Dr. Mae Won Ho is a brilliant and fearless truth teller. Her science is impeccable and her voice is loud and strong when it comes to telling the truth about dangerous make believe science. Nowhere is she more vigorous in alerting us to the absurdities and deadly consequences of corporate junk science and junk policies than in the area of Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs.
The following article is a must read, must share one which I urge you to forward to as many people as possible so that they can join forces to make sure that all legislators understand that the FDA and USDA are not protecting our interests and Congress must take the reins from them before their criminal negligence kills us all.
The reallity is that stark.
Click here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25920) to urge your legislators to become supporters of the suite of bills introduced by Rep. Denis Kucinich to require safety assessments of GMOs and require clear labeling of all GMO ingredients and components of food.
And then click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to make a tax deductible, recurring donation so that the Natural Solutions Foundation can continue to bring you the facts you need about your health freedom.
Thanks.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
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GM is Dangerous and Futile
We Need Organic Sustainable Food and Energy Systems Now
New genetics research invalidates the science underpinning the $73.5 billon global biotech industry and confirms why genetic modification is futile and dangerous; we must implement organic sustainable food and energy systems now Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
Invited Lecture at Conference on Future of Food: Climate Change, GMOs and Food Security, 1-2 October 2008, India International Centre, New Delhi
A fully referenced version of this article is posted on ISIS members’ website. Details here
An electronic version of this report with full references can be downloaded from the ISIS online store. Download Now
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I am deeply and doubly honoured to be part of this important conference on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, because it was Vandana Shiva and Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher who inspired me and turned me from an ivory tower academic into a science activist. Consequently, I was thrown out of my university and liberated to join civil society in fighting corrupt science and protecting good independent science.
Food Futures Now , *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free, How organic agriculture and localised food, and energy systems can potentially compensate for all greenhouse gas emissions due to human activities and free us from fossil fuels “Change to gene theory raises new challenges for biotechâ€
The headline appeared in the business section of the International Herald Tribune 3 July 2007 [1]. The article went on to say: “The $73.5 billion global biotech business may soon have to grapple with a discovery that calls into question the scientific principles on which it was founded.â€
It was referring to the findings of project ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA elements), organised by the US National Human Genome Research Institute. A consortium of 35 research groups went through 1 percent of the human genome with a fine-tooth comb to find out exactly how genes work.
To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a “tidy collection of independent genes†after all…Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood.â€
The Human Genome Research Institute said that these findings will challenge scientists “to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.â€
The author of the article Denis Caruso commented that, “the report is likely to have repercussions far beyond the laboratory. The presumption that genes operate independently has been institutionalized since 1976, when the first biotech company was founded. In fact, it is the economic and regulatory foundation on which the entire biotechnology industry is built.†She went on to point out that gene patents and safety assessment based on the same paradigm are also in trouble.
She is right on all counts. I pointed that out 10 years previously when a plethora of findings in molecular genetics had already invalidated the genetic determinist paradigm underpinning the biotech industry. In fact, the paradigm had begun to unravel almost as the industry was starting up twenty years earlier.
The Brave New World of GM Science
In Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare, the Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business [2] first published in 1997/1998 I explained why the science behind GM is wrong and obsolete, and hence dangerous; a story elaborated further in Living with the Fluid Genome [3] published in 2003.
Genetic engineering of plants and animals began in the mid 1970s in the belief that the genome (the totality of all the genetic material of a species) is constant and static, and that the characteristics of organism are simply hardwired in their genome. This was encapsulated in the Central Dogma of molecular biology. The genetic information goes from DNA, the genetic material, to RNA, a kind of intermediate, to protein which determines the characteristic involved, such as tolerance to herbicide, for example. One gene determines one trait, so you can transfer one gene and get exactly the trait you want, be it herbicide tolerance, or resistance to insect pest.
But geneticists soon discovered that the genome is remarkably dynamic and ‘fluid’. It is constantly in conversation with the environment, and that determines which genes are turned on, when, where, by how much and for how long. Moreover, the genetic material itself could also be marked or changed according to experience, and the influence passed on to the next generation. Most of that was known by 1980, long before the Human Genome Project was conceived.
The best thing about the Human Genome Project is to finally explode the myth of genetic determinism [4] (The Myth that Launched a Thousand Companies, SiS 18), revealing the layers of molecular complexity that transmit, interpret and rewrite the genetic texts [5] (Life Beyond the Central Dogma series, SiS 24). The ENCODE project has confirmed and extended the complexities especially with regard to what constitutes a gene. Traditionally, a gene is a sequence of DNA that codes for a protein with a well-defined function. This idea has been well and truly shattered [6]; as Barry Patrick wrote in the Science News [7] “genes are proving to be fragmented, intertwined with other genes, and scattered across the whole genome.â€
The genetic engineer’s idea of a gene is presented in Figure 1. It has a regulatory signal, a promoter that says to the cell, go and make lots of copies of the coding sequence that would be translated into a protein, and a terminator that says stop, end of message. This is what genetic engineers put into cells to make a genetically modified organism (GMO).
A gene expression cassette, the genetic engineer’s idea of a gene
Figure 1. A gene expression cassette, the genetic engineer’s idea of a gene
Instead, within the human genome, and indeed other mammalian genomes, coding sequences are in bits (exons) separated by non-coding introns, and exons contributing to a single protein could be in different parts of the genome. Coding sequences of different proteins frequently overlap. Regulatory signals are similarly scattered upstream, downstream, within the coding sequence or in some other distant part of the genome. Coding sequences occupy just 1.5 percent of the human genome, but between 74 and 93 percent of the genome produce RNA transcripts [7], many now known to have regulatory functions. So much so that the project of mapping genetic predisposition to diseases, the original rationale for the Human Genome Project, has now run into serious trouble.
David M. Altshuler, associate professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School and his research team showed that the risk for type 2 diabetes involves more than a mutated gene. Instead, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, and other deadly ailments involve non-coding DNA as well as in genes [8]. “We’re realizing that things happening ‘somewhere else’ in the genome, not in genes, are playing critical roles†in sickness and in health, Altshuler said.
David B. Goldstein at Duke University is very pessimistic. He said the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working [9]: “There is absolutely no question that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just as bleak as it could be. After doing comprehensive studies for common diseases, we can explain only a few percent of the genetic components of most of these traits.†For schizophrenia and biopolar disorder, there is almost nothing, for type 2 diabetes, 20 variants, but they explain only up to 3 percent of familial clustering, and so on.
