Monsanto VP To Head Food Safety?

Fox to Guard Henhouse?
Former Monsanto VP May Be Named To Head FDA Safety

Working Group
By Susie Madrak
Tuesday Jul 07, 2009 7:00pm

Sometimes I'm just rendered speechless, and this is one of those times. Natasha
Chart via Sustainable Food at Change.org:

Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to
head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.

As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the
FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants.
Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow
down their line speed too much.

Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US
meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker
injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.

As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows
doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all.
Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.

So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from
mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking
Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.

This guy is heading up a food safety working group.

I'm just swimming in the changeiness.

Kids, if you care about your food, you know what to do:

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414

(There's a link instead of making a call if you go to the article website.)

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/fox-guard-henhouse-former-monsanto-vp

Monsanto's Dream Bill In The House of Reps

My brother and I were actually talking about this last night. And it all has to do with food security. I'm sure it's being advertised as a way to improve security, but diversification is the only way to keep anything safe - whether it's electric, natural gas, your own money, or your food.

Europe is a prime example with natural gas. They've been held hostage by Russia at least twice this winter, by actually stopping gas transport through Ukraine. Having only one source for anything is bad.

Also - if you remember from history lessons, monopolies were outlawed for a reason. They create a huge imbalance that has catastrophic consequences to all, not just those directly affected by a conglomerate.

Another example is something as simple as egg and poultry farming. Here's what my brother found...
(NYSEQAP). Over 85% of NY eggs come from just 12 commercial egg farms, 5 replacement pullet growers and one large breeder. 12 growers supply over 19,000,000 people. Please explain to me how that's safe. I could list hundreds of such example all over the nation.

Pease - go to Senate.gov and House.gov and contact your elected officials. No one should have such an inside track to total control over OUR lives. Monsanto has already bought the larger seed companies. Don't let them take the smaller ones or OUR personal right to grow, exchange or store our own seed.

Leslie

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Monsanto's dream bill, HR 875
by Linn Cohen-Cole
To begin reversing GM contamination will require ending the power biotech companies such as Monsanto exert over our government and through that, over our food.

HR 875, was introduced by Rosa DeLauro whose husband Stanley Greenburg works for Monsanto.

The bill is monstrous on level after level - the power it would give to Monsanto, the criminalization of seed banking, the prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers, the 24 hours GPS tracking of their animals, the easements on their property to allow for warrantless government entry, the stripping away of their property rights, the imposition by the filthy, greedy industrial side of anti-farming international "industrial" standards to independent farms - the only part of our food system that still works, the planned elimination of farmers through all these means.

The corporations want the land, they want more intensive industrialization, they want the end of normal animals so they can substitute patented genetically engineered ones they own, they want the end of normal seeds and thus of seed banking by farmers or individuals. They want control over all seeds, animals, water, and land.

Our farmers are good stewards. That is who is threatened by Rosa DeLauro's bill (and because of that, we all are). At a time in this country when wise stewardship and the production of anything real - especially good food - is what is most needed, it is our best stewards whom Rosa DeLauro threatens, under the cruelly false name of "food safety."

And now Monsanto wants its own employee, Michael Taylor - the man who forced genetically engineered rBGH on us (unlabeled so us, unaware) when the Clintons placed him over "food safety" in the 90s - back in government, this time to act with massive police power as a "food safety tsar" from inside the White House. HR 875 would give him immense power over what is done on every single farm in the country and massive police state power to wield over farmers and punishments to break them at will.
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We have a real chance to get this bill dropped from committee, as the head of the Energy and Commerce Committee is Congressman Democrat Henry Waxman.

Please call his office immediately and let them know your feelings on the matter and please tell them that you "disapprove" of HR875.

His office is located at:

8436 West Third Street, Suite 600
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 651-1040 (phone)
(818) 878-7400 (phone)
(310) 652-3095 (phone)
(323) 655-0502 (fax)

Newest Monsanto Crop in US

That's exactly what Flint Michigan residents Kathleen Kirby and Mark Fisher are banking on: their power to influence change. They're participating in a nationwide consumer boycott of Kellogg's Co. instigated by the Organic Consumers Association. By boycotting the world's largest cereal company, they hope to pressure Kellogg's into rejecting the use of sugar from genetically engineered (GE) sugar beets and to spark widespread market rejection in products ranging from cereal to baby food to candy.

