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GMO Labeling Is about More than GMO Labeling

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Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, has issued an important editorial summing up why GMO labeling is such an important policy. And that’s because it’s the front line—the point of contact—of a much larger battle: the war for the nature of our food supply.

Our food is not just commodities “out there” in the supermarkets. It’s “in here,” within us, in our bodies. And it affects every aspect of our health—the nourishment we need to grow and stay strong, the quality of our very lives.

The war we speak about is led on one side by corporate America, the chemical industry, biotech, food processors, Monsanto, and it’s all about money and the dangerous, poisonous way we Americans are being abused through our food supply. On the other side is the organic community of environmentally aware folks who want to avoid the chemicals and genetically modified foods that corporate culture shoves our way. We cherish good, wholesome, clean food.

Here’s Ronnie Cummins’s editorial.

In January, 2016, Vilsack will hold an invitation-only meeting between industry and consumer groups to “forge a compromise” on GMO labeling.

But there is no compromise between mandatory and voluntary labeling laws. It’s one or the other. What Vilsack really plans to do is this: everything in his power to permanently legalize the right of Monsanto and Big Food to deceive consumers.

Vilsack recently told reporters he’s concerned about “chaos in the market” if more states pass mandatory GMO labeling laws like Vermont’s. He also trotted out the tired meme that requiring food companies to label GMO ingredients will cause drastic increases in food prices.

What “compromise” will Vilsack likely propose in his back-room confab? A voluntary labeling scheme involving QR codes—fancy barcode technology requiring consumers to have smart phones.

Never mind the ridiculous argument that printing four words on a label will cost food companies more than setting up fancy smart-phone technology that links to websites. We know what QR codes are really about. They’re about making it as difficult as possible for consumers to find out if the food they are buying has been genetically modified, or contains genetically engineered ingredients.

That Vilsack even has to call this emergency meeting is a testament to you, and everyone else who has fought so hard for the basic right to know. Monsanto thought it would be easy to ram a preemption bill through Congress. Thanks to you, it wasn’t.
With your help, we will come back in January as strong as ever, to protect states’ rights to pass mandatory GMO labeling laws. We will make it crystal clear to every member of the U.S. Congress: Consumers will settle for nothing less than mandatory labeling laws.

But requiring food companies to label GMOs is just one battle in a much larger war. That’s why, in 2016, we will introduce new campaigns that will shed more light on Monsanto’s role in factory farms, in the ethanol scam, in global warming. We will mobilize millions of consumers to engage in policy battles that will go well beyond GMO labeling. Policy battles that will put an end to subsidizing the corporations that poison and pollute.

Only about 20 percent of GMO crops grown in the U.S. go into food. The other 80 percent are used to feed animals imprisoned in factory farms, or to make fuel. Billions of tax dollars—your dollars—are used to subsidize these degenerative crops. Crops that are grown with millions of tons of toxic chemicals. Crops that pollute our waters, degrade our soils, destabilize our climate.

There’s a better way. The fact is, small farmers already grow 70 percent of the world’s food. We don’t need Monsanto. What we need is to support those farmers who grow the food we actually need, using techniques that restore, renew, rebuild and regenerate—our soils, our health, our economies, our climate.

This is our mission. This is our challenge. Win or lose the labeling battle, we need you in this fight.

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NATIVE AMERICANS BAN GMOS, FRANKENFISH SALMON

The Yurok Tribe—California’s largest tribe with roughly 5,000 enrolled members—has passed a historic ban on genetically modified (GMOs) crops and salmon, writes Lorraine Chow in EcoWatch.

The Yurok Tribal Council unanimously voted on December 10 to enact the Yurok Tribe Genetically Engineered Organism (GEO) Ordinance:

The ordinance prohibits the propagation, raising, growing, spawning, incubating or releasing genetically engineered organisms (such as growing GMO crops or releasing genetically engineered salmon) within the Tribe’s territory and declares the Yurok Reservation to be a GMO-free zone. While other Tribes, such as the Dine’ (Navajo) Nation, have declared GMO-free zones by resolution, this ordinance appears to be the first of its kind in the nation.