Goldstein added: “we have cracked open the human genome and can look at the entire complement of common genetic variants, and what do we find? Almost nothing. That is absolutely beyond belief.â€
That is just what I predicted soon after the human genome sequence was announced [10, 11] (Human DNA ‘BioBank’ Worthless, SiS 13/14; Why Genomics Won’t Deliver, SiS 26)
Fresh attempts are now made to redefine a gene either in terms of a protein product [12] or a transcript [13], neither of which are satisfactory or would save the industry. All patents on genes based on the old concept are no longer valid; ultimately because the patent is awarded on a supposed function attached to a DNA sequence. But as genes exist in bits interweaving with other genes, so are functions. Multiple DNA sequences may serve the same function, and conversely the same DNA sequence can have different functions. Again, I have explained Why Biotech Patents Are Patently Absurd [14].
Despite the bewildering complexities of how the genome works, individual processes are precisely orchestrated and finely tuned by the organism as a whole, in a highly coordinated molecular ‘dance of life’ that’s necessary for survival.
In contrast, genetic engineering in the laboratory is crude, imprecise and invasive. The rogue genes inserted into a genome to make a GMO could land anywhere; typically in a rearranged or defective form, scrambling and mutating the host genome, and tend to move or rearrange further once inserted. Transgene instability is a big problem, and has been so right from the beginning. There is fresh evidence that GM crops grown commercially for years have rearranged [15, 16] (MON810 Genome Rearranged Again. Transgenic Lines Unstable hence Illegal and Ineligible for Protection, SiS 38). This is a real opportunity to challenge the validity of all biotech patents. Another key issue is safety. Transgene instability means that the original transgenic line has turned into something else, and even if it had been assessed as ‘safe’, this is no longer the case.
The genetically modified genes are a big hazard because they do not know the intricate dance of life that has been perfected in billions of years of evolution. That’s ultimately why genetic modification is both dangerous and futile.
Thirty years of GM are more than enough
We’d had 30 years of GM and more than enough damage done, as detailed in the ISP Report The Case for A GM-Free Sustainable World [17] and the dossier GM Science Expose : Hazards Ignored, Fraud, Regulatory Sham, Violation of Farmers Rights [18] we compiled for the European Parliament in June 2007. And more evidence has been piling up since. Why has this been allowed to go on? W documented how national and international regulators and advisory bodies such as the European Food Safety Authority not only routinely ignore the precautionary principle, but also actively abuse science, sidestep the law, and helping to promote GM technology in the face of evidence piling up against the safety of GM food and feed [19] (GM Food Nightmare Unfolding in the Regulatory Sham, ISIS scientific publication).
Let me summarize the evidence stacked up against GMOs.
* No increase in yields
Successive reports [17, 18, 20] confirm that the yields of all major GM crops varieties cultivated are lower than, or at best, equal to yields from non-GM varieties. Studies from 1999 to 2007 consistently show that GM soya decreased yields by 4 to 12 percent compared to non-GM soya, while Bt maize yields from 0 to 12 percent less than conventional isolines. Up to 100 percent failures of Bt cotton crops have been recorded in India [18] (and amply confirmed by the farmer witnesses who are here today). New research from the University of Kansas found a 10 percent average yield drag for Roundup Ready soya [21], and extra manganese is needed for the soil Scientists from the USDA and the University of Georgia found growing GM cotton in the US could result in a drop in income by up to 40 percent [22, 23] (Transgenic Cotton Offers No Advantage, SiS 38)
* No reduction in pesticides use
USDA data showed that GM crops increase pesticide use by 50 million pounds from 1996 to 2003 in the United States [17]. New data paint an even grimmer picture: the use of glyphosate on major crops went up more than 15-fold between 1994 and 2005, along with increases in other herbicides [24] in order to cope with rising glyphosate resistant superweeds [6]. Palmer 3pigweed is a major concern in Georgia, with farmer there having to mow cotton down in fields with glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth [25]. And following close on the health of that is glyphosate resistant giant ragweed [26]. Roundup tolerant canola volunteers are top among the worries of Canadian farmers [27, 28] (Study Based on Farmers’ Experience Exposes Risks of GM Crops, SiS 38)
* Roundup lethal to frogs and toxic to human placental and embryonic cells [18].
Roundup is more toxic than glyphosate, and it is used in more than 80 percent of all GM crops planted in the world.
* GM crops harm wildlife
UK’s farm scale evaluations have found that GM crops harm wildlife [18]; more recently a study led by Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois in the United Stated, found that wastes from Bt corn impaired the growth of a common aquatic insect [29, 30] (Bt Crops Threaten Aquatic Ecosystems, SiS 36). This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is evidence that GM crops, especially Bt crops contribute to the demise of the honeybee worldwide because it compromises their immune system and make them exra-susceptible to attacks by parasitic fungus (31) (Parasitic Fungi and Pesticides Act Synergistically to Kill Honeybees? SiS 35).
* Bt resistance pests and Roundup tolerant superweeds render the two major GM crop traits practically useless [18].
A recent review concluded that [32] “evolved glyphosate-resistant weeds are a major risk for the continued success of glyphosate and transgenic glyphosate-resistant crops.†And the evolution of Bt resistant bollworms worldwide have now been confirmed and documented in more than a dozen fields in Mississippi and Arkansas between 2003 and 2006 [33]. Worse yet, secondary pests now plague the fields and spread to other crops in India [34] (Deadly gift from Monsanto to India, SiS 38).
* Vast areas of forests, pampas and cerrados lost to GM soya in Latin America
Argentina alone has lot 15 m hectares [18]; and this has worsened considerably with the demand for biofuels (see later)
* Epidemic of suicides in the cotton belt of India
An estimated 100 000 farmers have killed themselves between 1993-2003, and a further 16 000 farmers a year have died since Bt cotton was introduced [18]
* GM food and feed linked to deaths and sicknesses
Evidence of serious health impacts in lab tests and from farmers’ fields around the world (more below)
GM food and feed inherently hazardous to health [19]
Here are some highlights from our GM Science dossier [18] on the hazards of GM food and feed. Dr. Irina Ermakova of the Russian Academy of Sciences showed how GM soya made female rats give birth to severely stunted and abnormal litters, with more than half dying in three weeks, and those remaining are sterile. Hundreds of villagers and cotton handlers in India suffer allergy-like symptoms, thousands of sheep died after grazing on the Bt cotton residues, goat and cows as well were reported in 2007 and 2008 [35] (Mass Protests against GM Crops in India , SiS 38). (As reported by farmer witnesses as this conference, the problem is continuing and sterility in offspring of exposed animals has also been observed.) A harmless bean protein transferred to pea when tested on mice cause severe inflammation in the lungs and provoked generalised food sensitivities. Dozens of villagers in the south of the Philippines fell ill when neighbouring GM maize fields came into flower in 2003, at least five have died and some remain ill to this day. A dozen cows died having eaten GM maize in Hesse Germany and more in the herd had to be slaughtered from mysterious illnesses. Arpad Pusztai and his colleagues in the UK found GM potatoes with snowdrop lectin damaged every organ system of young rats; the stomach lining grew twice as thick as controls. Chickens fed GM maize Chardon LL were twice as likely to die as controls. And finally, GM maize Mon 863 was claimed to be as safe as non-GM maize by the company, and accepted as such by European Food Safety Authority. But independent scientists of CriiGen in France re-analysed the data and found signs of liver and kidney toxicity.
