Monsanto Now Owns Your Garden

The issue here is not whether GMO food is safe to eat.  The issue is for-profit corporations having control of our food supply.

For more than ten thousand years, human beings have grown food by saving seeds from the harvest to plant next year.  As long as we can grow food this way, we can survive.

But now Monsanto and other giant agriculture corporations are destroying subsistence agriculture.  No more growing food unless you pay Monsanto for seeds you have to buy again every year.

And because you commie hippies might object to losing control over your own food supply, Monsanto is making sure you can't say anything about it.

Mother Jones:

With little notice, more than two dozen state legislatures have passed “seed-preemption laws” designed to block counties and cities from adopting their own rules on the use of seeds, including bans on GMOs. Opponents say that there’s nothing more fundamental than a seed, and that now, in many parts of the country, decisions about what can be grown have been taken out of local control and put solely in the hands of the state.

“This bill should be viewed for what it is — a gag order on public debate,” says Kristina Hubbard, director of advocacy and communications at the Organic Seed Alliance, a national advocacy group, and a resident of Montana, which along with Texas passed a seed-preemption bill this year. “This thinly disguised attack on local democracy can be easily traced to out-of-state, corporate interests that want to quash local autonomy.”

Seed-preemption laws are part of a spate of legislative initiatives by industrial agriculture, including ag-gag laws passed in several states that legally prohibit outsiders from photographing farms, and “right-to-farm” laws that make it easier to snuff out complaints about animal welfare. The seed laws, critics say, are a related thrust meant to protect the interests of agro-chemical companies.

SNIP

Organic farmers can lose their crop if it becomes contaminated with genetically modified material. Even conventional farmers who rely on exports to Asia, where GMOs are banned by some countries, face risks from contamination. There are currently no plans to push for a GMO ban anywhere in Texas or Montana, and neither state requires companies to disclose the use of GMOs. (In Montana, at least, Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, added an amendment to the preemption bill when he signed it, preserving the right of local governments to require that farmers notify their neighbors if they’re planting GMO seeds.) Yet critics of the preemption laws fear that they tie the hands of local governments, which will make it harder for communities to respond to problems in the future. 

Still, the fight isn’t just about GMOs, says Judith McGeary, noting that seeds coated with neonicotinoids — a class of pesticides linked to colony collapse disorder in bees — are also at issue. Under the Texas bill, a local government can’t ban neonic seeds in order to protect pollinator insects, and in the current political climate, it’s hard to imagine that such a ban would happen on the state level.

“We have an extremely large state with an incredible diversity of agricultural practices and ecological conditions, and you’ve now hobbled any ability to address a problem that’s found in one local area,” says McGeary. “Until it’s a big enough issue for a state of 23 million to pay attention to through the state legislature, nothing is going to happen,” she says.

No, Kentucky Is Not Safe From Global Warming

At 700 feet above sea level, Kentucky feels safe from the rising sea levels that global warming will bring to drown coastal cities.

And this year's near-constant rains make the California drought seem remote.

But Kentucky is in for some dangerous and economically disastrous effects.

 

Think Progress:

Climate change is set to hit the Southeast United States and Texas hard.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Risky Business Project, a nonprofit that focuses on the economic impacts of climate change. The report, which focused on 12 states — 11 states in the Southeastern United States plus Texas — found that the increased heat and humidity that these states are expected to experience as the climate changes will put the region’s recent manufacturing boom at risk.

“While the Southeast and Texas are generally accustomed to heat and humidity, the scale of increased heat — along with other impacts such as sea level rise and storm surge — will likely cause significant and widespread economic harm, especially to a region so heavily invested in physical manufacturing, agriculture and energy infrastructure,” the report reads. “If we continue on our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway, the southeastern United States and Texas will likely experience significant drops in agricultural yield and labor productivity, along with increased sea level rise, higher energy demand, and rising mortality rates.”

Kentucky information starts on page 44 and boils down to this:  

 

Extreme heat leading to severe drops in corn and soybean yields and poultry and beef output. 

 

Higher energy costs, lower productivity and more human mortality from more days of extreme heat. 

 

And that's not even taking into consideration economic losses from more severe storms, tornadoes, flooding and drought.

 

But let's expand hydraulic fracking that will destroy our drinking water supplies and accelerate global warming.

