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Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest
The Food We Produce Is Killing Us and Decimating Biodiversity – A Change Has to Be Made
COVID-19 Sparks a Rebirth of the Local Farm Movement
Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos
15 Indigenous Crops to Boost Your Immune System and Celebrate Biodiversity
As COVID-19 swept through U.S. slaughterhouses, plants closed, leaving farmers with millions of animals they couldn’t get to market. This prompted Tyson to take out an ad in the New York Times, warning that the “food supply chain is breaking.”
But COVID-19 didn’t break the food system. The four Big Meat titans—Tyson, Smithfield, JBS and Cargill—broke the supply chain. They did it by forcing consolidation in the meatpacking industry, which ultimately created another “too big to fail” industry.
Congress has a plan to save Big Meat, by taking an old law intended to help family farmers, and turning it into a taxpayer-funded rescue plan for big corporations.
Companies like Tyson and Cargill don’t need our help. They can use bankruptcy protection laws to “reorganize” their debt and restructure their operations.
Who does need our help? The independent family farmers and ranchers who raise grass-fed and pasture-raised meat, while also being good neighbors and good stewards of the land.
If you want to know where Big Pharma stands on protecting consumers from being poisoned by chemicals, start here.
The website FiercePharma.com posted an article this week about reports that Bayer is nearing a settlement agreement with the more than 125,000 people suing the company over Roundup weedkiller. The article starts out with this:
“Investors suffering losses from Bayer’s Roundup legal woes are finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, as the German conglomerate is said to be nearing a final settlement that could put tens of thousands of lawsuits behind it.”
Wow. So the victims here are Bayer, who’s “finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” and Bayer shareholders, who have been “suffering losses?”
Funny, we would have thought that the victims in this story are the tens of thousands of human beings and their families, devastated by cancer—not the corporation that sold those people a weedkiller, falsely marketed as “safe,” that caused cancer.
Meanwhile, looks as though Bayer (which paid more than $60 billion for Monsanto in 2016, then later announced it was dropping the Monsanto name) is testing a new, “no-glyphosate” version of Roundup. It’s being marketed on Amazon as containing a “100% natural active ingredient.”
No clue as to what that “100% natural” mystery ingredient actually is—but we’ll be looking into it, and reporting back later.
Read ‘No More Legal Headache for Bayer as It Nears $10B Roundup Settlement: Report
More on the Monsanto Roundup trials
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to ban Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller!
Would you believe your Smithfield pork chop was the “safest possible” U.S. pork product—if you knew that pork products produced by Smithfield are commonly contaminated with dangerous pathogens?
And what if you knew that the U.S. Department of Agriculture frequently notifies Smithfield that pork processed product in its slaughter plants is more likely to be contaminated with Salmonella than similar products in slaughter plants of the same size?
Safe to say, you wouldn’t. Yet Smithfield makes that exact (false) claim, in hope of convincing more consumers to buy more Smithfield pork products.
Last week we sued Smithfield. You can read all of the reasons here, in the complaint.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Smithfield, one of the four Big Meat corporations (along with Tyson, Cargill and JBS) that dominate industrial meat production.
There’s the animal abuse. The water pollution. The air pollution.
There’s the fact that Smithfield, a wholly owned subsidiary of WH Group of China, destroys rural communities in the U.S. in order to satisfy its own country’s insatiable appetite for pork.
And then there’s Smithfield’s exploitation of slaughterhouse employees. Smithfield, like the other Big Meat producers, has never been known for treating workers fairly or with dignity.
That situation is so bad now, during the COVID-19 crisis, that workers at one facility recently sued the company, for:
“ . . . failing to provide workers with sufficient protective equipment; forcing them to work shoulder to shoulder; giving them insufficient opportunities to wash their hands; discouraging them from taking sick leave; and failing to implement a plan for testing and contact tracing.”
But these aren’t the reasons we sued Smithfield. We sued the company for lying to consumers. Because there are laws against that. And we think consumers have the right to know when corporations lie to them.
Read ‘Food Safety Claims Land Smithfield Foods Inc. in D.C. Court’
In the COVID-19-driven time warp of the past 90 days, politics, economics and public opinion have changed drastically.