Different animals and human beings exposed to a variety of transgenic crops with different traits either fall ill or die. The evidence compels us to consider the possibility that the hazards of GMOs may be inherent to the technology, as I suggested more than ten years ago [2].
Table 1. Summary of Exposure of Animals and Human Beings to GMOs
Species GM species Transgene trait Effect
Rat Soya Roundup Ready Stunting, death, sterility
Humans Cotton Cry1Ac/Cry1Ab Allergy symptoms
Sheep “ “ Death, liver toxicity
Cows “ “ “
Goats “ “ “
Mice Pea Alpha-amylase Inhibitor Lung Inflammation, General food sensitivity
Mice Soya Roundup Ready Liver, pancreas and testis Affected
Humans Maize Cry1Ab Illnesses and death
Rats Maize Cry3Bb liver and kidney toxicity
Cows Maize Cry1Ab/Cry1Ac Death and illnesses
Rats Potato Snowdrop lectin Damage in every organ system. Stomach lining twice as thick as controls
Mice Potato Cry1A Gut lining thickened
Rats Tomato Delay ripening Holes in the stomach
Chickens Maize Glufosinate tolerance Deaths
An epidemic of Morgellons Disease has hit the US and other countries that had been involved in genetic modification technology [36] (Agrobacterium & Morgellons Disease, A GM Connection?. SiS 38). The pathogen is suspected to be Agrobacterium, which has been widely used in smuggling genes into cells to make GMOs. Is this a disease created by GM? There have been close calls before.
US courts rule GM crop field-tests and releases illegal
The message that GM crops are unsafe appears to have got through to the judiciary system in the United States. There have been three court rulings against the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for failing to carry out proper environmental impact assessment, making the original releases illegal [37] (Approval of GM Crops Illegal, US Federal Courts Rule, SiS 34). These are the first rulings against GMOs in the top producing country in the world, which has been also promoting GMOs aggressively.
The first case was on drug-producing GM crops in Hawaii. The court said that the USDA violated the Endangered Species Act as well as the National Environmental Policy Act.
The second court case not only ruled GM herbicide-tolerant creeping bentgrass illegal, but also that the USDA must halt approval of all new field trials until more rigorous environmental reviews are conducted.
The third decision was passed on Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa for having been commercial released illegally without an Environment Impact Statement.
An avalanche of bans and rulings strikes GM crops worldwide
There have been numerous bans and restrictions imposed on GM crops in recent years, which say a lot about the inadequacies of regulatory regimes worldwide (see Box 1).
Box 1
Rulings and bans on GMOs between May 2007 and May 2008
* US GM alfalfa ban made permanent [38]
* US Federal Court of Appeals ruled against GM bentgrass again [39]
* Four counties in California have bans or moratorium on GM crops and the first state bill to protect Californian farmers against lawsuits that intimate and harass them when their field are contaminated passed through the Agriculture committee in January 2008 [40]
* Montville USA became the first town outside California to ban GM crops [41]
* South Australia extended its GM ban [42]
* Romania joined EU members in banning GM crop Mon 810 [43], the others are France, Hungary, Italy, Austria, Greece, and Poland
* 13 out of 20 counties in Croatia have declared themselves GM-Free [44]
* Greece renewed its ban on GM maize seeds [44]
* Germany imposed much stricter regulations on GM maize [46]
* Scotland backs GM ban in Europe [47]
* France banned GM maize Mon 810 in February 2008 and passed GMO law in April to guard against contamination by GMO, making it compulsory for farmers to “respect agricultural structures, local ecosystems and non-GMO commercial and production industries†[48, 49]
* Wales is set to ban GM crops [50]
* Switzerland bans crops until 2012 [51]
* More than 230 regions, over 4 000 municipalities and other local entities and tens of thousands of farmers and food producers in Europe have declared themselves GMO-free so far [52]
EU Commissioner for the Environment Stavros Dimas has expressed serious reservations concerning GMOs [53] (GM-Free Europe Beginning?, SiS 36), which is unprecedented in the history of the European Commission. On 7 May 2008, the European Commission delayed a decision on allowing farmers to grow more GM crops, and asked European Food Safety Authority to reconsider its previous review, which it had admitted was inadequate, as it was unable to take indirect and long term impacts into account [54].
No case for GM crops, small scale organic farming is the way ahead
Meanwhile, on 15 April 2008, 400 scientists of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) released its 2 500-page report [55, 56] (GM-Free Organic Agriculture to Feed the Worldâ€, SiS 38) that took 4 years to complete. It is a thorough examination of global agriculture on a scale comparable to the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change.
The IAASTD calls for a fundamental change in farming practice to counteract soaring food prices, hunger, poverty and environmental disasters, it says GM crops are controversial with respect to safety for health and the environment, and will not play a substantial role in addressing climate change, loss of biodiversity, hunger and poverty. Small scale farmers and agro-ecological methods are the way forward, and indigenous and local knowledge are as important as formal scientific knowledge. It warns that growing crops for biofuels could worsen food shortages and price rises.
The conclusions of the IAASTD are remarkably similar to our own report Food Futures Now *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free [57] launched in UK Parliament a week later.
Our Food Futures Now report goes a step further. We argue that only organic agriculture can truly feed the world. More than that, organic agriculture and localised food and energy systems can potentially compensate for all greenhouse emissions due to human activities and free us from fossil fuels, and we need to implement this urgently.
The UN has declared 2008 the year of the Global Food Crisis, and it has been the top news story everyday for months now as the crisis deepens. Food prices increased by an average of 40 percent last year; a string of food riots and protests spread around the world including the UK, and more than 25 000 farmers killed themselves in India.
Most commentators agree that the immediate cause of the food crisis is the divestment of food grains into producing biofuels. BusinessWeek identified Monsanto as a “prime beneficiaryâ€. Its stock correlated closely with the price of oil (better than ExxonMobile), and hardly correlated with the price of corn, basically because no one will eat its GM corn. Nevertheless the pro-GM lobby are out in force, using the food crisis to promote GM crops.