 

It's the proud coal tradition.

Farmworker Abuse in Kentucky No Surprise

That they're brown and not citizens just makes it nostalgic and familiar.

Bruce Schreiner at the AP:

Mexican fieldworkers lured through a guest worker program to do sweaty, back-aching work in Kentucky tobacco fields were paid far less than their guaranteed wages and lived in rat-infested housing, according to federal lawsuits against a half-dozen farmers.

Three separate lawsuits filed this past week in Kentucky allege numerous abuses of the H-2A program by the handful of farmers named as defendants.

The guest worker program has been a staple in Kentucky agriculture. It brings in temporary fieldhands from other countries to handle jobs that go unfilled among local workers. Those chores include harvesting tobacco and stripping leaves from harvested stalks to prepare the crop for market.

The plaintiffs — 39 Mexican guest workers represented by Southern Migrant Legal Services and the Kentucky Equal Justice Center — are seeking back wages and other damages. They claim violations of federal and state labor and civil rights laws.

Not to mention that green tobacco is horrifically toxic - nicotine's a poison, remember - and no farmwarkers get protective clothing or masks.

Like so many other crops, tobacco used to be a family operation. Parents and four kids could set, weed, cut, hang, strip and hand-tie several acres, enough to pay for Christmas.

Then the bottom fell out of the small-farm market, now it's all Big Ag, and the browns have to suffer and die for it.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/05/30/3876889_lawsuits-allege-abuse-of-foreign.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Get Rich Off Global Warming: Plant Your Lawn in Fruit and Veggies

Very, very soon - months, not years from now - 90 percent of the produce in the grocery store is going to disappear because California has run out of water.

The little produce an equally parched Mexico manages to export is likely to cost 10 or 100 times what it costs now.

You wanna pay $50 for a tomato?  Or charge $50 for the ones you grow yourself?

Global Warming is likely to bring multiple F5 tornadoes to Kentucky in spring, along with tree-killing ice storms in February, heat waves in August and forest fires in fall, but we will remain much better off in food-growing than the deserts of the West.

Think Progress:

Almonds get a lot of the attention when it comes to California’s agriculture and water, but the state is responsible for a dizzying diversity of produce. Eaten a salad recently? Odds are the lettuce, carrots, and celery came from California. Have a soft spot for stone fruit? California produces 84 percent of the country’s fresh peaches and 94 percent of the country’s fresh plums. It produces 99 percent of the artichokes grown in the United States, and 94 percent of the broccoli. As spring begins to creep in, almost half of asparagus will come from California.

“California is running through its water supply because, for complicated historical and climatological reasons, it has taken on the burden of feeding the rest of the country,” Steven Johnson wrote in Medium, pointing out that California’s water problems are actually a national problem — for better or for worse, the trillions of gallons of water California agriculture uses annually is the price we all pay for supermarket produce aisles stocked with fruits and vegetables.

Up to this point, feats of engineering and underground aquifers have made the drought somewhat bearable for California’s farmers. But if dry conditions become the new normal, how much longer can — and should — California’s fields feed the country? And if they can no longer do so, what should the rest of the country do?

 Read the whole terrifying thing.

GMOs Don't Work

As I have written before, my objection to GMOs has to do with destroying the food supply through hybrid seeds that farmers must buy every year instead of being able to propagate from their own harvest.

Not to mention the extreme danger of putting the future and safety of our food supply in the hands of giant corporations - many of which like Monsanto are proven criminals - which can then literally hold the planet hostage.

Those objections would stand even if GMOs actually worked the way they are advertised.

They don't.

Lauren McCauley at Firedoglake:

The biotechnology industry “myth” that feeding billions of people necessitates genetically engineered agriculture has been debunked by a new report out Tuesday by the nonprofit health organization Environmental Working Group.

The report, Feeding the World Without GMOs (pdf), argues that investment in genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, has failed to expand global food security. It advocates more traditional methods “shown to actually increase food supplies and reduce the environmental impact of production.”

Over the past 20 years, the report notes, global crop yields have only grown by 20 percent—despite the massive investment in biotechnology.

On the other hand, it continues, in recent decades “the dominant source of yield improvements has been traditional crossbreeding, and that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.”

