other ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and aspartame.

As Yes on 37 campaign manager Gary Ruskin explains:

“Monsanto, DuPont, and Coca-Cola do not want Californians to know what’s really in their food and drinks, because they fear consumers will turn away from their genetically engineered ingredients and pesticides that go with them.”

If they knew they were eating mercury in the HFCS and consuming an artificial sweetener with over 42 associated diseases, then major change would occur – change that includes forcing manufacturers to abandon these ingredients in order to stay profitable. And after all, Monsanto’s number one goal is profit. This is a company that has been caught running ‘slave-like’ working conditions in which ‘employees’ were forced to buy only from the company store and were not allowed to leave the area or their pay would be withheld.

If Monsanto’s profits were to plummet, their political reign would likely follow as well. Without an endless amount of cash to throw at crushing Prop 37, already contributing $4 million to fuel anti-labeling propaganda in California, the corporation’s massive grasp on the world of science (continually censoring studies and funding pro-GM research) and politics would virtually cease to exist.

It is essential that we ensure the passing of Prop 37 in a bid to generate the literal end of Monsanto. Once consumers actually know that they’re putting genetically modified creations into their body, real change will occur within the food supply.

Russia Bans Use and Import of Monsanto's GMO Corn Following Study

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Thursday 27 September 2012 in Nation of Change

“With Russia now acting to secure food safety, many other nations will surely follow.”

Following the ground- breaking French study that graphically linked the lifetime consumption of Monsanto’s GMO corn in rats to massive tumors and direct organ failure, Russia’s premiere consumers rights organization has suspended both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn within the nation’s borders.

The move may soon be echoed by other nations, who may soon be urged by France to ban Monsanto’s GMOs due to serious health concerns. France, who also recently upheld a key ban on growing GMOs, has been instrumental in alerting the world to the dangers of GMOs and Monsanto’s overall corruption. In the nation’s latest announcement, it was revealed that France’s Agriculture Minister was launching an investigation into the GMO study, ultimately calling for European authorities to ban Monsanto’s GMOs in order to protect citizens in the event that the study was found to be sound.

It seems that France has become somewhat of a consumer health watchdog in more than just one area, simultaneously tackling the issue of pesticide contamination as well. It was even announced that the French government was seeking to ban crop dusters in all areas possible, aiming to reduce the amount of obesity-linked pesticides within the food supply.

Monsanto Still Clinging to Old GMO Mantra

Meanwhile, Monsanto is continuing to stick to its tired statements regarding the ‘safety’ of its GMO crops and Roundup herbicide. Instead of discussing not only the French study finding that the company’s GMOs led to horrendous tumors that led to rats literally dragging them along the ground as they walked, they claim that the information ‘does not warrant’ any concern at all from European officials. Just as Monsanto (and the US government) ignored evidence linking Roundup to DNA damage and infertility, it appears they intend to do it once more and hope that it all goes away.

Unfortunately for Monsanto, it’s not going away this time.

With Russia now acting to secure food safety, many other nations will surely follow. While the United States may continue to ignore the issues surrounding GMOs and Monsanto’s blatant disregard for human health (they were caught running ‘slave-like’ working rings, after all), many foreign nations will not. Countries like Poland, Peru, and Hungary have already taken action in banning or removing Monsanto’s GMO crops. And even in the United States grassroots movements have spawned bills like Proposition 37 – the monumental bill in California that seeks to label GMOs.

Who’s Deceiving Whom? Push to Label GMO Foods Frightens Big Ag Interests

Published on Friday, September 21, 2012 by Food & Water Watch Blog

by Anna Ghosh

Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Pepsi and Coke are scared. They’re afraid that California’s proposition 37 to make labeling of genetically engineered foods mandatory will end their unchecked, unquestioned power to hide GE ingredients in the majority processed foods without their customers’ knowledge. Which is why they’ve poured millions into an anti-Prop 37 propaganda campaign they’re calling “Stop the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme.” But who’s deceiving who?

These corporations have enjoyed the transgenic food version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that lax regulation has afforded them for more than two decades. During this time, GE ingredients have permeated the vast majority of our food supply with little independent, long-term scientific scrutiny (Finally this week, the first long-term peer-reviewed study on GE food was released and the results are frightening). Proposition 37 and several other statewide mandatory labeling initiatives in the works are about giving the power of information back to consumers and ending the tyranny that large corporations have had over our food supply.

But first, let’s dispel some of the top myths that the “Stop the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme” front group has been busy spinning.

Myth #1: GE labeling will mean higher food costs.

TRUTH: Opponents of labeling claim that mandatory GE food labeling would increase food costs for the average family by $600 to $825 per year, but since the opponents are the ones doing the analysis, it’s not surprising that they’re grossly overestimated. On the contrary, an impartial consulting firm did a study in 2001 for the U.K. Food Standards Agency and found that GE labeling would increase a household’s annual food spending by only 0.01 to 0.17 percent — a very small figure ranging from an increase of $.33 to $5.58 in 2010 real U.S. dollars (inflation-adjusted) annually. Plus, food companies change their labels all the time (New and Improved! Heart Healthy!).

