Do unto Others as You Would Have Them Do unto You
Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on Do unto Others as You Would Have Them Do unto You
If I said that cruelty to animals is a blot on our humanity, then someone might counter by saying that what we do to each other is just as bad or worse than what we do to animals. And they’d be right.
But pointing out that the reservoir of human cruelty is plenty big enough to cover animals, other humans, and even nature herself is no reason to dismiss it as inevitable.
If the organic method teaches us anything, it’s that all of Mother Nature’s creatures—plants and animals—need to be treated with respect. And that biodiversity is healthier than limited diversity and species extinction. And that the more diverse any ecology is, whether wild or on the farm or in the garden or just in our backyards or even in our intestinal flora, the healthier it is.
The founders of the American political system knew that in the real world, especially the political world, there will be good guys and bad guys, and that the best way to insure an orderly politics is to set up a system of checks and balances, where if one branch of government steps out of line, the other branches will haul it back into line. It’s the same in nature: checks and balances are maximized in biodiverse ecosystems. The good guys eat the bad guys. The bad guys eat the weak plants. The strong plants support the good guys and the bad guys.
The point is that all creatures need to be treated with respect. As Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago, “For nought so vile that on the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth give.” In regards to farm animals—chickens, turkeys, ducks, fish, pigs, beef cattle, sheep, and so on—it must be recognized that each animal has a nature and an ecological purpose that needs to be respected.
What does it mean to put a chicken in a cage so tiny it can hardly turn around for its entire life? It means the same as doing that to you. It demeans us as human beings to treat animals with no regard to their ecological purpose, their meaning, or their needs.
That’s yet another reason why organic farming and culture is so benign. No antibiotics to force quick growth. No hormones to force milk production. No GMOs in the feed. And—it’s to be hoped some day—no fattening cattle on grain for the last few months of their lives. Cattle, after all, are grazing ruminants whose natural food is grass.
It would be nice to have all our food produced on family farms where all the animals are allowed to play their natural roles, like the movie “Babe.” Granted that’s not feasible. But cattle should graze, chickens should scratch, pigs should root. The organic farm should show the way forward for American farming, away from the cruelties perpetrated on our farm animals today, and toward an integrated system of farming that animals can enjoy until the time comes for us to enjoy them.
***
HOW’S THIS FOR BAD GOVERNMENT?
The California Department of Food and Agriculture has published a draft of an environmental plan giving the agency authority to spray toxic pesticides anywhere in California, at any time into the indefinite future, even on organic farmland and crops. The blanket approval would allow no opportunity for affected communities or farmers to stop the spraying.
According to the plan, the state’s agency would have the right to approve new pesticides and other expansions of the spray program with no public review, notice, or analysis of the health and environmental impacts on specific locations to be sprayed.
The plan, described in the Statewide Plant Pest Prevention and Management Programmatic Environmental Impact Report (PEIR), relies on a list of 79 pesticides and other chemicals, including substances linked to cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and reproductive system impacts. Many of the pesticides are also lethal to bees and other pollinators, fish and other aquatic life, birds, and mammals. Among the PEIR pesticides are several neonicotinoids, which many scientists believe are directly linked to the collapse of honeybee populations.
The environmental review’s cursory analysis of the health and ecological impacts of these chemicals fails to answer many essential questions, such as the effects of pesticide exposure on infants, pregnant women, and other sensitive populations;
children whose schools could be sprayed under the plan; rivers, streams, and drinking water wells.
The plan directly threatens organic farming—one of California’s fastest-growing industries—because organic farmers could be forced to spray non-organic pesticides as part of state treatment programs. Although the state’s review admits that “treated products would not command the typical premium prices demanded for organic produce in the marketplace,” it dismisses the impact of spraying on organic farmers by asserting that they could simply switch to conventional farming.
Tell CA Dept of Food & Ag you “absolutely oppose the Statewide Pest PEIR (Problematic Environmental Impact Report). Here’s where you can contact them: http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/plant/peir/#comment
The deadline for public comments is Oct 31.
***
ORGANIC TRADE ASSOCIATION—CONTROLLED BY BIG FOOD?
Over the past few years, the Organic Trade Association has received increasing criticism for lobbying efforts that have allegedly helped water down the federal standards governing organic farming and food production, according to The Cornucopia Institute, an organic watchdog group based in Wisconsin.
The latest dustup in Washington surrounding OTA activities concerns their attempt to sell Congress, and the organic farming community, on a scheme that will tax farmers and other industry participants to do research and promotional work.