As the report states, “seed companies’ investment in improving yields in already high-yielding areas does little to improve food security; it mainly helps line the pockets of seed and chemical companies, large-scale growers and producers of corn ethanol.”

Yep, Roundup Causes Cancer. Monsanto is Literally Killing Your Children

Thinking about getting rid of those spring weeds in your yard before they get well-established? Go with plain white vinegar.

Think Progress:

The most popular weed-killer in the United States — and possibly the world — “probably” causes cancer, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Published Thursday in the journal The Lancet Oncology, the report focuses on a chemical called glyphosate, invented by Monsanto back in 1974 as a broad-spectrum herbicide. It’s the active ingredient in Roundup, a popular product used mostly in commercial agriculture production. Roundup is particularly good for genetically modified crops, which can be bred to resist damage from the product while it kills the weeds surrounding it.

In the U.S., glyphosate is not considered carcinogenic. The Environmental Protection Agency’s current position is that “there is inadequate evidence to state whether or not glyphosate has the potential to cause cancer from a lifetime exposure in drinking water.” In the wake of Thursday’s report, however, the EPA said it “would consider” the U.N. agency’s findings.

The new report, crafted by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), puts glyphosate at the second-highest level of the agency’s classifications for cancer. There are four classifications for things that could cause cancer: known carcinogens, probable or possible carcinogens, not classifiable, and probably not carcinogenic. It noted that glyphosate has been detected in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, indicating that it is absorbed by the human body.

The next week,  EPA announced it would regulate glyphosphate.  That doesn't mean Roundup is safe; it means the EPA will spend the next 20 years writing rules that will reduce the amount of glyphosphate in Roundup to the exact amount that is still lethal to children and other living things, but is cut enough to give Monsanto justification to piss and moan and bitch about Big Gubmint killing free enterprise and JERBS.

And the week after that:

An employee of Monsanto admitted there is a department to discredit any scientist opposed to them.

 The Roundup Hit Squad.

Get Your Seeds From Coops, Not Corporations

It's getting harder every year to find seeds that are not genetically modified to put real farmers out of business and turn a giant profit for Monsanto.

But in some countries, farmers are doing it for themselves.

Truthout:

In the face of overwhelming competition skewed by the rules of free trade, farmers in El Salvador have managed to beat the agricultural giants like Monsanto and Dupont to supply local corn seed to thousands of family farmers. Local seed has consistently outperformed the transnational product, and farmers helped develop El Salvador’s own domestic seed supply–all while outsmarting the heavy hand of free trade.

 Here in the States, try Seed Savers to find untreated, heirloom, non-GMO seeds.

Stop Drinking Bottled Water: It's Stupid

First, almost half of bottled water is municipal tap water. You're paying 100 times what it cost to get the same thing out of your home faucet.

Second, all that plastic is a fucking crime, even if you do recycle it.

Third, if you're buying the expensive stuff that really comes from underground springs, thanks, motherfucker!  You're contributing to the California drought that's going to kill American agriculture.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

More on America’s most ridiculous industry: bottled water. Where are the sources of that water?

Yeah, that’s sustainable.

But that only accounts for 55% of the bottled water. What about the rest?

The other 45 percent comes from the municipal water supply, meaning that companies, including Aquafina and Dasani, simply treat tap water—the same stuff that comes out of your faucet at home—and bottle it up. (Weird, right?)

Not weird at all. It shows that you can create a fake problem (there is something wrong with the tap water!), develop a consumer market around it, and then sell people the same water they would be drinking if they turned on their faucet. Now that’s a capitalist success story!

Kentucky Native Hemp Thriving Without Chemicals

Of course it is. Native plants* in strong soil don't need fucking chemicals. Only weak-ass foreigners, GMOs and hybrids like modern tobacco need to be drenched in toxic additives to survive.

Janet Patton at the Herald:

Hemp's comeback in Kentucky is going strong, tall and green.

A patch of hemp seeded at the University of Kentucky's Spindletop research farm in Lexington in late May has climbed well over 6 feet in some places and is still going, without neither fertilizer nor pesticides.

"It's doing just fine so far," said Dave Williams, a UK agronomist who, with Rich Mundell, is in charge of the test plots.

"We've had enough rain to keep it growing and enough heat to make it grow." 

 The first legal hemp planted in Central Kentucky appears to be off to a good start despite being planted later than originally hoped.