GM crops are one big failed experiment based on an obsolete scientific theory, and this failure has been evident since 2004 if not before [58] (Puncturing the GM Myths, SiS 22). Apart from yielding less and requiring more pesticides, anecdotal evidence since 2005 from farmers around the world indicates that GM crops also require more water [59]. Industrial Green Revolution agriculture is now generally acknowledged to be a major driver of climate change as well as being vulnerable to climate change because of its heavy dependence on fossil energies and water, and its susceptibility to pests, diseases and climate extremes [56, 60, 61] (Beware the New “Doubly Green Revolution”, SiS 37)..GM crops have all the worst features of industrial Green Revolution varieties exaggerated, and not least, there are outstanding safety concerns as I mentioned. Growing GM crops for biofuels does not make them safe, as they will contaminate our food crops all the same.
Any further indulgence in GMOs will surely damage our chances of surviving global warming. We must get on with the urgent business of building organic, sustainable food and energy systems right now.
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The Natural Solutions Foundation has been urging the US to examine its food policies in favor of clean, unadulterated, locally grown, GMO free foods for years. We have asked supporters to write letters, met with senior Congressional Aides and members of Congress, attended Codex meetings where FDA and USDA representatives foster the worst of the worst of the multinational interests with respect to adulterated food and enhanced profits.
All along, we have been educating our supporters, who number in the hundreds of thousands, and others as well, to understand that the economic, social, personal and national impact of a degraded food system is the destruction not only of the individual, but the entire society.
If people are dying or dead, or caring for the ill, they cannot go to school, work or carry out the essential functions of a society. If 16% of the GNP goes, at it does in America, for health care that does not care about health, but profits only from illness, and food, the only source of nutrition and health, is contaminated for the sake of profit, and at the same time that nation has just about the worst health of any developed nation, despite all the wildly expensive “care” something is rotten in Denmark, or, rather, the US. And what is rotten is our food.
Our chemicalized, synthesized, devitalized, devalued and destroyed food is, in fact, what is wrong. Without nutrition the immune system flags and falters. Without nutrition, the brain does not function well, Without nutrition the reproductive systems grinds to a halt.
Without nutrition, the eyes grow dim. Obvious but true: synthetic food does not provide nutitional sufficiency. Food that is transported a half a world away looses its nutritional value.
People who eat food made from GMOs ingest, incorporate and keep within them the seeds of their own destruction and that of any child they might bear.
Science is clear. But profit is, apparently, clearer.
Cheap food is not good food. Cheap food is expensive social degreedation and expensive disease. Very, very expensive disease.
And that is, perhaps a good point to remember: Back in 1952 the head of Germany’s Bayer Pharmaceutical, Fritz ter Meer, brought a letter to the UN signed by 5 pharmaceutical executives who haD, like ter Meer, all gone to prison at the end of the Second World War for crimes against humanity and who were now, once again, working for pharmaceutical firms.
Chief executives (and, in ter Meer’s case, the head) of the great civilian German war machine “I G Farben”, these pharmaceutical executives knew well that to accomplish the dream of world domination and cleansing which the Third Reich’s fall left unfinished, they would need to control – and kill – much of the world’s population.
What better way than food? So they urged the UN, in their letter, to take control of the world’s food. He who controls the world’s food, after all, controls the world. And pharmaceutical executives, whose legal responsibility to their share holders have, after all, no interest at all in healthy food. Healthy food makes healthy people and they are poor customers for the diseases which fuel the astronomical profits of the pharmaceutical industry – the preventable, non communicable diseases of under nutrition, as the World Health Organization calls them. These diseases kill an increasing portion of the world’s people as the world converts to Codex-compliant, USDA and FDA approved “food” which weakens and sickens us individually and in our body politic.
It is the drug lord’s gambit, now writ large through the participation of the biotech industry, the factory farming industry, the pesticide industry, the veterinary drug industry (Big Pharma again, because more drugs are used annually for animals than for people), the irradiation industry and the Chemical industry. Codex is part of the picture. Codex was born from that impulse.
Visit Nutricide, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5266884912495233634 to learn more about the origins and impact of Codex Alimentarius (the World Food Code) on your health and the world’s.
Please read below this posting for more information on how to take back the world’s food production, put it back in the capable hands of farmers and reverse the devastating nutrition-based illness trends which will be responsible for 75 % of the world’s people by 2025, according to the joint publication of the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s,
The Role of Diet and Exercise in the Prevention of Chronic Disease
visit www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org to learn about the Natural Solutions Foundation’s International Decade of Nutrition and its Valley of the Moon(TM) Eco Demonstration Community in the highlands of Panama’s Chiriqui Highlands.
WHO/FAO’s joint report on the impact of the PREVENTABLE, non communicable chronic degenerative diseases of under nutrition “It has been projected that, by 2020, chronic diseases will account for
almost three-quarters of all deaths worldwide, and that 71% of deaths due to ischaemic heart disease (IHD), 75% of deaths due to stroke, and 70% of deaths due to diabetes will occur in developing countries (4). The number of people in the developing world with diabetes will increase by more than 2.5-fold, from 84 million in 1995 to 228 million in 2025 (5). On a global basis, 60% of the burden of chronic diseases will occur in developing countries.” reaching the proportions already attained in the developed world for these diseases of under nutrition.
Then National Solutions Foundation strongly supports taking back the production of food from the multinational corporations who are, literally, killing us and putting it back into the hands and lands of people who know, and love, the food they grow and are part of the communities they serve. That’s what the International Decade of Nutrition is all about and that is the reason that the Valley of the Moon(TM) Eco Community will house not only a BeyondOrganic(TM) Bio Dynamic Zero Emissions Farm, but a farm school as well.
Please give generously to the Natural Solutions Foundation health freedom and International Decade of Nutrition activities. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to make your tax deductible recurring donation.
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Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
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Farmer in Chief
Michael Pollan, The New York Times
Thursday 09 October 2008
(Copyright – New York Times)
[Reproduced for Educational purposes.]
Federal policies to promote maximum production of commodity crops such as wheat, from which most of our supermarket foods are derived, have succeeded in keeping prices low. But suddenly the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close.
Dear Mr. President-Elect,
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration – the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact – so easy to overlook these past few years – that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on – but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy – 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do – as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis – a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.
In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount – from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.
The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little – a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.
Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”
This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited – designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so – are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food – organic, local, pasture-based, humane – are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”
There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done – fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.
How We Got Here
Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it’s important to understand how that system came to be – and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage – indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
It must be recognized that the current food system – characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table – is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.
Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare – black – from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.
This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer – ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer – and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”
The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.
Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year – a half pound every day.
But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant – factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution – animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete – and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.
What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope – thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy – for trucking food as well as pumping water – is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”
Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.
In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.
I. Resolarizing the American Farm
What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals – if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land.
Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.
Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” – farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops – including animals – as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.
