#biotech farming

[foodwarriornetwork]

Hey biotech farmers, listen up! Why don't you fire Monsanto and use these weapons of mass destruction instead?

[foodwarriornetwork]

This from Heather Pilatic/Ground Truth: 'What Would Rachel (Carson) Write: Top 4 Untold Pesticide Stories'

1. Genetically engineered (GE) crops are the present-day growth engine of the global pesticide industry; and we know about as much about their health and environmental impacts as we did about DDT in 1962. Working title: "GMOs are DDT 2.0"

Fact: 99% of GE crops on the market are engineered either to contain an insecticide, or to withstand high application rates of particular herbicides.  Fact: Of the "hundreds" of studies that industry claims have proven the safety of GE crops, not one has been repeated.  2. We know very little about pesticide use patterns in the U.S. because, with the exception of CA, use is not tracked. EPA has neither the funding nor the mandate to require applicators to report pesticide use, so what we are left with is spotty data aggregated at the national level and cut in such a way as to be nearly useless. Working title: "50 years later, still flying blind" 3. "Conditional registrations" are a regularly used loophole through which pesticide products are rushed to market without adequate safety testing where they remain in use for many years before being tested. Recent examples include Bayer's bee-toxic clothianidin, and DuPont's tree-killing Imprellis. Working title: some combination of "loop hole" and "Mack truck." Fact: Of the 16,000 current product registrations, 11,000 (68%) have been brought to market through conditional registration (CR), and half (5,400) of those have been conditionally registered since 2000.  4. Pesticide law and regulation in the U.S. is a case study in corporate capture. And always has been. The last 30 years of market consolidation in the seed and pesticide industry have not helped matters. Working title: "Chemical Cartel + Farm Lobby = 50 yrs of Pesticide Policy Paralyis." Fact: From 1988 to 1995, more than 65 bills were introduced in Congress to tighten pesticide regulations. None of them passed.  Fact: In the late 1990s, two separate investigations revealed that between 1/2 and 2/3 of all former top-level pesticide regulators at the U.S. EPA subsequently went to work for, or were paid by, pesticide and chemical industry interests actively involved in fighting EPA efforts to protect the public from pesticides.  On this last issue, Christopher Bosso's Pesticides and Politics: The Lifecycle of Public Issue (1987) remains the most comprehensive account of the political history of pesticide legislation and regulation. In it, he examines pesticides as a case study in special interest politics largely beholden to the farm lobby in Congress — all the way back to the 1947 formation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). In political science, the term is "client politics."  IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO HELP THE HONEYBEES, BAN CLOTHIANIDIN: Comments being received through Sept. 25, 2012 for the 'Emergency Petition to Suspend: Clothianidin':http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2012-0334-0015

[foodwarriornetwork]

[foodwarriornetwork]

Hilarious.  Grocery Store Wars.

[foodwarriornetwork]

Baltimore Radio Show 'Sound Bites' Debates Genetically Engineered Products

This week's episode of Sound Bites shines a light on the debate around genetically engineered foods. Are they safe? Should they be labeled?  The episode also explores issues around ownership and cross pollination of GE seeds. Our guests include:

Patty Lovera, Assistant Director of Food and Water Watch;

Andrew Pollack, reporter for the New York Times who covers biotechnology;

Kathy Fairbanks, spokesperson for California's “No on Prop 37” campaign;

Nick and Sophia Maravell, Maryland farmers who save organic and heirloom seeds; and

Cathleen Enright, PhD, Executive Vice President, Food & Agriculture Section, Biotechnology Industry Organization

Wed. 9/12 at 9am on WSDL 90.7FM and 6pm on WSCL 89.5FM