*Although the seeds of the current crop were imported from Italy, hemp originated in North America and still grows wild all over Kentucky.

Beating Monsanto

Corporations are close - very close - to establishing the Lords-n-serfs economy that will give them unchecked power.  But they're not there yet.

And it is possible for even the most marginalized people to stop them.

Truthout:

Farmers across El Salvador united to block a stipulation in a US aid package to their country that would have indirectly required the purchase of Monsanto genetically modified (GM) seeds.

Thousands of farmers, like 45-year-old farmer Juan Joaquin Luna Vides, prefer to source their seeds locally, and not to use Monsanto's GM seeds.

"Transnational companies have been known to provide expired seeds that they weren’t able to distribute elsewhere," said Vides, who heads the Diversified Production program at the Mangrove Association, a community development organization that works in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador.

"We would like the US embassy and the misinformed media outlets [that are pressuring the Salvadoran government to change their procurement procedure] to know more about the reality of national producers and recognize the food sovereignty of the country," he added.

Big Ag might not win.  But only if we fight them every step of the way.

Hemp Thriving Back Home in Kentucky

No surprise - it's a native, after all.

Greg Hall at the Courier:

A month after the seeds for Kentucky's first legal hemp crop were released to the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, hundreds of leafy plants are growing in research fields across Kentucky. 

After initial fears that government holdups on delivering the seed would limit growers' ability to get a good crop, seeds were released and planted around Memorial Day — beating a June 1 mark set by the Kentucky organizers of new trials to avoid significantly reduced yields.

Holly VonLuehrte, a spokeswoman for the state agriculture department said initial growing reports are good — shoulder high already in at least one location — and those assessments are echoed by two of the growers interviewed.

"The research will show that this is a crop that grows well in Kentucky, but particularly well out west at least thus far," VonLuehrte said. "All indications are it's not just doing well," it's doing "extremely well."

"Hemp certainly grows well in Kentucky's climate, Kentucky's soil types," said Katie Moyer of the Kentucky for Hemp group, and who is growing the plant in Christian County. "We're seeing that it works really well for erosion."

85 Fucking Degrees 10 Days Before Last Frost Date: Get Used to It

Like I keep sayin': climate change/global warming does not mean always hotter weather, as we discovered this record-setting winter.  It means fucked-up weather.

Joe Romm at Think Progress:

The National Climate Assessment is the definitive statement of current and future impacts of carbon pollution on the United States. And the picture it paints is stark: Inaction will devastate much of the arable land of the nation’s breadbasket — and ruin a livable climate for most Americans.

“Americans face choices” explains the Congressionally-mandated report by 300 leading climate scientists and experts, which was reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences. We’re already seeing serious climate impacts — such as more extreme heat waves, droughts, and deluges — and additional impacts are “now unavoidable.” But just how bad future climate change is “will still largely be determined by choices society makes about emissions.”

SNIP

One reason we can be confident in the report’s projections of the future is that the same scientists warned decades ago that we would start to see increases in heatwaves, droughts and deluges by now — and we have:

The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels….
Over the last 50 years, much of the United States has seen an increase in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, and in some regions, more severe droughts.

The study notes, “Evidence indicates that the human influence on climate has already roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat events such as the record-breaking summer heat experienced in 2011 in Texas and Oklahoma.” At the same time, “In some regions, prolonged periods of high temperatures associated with droughts contribute to conditions that lead to larger wildfires and longer fire seasons.”

Don't come crying to me when weeks of triple-digit temperatures, months-long drought and massive flooding kill your garden this summer and lettuce goes for $100 a bag; tell it to the assholes with the "Friend of Coal" license plates.

Buy Your Groceries in Vermont

Remember, the issue is not just lack of safety - which has yet to be proven - but the catastrophe of letting one giant corporation own the basis of the entire planet's food supply.

They couldn't make it happen in California, but ....

From Firedoglake:

- It seems Vermont will be the first state in the nation requiring GMO labeling on all foods

And Your Invisible Sky Wizard Ain't Gonna Save You Either

From Firedoglake:

- Juan Cole: “Dear America: Climate Change is threatening Water, Plants, Animals & doesn’t care what Party you belong To”

Chile Protects World Food Supply From Corporate Greed

Expect the full weight of multi-national corporations and their obedient governments to fall on the rebellious nation immediately.

