Katherine's Blog
When the colours turn grey and the lights all fade To black again We’re in over our heads But somehow we make it back again – lyrics from “Beautiful Mess”
Monsanto is facing down scores of lawsuits by people, or their families, who were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after being exposed to Roundup. Those lawsuits have led to revelations about possible collusion between Monsanto employees and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials to bury evidence of Roundup’s carcinogenicity.
Meanwhile the EPA, perhaps fearing consumer backlash, has yet to rule on whether to renew the license for glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup), even though we’re now nearly two years past the deadline.
Food companies are being sued, too, when product testing reveals that brands labeled “100% Natural” contain glyphosate residues. And the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced it will resume testing of consumer foods for glyphosate.
Farmers are growing fewer GMO crops. Other countries are banning GMOs and glyphosate.
It’s no wonder Monsanto can’t wait to hand over the keys to Bayer. Things are getting messy. But for consumers and environmentalists, it’s a beautiful mess.
On Saturday, May 20, activists took to the streets, all over the world, for the sixth annual March Against Monsanto protests.
As in years past, the Organic Consumers Association wholeheartedly supported this year’s march. We promoted it through our website, newsletter and social media networks. We mailed out about 400 packets of anti-GMO and anti-pesticide banners, bumperstickers and leaflets, to March Against Monsanto organizers.
We have always actively participated in the global March against Monsanto, and we will continue. But we also recognize that anti-Monsanto protests alone have not forced enough change, fast enough.
As Occupy activist Micah White said in a recent interview with National Public Radio, protest alone does not give us political power. How true—if we learned anything from our years of work trying to pass GMO labeling laws, it was this: As long as corporations own our politicians, no amount of public support, no amount of protesting a corporation, without also addressing our broken political system, will move us in the direction we want to go.
“How could we have ever believed that it is a good idea to grow our food with poisons?” – Dr. Jane Goodall
Two new reports published in recent weeks add to the already large and convincing body of evidence, accumulated over more than half a century, that agricultural pesticides and other toxic chemicals are poisoning us.
Both reports issue scathing indictments of U.S. and global regulatory systems that collude with chemical companies to hide the truth from the public, while they fill their coffers with ill-gotten profits.
In announcing his pick last week for Secretary of Agriculture, Trump heaped predictable praise on Sonny Perdue, promising that the former governor of Georgia will “deliver big results for all Americans who earn their living off the land."
We predict that Perdue will indeed deliver “big” results—but he’ll deliver them to his friends in Big Food and Big Ag, not to America’s rural farmers, and surely not to America’s consumers.
If it’s true that you can judge a man by the company he keeps, well, judge for yourself whose side Perdue is really on.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), that multi-billion-dollar lobbying group that represents Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, Coca-Cola, General Mills (you get the picture) rushed to praise Perdue’s nomination. In a statement, GMA’s president said her group “looks forward to working with [Perdue] on issues key to keeping America's food the safest and most affordable food supply in the history of the world.”
Coming from the GMA, leader of the charge to keep labels off GMO foods, we know that “safest and most affordable food” is code for “industrial chemical GMO food.”
If ever conditions were ripe for revolution, that time is now—especially for anyone who cares about their health, and the health of planet earth.
President-Elect Donald Trump’s short lists for his environment and agriculture cabinet appointments are dominated by entrenched D.C. insiders, career politicians and industry lobbyists. Not one of these proposed "leaders" supports policies that would lead to healthier food, a cleaner environment or a cooler planet.
So much for “draining the swamp.” And so much for an easy road to forward progress on food, ag and climate policy during the next four years under our future fast-food leader.
We've outlined six of the reasons we'll need to ramp up the #ConsumerRevolution under the Trump Administration.
A word of warning. The new crop of Monsanto's minions in the Trump administration have rebranded Monsanto's pesticide-and chemical-intensive degenerative agriculture as "American" agriculture. Don't be surprised if they brand you "anti-American" for criticizing it.
Sunday, October 16, is World Food Day. It’s also the day that the International Monsanto Tribunal will conclude, in The Hague, Netherlands—and mark the beginning of justice for Earth and its inhabitants.
Monsanto and its friends in the pesticide industry will try to characterize this historic citizens’ initiative as a “kangaroo court.”
But those of us who are already here, preparing for the opening of the People’s Assembly (October 14), and the formal Tribunal (October 15-16), can attest to the fact that there are no kangaroos in sight. There are only distinguished judges and lawyers, people who have been harmed by Monsanto’s products, and concerned citizens from all over the world.