The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale “alternative” farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can’t survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don’t survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason – save current policy and custom – that American farmers couldn’t grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today’s sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.)
Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green – that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don’t farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.
In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields – a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.
Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to “perennialize” commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses – without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.
But that is probably a 50-year project. For today’s agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm – as in Wendell Berry’s elegant “solution.” Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season’s grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste – all without our help or fossil fuel.
If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these – the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it – has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.
It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will – as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.
It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world?
There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn’t produce comparable yields. Today’s organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world – with a population expected to peak at 10 billion – survive on these yields?
First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today’s organic levels could increase the world’s food supply by 50 percent.
The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything – and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.
The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone – however we choose to grow it.
In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels – performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals – is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.
To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food – millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production – as farmers and probably also as gardeners.
The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America – not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.
National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day’s drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food-system impact statements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.
The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.
II. Reregionalizing the Food System
For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy – one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet.
A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.
Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:
Four-Season Farmers’ Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.
Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems – it will – only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.
Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the department’s perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A. should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.
Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda – as well as the food security of billions of people around the world – will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.
Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases – whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons – go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.
Create a Federal Definition of “Food.” It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a “junk food.” We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” – and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you’ll recall President Reagan’s ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only “food” is exempt from local sales tax.
A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets – all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers’ markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.
III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture
In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal – not just federal policy and public education but the president’s bully pulpit and the example of the first family’s own dinner table – to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.
Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” – in Alice Waters’s phrase – by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.
To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day – the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.
But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.
There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible – the other sense in which “sunlight” should be the watchword of our agenda. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.
Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what’s needed is a change of culture in America’s thinking about food, then how America’s first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.
The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence – at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week – a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.
Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.
When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist
Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system – something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.
I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.
You’re probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry – the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat – meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher “family value,” after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?
Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced – it is in fact unconscionably expensive.
Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment – that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.
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Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”
Irradiated food is really bad stuff. Of course, it is not radioactive, but it is filled with disease-causing free radicals caused by the process of bombarding it with high energy radiation, the contents of dead organisms killed by the radiation, inactivated, worthless enzymes, and the bits and pieces of what is known in the legal trade as “filth”: insect parts, rat excrement, hairs, dead vermin, etc., which careful handling would eliminate or minimize.
Food that is going to be irradiated, however, does not receive careful handling typically since it will be “sterilized” by the irradiation. If your food is not only irradiated, but genetically modified and stuffed with toxic chemicals, in other words, meets FDA, USDA and Codex standards, now THAT’s as bad as it gets. That’s fully weaponized, “loaded and locked” food. Don’t go near the stuff.
UGH!
Consumers do not want irradiated food. So the ever corporate-friendly agencies of the government, and of course, Codex Alimentarius, take the crafty step of not telling us whether food is irradiated or not if they can get away without doing so. Once food is processed, it does not have to have the familiar “radura”, the radiation symbol, which the law previously required.
Now that fresh lettuce, spinach and other greens are defined as a “health hazard” by a berserk FDA, they, too, will be irradiated before we can eat them. All of them, unless consumed locally or grown by you or your friends.
What does that tell you? Eat locally. Grow your own food.
Print bumper stickers that say “Grow or Glow” and tell people what that means. Get good at “4 foot square” gardening, or growing on your patio or balcony. Organize window box growing for your community or community gardens. You ARE in control of what goes into your body. If you are not, get yourself organized and get into that position. Meet with your neighbors to make this happen for all of you. You and your neighbors are something else besides neighbors: you are CONSUMERS.
Consumers are very powerful when they take the time and effort to be. Since your food is being weaponized against you and your family (!) GET organized.
Email Kathy Greene, kathy.greene@usa.net, the Community Organization Coordinator of the Natural Solutions Foundation and let us help you get your neighbors motivated and activated. We have an excellent eBook on Community Organizing that we will send you if you ask. Just put “Organizing” in the subject line.
Consumer organizations perform valuable services. Not only can they be watchdogs and whistleblowers, they can provide significant information to other consumers, government officials and agencies, university decision makers and the people who attend and shape policy at national and international meetings. According to our West African sources, in that part of the world, consumers organizations who become upset about an issue can literally bring down a government.
Of course, what that takes is a strong sense of ownership: this is MY body, this is MY environment, this is MY child, this is MY body. And the people living right next store to me, and across town, and across the country care about what happens to me, and to themselves, too.
If companies and governments are lying to me, or poisoning me or corrupting my food, or my field or my child’s body, or keeping deadly secrets of putting me in harm’s way for your own good, we, the Consumers, should, can, will, say “NO!” to what is bad and “YES!” to what is good for us.
Up with consumers and consumerism, I say.
The diametrical opposite to consumerism, of course, is “corporatism”. What is good for corporations, which is generally what governments decide is good for them since so much money is involved, is very often exactly NOT what is good for people, for consumers, for you, for me. And, oh, by the way, it may not be at all good for the environment. In fact, when their decisions and actions are good for the consumer or the environment, that is the cause for press releases and hoopla.
It’s up to us.
The Organic Consumers organization has published a very useful compendium called “WHAT’S WRONG WITH FOOD IRRADIATION, http://www.organicconsumers.org/Irrad/irradfact.cfm. Although food irradiation is presented by government and industry, and, of course, by the ever corporate-friendly FDA and USDA, as benign and helpful, it is neither. Read below and see why irradiation, sometimes misleadingly called “Cold Sterilization” or “Cold Pasturization” is neither.
And then start eating and growing organic!
Check it out and take control of your health by taking control of what you eat!
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
What’s Wrong With Irradiated Food?
Irradiation damages the quality of food.
· Irradiation damages food by breaking up molecules and creating free radicals. The free radicals kill some bacteria, but they also bounce around in the food, damage vitamins and enzymes, and combine with existing chemicals (like pesticides) in the food to form new chemicals, called unique radiolytic products (URPs).
· Some of these URPs are known toxins (benzene, formaldehyde, lipid peroxides) and some are unique to irradiated foods. Scientists have not studied the long-term effect of these new chemicals in our diet. Therefore, we cannot assume they are safe.
· Irradiated foods can lose 5%-80% of many vitamins (A, C, E, K and B complex). The amount of loss depends on the dose of irradiation and the length of storage time.
· Most of the food in the American diet is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for irradiation: beef, pork, lamb, poultry, wheat, wheat flour, vegetables, fruits, shell eggs, seeds for sprouting, spices, herb teas. (Dairy is already pasteurized). A food industry petition currently before the FDA asks for approval for luncheon meats, salad bar items, sprouts, fresh juices and frozen foods. Another petition before the USDA asks for approval for imported fruits and vegetables.
· Irradiation damages the natural digestive enzymes found in raw foods. This means the body has to work harder to digest them.