Important aspects of social behavior seem to have improved—less non-essential travel, less consumption, more family focus, reduced greenhouse gas pollution (17 percent less worldwide in early April), increase in demand for healthy, home-cooked foods, appreciation for nature, mutual aid, social solidarity and more attention paid to the plight of farmworkers, small farmers, healthcare workers and food chain workers.
Unfortunately, other impacts of the pandemic are quite negative, in fact catastrophic: widespread anxiety and fear, extreme political polarization and economic meltdown, including a massive number of bankruptcies of small businesses, with 40 million workers unemployed in the U.S. alone.
In addition, the federal government, led by the White House and Senate Republicans, abetted by corporate Democrats, has relaxed pollution, environmental and food safety standards, and handed out multi-trillion-dollar bailouts, with little or no government oversight, to the fossil fuel industry, corporate agribusiness and Fortune 500 corporations—instead of providing sufficient resources for those businesses, farmers, workers, families and individuals who most need help.
As Arundhati Roy suggested early on in this crisis, historically, pandemics have served as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” How we walk through that portal, whether we choose to imagine another world—and fight for that world—is up to us.
Read Ronnie’s essay of the week: ‘Pandemic Shock: Digital Dictatorship or Green Recovery?’
Want to know where all the 2020 presidential candidates stand on GMOs? You’re in luck.
We investigated the candidates’ positions based on who’s funding their campaigns, how they voted as elected officials and what they’ve said in their platforms and public statements. And we’re ready to share.
Using data compiled by FEC.gov and OpenSecrets.org we dug up the dirt on who’s taken campaign contributions from the biggest companies in the food system, including the four multinational corporations, Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, BASF, and DowDuPont (now Corteva).
Of course we know where several of the candidates stand on GMOs because they were in the House or Senate in 2016. That was the year Congress ended our fight for GMO labels on genetically engineered foods by passing a federal bill that took away states’ rights to label GMOs and instituted a federal “bioengineered disclosure” standard that has yet to result in any GMOs being labeled.
Truth be told, only Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) came out “GMO-Free” based on our research.
Note: This information was compiled by Citizens Regeneration Lobby (CRL), the 501(c)(4) sister organization of Organic Consumers Association. CRL can endorse candidates and engage in political advocacy that is out-of-bounds for 501(c)(3) organizations. We can’t share CRL’s endorsements with you here. If you’d like to receive that information from CRL via email, please join CRL here.
Read: ‘Where do the 2020 Presidential Candidates Stand on GMOs?’
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report writes that “No justice, no peace” is “a vow by the movement to transform the crisis that is inflicted on Black people into a generalized crisis for the larger society, and for those who currently rule.”
In reality, given the violence being inflicted upon people, particularly people of color, whether directly or indirectly through rising poverty, unemployment, homelessness, lack of access to health care and more, and the government’s failures to address these crises and listen to the people, disruption is a necessary element for political change.
Structural Racism
Institutionalized racism is a founding principle of the United States beginning with treatment of the Native inhabitants when settlers arrived and continuing today in the disparities between the ways that people of color and white people are treated. This was blatantly exposed recently when police in McKinney, Texas brutalized a fourteen year old girl and her friends at a pool party.
Lawrence Brown puts the racist terrorist attack in North Charleston, SC in context by documenting the history of brutality against blacks. He asks, “will white Americans confront the ideology of white supremacy and uproot it from every policy, practice, and community?” Alicia Garza urges us not to see the recent massacre in North Charleston as an isolated incident, nor to view it as a consequence of mental illness. Instead, it should be recognized as a manifestation of inherent racism and those who promote this racism should be held accountable.
Similarly Richard Rothstein outlines how racist public policies have caused racial disparities in housing and access to work. He describes how in Los Angeles, as in many cities across the country, primarily people of color are being displaced from their homes so that landlords and developers can make higher profits.
Communities are fighting back. Residents of one building in LA are sticking together and protesting weekly. Community members in LA are also taking action together to end police violence. In New York, the death of Kalief Browder who was jailed in Rikers, New York at sixteen and held for three years without trial is starting to change structural policies. It is a sad fact that it takes such tragedy to bring about this change.