Citizens’ Tribunals are not mock trials. They have a long history of bringing justice to issues where governments either act corruptly or fail to act. It is the legal right of citizens to ensure the carriage of justice, when governments do not.
It’s been about a week since Monsanto and Bayer confirmed their intention to say “I do”—ample time for media, lawmakers, consumer and farmer advocacy groups, and of course the happy couple themselves, to weigh in on the pros and cons.
Reactions poured in from all the usual suspects.
Groups like the Farmers Union, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth and others didn’t mince words when it came to condemning the deal. (Organic Consumers Association tagged it a “Marriage Made in Hell” back in May, pre-announcement, when the two mega-corporations were still doing their mating dance).
Predictably, the corporate heads of state last week promoted the proposed $66-billion deal as an altruistic plan to improve “the lives of growers and people around the world.” This week, they told Senate Judiciary Committee members that the merger “is needed to meet a rising food demand.”
Is anyone out there still buying the line that Monsanto and Bayer are in the business of feeding the world? When the evidence says otherwise?
Even if that claim weren’t ludicrous, who thinks it’s a good idea to entrust the job of “feeding the world” to the likes of Bayer, a company that as part of the I.G. Farben cartel in the 1940s produced the poison gas for the Nazi concentration camps, and more recently sold HIV-infected drugs to parents of haemophiliacs in foreign countries, causing thousands of children to die of AIDS?
Bayer and Monsanto finally agreed to say “I do” yesterday (September 14), striking a $66-billion deal that Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant tried to sell as a move to improve “the lives of growers and people around the world.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Jacob Bunge painted the news in a different light. Bunge implied that behind the Bayer-Monsanto buyout, a similar proposed merger between Dow and Dupont, and the recently approved ChemChina-Syngenta deal, runs the story of an industry in trouble.
“The dominance of genetically modified crops is under threat,” wrote Bunge on Wednesday. Bunge interviewed Ohio farmer Joe Logan who told him:
“The price we are paying for biotech seed now, we’re not able to capture the returns,” said Ohio farmer Joe Logan. This spring, Mr. Logan loaded up his planter with soybean seeds costing $85 a bag, nearly five times what he paid two decades ago. Next spring, he says, he plans to sow many of his corn and soybean fields with non-biotech seeds to save money.
With farmers giving up on biotech seeds, a global public wise to the destruction wrought by poisons like glyphosate (Monsanto) and neonicotinoids (Bayer), and a food industry increasingly under pressure to remove GMO ingredients, the Gene Giants figure all they need to do is get bigger—and more powerful—and they’ll be able to use their clout to step up the bullying of farmers, governments, scientists and the media.
“This is one celebration you don’t want to miss!”
That’s the message leaders of the Organic Trade Association (aka the Organic “Traitors” Association) sent their members recently, in an email inviting them to the OTA’s 2016 Leadership Awards Celebration at Expo East in Baltimore.
Here’s one thing that OCA and organic consumers will not be celebrating—the fact that the OTA’s “Organic Elite” conspired with Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) to overturn Vermont’s mandatory GMO labeling law, and ensure that food companies will never be required to reveal GMO reveal GMO ingredients in their products, using clear, on-package labels.
As consumers, we think a lot about food brands and food companies, and pay little if any attention to the associations and lobbying groups that represent those brands and companies. If we think about them at all, we aren’t surprised when groups like the infamous Grocery Manufacturers Association spend millions, illegally, to block GMO labeling laws so they can protect the profits of junk food manufacturers.
We expect better of the OTA. But at the end of the day, when Monsanto’s minions in Congress were on the verge of losing, and consumers were on the verge of winning, it was the bureaucrats at the OTA who stabbed us in the back on GMO labeling.
TAKE ACTION: Contact your favorite organic brands and ask them to stand with you—not Monsanto and Big Food, and not the back-stabbing bureaucrats of the Organic “Traitors” Association!
Stephen Colbert made it popular, but the word “truthiness” has been around for a long time.
Webster’s provides a list of definitions for "truthiness," including this one: (noun) : truth level of a statement; and this one: (noun) : The quality of stating what one wishes or feels to be true instead of what is actually true.
Tom’s of Maine, or more accurately, the brand’s majority owner, Colgate-Palmolive, was clearly guilty of “truthiness” when it created a webpage titled “How to Identify Organic Toothpaste.”
On that page, intended primarily to promote the Tom’s of Maine toothpaste brand, the company stopped just short of overtly claiming the brand is organic. But it clearly implied that it is.
We complained, and we asked you to do the same.
You did. And within hours, we were contacted by a manager at Tom’s, and a Colgate lawyer. They apologized, and removed the webpage.
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