This month, rural women, indigenous communities, and farmers in Chile found themselves on the winning end of a long-fought battle against a bill that had come to be known by many in this country as simply, the “Monsanto Law.”

The bill, which would have given multinational agribusiness corporations the right to patent seeds they discover, develop or modify, was withdrawn by the Chilean government now controlled by newly elected members of the center-left coalition known as the New Majority, amid concerns that the law would bring harm to the country’s small and mid-sized farmers.

This isn't about patent law or the free market or any of the other lies corporations use to cover up their real agenda.

This is about the ability of human beings to grow the food we need to survive. Allowing corporations to patent seeds - the source of all food - allows corporations to decide who lives and who dies.

What's next? Selling off corporate rights to rainwater? Do you really think there aren't law firms all over the world frantically working on that one?

Legal Kentucky Hemp Gets Real; Let the Best Product Win the Market

For years, Kentucky farmers have ground their teeth down to stubs watching Canadian hemp farmers rank in the profits on the crop that grows nearly wild here in Kentucky. No more.

Janet Patton at the Herald:

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture is gearing up to grow hemp this year after a letter from Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway indicates that farmers will be allowed to sell what they produce.

The state began making plans after President Barack Obama signed the U.S. Farm Bill in February that included language at the behest of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville, to allow universities and state agriculture departments to grow research plots of hemp.

On Tuesday, Conway's office sent Agriculture Commissioner James Comer an advisory letter indicating that "absent any federal guidance to the contrary, (the Farm Bill) appears to exempt hemp pilot programs from the Controlled Substances Act, allowing the sale of hemp in Kentucky by those programs."

Comer said this will make a world of difference. Before, he said, some farmers were worried that they might have to destroy the crop. But the bill calls for researching marketability, so selling appears to be OK, Conway's office concluded.

Look out: don't get crushed by the stampede of Kentucky farmers running to sign up for hemp licenses. Because while all marijuana can do is relieve pain, industrial hemp can replace virtually every petroleum-based product in the economy:

• Food, both indirectly as fodder for cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep and other animals we eat, and directly  in many delicious dishes  at home and in restaurants.
• Fuel, in all the different forms needs for cars, for airplanes, for ships, for trains and for industrial machine.
• Energy, as a substitute for oil, gas, biomass, ethanol or anything else to operate energy-generating plants that keep the lights on in your house and the battery working in your computer
• Plastic, in the form of a nearly infinitely flexible material that now requires petroleum to manufacture everything from medicines and pharamaceuticals to cosmetics, pesticides, diapers, cell phones and doggie toys.

Hemp - industrial hemp growing like a weed right here in Kentucky - is going to need about one growing season to put the entire fossil fuel industry out of business.

And that's why the stampede right behind the one for licenses is going to be the one of million-dollar lobbyists screaming their lies about how hemp is useless and dangerous and unamerican and communist and muslinterrist and also gives you AIDs.

Food Safety Won't Matter When Corporations Own the Source of Our Food Supply

Far be it from me to question a biologist's expertise on biology, so I will address the political problem:

GMO puts the entirety of the planet's food supply and future ability to grow food in the hands of profit-taking corporations.

Without GMO, you don't have to pay any money to anyone to grow your own food. Collect seed from open-pollinated, heirloom plants, nurture the seeds into mature plants, eat what you need, store the extra and save seeds from the rest, and do it all over again next year.

With GMO, you have to pay money - huge, unsustainable amounts of money - Monsanto to get seeds to plant to grow food.  But you can't save seeds from what you've grown, because they are hybrids or sterile.  You have to pay again for seeds next year to start all over from scratch.  And the year after that and the year after that and the year after that.

It's food slavery.  Even if I thought GMO foods were perfectly safe, cured cancer, eliminated racism and were the solution to biodiversity, drought, overpopulation, climate change and the heartbreak of psoriasis, I wouldn't eat or plant them because doing so leads to a corporation owning the source of our food supply.

PZ Myers:

I find myself continually bewildered by the argument against genetically modified food. However, we have no choice, we need to constantly improve the stocks.

