| SUBSCRIBE | DONATE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Can Sugar Beets Help Save Thousands of Lives?
Antibiotic Resistance Will Kill 300 Million People by 2050
Swiss Merchant Banker Gives Backing to $ 25 Million 'Factor GMO' Science Project
Untested Chemicals Are Everywhere, Thanks to a 39-Year-Old US Law. Will the Senate Finally Act?
Paid by Monsanto: Universities Taking Money from the Biotech Bully
Driscoll’s Food Service is a leading distributor of fresh berries. The New Jersey-based company sources a lot of those berries from Sakuma Brothers, a Washington State berry farm that has a long history of underpaying and abusing farm workers.
Those workers have organized under the banner of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (United Families for Justice), in an attempt to obtain a legally binding contract that ensures a fair wage and decent working conditions.
Sounds reasonable, no? You'd think. But Sakuma Brothers won’t negotiate. So in an attempt to earn basic workers’ rights, the workers have called for a boycott of Sakuma Brothers berries. In other words, the situation is so desperate, the workers are asking buyers not to buy the very product that provides their livelihoods.
How can consumers help win basic rights for the abused workers at Sakuma Brothers? By asking Driscoll, one of Sakuma Brothers' largest customers, to boycott Sakuma Brothers until the company negotiates with the workers for fair wages and decent working conditions.
The monarch butterfly. It’s as fragile as it is beautiful.
And now, the monarch is on the brink of extinction. Thanks in large part to human—and corporate—activity.
Will we let Monsanto’s Roundup kill off what little is left of the monarch’s habitat? Or will we save the monarch by protecting it from Monsanto?
Last week, we asked you to ask Kettle Chips to drop out of the Snack Foods Association, a junk food lobbying group that is suing Vermont to overturn the state’s GMO labeling law. More than 12,000 of you signed the petition. Thank you!
Many of you also posted on Kettle Chips Facebook page, and/or commented on OCA’s own Facebook posts linking to the petition.
That's when things started to heat up. First, Kettle Chips responded to your comments on Facebook, stating that the company is not a member of the SFA. Later, after we posted the link to an archived page listing SFA members—including Kettle Foods—Kettle Foods posted this comment in response:
This image is archived from 2012 and the last time we made a payment for membership was 2011, so it must have been taken before our membership lapsed. If you check the current member directory you will not find our name.
Kettle Foods is right. The link we provided to the SFA members list was archived from 2012. Why? Because just as the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) removed its member roster from the GMA website when we started targeting members, after the SFA sued Vermont, the SFA’s member roster was also MIA for awhile from the lobbying group’s website.
We’re glad to know that Kettle Foods has dropped its membership from the SFA—regardless of when they did it.
We’re also a bit confused. Here’s why. On January 14, OCA sent a letter via email to Kettle Chips Brand Manager Marc McCullagh, asking the company to withdraw from the SFA. (We called ahead to be sure we directed the email to the right person). We asked that Kettle Chips respond by February 1.
We didn’t hear back from anyone at Kettle Chips. So on February 12, nearly a month after sending the letter, we published it as an open letter, and asked consumers to pressure Kettle Chips to withdraw from the SFA.
We have no idea why Kettle Chips didn’t simply respond to our original, private letter, by pointing out that the company is no longer a member of the SFA. We wouldn’t have published our letter, or asked consumers to pressure the company, if the company had responded with that information in a timely manner. Instead, Mr. McCullagh sent a letter, via snail mail, to our offices. The letter was dated February 17—after we went public.
We're going to put this in the "All's Well that Ends Well" file. But really, it's a victory for consumers who ultimately were able to elicit a statement from Kettle Chips that meets our goal.
The countdown has begun. To the end of February—and to the end of OCA’s chance to win funding from CREDO in 2015.
How much funding? That depends on how many votes we receive between today and February 28.
Who can vote? Anyone who has ever signed a CREDO petition, or purchased CREDO mobile or credit card services.
As of Wednesday, February 18, OCA had 19,919 votes. To everyone who has already voted, thank you! If you haven’t yet voted, can you help us reach 25,000 votes by midnight February 28?
As always, we are grateful to all of you who have helped grow this organic food and farming movement into the powerful force that it is.
Sign a Credo petition to be eligible to vote
Donate to the Organic Consumers Association (tax-deductible, helps support our work on behalf of organic standards, fair trade and public education)
Donate to the Organic Consumers Fund (non-tax-deductible, but necessary for our GMO labeling legislative efforts)
There’s ample science—including a new study by Center for Food Safety—linking Monsanto’s Roundup to the collapse of the world’s monarch butterfly population.
Why? Because Roundup kills the milkweed plant, which is essential to the monarch’s survival.
In order to protect the monarch’s habitat, and save the monarch, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) is considering a petition, submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety, seeking protection for the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act.
Until we successfully ban Roundup for good, placing the Monarch on the Endangered Species List is our best hope for saving America’s favorite butterfly from extinction.
On February 13 (2015), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved the first GMO apple, genetically engineered to not turn brown after it’s sliced.
The company (Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc.) that makes the apple wants you to believe that consumer demand was behind the invention.
But the real target customers for GMO apples are fast-food restaurants and food service businesses—companies that want mothers of young children to think they’re selling healthy fresh fruit, even if that fruit is a genetically engineered apple that has undergone no meaningful safety testing for human consumption.
Fortunately, it takes a while to grow an apple tree. So it may be a couple of years before the GMO apple shows up in grocery stores, fast-food restaurants, schools or hospitals.
In the meantime, it’s up to consumers to make sure the main customers for Okanagan’s frankenapple—fast-food restaurants who want to serve the apple in kids’ meals and salad bars—know that consumers don’t want ‘em, and won’t buy ‘em.
On Friday, February 13, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved the first genetically engineered apple, despite hundreds of thousands of petitions asking the USDA to reject it.
According an article in Politico, the USDA said the GMO apple “doesn’t pose any harm to other plants or pests.”
Great. But what about potential harm to the humans who consume them?
The GMO Arctic Apple (Golden Delicious and Granny varieties), developed by Canada-based Okanagan Specialty Fruit, shockingly doesn’t require approval by the U.S. Food & Drug Association (FDA). The FDA will merely conduct a “voluntary review” before, presumably, rubber-stamping the apple for use in restaurants, institutions (including schools and hospitals) and grocery stores—with no meaningful long- (or even short-) term safety testing for its potential impact on human health.
Here’s why that should concern every consumer out there, especially parents of young children.