Most Recent Campaign Headlines
Tech billionaire Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, may seem a strange fit for the role of America’s top farmer. But he’s been quietly amassing massive tracts of U.S. land under the cover of investment firm Cascade Investment LLC, and now owns a minimum of 242,000 acres of U.S. farmland.
A group of international scientists from the U.S. and EU have released a peer-reviewed pilot study that suggests the anogenital distance of baby girls is becoming more male-typical, due to their mothers being exposed to glyphosate when they are in the womb.
Planning documents for the controversial 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit shed new light on its agenda. Farmers' and human rights groups say agribusiness interests and elite foundations are dominating the process to push through an agenda that would enable the exploitation of global food systems, and especially Africa.
Imagine a world where algorithms are used to optimize growing conditions on every fertile square metre of land, where food is treated like a strategic asset and food transit routes are militarized, many foods are grown in petri dishes, vats, and bioreactors. This may sound like science fiction. But the "4th industrial revolution" is already sweeping through food systems.
A group of international scientists from the U.S. and EU have released a peer-reviewed pilot study that suggests the anogenital distance of baby girls is becoming more male-typical, due to their mothers being exposed to glyphosate when they are in the womb.
For thousands of years of human agriculture, seeds were freely exchanged and shared. All that changed in the 1990s when laws were introduced to protect new bioengineered crops. Today, four corporations — Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina and Limagrain — control more than 50% of the world's seeds. These staggering monopolies dominate the global food supply.
Bees provide the crucial ecosystem service of pollination, but are under threat, with 37% of EU bee species with known trends exhibiting population declines. One apparent cause of these declines is pesticides. Pesticide usage is pervasive, with 4.1 billion kilograms of active ingredient applied globally in 2017, nearly double the amount used in 1990.
Around the world, the deadly dangers of a weedkiller called paraquat are well known. When working with the highly toxic herbicide, farmers and other users take care not to splash or spill even small amounts of the product, heeding regulatory warnings that just a tiny amount – if swallowed – will kill them.
Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., is a physicist and activist who works tirelessly to defend the environment and protect biodiversity from multinational corporations. Her life's work has culminated in the creation of seed banks that may one day save future generations' food sovereignty, but how she got there is a fascinating story, chronicled in the documentary "The Seeds of Vandana Shiva."
At least five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile and the U.S. — have approved a variety of maize genetically modified (GM) with a genome editing technique called CRISPR, without subjecting the crop to the risk assessments and regulations for GM crops. Other countries could soon follow.