We have a great deal to gain from growing GM crops. They offer humanity a way to improve food productivity without having to make further inroads into our planet’s wild places to create more fields for farmers. The position was summed up by Sir Mark Wolpert, the government chief scientist last week, when debating the CST’s report. "The challenge is to get more from existing land in a sustainable way or face the alternative, which is that people will go unfed, or we’ll have to bring more wilderness land into cultivation." From that perspective, the case for GM crops is unanswerable.

Not everyone will agree, of course. Green opponents to GM crops claim they pose a risk to health, though no research has ever produced any credible evidence to back this point. Thirty years ago, it could be argued that we should proceed cautiously because of potential health dangers. That argument is no longer acceptable.

I have a lot of sympathy for the green argument, except that it ignores the real problem to focus on a minor issue. The real problem isn’t that some of our crops carry modified genes, especially since they all do — every single one of our major food plants are the product of intense artificial selection for traits that benefit agriculture. No, the real problem is how much of our country is overwhelmed with monocultured species — most of the botanical diversity of the United States is gone under a layer of wheat and corn and soybeans and pretty much nothing else. Minnesota is 54% farmland, and we aren’t even the most intensely plowed over state in the country.

It seems to me that the green approach would be to encourage more GMOs to increase the efficiency of farmland use; and to struggle to get less land committed to agriculture by ending the corn ethanol boondoggle and by encouraging more vegetarian diets, so less livestock. Worrying about an artificially introduced gene in a crop seems silly when the real problem is that versions of that crop are taking over everything, replacing wetlands and prairie with endless fields of corn, GMO or not.

Kevin Drum, on even more food-supply-endangering problems with GMO crops: 

Even if GMO foods are safe to eat, there are a host of practices surrounding the use and marketing of GMO seeds and crops that are highly questionable. And those practices frequently fail to get the attention they deserve thanks to intense lobbying from corporate interests with billions of dollars at stake. Over at Wired, Brandon Keim provides an example of this dynamic at work. It's the story of Bt corn, which was engineered to be poisonous to corn rootworms, a pest that used to cause billions of dollars in damage to corn crops. For a while it worked great. But then, corn rootworms evolved a resistance to Bt corn, largely due to industry and farmer resistance to proper management:

Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Give Monsanto Control Over the World's Food

Throughout human history, as long as you had the tiniest patch of ground and a few seeds, you could feed yourself.

If the U.S. approves the TPP, that ends.

Ellen Brown at Counterpunch:

“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.  “Control food and you control the people.”

Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.

Profits Before Populations

Genetic engineering has made proprietary control possible over the seeds on which the world’s food supply depends. According to an Acres USA interview of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today. One involves insect resistance. The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to resist it.

SNIP

Sixty to seventy percent of the foods in US supermarkets are now genetically modified. By contrast, in at least 26 other countries—including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia—GMOs are totally or partially banned; and significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

A ban on GMO and glyphosate use might go far toward improving the health of Americans. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement for which the Obama Administration has sought Fast Track status, would block that sort of cause-focused approach to the healthcare crisis.

Read the whole thing.

Be Thankful for AgriCULTURE and Reject AgriBUSINESS

Jim Hightower at Nation of Change:

An arrogant, brusque, narrow-minded and dogmatic agricultural economist, Butz had risen to prominence in the small — but politically powerful — world of agriculture by devoting himself to the corporate takeover of the global food economy. He was dean of agriculture at Purdue University, but also a paid board member of Ralston Purina and other agribusiness giants. In these roles, he openly promoted the preeminence of middleman food manufacturers over family farmers, whom he disdained.

"Agriculture is no longer a way of life," he infamously barked at them. "It's a business." He callously instructed farmers to "get big or get out" — and he then proceeded to shove tens of thousands of them out by promoting an export-based, conglomerated, industrialized, globalized, and heavily subsidized corporate-run food economy. "Adapt," he warned farmers, "or die." The ruination of farms and rural communities, Butz added, "releases people to do something useful in our society."
The whirling horror of Butz, however, spun off a blessing, which is that innovative, freethinking, populist-minded and rebellious small farmers and food artisans practically threw up at the resulting Twinkieization of America's food.

They were sickened that nature's own rich contribution to human culture was being turned into just another plasticized product of corporate profiteers. "The central problem with modern industrial agriculture ... (is) not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste, and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all. More fundamentally, it has no soul," said Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and former farm boy from Yamhill, Ore. Rather than accept that, they threw themselves into creating and sustaining a viable, democratic alternative. The "good food" rebellion has since sprouted, spread and blossomed from coast to coast.

