Essays
We all love to hate Monsanto. We also know that Monsanto isn’t the only poison-maker trying to pass itself off as a “farmer-friendly producer of food to feed the world.”
Monsanto belongs to an exclusive club of dominant pesticide makers. That club, which includes Dow, Dupont, Bayer, Syngenta and BASF, is about to get a lot smaller. And a lot more dangerous.
Bayer has been trying for months to buy Monsanto. Dow and Dupont are in talks to merge. And Switzerland-based Syngenta may soon be owned by ChemChina.
It’s bad enough that less than a dozen multinational corporations (including Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta) control nearly 70 percent of the global seed market. If these mergers and buyouts go through, that number will shrink even further.
The recent merger and acquisition in the seed and chemical signals trouble in the industry, a fact Bayer CEO Werner Baumann recently admitted. That’s probably a good sign.
But giving more control to even fewer corporations will definitely have a downside. Martha Rosenberg and Ronnie Cummins take a look at the proposed buyout of Syngenta by ChemChina.
Here’s your mid-summer culinary directive from Congress and the White House: Shut up and eat your Frankenfoods.
Don’t worry about mutant genes, pesticide residues, and a growing list of horrors in your food. Don’t worry about your health, your children’s health, global warming or the health of the environment.
Just put your trust in America’s industrial food system and in Monsanto’s minions—the indentured scientists, politicians, regulatory agencies and members of the mass media who all toe the line for the biotech industry.
In case some of us didn’t notice, given our mounting daily dose of insults and injustices, the federal government, aided and abetted by the Organic Trade Association (now known as the Organic Traitors Association), just slapped you and millions of other health and environmentally concerned consumers in the mouth.
Ignoring the protests of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the entire grassroots food movement, ignoring 22 years of consumer pressure, multiple state ballot initiatives and “Right-to-Know” legislative efforts, the infamous DARK Act (Deny Americans the Right to Know) is about to be enshrined in federal law by President O’Bummer.
So, what’s next?
Editor's note: This article was written and first appeared before the Senate voted on July 7 to pass the Roberts-Stabenow GMO labeling bill.
A growing list of Organic Traitors have been telling Congress behind closed doors—and now publicly—that they and the organic community will accept an industry-crafted DARK Act “compromise"—the Stabenow/Roberts bill— that eliminates mandatory GMO labeling and preempts the Vermont law with a convoluted and deceptive federal regime for QR codes and 1-800 numbers that is completely voluntary, and will exempt 95 percent of the current GMO-tainted foods on the market.
This list of Organic Traitors includes the head of Whole Foods Market, Walter Robb; Gary Hirschberg, the CEO of Stonyfield Farm and the pseudo-pro GMO labeling group Just Label It; the Environmental Working Group, represented by Scott Faber, former head lobbyist for the pro-biotech Grocery Manufacturers Association; UNFI, the largest wholesaler of natural and organic foods; and the OTA, led by “natural” brands such as Smuckers and White Wave, and represented by their Board Chair Melissa Hughes from Organic Valley.
For all their posturing, for all their proclamations that Vermont’s law must be preempted or “chaos will ensue,” key Senate proponents of a federal bill to preempt Vermont’s mandatory GMO labeling bill have yet to produce a viable version of the bill, much less pass such a bill.
Now, they’re down to five days. The anti-labeling brigade has just five working days (including today, June 16, 2016) to preempt Vermont’s law before it takes effect July 1.
Five working days, before the House adjourns for the July 4 holiday recess on June 24. And because any bill passed by the Senate would have to go back to the House, before it goes to a full vote in Congress, it doesn’t matter if the Senate is in session for 15 days. Without the House, the Senate’s hands are tied.
That leaves five days to produce a new Senate version of the bill, to secure enough votes to pass the new version in the Senate, to reconcile the Senate version with the House version (passed in July 2015), and to hold a full vote by both House and Senate.
Five days. And counting.
That means we have five days to defend Vermont’s labeling law. We need to make a record-breaking number of phone calls in the next 5 days.
