On January 27, 2021, President Joe Biden signed his “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” This historic action commited the U.S. to achieving “significant short-term global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and net-zero global emissions by mid-century or before.”
Biden’s climate EO was immediately likened to the Green New Deal resolution championed by the Sunrise Movement.
One big difference between the two is, while the Green New Deal sticks to direct government investment in proven climate solutions, Biden’s climate EO relies, in part, on “market-based mechanisms” and “robust standards for the market ... to catalyze private sector investment.”
The differences between the Green New Deal and Biden’s climate EO wouldn’t have us so concerned if it weren’t for the support for three dangerous false solutions that his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack brings to the Biden-Harris Cabinet.
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USDA has presented to the public a massive and far-reaching rewrite of the regulations implementing the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA). However, unlike the process by which the initial regulations were established in 2002, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) was only consulted on a portion of the elements in this draft rule.
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Addressing what it calls the industrialization of the organic farming movement, OrganicEye announced the filing of a formal legal complaint against one of the country’s largest producers of certified organic milk, Natural Prairie. According to the organic industry watchdog, animal abuse and serious environmental degradation have been documented, demonstrating that Natural Prairie, with operations in Texas and a new facility under construction in Indiana, violated federal organic regulations.
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Here's one unexpected consequence of the Defense Production Act: Your food is less safe. When President Trump invoked the act three months ago, as a means to bolster American food security, it marked the beginning of a campaign to deregulate the meat industry.
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Most avocado oil sold in the United States — including that labeled “pure” or “extra virgin” — is either stale before its expiration date or mixed with other oils, according to a study published recently in the journal Food Control. In fact, some of the samples tested in the study contained almost no avocado oil.
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The Brave Little State Versus Godzilla.
We know how that movie ends.
Vermont is the Brave Little State.
In this case, Godzilla is Monsanto and the Organic Trade Association.
That is an odd pairing. How did that happen?
For years there was a huge national effort to require labeling for products containing GMOs. And there was an even more intense effort to defeat those labeling requirements.
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If consumers are seeking fair and balanced information about GMOs, they certainly will not find it on the new FDA/USDA/EPA website called Feed Your Mind.
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Why do we need to end factory farming? So many reasons.
But the one reason that’s getting the most attention from public health officials these days is this: Drug-resistant infections from food are growing. And, as New York Times reporter Matt Richtel laid out in his article this week, powerful industry interests are blocking scientists and investigators from getting information they need to combat the problem.
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Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with help from then-President Obama, effectively stripped consumers of their right to know if their food contains GMO ingredients.
Now, under the Trump administration’s “free-for-all” approach to regulation, the USDA wants to let companies like Monsanto-Bayer, DowDupont and Syngenta (now owned by ChemChina) “regulate” their own genetically engineered products.
TAKE ACTION: Tell the USDA to do its job: protect consumers, not the biotech industry!
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The biotech industry has long insisted that genetic engineering is no different than, or at the very least a continuum, of traditional plant breeding techniques—a myth perpetuated by the industry to shield it from public criticism, as well as from regulatory oversight.
But a new study from the biotech industry itself admits that there are in fact significant differences between new methods of genetic engineering, including the gene-editing technique CRISPR, and conventional plant breeding, further dispelling the claim that the two methods are one in the same.
In the U.S., there is yet no meaningful law requiring the labeling of GMO foods, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has said it won’t even regulate gene-editing techniques, much less require labels on foods produced by those technologies.
The USDA supports its no-regulation position by claiming that gene-editing technologies “are increasingly being used by plant breeders to produce new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods.”
That claim isn’t shared by EU regulators. And it isn’t supported by scientists at DowDuPont, the world’s largest chemical company.
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