ESSAY OF THE WEEK

The 9-Percent Lie

The Climate Emergency is finally getting the attention of the media and the U.S. (and world) body politic, as well as a growing number of politicians, activists and even U.S. farmers.

Also gaining traction is the idea that the combination of regenerative agriculture, reforestation and land restoration provides a critical, and shovel-ready, solution for both reducing emissions and drawing down excess carbon in the atmosphere and sequestering it in healthy soil.

So why are the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) downplaying this solution? By refusing to acknowledge industrial agriculture’s role in global warming, and regenerative agriculture’s potential to reverse it?

Could Big Food and Big Ag’s lobbying power have anything to do with the EPA’s and USDA’s “9-percent lie?”

Read Ronnie’s essay

FARMERS & RANCHERS ONLY: Sign this letter to Congress

CONSUMERS: Sign this petition

END FACTORY FARMING

Eye Opening

In 2016, the Environment America Research & Policy Center reported that Tyson foods, one of the world’s largest meat and poultry producers, dumps more toxic pollution into the nation’s waters than any other agribusiness corporation, and produces the most animal manure of five major companies assessed nationwide.

Yet Tyson continues to falsely claim that the company cares about being “stewards of the land.” In its marketing and advertising materials, Tyson brags about its “commitment to conservation” and its “dedication to environmental leadership.”

We don’t think false claims like these are harmless. And we believe the courts won’t either.

OCA and Food & Water Watch sued Tyson this week for deliberately misleading consumers with false claims about the company’s environmental and animal welfare claims.

If you care about the environment. If you care about animal welfare. If you care about how food is produced. If you care about holding corporations accountable for the claims they make, you’ll want to read this lawsuit.

Our detailed complaint is filled with fun facts about what’s really goes into making Tyson chicken products—anti-parasitic drugs, antibiotic-resistant pathogens, formaldehyde, hazardous disinfectant chemicals—and how a company that claims it cares about the humane treatment of animals crowds tens of thousands of birds into industrial warehouses.

It's a real eye-opener.

Tyson is no stranger to legal woes. The company is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for price fixing. And according to the website, Violation Tracker, Tyson has paid out $164.2 million (peanuts for a company with $40 billion in annual sales) since 2000 related to a total of 264 violations, for everything from food safety and environmental violations, to employment discrimination and violations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Read our press release

Read the lawsuit

More on the Myth of Natural

ACTION ALERT

Merger Madness

Bigger may not mean better. But in the corporate agribusiness world, bigger means more power—more power over farmers, more power over consumers and more power over policymakers.

As already-big corporations become even more economically and politically powerful, they become less accountable to the public. 

That makes the work we do—to protect consumers from pesticides, GMOs and the widespread harm inflicted by factory farms on human health, animal welfare and the environment—that much harder.

It also makes life exceedingly difficult for independent family farmers, who find themselves faced with fewer and fewer choices when it comes to which crops or livestock to produce, and what markets to sell into, according to this University of Missouri study, “Power Food and Agriculture: Implications for Farmers, Consumers and Communities.”

It’s time to stop the merger madness that’s running your favorite farmers out of business—and leaving you, the consumer, with fewer choices, too.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress: Stop the Big Ag Merger Mania! Protect Family Farms, Consumers & the Environment

SUPPORT THE OCA & CRL

For Jake

There are days when fighting giant corporations, like Monsanto-Bayer and Tyson, feels a bit hopeless.

Huge corporations have pockets deeper than we can ever dream to have. And they use their vast financial resources to buy power—over politicians, over regulatory agencies like the EPA, over the farmers they squeeze every dime out of, and ultimately over all of us.

Hopeless, because all that power gives them the freedom to poison everything in sight, from our air, soil and water, to the very food we eat.

But hopeless isn’t an option. 

Jake Bellah is 12 years old. His father, unaware of the risks, used Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller for years. In the family’s yard. Around their gardens.

Jake has non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He sued Monsanto-Bayer. His lawyers argue that his trial, one of thousands by other cancer victims, should be expedited.

Jake is 12. If he can take on Monsanto, we all can. And must.

A recent article in Wired magazine cites statistics revealing that pollution—from all sources and contaminating everything from our air and water to our food—killed more than 9 million people in 2015.

Whether like Jake, we’re poisoned directly by chemicals companies claim are “safe," or whether we’re indirectly poisoned by companies like Tyson—which according to a 2016 study by the Environment America Research & Policy Center beats out every other agribusiness corporation when it comes to polluting U.S. waterways—we’re all in this battle together.

We all have to speak out, stand up and do everything in our power to hold toxin-spewing corporations accountable, until finally, one day, they’re forced to clean up their acts.

We owe it to the Jakes of the world. Thank you for keeping OCA strong. Thank you for giving us hope.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Support Citizens Regeneration Lobby, OCA’s 501(c)(4) lobbying arm (not tax-deductible)

Click here for more ways to support our work

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Let's Go Camping!

Ecorestoration is “the great work of our time,” according to one of last year’s land-restoration campers at the Vía Orgánica Ranch, a regenerative teaching farm and ranch near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

What’s an “ecorestoration camp?” The best explanation is here, in this video produced by Wil Crombie of Organic Compound Farm for OCA’s Vía Orgánica project in collaboration with Ecosystem Restoration Camps and Regeneration International.

Want to participate? 

Join Vía Orgánica and the Ecosystem Restoration Camp Movement in Mexico for the week of Nov. 9th to 17th at the land-restoration camp at Vía Orgánica Ranch. 

Volunteer to camp, work, study, connect with the earth and meet new friends in this beautiful ranch near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Camp activities will include restoration work such as tree planting, composting, seed collecting, earthworks, cooking, listening to music, campfires, making new friends and much more.

Ecosystem restoration is a growing global strategy to naturally draw down and sequester carbon from the atmosphere and store it in our soils, forests and vegetation to reverse global warming.  

Learn more and sign up

Watch this beautiful video filmed on site at the last Vía Orgánica Ecosystem Restoration Camp in March

Questions? Email office@organicconsumers.org

ACTION ALERT

Coffee Slaves?

Many of us are slaves to our morning coffee. But most of us would be appalled to learn that our morning cup of Joe was brought to us by slaves.

Starbucks has long been on our list of bad actors, for a host of reasons. The latest? The world’s largest retail coffee chain’s slave labor problem.

In 2014, we wrote about our efforts (failed, so far) to force Starbucks to stop supporting the industrial “dirty dairy” system and switch to organic milk.

Now, through our Fair World Project, we’re calling out Starbucks for its fake claims of “99% ethical coffee.” For the second time in nine months, Brazilian labor inspectors have found slave labor on plantations where Starbucks buys coffee. And not just any plantations, but ones that have been “certified” to Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. Practices standards.

You’d think a CEO with a personal net worth of $3.4 billion would be embarrassed to keep building his fortune on the backs of slaves. Apparently not. 

Read ‘Starbucks Has a Slave Labor Problem’

TAKE ACTION: Tell Starbucks: Stop slave labor, choose real fair trade

LITTLE BYTES

Essential Reading

Intermittent Fasting May Prevent Diabetes

'The Biggest Problem Is Greed' Says Conservationist Jane Goodall

Google Is Now a Pharmaceutical Company

Fishless Fish? Impossible Foods Is Developing Fake Seafood for Vegetarians

Putting Pigs in the Shade: The Radical Farming System Banking on Trees

Why Is Food Wrapped in Plastic Inside Plastic?

A Global Pollution Observatory Hunts for Hidden Killers