· If unlabeled, raw foods that have been irradiated look like fresh foods, but nutritionally they are like cooked foods, with decreased vitamins and enzymes. The FDA allows these foods to be labeled “fresh.”
· Irradiated fats tend to become rancid.
· When high-energy electron beams are used, trace amounts of radioactivity may be created in the food.
Science has not proved that a long-term diet of irradiated foods is safe for human health
· The longest human feeding study was 15 weeks. No one knows the long-term effects of a life-long diet that includes foods which will be frequently irradiated, such as meat, chicken, vegetables, fruits, salads, sprouts and juices.
· There are no studies on the effects of feeding babies or children diets containing irradiated foods, except a very small and controversial study from India that showed health effects.
· Studies on animals fed irradiated foods have shown increased tumors, reproductive failures and kidney damage. Some possible causes are: irradiation-induced vitamin deficiencies, the inactivity of enzymes in the food, DNA damage, and toxic radiolytic products in the food.
· The FDA based its approval of irradiation for poultry on only 5 of 441 animal-feeding studies. Marcia van Gemert, Ph.D., the toxicologist who chaired the FDA committee that approved irradiation, later said, “These studies reviewed in the 1982 literature from the FDA were not adequate by 1982 standards, and are even less accurate by 1993 standards to evaluate the safety of any product, especially a food product such as irradiated food.” The 5 studies are not a good basis for approval of irradiation for humans, because they showed health effects on the animals or were conducted using irradiation at lower energies than those the FDA eventually approved.
· The FDA based its approval of irradiation for fruits and vegetables on a theoretical calculation of the amount of URPs in the diet from one 7.5 oz. serving/day of irradiated food. Considering the different kinds of foods approved for irradiation, this quantity is too small and the calculation is irrelevant.
· Even with current labeling requirements, people cannot avoid eating irradiated food. That means there is no control group, and epidemiologists will never be able to determine if irradiated food has any health effects.
· Science is always changing. The science of today is not the science of tomorrow. The science we have today is not adequate to prove the long-term safety of food irradiation.
Irradiation covers up problems that the meat and poultry industry should solve
· Irradiation covers up the increased fecal contamination that results from speeded up slaughter and decreased federal inspection, both of which allow meat and poultry to be produced more cheaply. Prodded by the industry, the USDA has allowed a transfer of inspection to company inspectors. Where government inspectors remain, they are not allowed to condemn meat and poultry now that they condemned 20 years ago.
· Because of this deregulation (continued under President Clinton, a protégé of Tyson Foods), the meat and poultry industry has recently lost money and suffered bad publicity from food-poisoning lawsuits and expensive product recalls. Irradiation is a “magic bullet” that will enable them to say that the product was “clean” when it left the packing plant. (Irradiation, however, does not sterilize food, and any bacteria that remain can grow to toxic proportions if the food is not properly stored and handled.)
· In 2000, seven meat industry associations submitted a petition to USDA to redefine key regulations relating to contamination. If accepted by USDA, this petition would permit unlimited fecal contamination during production, as long as irradiation was used afterward.
Labeling is necessary to inform people so they can choose to avoid irradiated foods
· Because irradiated foods have not been proven safe for human health in the long term, prominent, conspicuous and truthful labels are necessary for all irradiated foods. Consumers should be able to easily determine if their food has been irradiated. Labels should also be required for irradiated ingredients of compound foods, and for restaurant and institutional foods.
· Because irradiation can deplete vitamins, labels should state the amount of vitamin loss after irradiation, especially for fresh foods that are usually eaten fresh. Consumers have the right to know if they are buying nutritionally impaired foods.
· Current US labels are not sufficient to enable consumers to avoid irradiated food. Foods are labeled only to the first purchaser. Irradiated spices, herb teas and supplement ingredients, foods that are served in restaurants, schools, etc., or receive further processing, do not bear consumer labels. Consumer labels are required only for foods sold whole (like a piece of fruit) or irradiated in the package (like chicken breasts). The text with the declaration of irradiation can be as small as the type face on the ingredient label. The US Department of Agriculture requirements have one difference: irradiated meat or poultry that is part of another food (like a tv dinner) must be disclosed on the label.
· The US Food and Drug Administration is currently rewriting the regulation for minimum labeling, and will release it for public comment by early 2002 [now long past – REL]. They may eliminate all required text labels. If they do retain the labels, Congress has told them to use a “friendly” euphemism instead of “irradiation.” [Hence “cold sterilization” or “cold Pasteurization” and similar inaccurate terms on foods which must be labeled, a small minority of foods which are consumed after irradiation -REL]
Electron-beam irradiation today means nuclear irradiation tomorrow
· The source of the irradiation is not listed on the label.
· The original sponsor of food irradiation in the US was the Department of Energy, which wanted to create a favorable image of nuclear power as well as dispose of radioactive waste. These goals have not changed. Cobalt-60, which is used for irradiation, must be manufactured in a nuclear reactor.
· Many foods cannot be irradiated using electron beams. E-beams only penetrate 1-1.5 inches on each side, and are suitable only for flat, evenly sized foods like patties. Large fruits, foods in boxes, and irregularly shaped foods must be irradiated using x-rays or gamma rays from nuclear materials.
· Countries that lack a cheap and reliable source of electricity for e-beams use nuclear materials. Opening U.S. markets to irradiated food encourages the spread of nuclear irradiation worldwide.
[Codex Alimentarius supports the universal irradiation of all foods moving through international trade except those which have been fully processed to an end product like roasted coffee. The USDA requires all fruits and vegetables (with very few limited exceptions) to be irradiated before they are imported into the United States. -REL]
Irradiation using radioactive materials is an environmental hazard
· The more nuclear irradiators, the more likelihood of a serious accident in transport, operation or disposal of the nuclear materials.
· Food irradiation facilities have already contaminated the environment. For example, in the state of Georgia in 1988, radioactive water escaped from an irradiation facility. The taxpayers were stuck with $47 million in cleanup costs. Radioactivity was tracked into cars and homes. In Hawaii in 1967 and New Jersey in 1982, radioactive water was flushed into the public sewer system.
· Numerous worker exposures have occurred in food irradiation facilities worldwide.
Irradiation doesn’t provide clean food
· Because irradiation doesn’t kill all the bacteria in a food, the ones that survive are by definition radiation-resistant. These bacteria will multiply and eventually work their way back to the ‘animal factories’. Soon thereafter, the bacteria that contaminate the meat will no longer be killed by currently approved doses of irradiation. The technology will no longer be usable, while stronger bacteria contaminate our food supply.