The announcement, as the release notes, came on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of genetically engineered AquAdvantage salmon in November. The controversial fish—dubbed “Frankenfish” by opponents—is genetically altered to grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon.

The 56,585-acre Yurok Reservation is located in Humboldt and Del Norte counties in the far northwest of California along a 44-mile stretch of the Klamath River. For thousands of years, the river has been a crucial source for fishing, mostly for salmon.

“The Yurok People have managed and relied upon the abundance of salmon on the Klamath River since time immemorial,” a press release from the Yurok Tribe says. “The tribe has a vital interest in the viability and survival of the wild, native Klamath River salmon species and all other traditional food resources.”

In recent years, however, the area’s fish populations have been devastated due to the region’s ongoing drought and low snowpack. NPR reported that as water levels dip dangerously low and become increasingly warm, the river has become a breeding ground for deadly fish diseases. Ichthyophthirius multifiliis (or “ick”), for instance, killed more than 35,000 adult Chinook salmon and steelhead in the Klamath River in 2002 and at least a thousand more fish last year.

The Yurok Tribe decided on the GMO ban in order protect its ancestral lands. The press release states: “GMO farms, whether they are cultivating fish or for fresh produce, have a huge, negative impact on watersheds the world over. The Yurok Tribe’s homeland is on the Klamath River, where massive algal blooms, exacerbated by agricultural runoff and antiquated hydroelectric dams, turn the river toxic each summer.”

James Dunlap, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, said that “the Yurok People have the responsibility to care for our natural world, including the plants and animals we use for our foods and medicines.”

“This ordinance is a necessary step to protect our food sovereignty and to ensure the spiritual, cultural and physical health of the Yurok People,” he added. “GMO food production systems, which are inherently dependent on the overuse of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics, are not our best interest.”

The ordinance means that violations can be enforced through the Yurok Tribal Court.

“It is the inherent sovereign right of the Yurok People to grow plants from natural traditional seeds and to sustainably harvest plants, salmon and other fish, animals, and other life-giving foods and medicines, in order to sustain our families and communities as we have successfully done since time immemorial; our Court will enforce any violations of these inherent, and now codified, rights,” Yurok Chief Judge Abby Abinanti stated.

Too bad our Federal Government can’t take such a stand to protect all U.S. citizens from the depredations of the agri-chemical and biotech industries.

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HOW QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT MIGHT WORK

Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon, now proven scientifically, whereby if two particles are quantum entangled, something that affects one particle will similarly and simultaneously affect the other particle, no matter how far apart they are. Even billions of light years apart.

Why is this important to the organic community? Think what “organic” means. It is the community of people who see things holistically. We are people who believe that nature knows best, and that the way to organize our agriculture is to trust the laws and tendencies of nature. To do that more perfectly, we need to understand nature more perfectly. And to understand nature more perfectly, we need to know how she works and what forces drive her along evolution’s pathways.

Here’s where we need to make a mental leap. It’s my belief that at the most fundamental level, nature is consciousness.

Now, I’m no theoretical physicist, nor mathematician, and I can’t fill a blackboard with equations proving that the nature of reality is, fundamentally, consciousness, but I do have my intuition and I can raise a hypothesis. Perhaps scientists could think about this for a moment, because strange as it seems, science doesn’t have a clue about the nature of consciousness. Science has mapped the pathways of the brain, examined its synapses, and identified the brain’s regions and the activities they control. But about awareness, a creature’s ability to glimpse the world whole? Not much.

Here’s my hypothesis: consciousness doesn’t arise from within physical creatures like ourselves. Physical reality arises from consciousness. Get down into the heart of elementary particles and you don’t find hard little marbles that form the building blocks of reality, you find almost entirely empty space imbued with energy relationships.

If consciousness is the fundamental ground of reality, then everything is at least conscious of itself. And the whole universe is therefore conscious. And within that consciousness arises all that is.