TAKE ACTION: Find out what you can do in the next five days to stop Congress from stomping out Vermont’s GMO labeling law.
If you’re worried about thinning bones, or bone fractures, you probably have Big Food and Big Pharma to thank for keeping you up at night.
For decades, these two industries have used scare tactics to convince the general population that they’re bones are at risk—and that they, and they alone, have the answers to your thinning bone problems.
The two multinationals that teamed up during the Vietnam War to poison millions of people with their Agent Orange herbicide—St. Louis, Mo.-based Monsanto and Germany’s Bayer AG—are looking to become one.
Bayer has announced a bid to buy Monsanto in a deal that would expand Bayer's GMO and pesticide holdings and add drugs to Monsanto’s global portfolio. Monsanto has rejected the latest bid, but the two are still in talks.
If Monsanto, perhaps the most hated GMO company in the world, joins hands with Bayer, one of the most hated Big Pharma corporations on Earth (whose evil deeds date back to World War I and the Nazi era), the newly formed seed-pesticide-drug behemoth would have combined annual sales of $67 billion.
That’s a staggering figure. But here’s another, even more alarming: Combined, the new mega-chemical/seed company would control 29 percent of the world’s seed market and 24 percent of the pesticide market.
A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) on GE crops and technology was met with cheers from the biotech industry, but little meaningful scrutiny by the mainstream media.
Initial media reports boiled the message down to “GMOs Are Safe” and even “healthy.” Some reports even claimed that the study “proves” the safety of genetically modified crops.
Aside from the obvious—that the headlines over-simplify the NAS findings in a way that spins favorable for the biotech industry—the media also overlooked the influence, as reported by Food & Water Watch, of the biotech industry on The National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the NAS.
Biased or not, and despite the positive spin by most media outlets, the report’s “conclusions” left plenty of room for doubt on a range of issues, from safety, to improved yields, to damage to the environment. On many the issues the committee, made up of 20 scientists and policy experts, couldn’t—or wouldn’t—commit.
Instead the experts produced a 400-page report full of equivocations, and of recommendations the committee knows will be ignored, but little in the way of clarity.
Here are three take-aways from the NAS report.
It’s safe to say that most American consumers probably can’t recall the last time they ate a meal prepared entirely from wholesome, farm-to-table ingredients, without any canned or prepackaged products.
That’s because most Americans today consume mostly processed foods—foods produced with pesticides, GMOs and synthetic chemicals, routinely laced with too much sugar, salt and unhealthy fats.
In fact, processed foods make up as much as 70 percent of people’s diets–meaning only 30 percent of what they consume consists of wholesome, natural, or organic foods!
But here’s the truth about processed foods: Long-term consumption of these “food products” spell bad news for your health.
The autopsy results from Prince’s unexpected death are not in yet, but it has been reported that the musical star had the prescription opioid painkiller Percocet in his possession when he died. Unconfirmed reports suggest Prince not only used prescription opioids for pain but may have had an addiction.
The Big Food giants, the pesticide and genetic engineering corporations such as Monsanto, the chemical, cosmetics, body care, food packaging, bottled water, and home furnishings industries—they all have a dirty secret.
All these “Better Living Through Chemistry” companies and their PR firms and trade associations, bolstered by their minions in the mass media and academia, like to reassure us that these toxic, carcinogenic, gender-bending compounds in their products have been thoroughly tested and approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulatory bodies.
But they haven’t. And we’re only beginning to learn that the tiniest amount of these chemicals are dangerous—sometimes more dangerous than higher levels. Because they can disrupt the body’s complex endocrine system which is responsible for growth, stress response, insulin production, sexual development and reproduction, metabolism, immunity—even intelligence and behavior.
Corporations would have us believe that there’s no harm in consuming or inhaling or absorbing small amounts of these chemicals into our bodies. But mounting evidence suggests otherwise. Here’s a scary thought: New research shows that the additives (co-formulants) used in glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, may have damaging endocrine-disrupting effects. Sobering news, given that billions of pounds of Roundup are sprayed on both GMO and non-GMO crops every year, everywhere in the world.
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