· People may become more careless about sanitation if irradiation is widely used. Irradiation doesn’t kill all the bacteria in a food. In a few hours at room temperature, the bacteria remaining in meat or poultry after irradiation can multiply to the level existing before irradiation.
· Some bacteria, like the one that causes botulism, as well as viruses and prions (which are believed to cause Mad Cow Disease) are not killed by current doses of irradiation.
· Irradiation encourages food producers to cut corners on sanitation, because they can ‘clean up’ the food just before it is shipped.
Irradiation does nothing to change the way food is grown and produced
· Irradiated foods can have longer shelf lives than nonirradiated foods, which means they can be shipped further while appearing ‘fresh.’ Food grown by giant farms far away may last longer than non-irradiated, locally grown food, even if it is inferior in nutrition and taste. Thus, irradiation encourages centralization and hurts small farmers.
· The use of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and other agri-chemicals, as well as pollution and energy use, are not affected. Irradiation is applied by the packer after harvest or slaughter.
· Some so-called Free-market economists say irradiation is ‘efficient’: it provides the cheapest possible food for the least possible risk. But these economists are not concerned about the impaired nutritional quality of the food. They are not considering the environmental effects of large-scale corporate farming, the social costs of centralization of agriculture and loss of family farms, the replacement of unionized, impartial government inspectors with company inspectors , the potential long-term damage to human health, and the possibility of irradiation-resistant super-bacteria. All of these developments should be (but are not) considered when regulators and public health officials evaluate the benefits of food irradiation.
In a truly free market, consumers would have access to truthful and not misleading information about all their food choices and could decide for themselves what risks to take. Honest companies would be free to truthfully tell that their products are organic, non-GMO, non-toxic, non-irradiated. Free people are free to choose risks… or to reject them. Slaves, of course, have to take whatever sh-t is dolled out to them.
Which are you?
August 21, 2008
Codex Alimentarius is a friend to Genetically Modified (GM) foods since it allows the US to replicate its devastatingly dangerous lack of labeling for GM foods. Here in the US, such labeling is forbidden since, in 1992, George H. W. Bush, then President, issued an Executive Order granting, as if by the magic of lobbying, equality to natural foods and those produced by biotechnology. Once equivalent, the GM foods not only did not have to be labeled, they MAY not be labeled, according to the ever corporate-friendly FDA — “GM Free” labels are not lawful, according to the FDA.
Not only that, but, playing the heavy at Codex, the US has managed to overcome the resistance of nearly all African countries, the EU and a host of other nations with grave reservations about both the safety of these “foods” and the ethical nature of denying consumers information they overwhelmingly say that they want to have — whether their food has been genetically tampered with or not.
A New York Times – CBS Poll earlier this summer indicated that 87% of Americans want GM labeling; over half would not buy GM food if it were so labeled: http://ecopreneurist.com/2008/05/23/half-of-all-americans-wouldnt-buy-frankenfoodsif-they-could-tell-the-difference/
Prince Charles, Heir Apparent to the throne of England, Wales and Scotland, however, got it right and did so in the face of the Press. Read what the Prince had to say below.
Natural Solutions Foundation commends Prince Charles for his stand on Genetically Modified foods and crops. The prince has long been an advocate of natural food production and a champion of organic farming. He notes, as does the Natural Solutions Foundation, that the industrialization of food production leads not only to inferior food, but drives the subsistence or peasant farmers off their lands creating social devastation along with the devastation of the environment and health for which GM foods are responsible.
The Prince warned that the bio tech corporations are taking us all towards a grim environmental disaster of unprecedented magnitude.
Whatever else the Royal Family of the UK may be engaged in, on this particular battle, they are on the right side and must be welcomed to the Natural Solutions Foundation Hall of Fame.
Congratulations, Prince Charles!
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.YouTube.com/NaturalSolutions
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
Charles in GM ‘disaster’ warning
BBC News August 13, 2008
Prince Charles has his own organic farm at his Gloucestershire estate
Companies developing genetically modified crops risk creating the biggest environmental disaster “of all time”, Prince Charles has warned.
GM crops were damaging Earth’s soil and were an experiment “gone seriously wrong”, he told the Daily Telegraph.
A future reliance on corporations to mass-produce food would drive millions of farmers off their land, he said.
The government said it welcomed all voices in the “important” debate over the future potential role of GM crops.
However, Dr Julian Little, chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, said he was “disappointed” by the Prince’s comments because “they do not seem to be based on any solid evidence”. *
“Our experience from over 10 years of GM cultivation shows that GM technology has been [sic] found to deliver real environmental and economic benefits,” he said. *
Mr Little added: “At a time when demand for food and fuel is rising and in the face of growing environmental challenges, we need to find ways to feed an ever-increasing global population.”
FROM THE TODAY PROGRAMME
More from Today programme
BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell said the Prince’s “robust” comments were “likely to rankle with the government”, which has given the go-ahead to a number of GM crop trials in the UK since 2000.
“Even for a prince who’s a long-established champion of organic farming and critic of GM crops, these are comments which verge on the extreme,” our correspondent said.
Prince Charles told the newspaper that huge multi-national corporations involved in developing GM foods were conducting a “gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong”.
Relying on “gigantic corporations” for food would end in “absolute disaster”, he warned.
“That would be the absolute destruction of everything… and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future.”
What should be being debated was “food security not food production”, he said.
He said GM developers might think they would be successful by having “one form of clever genetic engineering after another”, but he believed “that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time”.
Prince Charles, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, said relying on big corporations for the mass production of food would not only threaten future food supplies but also force smaller producers out of business.
“If they think this is the way to go, we will end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness,” he said.
The prince also told the Telegraph he hoped to see more family-run co-operative farms, with producers working with nature and not against it.
The Prince’s comments come at a time of rising world food prices and food shortages.
The biotech industry says that GM technology can help combat world hunger and poverty by delivering higher yields from crops and also reduce the use of pesticides.
‘Untenable’
In June, Environment Minister Phil Woolas said the government was ready to argue for a greater role for the technology.
But green groups and aid agencies have doubts about GM technology’s effectiveness in tackling world hunger and have concerns about the long-term environmental impact.
Responding to the prince’s comments, a spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Safety will always be our top priority on this issue.” …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7557644.stm
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* In the opinion of the Natural Solutions Foundation, the statements made by Dr. Little are disingenuous at the least. We know of no conclusive evidence that GM products are safe; certainly no long-term studies have been undertaken. Further, there are many suggestive developments, such as the upsurge in Morgellon’s-like syndrome, the reported devastation of the bee population, and similar instances that suggest the long term safety of GM products is not proven. Under the usual Precautionary Principal GM products cannot be deemed safe.