Now consider two quantum entangled elementary particles. They uniquely share the consciousness from which they are made. So when something happens to one, it also happens to the other. They can be any distance apart, and yet when one changes, so does the other. Not easy to explain if you’re looking for physical forces operating through time and space that create this effect. But if you think that the conscious universe embraces them both as one, then of course anything that affects one affects the other simultaneously.

As an organic grower, I enjoy being conscious of my plants’ purpose and their destiny. And something tells me that they, in some way, enjoy being conscious of me.

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WHAT IS HILLARY’S STANCE ON GMOS?

Hillary Clinton told a town hall meeting in Fairfield, Iowa, on Tuesday, December 22, that consumers have the right to know if they are eating GMOs and that more independent scientific evaluation of them is needed, reports the Institute for Responsible Technology.

Below is a press release about Secretary Clinton’s stand on GMOs and GMO labeling that is very enlightening. Its major points are, thankfully, referenced.

At the same town hall meeting, Secretary Clinton also referred to the previous week’s massive lobbying effort by GMO manufacturers and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the U.S. Senate’s failure to vote on the labeling preemption law in 2015 by saying, “Very powerful agriculture forces were trying to pass a law, get it into the Omnibus (spending bill), to prohibit states from passing laws requiring labeling.” When she acknowledged that the preemption didn’t get into the bill, the crowd erupted in applause. Clinton said, “That was a good development for Secretary Vilsack.”

She gave support to former Iowa Governor turned US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who was also in the town hall meeting. “What he’s trying to do as the Secretary of Agriculture for our country,” said Clinton, “is to get a labeling program started and try to get everybody at the table to agree on what we need to do here.”

Clinton’s biggest applause came when she said, “What [Secretary Vilsack is] trying to do is get states and advocates and agricultural interests all at the same table to say, ‘Look there’s a right to know. You should be able to have the information that you can make your judgment about.’”

Clinton said that we needed “more science on this—independent science that we can count on that doesn’t get done by some institution, company, whatever, that has a stake in the outcome. That’s what I am supporting.”

Ironically, she then followed up with a statement that completely bungled the science. She made the claim that “. . . there are a lot of advocates who fight hunger in Africa who are desperate for GMO seeds, because they are drought resistant and they don’t know how else they’re going to get enough yield to feed people.”

According to the USDA’s own reports, however, GMOs do not increase yield and often yield less than their non-GMO counterparts. And the drought-resistant corn variety approved by the USDA was widely criticized for yielding less than conventional, non-GMO varieties.[1]

Clinton’s proposal for independent science is in sharp contrast to the current state of U.S. government evaluations, which rely almost entirely on the data submitted by the biotech companies.[2] These include Monsanto, who has been accused of falsifying safety data in other of their products in the past, and hiding evidence of harm.[3]

Furthermore, the Food and Drug Administration allows GMO makers to decide on their own whether their foods are safe, and does not even require any safety data to be submitted.[4] This policy was crafted by the FDA’s Michael Taylor in 1992, who was formerly Monsanto’s attorney, later Monsanto’s vice president, and now back at the FDA as the U.S. Food Czar.[5]

If Clinton’s proposal to use the best science were actually applied, the current GMOs on the market would likely be withdrawn, based on numerous adverse effects found in animal feeding studies[6]. Furthermore, over 80 percent are engineered with foreign genes that allow the crops to be sprayed with Roundup herbicide. This results in high residue levels of Roundup’s active ingredient glyphosate, which the World Health Organization recently classified as a probable human carcinogen[7]. Most of the other GMO varieties are engineered to produce a toxic insecticide that kills bugs by breaking holes in the walls of their stomachs. Published research now shows that the toxin can also create holes in human cells[8], and may also provoke immune reactions.

In 2014 Clinton was the paid keynote speaker for the world’s largest GMO trade association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO)[9]. Her support for GMOs was evident throughout, and she even schooled the companies on doing better public relations. She famously expressed her distaste for the words “genetically modified” saying, “’Genetically modified’ sounds Frankenstein-ish. ‘Drought-resistant’ sounds like something you’d want.” She advised her GMO industry audience to “be more careful so you don’t raise that red flag immediately.”

