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Over the next month, CFS will be bringing you videos from some experts with whom we work closely in the trenches—Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Anna Lappé, and CFS’s Executive Director Andrew Kimbrell—to help us tell you the real truth about the false claims put forth by Monsanto and other biotech companies. We’ll share with you why these leading activists support the work of the Center for Food Safety.
In this week’s video, Vandana Shiva, founder and director of Navdanya in India, leader in the Slow Foods Movement, and author of the recently released book, Soil not Oil, shares the tragic story of farmers pushed into intractable debt, and some to suicide, by the economy of biotech crops, and why she supports the work of the Center for Food Safety.
Despite campaign promises to the contrary, President Obama has nominated to two key posts “Big Ag” industry insiders who come straight from the chemical pesticide and biotechnology sectors.
Islam Siddiqui — current VP of science and regulatory affairs at CropLife, and a former lobbyist — has been nominated to the critical post of U.S. Chief Agricultural Negotiator. This position will enable him to keep pushing chemical pesticides, inappropriate biotechnologies, and unfair trade arrangements on nations that do not want and can least afford them.
Roger Beachy — long-time head of Monsanto’s defacto nonprofit research arm — has been installed as director of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). This office comes with a $500 million budget, and therein control over the U.S. ag research agenda for years to come.
Breaches in food safety in the U.S. continue to make international headlines as contamination incidents arise and tragic, personal stories about food borne illnesses unfold. In response, the US Department of Agriculture is holding hearings across the country on a proposed National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (NLGMA). If adopted, the LGMA would serve to further consolidate and industrialize our nation’s food system, to the detriment of small, medium-sized and family farmers. It would also undermine organic agriculture through draconian measures that would destroy habitats and cripple biodiversity on farms, with no scientific proof that these measures would actually improve food safety. Read CFS’s testimony on the LGMA presented at the hearing in Monterey, California. You can also watch videos of the hearing in California and elsewhere.
USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) is voting on whether nanotechnology should be banned from use in Organic products. Thanks to your overwhelming outcry in May 2009 the Board’s initial recommendation is to keep nanotech out of organic entirely. Now, we need your help again to make sure USDA holds the line! The critical vote on the Board’s final recommendation will be held in Washington D.C. on Nov 3.
Nanotechnology is contrary to Organic Principles and could further entrench industrial/chemical agriculture and industrial food as our dominant paradigm, to the detriment of public health and the environment. Tell NOSB to ensure the integrity of Organic on this issue by voting that USDA ban nanotechnology as an excluded method.
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