Almost 90% of the $540bn in global subsidies given to farmers every year are “harmful”, a startling UN report has found.
This agricultural support damages people’s health, fuels the climate crisis, destroys nature and drives inequality by excluding smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, according to the UN agencies.
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Swapping traditional, whole foods grown by small farmers for mass-produced fake foods grown in a laboratory is part and parcel of the Great Reset. The EAT Forum, co-founded by the Wellcome Trust, developed a Planetary Health Diet that’s designed to be applied to the global population and entails cutting meat and dairy intake by up to 90%, replacing it largely with foods made in laboratories, along with cereals and oil.
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Fair Trade USA released a new “Fair Trade Dairy” label in partnership with Chobani. It’s a program that has been opposed by farmworker and human rights organizations since it was first announced. Now that there is yogurt on the shelf, but still no final standard released, this report looks at the label claims and evaluates “Fair Trade Dairy” based on the available standards.
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In late January last year, dairy farmers filled a pub in the tiny town of Greenwald, Minnesota (population 238). Organisers from the Land Stewardship Project – a sustainable agriculture nonprofit – expected 50 people to attend, but 130 showed up from all corners of the state.
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The 1,500 Jersey cows that Nathan Chittenden and his family raise in upstate New York seem to lead carefree lives. They spend their days lolling around inside well-ventilated barns and eating their fill from troughs.
Read moreIndustrial factory farming threatens our health, our environment and our local economic and food security.
The handful of “Big Meat” corporations that monopolize industrial meat production are guilty of exploiting meatpacking workers, farmworkers, farmers and ranchers—and torturing billions of farm animals.
There’s a better way. We need to act now.
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The industrial meat industry has been hogging the food-related news cycle lately. The COVID-19 outbreaks at meatpacking plants. The slaughterhouse shut-downs. The “depopulating” of farm animals. Meat shortages and rising meat prices.
And then there’s the corresponding good news: Consumers buying more organic, grass-fed, pasture-raised meat products from local farmers and CSAs—even online sales of these products are surging.
So far, the industrial factory farm dairy industry hasn’t seen nearly as much news coverage during the pandemic. But under the mainstream media radar, two organizations recently shone a spotlight on dairy producers.
The Institute for Ag and Trade Policy (IATP) issued a report on the role of industrial dairy in global warming. The report, “Milking the Planet: How Big Dairy Is Heating Up the Planet and Hollowing Rural Communities,” calls for “redirecting public funds away from industrial agriculture, regulating the public health, environmental and social impacts of this extractive model of production and designing incentives to regenerate rural communities through agroecology.”
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Last month, Ben & Jerry’s revealed that it will no longer claim on its product packaging that its ice cream comes from “happy cows.” The company’s statement comes after being sued twice for deceiving consumers about its animal welfare policies.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Attorneys for Organic Consumers Association (OCA) filed a limited motion for summary judgment, with the D.C. Superior Court, in the nonprofit’s false advertising lawsuit, filed in July 2018, against Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry’s.
The motion asks the court to find that Ben & Jerry’s falsely claimed that its “Caring Dairy” animal husbandry standards were “required for all farmers” who supplied the dairy used in its products. The motion states that Ben & Jerry’s admitted that it uses milk from “conventional dairy sources” that do not adhere to “Caring Dairy” standards.
“Consumer protection laws are intended to protect consumers from advertising, marketing and packaging claims that are patently false,” said Ronnie Cummins, OCA’s international director. “This goal will be achieved only if companies like Unilever are challenged when they make false claims about their brands, and held accountable by the courts. OCA’s mission includes working on behalf of consumers to make sure our legal system defends consumer rights.”
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The Columbus-area farmer, one of six Miller family members running a venerable homestead farm that dates to 1852, is patiently explaining how the previous fall they couldn’t harvest crops or plant winter grains because of the wet fields that had mired the 1,600 acres they own and rent north of Sun Prairie.
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