“Trying to recruit farmers is an attempt by the OTA to redeem their damaged credibility and sell their agenda on Capitol Hill,” said Mark A. Kastel, Codirector at The Cornucopia Institute. “The agribusiness lobby is also attempting to dilute the influence of nonprofit groups and cooperatives that legitimately represent the interests of family-scale farmers — and frequently differ with the OTA on regulatory policy.”
Over the past two years the OTA has run into a buzzsaw of opposition from farmers, and the groups that represent them, after proposing a commodity checkoff that would create an estimated $40 million per year. “Farmers are understandably skeptical about being forced to pay into such a fund because of a long history of corruption, mismanagement and lack of effectiveness in existing checkoff programs showcasing milk mustaches, ‘incredible edible eggs,’ and ‘the other white meat’ (pork),” Kastel said.
The OTA is held in low esteem by many farmers and organic food advocates because of its past history and alleged duplicity in dealing with other interests in the organic food movement. “This move is consistent with a long pattern of agribusiness executives treating family farmers as ignorant and naïve,” said Richard Parrott, a Buhl, Idaho, organic beef and crop producer who has been certified since 1992. “Why should farmers trust corporations that buy organic commodities from factory farms, and have pitted U.S. farmers, like me, against Chinese exports, when they tell us they are looking out for our interests?” One of the crops Parrott produces is dried beans, an organic commodity that has been dominated by imports for a number of years.
The trade-lobby group is also looked at as a major political force behind recent highly controversial moves at the USDA that significantly water down the independent power of the National Organic Standards Board, an expert advisory panel Congress set up to protect organic rulemaking from undue corporate influence.
When the OTA started out, during the 1980s as the Organic Foods Production Association of North America (OFPANA), the organization was widely recognized as an umbrella group with many farmers, organic certifiers, nonprofits and processors (all of which, at the time, were independently owned). Since then, the OTA has morphed into what The Cornucopia Institute calls “just another powerful, trade-lobby group funded and controlled by multibillion-dollar, multinational food corporations.”
The OTA is now controlled and funded by large corporate agribusinesses such as Smucker’s, General Mills, Hershey, and Kellogg’s. Unlike the majority of organic farmers, many of the most active and influential members of the OTA earn the majority of their revenue selling non-organic food.
In recent years, there have been virtually no working farmers as OTA members (other than a few that are affiliated with the corporate participants), and a large percentage of the nonprofits were given, unsolicited, free memberships.
“When they doubled their dues a few years ago they lost most of their farmers and other individual members,” added Kastel. OTA membership now costs between hundreds of dollars a year to $35,000 per year, on a sliding scale (and many corporate members make additional contributions in the tens of thousands of dollars).
The OTA just created a new class of membership, with $50 a year dues, for small farmers with gross annual revenue of under $250,000. The farmers also have to be members of one of the organizations represented on the OTA’s Farmer Advisory Council.
Smaller farmers as OTA members would be in stark contrast to existing members such as Aurora Organic Dairy, a giant vertically-integrated operation with a number of facilities in Texas and Colorado milking thousands of cows each. Aurora was found by USDA investigators to have been “willfully” violating organic standards, one of the largest scandals in the industry’s history, but they continued as OTA members and Aurora executives even subsequently served as spokespersons for the group.
Cornucopia, a 10,000-member, nonprofit, farm policy research group characterized the lobby group’s recent public relations push as “a not-so-veiled attempt by the OTA to greenwash their corporate approach to organics.”
***
GMO SOY USED TO MAKE INFANT FORMULA
The Center for Food Safety recently announced that GMO soy engineered by Monsanto for heavy pesticide exposure has been found in infant formula purchased in Portland, Oregon.
Finding soy in infant formula that has been genetically engineered by Monsanto specifically to survive high levels of toxic pesticides is exceptionally troubling– and it makes a powerful case for the GMO labeling that would happen under Oregon’s Measure 92, which seeks to have GMO foods labeled as such.
***
FUKUSHIMA RADIATION REACHING NORTH AMERICA
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported that an August sample of ocean water taken off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia, tested positive for cesium-134, one of the radioactive elements released as a result of the Fukushima disaster. This same group also found traces of Fukushima radiation as far down the Pacific coastline as California.
In the almost four years since the Fukushima meltdown and disaster, the ruined nuclear plant has been releasing 300 tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean every day.
Is it time to think about avoiding Pacific seafood harvested from Alaska to Mexico? We have this report from the non-governmental organization, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, but have you heard anything from the Federal agencies tasked to protect our food supply? FDA? Nothing. EPA? Nada. USDA? Bupkis.
###
