New Report: GMOs Causing Massive Pesticide Pollution

By Andrew Kimbrell

Two new reports this year on genetically modified foods expose Monsanto and other biotech company lies. The first by Union of Concerned Scientists,  Failure to Yield, came out in February. The latest report comes from Organic Center: Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years, and exposes that pesticide use has increased with GM crops.

PA Food Police Banned from Monitoring Private Club

By Farm to Consumer

On November 17th, Magisterial District Judge Jene Willwerth dismissed both charges brought by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture against C.A.R.E. member Jan Haller in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.  Before cross examination of the Department’s two witnesses was even completed, the Judge dismissed the charges without prejudice.  “He made the right ruling” said the Fund’s attorney Gary Cox “because they simply had no evidence of any violation.  It was a sloppy investigation from start to finish.”

Extinctions, Over-Population and the Profit Paradigm

The six great extinction spasms, with projection thru 2100. From http://bit.ly/7Eaq5Q

By Rady Ananda

Human activities are blamed for what may be Earth’s greatest extinction spasm. Of the five categories of these activities, global elites address purported over-population. Earth has between 12 and 18 billion arable acres. There are less than 7 billion people, each of whom requires a little over an acre to eat well. In seeking to protect the biosphere, elites focus on human population while ignoring their own environmentally destructive actions.

Medicinal properties of sage revealed

By Mike Adams

Of all the culinary herbs, sage is perhaps the one with the broadest range of medicinal uses. As you’ll see in the collection of quotes about sage shown below, sage is anti-hypertensive, anti-diabetic, anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial; plus it helps cleanse your blood and may even prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

You may not have known all these amazing health applications for such a simple herb. Check out the quotes below and learn what health experts like Dr. James Duke are saying about sage…

Corporate Land Grab: The new farm owners

Corporate investors lead the rush for control over overseas farmland

By GRAIN

This table accompanies this article.

With all the talk about “food security,” and distorted media statements like “South Korea leases half of Madagascar’s land,”1 it may not be evident to a lot of people that the lead actors in today’s global land grab for overseas food production are not countries or governments but corporations. So much attention has been focused on the involvement of states, like Saudi Arabia, China or South Korea. But the reality is that while governments are facilitating the deals, private companies are the ones getting control of the land. And their interests are simply not the same as those of governments. 

America at Bat: NAFTA, Bailouts, and now the Food Supply

By Patrick Henry

It is well-planned — one, two, three strikes for destruction of the country.

1.  Bill Clinton outsourced our industry under NAFTA (how did Hillary get a single vote in Ohio?).  Since then, the US has been stripped of virtually all its industrial base.

2.  George W. Bush “outsourced” our economy, setting up the bailout that funded international banking interests.  Obama followed, even signing an agreement in May with the G-20 arranging that the US has only one vote in its own banking system now.

3.  And now the final grab, one which puts the loss of jobs and money into pale comparison – corporations are going after control of the US food supply.

The Festering Fraud behind Food Safety Reform

By Nicole Johnson

A New York Times article by Michael Moss provides a window into well-hidden meat industry practices that most find revolting, but omits critical information about today’s meat inspection process.  If we don’t grasp how the meat industry’s inspection process became an essentially unregulated, privatized affair, we are likely to allow Congress to pass food “safety” legislation that will serve global cartels but do nothing for the safety of the US food supply.

Obama’s Pesticide-Pushing Nominee

By Kate Sheppard

The president taps an exec from the pesticide lobby—which slammed Michelle Obama’s organic garden—for a top agriculture post.

Monsanto Withdraws High Lysine GM Maize from Europe, Safety Concerns

Monsanto withdraws maize from regulatory approval citing commercial reasons

By Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Peter Saunders

In a dramatic move, Monsanto has withdrawn its genetically modified (GM) maize, LY038, from commercial approval in Europe after safety concerns prompted the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to request further evidence from the company [1].

Consumer Reports Studies BPA in the Food Supply

Concern over canned foods

Our tests find wide range of Bisphenol A in soups, juice, and more

By Consumer Reports

The chemical Bisphenol A, which has been used for years in clear plastic bottles and food-can liners, has been restricted in Canada and some U.S. states and municipalities because of potential health effects. The Food and Drug Administration will soon decide what it considers a safe level of exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA), which some studies have linked to reproductive abnormalities and a heightened risk of breast and prostate cancers, diabetes, and heart disease.

