This seems like as good a time as any to review a little bit of our common history.

You and I, the OCA staff, and our entire volunteer network have been speaking truth to power for almost two decades now, fighting to safeguard organic standards, campaigning against GMOs and pesticides, advocating for Fair Trade, natural health, and environmental, animal and climate-friendly regenerative agriculture.

We’ve connected the dots in our newsletter, website and social media between health, justice, sustainability, peace, and democracy.

OCA now has over two million organic consumers in our online network, reading and sharing information, pressuring companies and politicians–and putting our consumer dollars where our values lie.

In the late 1990s, we and our allies kept GMOs, sewage sludge and irradiation out of organic. Since then we’ve fought against synthetic ingredients in organic, against fraudulent “natural” and organic label claims (including six lawsuits this year), and against factory farm-style confinement of “organic” dairy and poultry.

We've fought for labels on GMO-tainted foods. We’ve pressured leading retail chains such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s to sell more organic and local organic products.

Most recently we’ve called on organic brands to move beyond mere organic to become fully regenerative.

Monsanto’s minions and the factory farm lobby often claim that OCA is “too radical.” We’ve been admonished to tone down our rhetoric. We’ve been told by some that we’re too harsh on the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration and now the Trump administration.

We’ve been advised to play nice, to not criticize the “Organic Traitors” in our own industry.

But OCA is not your typical nonprofit organization. Taking on the Monsantos of the world, and their accomplices in Washington, standing up for what’s right—this is what we do, and will continue to do.

We believe that transforming our food and farming system is a matter of life or death. Our health and the health of the planet literally hang in the balance.

As we prepare our campaigns for 2017, our rights to healthy food, to poison-free water and air, to choose natural health practices and practitioners, our right to a non-toxic environment and a healthy climate are threatened on all fronts.

Business-as-usual in the marketplace and in the political arena is a recipe for disaster. We need to organize for big change, and we need to begin now.

The OCA staff and I are prepared to go all out. But we’re going to need your help.

Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, warned us 50 years ago to move beyond “little tranquilizing pills of half-truth.” With Monsanto and Big Ag moving to monopolize our seeds and food, with one third of our children suffering from diet-related and environmental-driven chronic disease, with Wall Street and corporate cronies tightening their stranglehold on the economy, with global warming and violent weather spiraling out of control, we need the whole truth.

And we need radical action.

With the US EPA poised to re-approve Monsanto’s glyphosate, the DDT of our generation, with an incoming administration chomping at the bit to wipe out every bit of reform we’ve made in the past few decades, OCA will not sit back and administer “little tranquilizing pills of half-truth.”

In the coming months, I’m going to call on you to help us take on Monsanto and Big Food in a very big way. Because our lives depend on it.

We are still a long way from making our year-end fundraising goal. Could you help us raise $250,000 by midnight December 31? You can donate online, by mail or by phone, details here. Thank you!

In solidarity,

Ronnie Cummins
International Director

 

 

P.S. Martin Luther King once said: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope." In 2017, we will need to build a #ConsumerRevolution and #PoliticalRevolution on a scale meaningful enough to counter what is shaping up to be one of the most financially and politically corrupt administrations in our lifetimes. But we will need your help. Click here to donate to our year-end campaign.