Much Needed Inventory Would Identify Animal Factories’ Locations and Manure Management Practices, Allowing EPA To Begin Assessing Scope of National Threat To Water and Food Supplies
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) submitted comments strongly criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) disappointing failure to implement a 2010 settlement agreement it reached with environmental groups and called on the agency not to capitulate to industry pressure and weaken its much needed action. CFS’s comments were also joined by Friends of the Earth.
In 2010, EPA agreed to conduct an inventory and profile the largest animal factories by requiring reporting of very basic operational information such as geographic location, ownership, quantity of manure produced, and use of manure. Despite widespread animal factory farming in the U.S., EPA never previously tracked this data, and thus has no understanding of the scope of the manure problem that is polluting our nation’s waters and placing our food supply at risk.
Filed under: Factory Farming, Food Safety, Politics and Policy | Leave a Comment »
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) pushed back today against longtime biotech crop supporter, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, over its announcement that it has invested nearly $2 billion in a campaign to fund the development of genetically engineered (GE) crops in an attempt to address global hunger. The Gates Foundation has been widely criticized by food security and public interest groups for promoting GE crops in developing countries rather than investing in organic and sustainable local models of agriculture.
AB 88—the California bill which would have required that all genetically engineered (GE) fish sold in California contain clear and prominent labeling—failed in the Assembly Appropriations Committee today by a vote of 9-7. AB 88 was stalled in Appropriations last year, and was held-over for reintroduction this session by the bill’s author, Assembly member Huffman.