As you may know, Roundup Ready sugar beets are genetically altered to resist Monsanto's toxic weed killer, Roundup, and its active ingredient, glyphosate. But here's the scary truth about these beets:

When the USDA first approved GE sugar beets for commercial planting in 1998, the EPA also increased the maximum allowable residues of glyphosate on sugar beet roots from just 0.2 parts per million to 10ppm. That's a staggering 5,000 percent increase of allowable toxins on beet roots. And, it's little surprise that EPA made this policy change at the request of Monsanto.

Currently, only four major GE crops are sold commercially -- corn, cotton, soy, and canola. Most of these are engineered to withstand repeated, large doses of herbicides. For the most part, these crops and their byproducts are largely fed to animals with the exception of some minor food ingredients and oils. GE beet sugar breaks with this tradition in that it could become the first major GE ingredient added to almost all processed foods on our grocery store shelves.

Last week, Hershey's in Brazil announced that it would not source ingredients from Cargill, one of the world's largest food providers, because the company could not guarantee that soy, lecithin, and oils were not GE. This successful public pressure campaign, led by Greenpeace, influenced the company to reject GE beet sugar. It also demonstrates how individuals who care about food safety can mobilize collectively to make a difference.

Like Hershey's, Kellogg's is only one of thousands of companies that may soon be using GE sugar -- perhaps without even knowing that they are doing so! That could be the case unless, of course, consumer pressure forces the market to reject GE beet sugar.

Kirby and Fisher know that as a market leader, Kellogg's could lead the charge in rejecting GE beet sugar and influence other companies to follow suit.

They also know that although they are just two people living in a small, Midwestern city north of Detroit, and with the Internet at their disposal, they are on their way to changing the world, one e-mail message at a time.

One of the comments posted:

World agriculture is increasingly becoming dependent upon a single tool for weed control -- the weedkiller glyphosate, Monsanto's Roundup in particular. This situation is largely attributable to the rapid spread of GM, Roundup Ready (RR) crops, which is also driving the expansion of glyphosate-resistant weeds. Since Roundup is becoming less and less effective in killing weeds, farmers are turning to the use of more toxic and persistent herbicides, such as atrazine and 2,4-D, to eliminate those same weeds that formerly succumbed to Roundup.

Contrary to claims that Roundup adversely affects only plants, studies have shown that the weedkiller is toxic to amphibians, frogs, and earthworms. Studies suggest that Roundup is a potential hormone disruptor and it may be correlated with increased rates of birth defects and cell division dysfunction. At least one study has shown that children of glyphosate applicators experience higher rates of behavioral disorders than non-exposed populations.

So, there's ample cause for concern not only that more Roundup is being sprayed on sugar beets, but also that more residues - a 5,000% increase since 1998 - are being allowed on sugar beet roots!

Let's start with manure. A vote for high-intensity livestock production is a vote for huge manure lagoons created in animal factories housing thousands of cattle, pigs, and poultry crowded into confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs. These manure lagoons sicken rural people with their stench and often leak into surface waters or breech their containers, contaminating local streams with a flood of fecal matter, causing massive fish kills.

At CAFOs, cattle are force-fed corn that they were never meant to eat, creating unnaturally acidic conditions in their guts that foster development of deadly E. coli 0157:H7. The source of pathogenic E. coli is animal factories, not organic agriculture. Organic farmers use cover crops that fix nitrogen and spread safely COMPOSTED manure in their fields.

Once organic farming systems are established, their yields are close or equal to that of the destructive "high-intensity" agriculture systems that you recommend. Organic farmers produce high yields without using massive doses of nitrogen fertilizer that have numerous adverse side effects including huge emissions of nitrous oxides (potent global warming gases) and the creation of ever-expanding dead zones such as the one found in the Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones are caused by hypoxia, a lack of oxygen due to nitrogen fertilizer-induced overgrowth of marine plants that suck all the oxygen (life) out of the water and then die.

I am also worried about habitat destruction, but I guess you haven't heard that practices such as ripping out riparian habitats and farmland vegetation are currently being touted as the solution to combat E. coli 0157:H7. This is a big mistake and so is misleading people to think that high-intensity agriculture will solve our food safety problems when, actually, it's the root cause.

Lisa J. Bunin
Campaigns Coordinator Center for Food Safety and Switzer Environmental Leadership Fellow
by Lisa J. Bunin