Clinton also hired Iowa lawyer, lobbyist, and campaign “bundler” Jerry Crawford to raise money and help support her current campaign, as well as for her 2008 bid for the White House. Crawford’s law firm became a registered lobbyist for Monsanto in 2009, to advocate on its behalf in the areas of competition/antitrust, environmental law, regulations and policies[10]. He also is a long-time friend and supporter of Tom Vilsack, [11] who is a proponent of GMOs and a recipient of BIO’s Vilsack “Governor of the Year” award in 2001.[12]

Clinton had been briefed in advance about the audience’s pro-GMO labeling position; and she certainly played to the crowd when she called for more independent science and touted the right to know. But unlike her specific proposal discussed minutes earlier, where she called for $2 billion per year to pay for research into Alzheimer’s disease, her recommendation for independent science on GMOs did not stipulate where independent money should come from or how much.

She also placed her faith in the resolution of the labeling issue with Secretary Vilsack’s meeting of stakeholders. She failed to mention that the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association is trying to circumvent real labels on packages, and substitute a QR code system that requires shoppers to use smart phones to look up whether foods contain GMOs. Vilsack has also weighed in in favor of the codes. But a recent poll showed that 88 percent of consumers reject QR codes and favor an actual statement written in English[13].

Will Hillary Clinton reject the QR code concept and stand with consumers? Will she propose specific funding for independent safety studies on GMOs? And will she even look at the independent science already conducted and abandon her unsupported “Feed the World through GMOs” position, which is a falsehood Monsanto has been spreading around the world? Given her cozy relationship with the Biotech Industry Association and Monsanto, it is not likely. But there are many town hall meetings left where citizens can ask pointed and specific questions to her and the other candidates so we can dig deeper into her position and what we can expect her to do with GMOs, if elected.

Barack Obama also called for labeling and more science when he campaigned in Iowa. And so far, he has not made good on those campaign promises [14].

What about Bernie Sanders? Where does he stand? As usual, he stands foursquare with the American people. Sanders represents Vermont, the first state in the nation to pass a “right to know” GMO labeling law. He authored an amendment to the 2013 farm bill that would have given states the ability to require labeling so that they don’t have to fight for it, state by state, through propositions on the ballot. Sanders’ amendment was defeated 71 to 27 in the Senate.

“An overwhelming majority of Americans favor GMO labeling but virtually all of the major biotech and food corporations in the country oppose it,” says Sanders. Vermont’s labeling law is scheduled to go into effect on July 1, 2016. “The people of Vermont and the people of America have a right to know what’s in the food that they eat,” Sanders said.

And pundits wonder why people don’t trust Hillary Clinton. It’s because her triangulation and “say anything to get elected” approach to GMOs belies her pro-labeling stance.

References:

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/1282242/err162_summary.pdf

[2] http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navid=AGRICULTURE&contentid=BiotechnologyFAQs.xml

[3] http://www.gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/16521-more-monsanto-scientific-fraud-in-early-glyphosate-safety-studies

[4] http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodScienceResearch/GEPlants/default.htm

[5] http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/CentersOffices/OfficeofFoods/ucm196721.htm

[6] http://responsibletechnology.org/resources/gmo-myths-and-truths-report/

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/21/business/who-report-links-ingredient-in-roundup-to-cancer.html

[8] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22337346

[9] https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/video-hilary-clinton-endorses-gmos-solution-focused-crop-biotechnology

[10] http://www.gmwatch.org/news/archive/2009/11783-iowa-law-firm-files-as-monsanto-lobbyist

[11] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/close-friend-of-agriculture-chief-now-a-monsanto-lobbyist/article/19855

[12] https://www.bio.org/media/press-release/iowas-vilsack-named-bio-governor-year

[13] http://www.justlabelit.org/press-room/new-poll-nearly-nine-in-10-americans-want-labels-on-gmo-food

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqaaB6NE1TI

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