Guest's Blog
Despite calls from health professionals worldwide to curb the use of farm-animal antibiotics, Vermont’s conventional dairy industry — dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – continues to use the antimicrobial drugs extensively, including non-therapeutic uses to prevent diseases caused by the animal confinement and concentration. After numerous records requests and analysis, including eight years of antibiotic violation data obtained from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, we found a rising trend with on-farm antibiotic violations, a lax regulatory environment, and no plan – or even goal – to address the problem.
Vermont’s nonorganic dairy industry is all but ignoring the dire warnings from the World Health Organization to reduce overall antibiotic use in food production, a leading cause of antibiotic resistance, which makes the drugs less effective when necessary to combat human illnesses. While the WHO has called for a complete halt to using antibiotics as a prophylactic in food production– preventing rather than treating animal diseases — Vermont’s dairy industry, with the support of VAAFM regulators, continues to allow healthy cows to be routinely treated between lactations.
Are those tortillas you’ve been making with Maseca flour toxic?
On October 9, the Organic Consumers Association reported that samples of Maseca white and yellow corn flour tested positive for concerning levels of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.
Testing also revealed that some Maseca flour samples tested as high as 94.15 percent for the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMO). That’s a startling finding, given that GMO crops are not allowed to be grown commercially in Mexico.
Those findings can mean only one thing—Mexico-based Gruma, which owns the Maseca brand, is importing GMO corn from the U.S. to produce its flour, sold all over the world, including in Mexico and the U.S.
Since we revealed our test results, concerned consumers from the U.S., Mexico and Canada have reached out asking what they should do. So we’ve researched some alternative corn flour brands that aren’t contaminated with glyphosate and aren’t made from GMO corn.
The developers of today’s salmon aquaculture often claim that their industry is “sustainable.” In response to concerns regarding the dangers of open-net salmon pens—where feces, chemicals, parasites and disease are directly transmitted into the bodies of water in which they are located—certain companies are moving their salmon farms on land to “closed-containment” models.
But are these farmed Atlantic salmon any more nutritious or sustainable than farmed land-animals? Is salmon farming really helping to feed a hungry world?
Nordic Aquafarms (NAF), a Norway-based company that proposes to build a mega-sized closed-containment salmon farm in Maine, claims that “the world has a growing need for protein sources produced in a sustainable way” and that “farmed Atlantic salmon has proven to be a more sustainable product than most other comparable protein sources."
Every day, for eight weeks, I sat in a San Francisco courtroom.
I listened as Dewayne “Lee” Johnson described, in excruciating detail, how non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a painful and potentially terminal cancer, robbed him of his health.
I watched the spectacle of Monsanto’s lawyers trying to deny that Roundup weedkiller caused Lee’s cancer.
I watched Monsanto’s hired guns tap dance and dissemble, as they tried to explain Monsanto’s herculean 40-year campaign to hide the truth about Roundup’s deadly cancer-causing properties.
I know that my many friends like you, who support OCA, have been doing your part for years to expose Monsanto and to bring down this criminal enterprise.
That’s why this $289-million verdict for Lee Johnson is your victory, too.
This recent win makes our joint mission much clearer: We must leverage the short-term victory and win the long game.
That’s why I’m asking for your support for the Organic Consumers Association. OCA needs to meet its fall fundraising goal of $200,000 by midnight, September 22. Please make a generous donation online, by phone or by mail—details here.
In a special telephone meeting on Thursday, August 23, Bayer AG’s CEO Werner Bauman tried to reassure the German conglomerate’s principal shareholders who were concerned about the recent drop in the company’s stock. Bayer’s stock fell dramatically after an unfavorable verdict against Bayer’s St. Louis subsidiary, Monsanto.
Bauman expressed his confidence in Monsanto and predicted a sunny future for its flagship herbicide, Roundup.
The shocking film "Genetically Modified Children" unveils the horrors of decades of chemical-intensive agricultural practices in Argentina, where the majority of crops are genetically modified (GM) and routinely doused in dangerous agrochemicals, and the chokehold big tobacco companies such as Philip Morris and chemical and seed giants have on poverty-stricken farmers desperate to earn a living.
The film, produced by Juliette Igier and Stephanie Lebrun, shows the devastating health effects the region's agricultural sector is having on children,1 an increasing number of whom are being born with monstrous physical deformities. Some of the children's cases are so severe that, without a medical intervention, will result in death before the age of five.
Consumers and journalists around the world were stunned earlier this month when Monsanto, after being forced in a court of law for the first time to defend the safety of its popular weed killer Roundup, was found liable for the terminal cancer of California groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson.
The unanimous 12-member jury found that Mr. Johnson's exposure to Monsanto's weedkiller was a "substantial" contributing factor to his disease and that there was "clear and convincing" evidence that Monsanto acted with "malice or oppression" because the risks were evident and Monsanto failed to warn of those known risks.
Johnson sued Monsanto and was awarded $289 million in damages last week, after the jury delivered a stunning, unanimous verdict against Monsanto.
Hardly a day goes by without a new scientific paper or news coverage addressing problems down on the farm.
Just this month, for example, two studies highlighted the growing problem of weeds resistant to the herbicide glyphosate—the main ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup—and how this continues to push herbicide use, expenditures, and collateral damage upward. The more herbicide farmers spray, the faster herbicide efficacy slips.
These are harrowing times for the nearly 1,500 migrant workers laboring on Vermont’s largest dairy farms. These farmworkers, predominantly from Mexico, are forced to live in the shadows, where their farm bosses harbor them in exchange for long hours, low wages, and cheap housing. It’s a human rights stain on the state, allowing these migrant workers to live and be treated this way. And it continues because there’s a whole lot of “looking away” from the deep-rooted ugliness of this system, which has been described by human rights advocates as “close to slavery.”
Worse than looking away, with its implicit acceptance of the exploitation, is the complicit role Vermont’s dairy industry giants are playing to maximize their profits on the backs of this cheap labor. As the state’s near-billion-dollar-a-year ice cream and cheese corporations – Ben & Jerry’s and Cabot Creamery – continue to pay less than the cost of production for its dairy supply, Vermont’s remaining 700-or-so dairy farms are forced to cut costs at every opportunity, particularly when it comes to labor. Gone are the days when these farm jobs were filled by neighbors and community members, as the danger, speed, scale and filth – coupled with poverty-level wages — has made it impossible to attract local workers.
A San Francisco jury returned a verdict today in the case of a former groundskeeper with terminal cancer against Monsanto Company, ordering the agrochemical giant to pay $39.2 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages for failing to warn consumers that exposure to Roundup weed killer causes cancer.
Dewayne “Lee” Johnson filed the lawsuit (case no. CGC-16-550128) against St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. on Jan. 28, 2016, alleging exposure to the Roundup herbicide he sprayed while working as a groundskeeper for the Benicia Unified School District caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
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