MSM finally covers No NAIS: ‘Rebellion on the Range’

At the Platt family ranch in Horse Springs, N.M., cattle were rounded up to be branded and tagged. The family opposes a government plan to track cattle with computer chips. Photo by Eric Draper

By Erik Erikholm
New York Times

HORSE SPRINGS, N.M. — Wranglers at the Platt ranch were marking calves the old-fashioned way last week, roping them from horseback and burning a brand onto their haunches.

What they were emphatically not doing, said Jay Platt, the third-generation proprietor of the ranch, was abiding by a federally recommended livestock identification plan, intended to speed the tracing of animal diseases, that has caused an uproar among ranchers. They were not attaching the recommended tags with microchips that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse.

Big Meat to seize rancher’s home: Tyson vs. Herman Schumacher

Directed by court order obtained by Tyson, the U.S. Marshals Service on June 11, 2009, posted a No Trespassing sign and Warning on the front door of the home of South Dakota rancher and cattle feeder Herman Schumacher. Tyson obtained a judgment against Schumacher because he tried to protect his fellow cattle producers by stopping Tyson from violating the Packers and Stockyards Act. A federal jury unanimously sided with Schumacher, but then a three-judge panel for the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the jury’s decision. So, in a bizarre twist, Schumacher must now pay Tyson $15,881.38 or Tyson will seize his home.

Fruits and Vegetables May Be Soaked with Toxic Flame Retardant

More Evidence of a Tattered Food and Chemical Safety Net

By Environment Working Group

Animal Studies Link Chemical to Cancer, Brain and Reproductive Disorders

WASHINGTON– Large plastic pallets used to ship, cool and store produce contain decabromodiphenyl ether (Deca), a flame retardant chemical and known neurotoxin that may leach onto the fruits and vegetables inside.

Safeguarding women’s rights will boost food security

By Mary Wandia
Pambazuka News

cc Find Your FeetAfrican women play a critical role in ensuring the food security of the continent, writes Mary Wandia in the run-up to the 2009 African Union Summit (24 June-3 July), which has its official theme ‘Investing in agriculture for economic growth and development’. Highlighting that women contribute 60-80 per cent of the labour used to produce food both for household consumption and for sale, Wandia writes that improved women’s ‘access, control and ownership of land and productive resources are key factors in eradicating hunger and rural poverty’.

GMOs contaminate crops worldwide; organic farmers penalized

The Global Spread of GMO Crops

By Peter Montague
permaculture.org

Felix Ballarin spent 15 years of his life developing a special organically-grown variety of red corn. It would bring a high price on the market because local chicken farmers said the red color lent a rosy hue to the meat and eggs from their corn-fed chickens. But when the corn emerged from the ground last year, yellow kernels were mixed with the red. Government officials later confirmed with DNA tests that Mr. Ballarin’s crop had become contaminated with a genetically modified (GMO) strain of corn.

The Genetic Conspiracy: Are Genetically Engineered Foods Dangerous?

2006 Video Report by Manfred Ladwig
DW-TV (Deutsche Welle Television) www.DW-world.de  28 mins.

How safe is genetic engineering really? Monsanto, the world’s largest genetic engineering corporation, insists it is safe. But numerous studies have shown that genetically modified plants can cause allergies and cancers. Nonetheless, commercial and political interests are determined to make genetic engineering the norm.

Big Ag to police its animal treatment in Ohio

Ohio Voters – Please Care

By Suzana Megles

This week both HSUS and Farm Sanctuary warned Ohioans of Big Agribusiness lobbying to have legislation introduced which would amend the state constitution to give industry oversight over the well-being of farm animals. 

Home: A beautiful and urgent case for cooperativism

By Rady Ananda
June 21, 2009

Take a slo-mo aerial tour of Earth. Released on June 5th, over two and a half million people have already watched Home. The message is potent: it is too late for pessimism. We can redirect our use of energy, of farming, of transportation. We can and must live a different paradigm.

EU proposal for national opt-outs on GM crops

By Rory Harrington
Food Production Daily

A proposal to allow individual countries in the European Union to opt out of growing genetically modified (GM) crops is to be tabled this week at a top-level meeting at the European Commission.