Now Consumer Reports’ latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice, tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand foods we tested contain some BPA. The canned organic foods we tested did not always have lower BPA levels than nonorganic brands of similar foods analyzed. We even found the chemical in some products in cans that were labeled “BPA-free.”

BPA in Our Food, Our Bodies

By Nichoals D. Kristof

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.

More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Under wraps: Genetically Engineered Seeds

By Emily Waltz

Are the crop industry’s strong-arm tactics and close-fisted attitude to sharing seeds holding back independent research and undermining public acceptance of transgenic crops?

The increasingly fractious relationship between public sector researchers and the biotech seed industry has come into the spotlight in recent months. In July, several leading seed companies met with a group of entomologists, who earlier in the year had lodged a public complaint with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over restricted access to materials. In a letter to the EPA, the 26 public sector scientists complained that crop developers are curbing their rights to study commercial biotech crops.

Antibiotics bill gathers momentum in Congress

By Margaret Mellon

In a recent speech on the House of Representatives floor, Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) encouraged House members to support the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA). The bill would end the use of antibiotics in the feed and water of livestock and poultry that are not sick, a practice that leads to antibiotic-resistant diseases in humans.

Farmers arrested for planting hemp at DEA HQ

By NORML

I drink raw milk (sold illegally on the underground market)

By Joel Salatin

From Joel Salatin’s foreword to The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights by David Gumpert.

I drink raw milk, sold illegally on the underground black market. I grew up on raw milk from our own Guernsey cows that our family hand-milked twice a day. We made yogurt, ice cream, butter, and cottage cheese. All through high school in the early 1970s, I sold our homemade yogurt, butter, buttermilk, and cottage cheese at the Curb Market on Saturday mornings. This was a precursor to today’s farmer’s markets.

Pollinator Conservation in Your Ecosystem Garden

By Carole Brown

The Pollinator Conservation Handbook, by The Xerces Society and The Bee Works, is a wonderful resource for all Ecosystem Gardeners to support native pollinators.

Most of you have probably heard of Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon where honey bees are dying off by the millions. A large part of our agricultural food supply is dependent on pollination by honey bees, this collapse is a matter of great concern to farmers across the country.

Guerilla Gardeners Get a Green Light

By Sue Jackson

Guerrilla gardens might not have ‘owners’ but they sure have defenders, as Yarra Council discovered when it tried to wipe out the gardens. 

At its regular monthly meeting in August, Melbourne’s Yarra Council won itself a green star for forward thinking. Instead of razing local unauthorised street gardens as it had threatened to shortly before the meeting, it did a complete about-face, voting unanimously to become a champion of such initiatives instead.

Activist’s Message at USF: End Needless Waste of Food

By  The Herald-News (Illinois)

JOLIET — Vandana Shiva is giving new meaning to the old metaphor, “You reap what you sow.”

Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, urged more than 225 people to consider the food and ecological crisis as one in the same during her speech at the University of St. Francis.

NAIS Stinks: A look at the opposition

Darol Dickinson

By Lee Pitts

NAIS, the national animal identification system, is a big government boondoggle that can easily be compared to President Obama’s plan to borrow trillions of dollars, much of it from the Chinese, to save a bad economy that was created in the first place by too much borrowing. NAIS will NOT make our food safer, but it will most certainly make thousands of small stockmen disappear. It will require ranchers to spend a great deal of money on equipment, inserting the chips, and reporting any changes, with terrible fines for computer errors, acts of nature, or noncompliance. Yet factory farms are exempt from those same rules.

The Potato Underground: How the ‘outlaw’ Cariboo spud, once blacklisted by agribiz advocates, was saved

By Joanne Will

When Jerry LeBourdais learned that big agribusiness couldn’t handle the Cariboo potato, he knew he’d found a variety that he wanted to support. The name didn’t hurt either. If there was a potato out there named “Cariboo,” it had a natural home on the back-to-the-land commune near Williams Lake that LeBourdais had founded.

All he needed was some seed. It sounded simple enough.