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Van Morrison, the Irish bard, one of my longstanding musical favorites, put things in perspective in a protest song he wrote in the middle of the Pandemic and the Lockdown. At this time Morrison and Eric Clapton were being vilified and censored by the Hollywood elite and famous (once rebellious) rock n’ rollers for deviating from the Establishment narrative on COVID-19.

OCA, myself personally, and other COVID investigators were being slandered and censored at the same time as Morrison and Clapton. In 2020 the internet monopolies including Google, Facebook, and YouTube had begun “shadow banning” OCA and Millions Against Monsanto’s postings and videos to our two million social media followers and threatening to de-platform us entirely.

So-called “progressive” media that had carried our articles and interviews for more than a decade (Common Dreams, Truthout, Counterpunch, Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio) censored and slandered us, calling us and our fellow COVID researchers and truth-tellers racists, “Trumpers,” or “conspiracy theorists” for exposing the obvious fact that the genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2 virus, a reckless joint venture of U.S. and Chinese scientists, governments, and the military, obviously came out of a Wuhan Lab, where it was accidentally or deliberately released.

OCA often talks about our long term goal: making organic and regenerative food, farming, and land use (and natural health) the norm, rather than just the alternative. As our longtime ally Vandana Shiva points out, this would be “the solution to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of democracy.”

OCA and its allies worldwide are dedicated to addressing critical issues of climate change, soil health, biodiversity, water pollution and scarcity, nutrition, environmental contamination, deteriorating public health, forced migration, economic justice, and rural economic development. But what do we need to do to make this goal a practical reality? What would an “Organic Greater Reset” look like.

We need to stop corrupt politicians and the global elite from subsidizing chemical and fossil fuel-intensive agriculture, GMOs, lab food, and factory farms. We need to pay organic farmers and ranchers, not only a fair price for the food and products they produce, but we need to pay them for sequestering excess atmospheric carbon in soils and above ground plants and trees, as well as providing other key environmental services such as preserving clean water, improving soil fertility, protecting biodiversity, wetlands, and wildlife habitat, and rehydrating and reforesting parched landscapes.

It’s a tragedy that all of us who knew about the dangers of GMOs, genetically engineered bioweapons, Big Pharma criminality, and the threat of out-of-control corporations and the national security state were not organized into a more powerful, united, and militant resistance several years ago. At the crucial moment when dangerous, experimental gene-therapy drugs were forced onto the market, and injected into the bodies of a fearful and coerced population, under the guise that they were harmless and effective COVID “vaccines,” we should have been able to stop them. Unfortunately, we didn’t. The major reason we couldn’t stop this massive assault on the body politic and our children is because the America we live in today is not really a democracy, but rather an oligarchy, a 21st Century corporate, technocratic, bio-medical, national security state.

Because we were threatened by what they said was an unprecedented public health emergency, Anthony Fauci, Big Pharma, and the Trump administration, followed by the Biden Administration, told us that the COVID mRNA “vaccines” needed to be rushed to market, at “Warp Speed,” with no liability for injury or death on the part of the manufacturers. They said that these mRNA shots needed to be injected into everyone, even healthy adults, those who already had acquired natural immunity, and youth and children, who faced little or no threat from SARS-CoV-2. For those who refused the jabs, you could lose your job, your schooling, your livelihood, your freedom to travel, or even your right to attend religious services. In China, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada the lockdowns were even more severe than the U.S.

The main issue that radicalized me when I first became a student activist in the 1960s was war, the actual bloody war going on in Viet-Nam, and the always pending war, permanently etched into the back of my mind, the threat of nuclear war between Russia and the United States. I became a draft resister in 1967, like hundreds of thousands of others, and refused to go to Viet-Nam, opting to become a non-violent warrior for peace and justice instead.

The nuclear standoff that traumatized me and a whole generation of anti-war and civil rights activists arose during the Cuban missile crisis of October 16-28, 1962—60 years ago.

Years later I learned that a global catastrophe in October 1962 was averted only because a Soviet submarine commander, off the coast of Cuba, disobeyed orders to fire his nuclear missiles, after a U.S. naval vessel dropped explosive depth-charges, trying to force the Russian submarine to the surface. The 1962 nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, eerily reminiscent of the current nuclear standoff in Ukraine, was precipitated by American deployment of nuclear missiles in Turkey, adjacent to the borders of the USSR, prompting Soviet deployment of intermediate atomic missiles in Cuba.

The Organic Consumers Association, in conjunction with our sister organization, Regeneration International, and other partners, held the People's Food Summit on Sunday, October 16, 2022.

This was the second time this world event was held - a major 24-hour event on World Food day on Oct 16, featuring speakers from every region of our planet. Last year was a spectacularly successful event, with over 522,000 people from all regions of our world tuning in to watch and listen to our numerous topics.

Because we reached so many people, this event had a very high impact.

This year’s event was a 24-hour global, participatory, virtual summit starting in Oceania and moving westwards through the time zones of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Each region was self-organized, so they were empowered to present the messages and issues that are their priorities.

The People’s Food Summit is a truly participatory summit that empowers the majority of the world's food producers: the small-holder family farmers, pastoralists, and foresters who produce 70% of the food we eat.