The bid for GM national self-determination comes as 11 nations plan to present a paper at the Environment Council on Thursday as a way to end the deadlock on GM authorisations that have frustrated EU member states and industry players alike for a number of years.

The literal enslavement of the American farmer

By Linn Cohen-Cole
February 26, 2009

The “food safety” bills now being contemplated by Congress enslave farmers to an industrial system (having to do its bidding or face penalties and prison so severe they function as whips). The bills will demand purchase and application of petrochemicals and drugs, rendering the farmers not only slaves but paying slaves (or else giving up), with the land and animals poisoned and/or genetically engineered.

Strange Martial Law via Food Control: HR 2749

Not what the American people ordered – HR 2749, martial law and the enslavement of their farmers

By The Writers’ Collective

HR 2749 is a strange bill in many ways.  While the other “food safety” bills have been around since winter, allowing for much public discussion on the internet, HR 2749 has only suddenly appeared.  It is a mutant conglomeration of the worst of the other bills, with the addition of one very original part – martial law.

Tasmania extends GMO ban for 5 years

By Prism Webcast News

Tasmania’s ban on the release of genetically modified organisms to the environment will continue for at least another five years under a Bill passed by Parliament today. The Minister for Primary Industries and Water, David Llewellyn, said today that the State’s GMO-free status is a key factor in the Tasmanian Brand.

Earth’s Enemies: GE, Monsanto and Obama’s AG Pick, Ignacia Moreno

May 16, 2009
By Rady Ananda

With Obama’s Department of Justice pick to head the Environment and Natural Resources Division, there can be little doubt the man of “hope and change” shills for the worst corporations on the planet.

African land grabbers on shaky ground

By Gwynne Dyer
New Zealand Herald

In the past two years, various non-African countries – China, India, South Korea, Britain and the Arab Gulf states lead the pack – have been taking over huge tracts of farmland in Africa by lease or purchase, to produce food or biofuels for their own use. Critics call them “neo-colonialists,” but they will not be as successful as the old ones.  

Tell Congress not to Force GE Crops on other Countries

By The Center for Food Safety

An effort to fight global poverty and hunger may become a Trojan horse to force genetically engineered crops on countries and farmers that do not want them. The Global Food Security Act requires that foreign agricultural development aid include investment in genetically engineered (GE) crops.

Have Monsanto, Oxfam America, Gates, Rockefeller and more teamed up to foist GM onto Africa? – MADGE follows the money trail

By MADGE, June 5, 2009

Congress may pass the Global Food Security Act – Senate Bill 384. This would “boost spending on foreign agricultural development and nutrition programs from $750 million in 2010 to $2.5 billion by 2014. …the money can go to ‘biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions,’ including genetically modified seeds.’”

GFC: Similarities between Global Food and Global Financial Crises

By MADGE June 5, 2009

The Global Food Crisis is being compared to the Global Financial Crisis. Like the financial system the food system has:

• Dramatically globalised in the past generation
• Has become increasingly concentrated
• Sent ripples across the world – the increasing use of food for biofuels in Europe and the US pushed hundreds of millions of people into hunger

Seed Treaty: La Via Campesina Declaration

June 2, 2009

Submitted to the members of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Genetic Plant Resources for Food and Agriculture on the occasion of the Third Session of the Governing Body, held June 1-5, 2009, in Tunis.

FOOD, Inc. Exposes Horrors of a Centralized Food System

Factory food sickens humans, livestock and the environment

By Rady Ananda

What we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 10,000. So asserts Robert Kenner’s new film, FOOD, Inc., which opens nationwide June 19^th. The vast bulk of food production is now controlled by just a few mega-corporations with one value: profit. Relying on genetic engineering, pesticides and antibiotics, factory food is cheap, requiring little land. But the external costs to our health, the environment and the natural food industry are enormous.

HR 2749: Totalitarian Control of the Food Supply

By The Writers’ Collective

 

A new food safety bill is on the fast track in Congress-HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009.  The bill needs to be stopped.

HR 2749 gives FDA tremendous power while significantly diminishing existing judicial restraints on actions taken by the agency.  The bill would impose a one-size-fits-all regulatory scheme on small farms and local artisanal producers; and it would disproportionately impact their operations for the worse.