The three videos from Organic Spies cast a spotlight on disturbing and unseemly developments in the organic food industry. In particular, they examine how corporate power is corrupting the integrity of organic food and agriculture. Knowledge is power, and the more we know and understand these trends, the better we will all be able to defend the wholesome bounty of the good food movement.
Antibiotic use may have driven the development of Europe’s deadly E. coli.
Nature.com
by Marian Turner
Women, beansprouts, cucumbers, bacteria, cows: the cast of the current European Escherichia coli outbreak is already a crowd. Enter the phage. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, and they are star players in the chain of events that led to this outbreak. Bacterial infections often originate from contaminated food, but it is now about six weeks since the start of this outbreak and the trail is going cold. It’s hard to be sure of the culprit — but this simply serves to highlight the importance of understanding how infectious bacteria get into the food chain in the first place. Read Full Article »
National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement Comments: Due July 28
Action Alert
Corporate agribusiness wants to tell the rest of us how to farm, and shut anyone out of the market who does not follow their one-size-fits-all “food safety” standards for leafy green vegetables. The USDA is supporting their plan, which, if accepted, will allow a committee of industry representatives, lobbyists and other officials to write a set of so-called food safety standards for the entire leafy green farming community—this could competitively injure smaller, local and organic producers.
If passed, leafy green handlers/marketers who sign on to this agreement will require every grower they buy from to follow a uniform set of standards, which will be written with large-scale, monoculture, chemical-intensive farming methods in mind. Farmers do not sign on to the agreement – their buyers (brokers, distributors and supermarket chains) do. Sustainable organic and local growers who take different approaches to food safety will likely be shut out of the market when buyers refuse their buy their crops. Read Full Article »
Consumers and Independent Producers Lose if Big Ag Wins on Animal Traceability
WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expected to issue its new proposed rule for mandatory animal traceability very shortly. While USDA already has traceability requirements as part of existing animal disease control programs, the proposed framework goes much further to require animal tagging and tracing even absent any active disease threat. The framework has raised significant concerns among family farm and ranch advocates, who criticize the agency for failing to provide a coherent, factual explanation for the new program’s necessity.
“USDA brags about the success of past programs, but has abandoned the principles that made them successful,” argued Bill Bullard of R-CALF USA. “Past programs were based on sound science and were developed in response to the transmission, treatment, and elimination of specific identified diseases. USDA’s new approach is a one-size-fits-all approach that does not specifically aim at the control of livestock diseases.” Read Full Article »
Reigniting Organic Attack by Corporate Agribusiness Interests
CORNUCOPIA, WIS: When The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group, officially launched in April 2004, one of its primary issue areas was what it referred to as “The Corporate Attack on Organic Agriculture.” At the time, Cornucopia’s focus was on the father and son team of Dennis and Alex Avery at the ultra-conservative Hudson Institute’s campaign to discredit organics. Now, in 2011, after seven years of successfully exposing the genesis of Hudson’s ire, and greatly diminishing its effectiveness, a new generation of “Trojan horse” naysayers has emerged.
The latest attacks come from Mischa Popoff, a Canadian who purports to be an advocate for organics and is publicizing his self-published book entitled Is It Organic? The author misses few opportunities to impugn the integrity of the organic label, or USDA oversight, while simultaneously defending biotechnology and the industrial agriculture system that organics seeks to replace. Read Full Article »