This transformative grass-roots movement rebuts old Earl's insistence that agriculture is nothing but a business. It most certainly is a business, but it's a good business — literally producing goodness — because it's "a way of life" for enterprising, very hardworking people who practice the art and science of cooperating with Mother Nature, rather than always trying to overwhelm her. These farmers don't want to be massive or make a killing; they want to farm and make delicious, healthy food products that help enrich the whole community.

This spirit was summed up in one simple word by a sustainable farmer in Ohio, who was asked what he'd be if he wasn't a farmer. He replied: "Disappointed." To farmers like these, food embodies our full "culture" — a word that is, after all, sculpted right into "agriculture" and is essential to its organic meaning.

Although agriculture has forestalled the total takeover of our food by crass agribusiness, the corporate powers and their political hirelings continue to press for the elimination of the food rebels and ultimately to impose the Butzian vision of complete corporatization. This is one of the most important populist struggles occurring in our society. It's literally a fight for control of our dinner, and it certainly deserves a major focus as you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner this year.

To find small-scale farmers, artisans, farmers markets and other resources in your area for everything from organic tomatoes to pastured turkey, visit LocalHarvest.org.

Illegal Gardening Won't Matter When the Food Supply's Gone

And no, I don't mean pot.

From Firedoglake:

“Meet Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll, a South Florida couple who’ve been growing what they say is 80 percent of their food in a front-yard vegetable garden for the past 17 years. As it turns out, their self-sufficient lifestyle counts as illegal activity in Miami Shore — the couple was told to either rip out their garden, or pay $50 per day in fines.”

This is the anti-garden, anti-nature prejudice infesting suburbs nationwide.  But it's not just a matter of hippie-bashing any more. The pesticide- and herbicide-drenched chemlawns are killing the insect cycle on which the global food supply depends.

Jim Robbins at the New York Times:

ON the first of November, when Mexicans celebrate a holiday called the Day of the Dead, some also celebrate the millions of monarch butterflies that, without fail, fly to the mountainous fir forests of central Mexico on that day. They are believed to be souls of the dead, returned.

This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn’t come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual, in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse.

“It does not look good,” said Lincoln P. Brower, a monarch expert at Sweet Briar College.

It is only the latest bad news about the dramatic decline of insect populations.

Another insect in serious trouble is the wild bee, which has thousands of species. Nicotine-based pesticides called neonicotinoids are implicated in their decline, but even if they were no longer used, experts say, bees, monarchs and many other species of insect would still be in serious trouble.

That’s because of another major factor that has not been widely recognized: the precipitous loss of native vegetation across the United States.

“There’s no question that the loss of habitat is huge,” said Douglas Tallamy, a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware, who has long warned of the perils of disappearing insects. “We notice the monarch and bees because they are iconic insects,” he said. “But what do you think is happening to everything else?”

A big part of it is the way the United States farms. As the price of corn has soared in recent years, driven by federal subsidies for biofuels, farmers have expanded their fields. That has meant plowing every scrap of earth that can grow a corn plant, including millions of acres of land once reserved in a federal program for conservation purposes.

Another major cause is farming with Roundup, a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except crops that are genetically modified to survive it.

As a result, millions of acres of native plants, especially milkweed, an important source of nectar for many species, and vital for monarch butterfly larvae, have been wiped out. One study showed that Iowa has lost almost 60 percent of its milkweed, and another found 90 percent was gone. “The agricultural landscape has been sterilized,” said Dr. Brower.

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(Restoring it) means reversing the hegemony of chemically green lawns. “If you’ve got just lawn grass, you’ve got nothing,” said Mace Vaughan of the Xerces Society, a leading organization in insect conservation. “But as soon as you create a front yard wildflower meadow you go from an occasional honeybee to a lawn that might be full of 20 or 30 species of bees and butterflies and monarchs.”

First and foremost, said Dr. Tallamy, a home for bugs is a matter of food security. “If the bees were to truly disappear, we would lose 80 percent of the plants,” he said. “That is not an option. That’s a huge problem for mankind.”

Jim Robbins is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of “The Man Who Planted Trees.”