Myth #2: GE labeling means more bureaucracy and taxpayer costs.

TRUTH: The monitoring and enforcement required for mandatory labeling doesn’t have to be difficult as long as
all players participated in labeling along all steps of the food chain. Federal and state agencies could simply add GE labeling to existing food labeling requirements that they already assess during compliance inspections.

Myth #3: GE labeling would burden grocers and retailers with mountains of paperwork.

TRUTH: Changing food labeling to indicate the presence of a GE ingredient wouldn’t be any different for grocery stores than stocking a product that has changed its ingredients or added a nutritional-benefit claim to the package. For foods that the store handles (such as produce or some meat that is repackaged on site), retailers will have to be sure that GE and non-GE products are kept separately and labeled as such, just like they currently do with country-of-origin and pricing information.

Myth #4: It is not the responsibility of the states to create food-labeling requirements.

TRUTH: States often lead the way when the federal government is too slow, too gridlocked or too weak to take action. Long before the United States enacted a mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) policy, eight states required this labeling on their own. Renewable energy standards are a good example – California has been building its renewable energy program since 1998 and today leads the country in renewable energy use and is the standard other states strive to match. Hopefully California will also lead the country in establishing mandatory GE labeling when a majority of Californians vote for Prop 37 this November.

Myth #5: GE labeling conflicts with science.

TRUTH: This one couldn’t be further from the truth. The chronic effects of eating GE foods are still largely unknown. And without labeling of GE foods, we cannot associate any health problems with people who ate them — because we do not know who ate them. Since the FDA has no way to track adverse health effects in people consuming GE foods, and because there is no requirement that food containing GE ingredients be labeled, there is no effective way to gather data on health problems that may be happening. Science is all about knowledge, testing and discovery. GE labels will only increase everyone’s knowledge and institute a system whereby more testing and track-back is available to trace the possible health problems that could arise through ingesting certain GE ingredients.

MYTH #6: California’s Proposition 37 will result in frivolous lawsuits.

TRUTH: According to the California Right to Know Campaign, the lawsuits argument is a red herring. Food companies accurately label for calories, fat content and other information required by law; likewise they will abide by the requirements of Prop 37. According to an independent legal analysis by James Cooper, JD, PhD, of George Mason University School of Law, Proposition 37 is unlikely to result in frivolous lawsuits.

MYTH #7: Prop. 37 would prohibit processed foods from being marketed as “natural.” 

TRUTH: According to the California Right to Know Campaign, Proposition 37 applies only to genetically engineered foods, not other foods. Processed foods such as canned olives could still be marketed as “natural” as long as the food is not genetically engineered.

The fight to make GE labels the law is a battle of more information vs. less. These corporations are not spending millions for our benefit. They are spending millions to protect their profits and maintain the status quo of keeping it customers in the dark. To learn more, read Food & Water Watch’s latest fact sheet: How Much Will Labeling Genetically Engineered Foods Really Cost and join the campaign to make GE labels the law.

© 2012 Food & Water Watch

Anna Ghosh is a writer and activist for environmental causes and sustainable food. She is a co-founder of the Kitchen Table Talks discussion series and was on the Slow Food Nation communications advisory committee. She is currently the Western Region Communications Manager for the consumer advocacy non-profit Food & Water Watch.

France Maintains Key Ban on Monsanto's GMO Maize Crops

from Nation of Change, September 17, 2012

by Anthony Gucciardi

“Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace.”

In another massive victory against Monsanto and the spread of genetically modified crops, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayraul has announced that the nation will be maintaining a key ban on the only remaining GMO currently allowed in Europe. Known as Monsanto’s GMO maize crops, or MON810 maize, the original ban was brought forth back in March following the French court’s previous annulment on a November ban.

Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace. This is even more true when you consider that France is the largest agricultural producer in Europe. This move by such a large and influential nation will surely lead to similar legislation throughout the rest of the globe. 

This decision comes in the face of emormous pressure from Monsanto to 'soften' its stance on GMOs (see first link). Monsanto has significant pull within governments around the globe, with the United States in particular being the ‘launch pad’ for the biotechnology movement. We now know thanks to WikiLeaks  that United States ambassadors have actually threatened nations opposed to Monsanto’s GMO maize crops, going as far as to threaten them with ‘military-style trade wars’. When considering that this is but one leak, it is very concerning.

France has thwarted the political preasure and led the charge against Monsanto, even finding Monsanto guilty of ‘chemical poisoning’ earlier this year. According to the prime minister, the ruling was also part a wider plan to reduce the use of chemicals in farming.

Many countries have taken action against Monsanto and its many harmful creations. Peru has banned Monsanto’s GMOs for a total of 10 years, Hungary uprooted the company’s crops from its farmland, and even the agricultural giant California is seeking to label GMOs this November. From Agent Orange (known to kill 400,000 and cause 500,000 plus birth defects) to GMO maize, Monsanto’s time for experimentation may soon be up.