Day 15, May 1, 2008
We are here in Ottawa during a free day when nothing formally related to Codex happens. The Codex Committee on Food Labeling has concluded its work for this year and what happens next is that today, Thursday, is the day that the Codex Secretariat spends preparing a report which will reflect (supposedly) what happened at this meeting. This report will be available tomorrow at 8 AM for everyone to read and then, from 9 AM onwards, the fun starts.
Since the Secretariat has compiled all of the dialogs and proceedings, amendments and corrections (remember, this is a commission that will spend hours fighting over the insertion of a comma – literally) into a draft report, countries and organizations which take exception to what the report says or what it does not say, or how it says it, or the innuendos of the way something was written, or whatever, have the opportunity on Friday, May 2, to go over the report in deep detail. DEEP detail.
Usually, this is simply an exercise in pedantic “place holding” but when the issues are hot and there has been no consensus, despite the assurance by Chair that “I believe we have reached consensus” on the issue, this final session of each meeting gives the participants a final opportunity to play a round of psychological and legal chess by creating a document more to their liking than the discussions may have been or, sometimes, more in keeping with the reality than the report is!
I have spent the day feverishly trying to catch up on emails (I now have 5329 unopened emails in my private email box – none of them spam!) and other issues which require my attention (like laundry!) but have been ignored because of the pressure of events, including reading the huge amount of documentation produced at a Codex meeting. Late in the afternoon, with Canadian Springtime beckoning outside my window, General Bert and I walked over to the market area behind the Rideau Conference Center where the meetings are held each day. There, in a rebuilt market building I saw a group of magnificent hand painted silk blouses, jackets, scarves, etc., in all the colors I love. Alas, unlike the years when I had an income because I was the Medical Director of a successful drug-free medical practice the wonderful textiles were out of reach for me. In years past, I would certainly have bought some of these marvels to take with me. General Bert and I have given up our home, our practice, our income and our personal comfort to become warriors for that most precious of possessions, freedom, specifically, health freedom. And when we have a week like we had this week at this meeting, with real forward movement for a life and death issue like the mandatory labeling of GM food, it is clearly worth it. In case you did not catch it, you might want to take a look at the Press Release that the Natural Solutions Foundation issues about the heavy handed (and, in the end, unwittingly productive for our side) imperial behavior of the US. Here it is: http://www.prweb.com/releases/GM_Labeling/Codex/prweb909004.htm.
This atrocious attitude on the US’ part led to a strong determination of the African countries to develop their own requirements without waiting any longer for Codex to give it to them.
Once other countries start demanding mandatory labeling, we can, too, because our manufacturers will not want to have two labels, one for the US and one for the rest of the world, we will have a much better shot at getting our food labeled, too. Remember, this will be a BIG battle since the corporate friendly FDA has made it clear that they know consumers reject GM food (with good reason!) and will try to keep it from being labeled. That’s the situation now: it is illegal to label food with GM components!
The tide is turning and, if we ride it right, we can ride it in to a safe harbor where our food is clean, safe and labeled! But we have to start now. When the campaign begins, it is essential that we are not hundreds of thousands strong, but millions strong! You know that this is true for every one of our issues – no forced vaccinations, medical privacy, the right to truthful health claims backed by science, the right to know what our food contains and has been exposed to (e.g., pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, irradiation), the right to food that is clean and unadulterated, etc.) – the more of us there are, the more impact we have, not just in a linear motion, but an exponential one!
Therefore, I am asking each person reading this to take a few moments and send an email to your friends, neighbors, contacts, etc, and ask them to visit our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and ask them if they will join the free, secure distribution list for the Health Freedom eAlerts by clicking on the orange tab on the upper right hand corner and filling in your information (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187).
And while we are on the topic, let’s talk about getting here and to the next place and the next one after that, having the resources to do this work and keep on doing it.
General Bert and I take no salary or compensation of any kind for the work we do. We devote our selves much more than full time to defending your freedom and ours. When there have been short falls, we have made them up so that our reserves, retirement funds, etc., have gone into this battle as well as our skills and capacities. And we have, in fact, built the largest health freedom organization in the world. More than that, we have created alliances inside the US and outside of it to bring about the structural, legislative, awareness and social changes which will defend those freedoms from the massive forces threatening them.
But that is expensive. Let me be frank: this meeting, at which we have been an important part of the forward motion (unintended by the US and its corporate and globalist allies, of course, was one which we would not have been able to attend for you if we had not received, pretty close to the last minute, a generous donation which covered our airfare. Well, a pledge, really, since we have not yet received the money, just the verbal assurance from people we trust that the money would be transferred to us soon enough so that we could pay for this trip. Since the donors are honorable people, we trusted them and bought our air tickets and booked our hotels on the basis of their pledge.
This constant worry about where the money is going to come from to keep your freedoms – and ours – protected diverts energy and time from the battle which needs to be waged. Many of you are generous supporters, giving what you can give and giving it more and more through a recurring donation. We appreciate your support enormously and it is the only reason that we can do what we are doing. The larger the list, the more effective we are at getting heard. And the larger the list, the more effective we are at raising the funds to make all of this possible. Very simple, very elegant, very real.
If you are already a supporter making a regular recurring donation, THANK YOU! If you are an occasional donor, thank you, as well, and won’t you consider making another donation today or turning your occasional donations into a recurring one. And if you are one of the folks who has not given your financial support, large or small, to the Natural Solutions Foundation, now is the time. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to make sure that the most powerful voice in health freedom, yours, is there to speak for you in effective and on-going ways!
I cannot think of many times in which such an effective battle for freedom has been waged by so few with so few resources with such high impact. Keep it going! Please! Donate generously. Oh, did I mention that all of your donations are tax deductible? They are! Act now for us all!
Day 16, May 2, 2008
Travel day today, but first I attended as much of the Report session of the CCFL as I could. The draft reports are distributed at 8 AM and then the discussion starts at 9 AM. This time, when the discussion of Agenda Item No. 5, Labeling of GM foods, began, there was blood on the floor. Although the rule is that no new information or discussion can take place and that this process is only to assure accuracy in the final report when there is a hotly contested area of debate, this is another fertile ground for getting things to read the way you want them to read.
The amount of backing and forthing, corrections and dissections this topic aroused was remarkable, just remarkable. There was a prolonged discussion in which the exact wording of a sentence about how the co-chairs of the Ghana Working Group on labeling of GM foods had presented their reports which went on for close to an hour. And it went on and on and on and on.
Finally, I had to leave because we had to catch a plane (I had allowed several hours extra to make sure that we would be present for the full report session, never imagining that it could possibly take as long as it did!). Three hours later, we learned from another delegate who also was leaving to make a plane that the discussion was still stuck on the same section!
Although this seems absurd, the reality is that it is very, very good news for our side.
After all, it means that people are not being bullied. Of course, the US was fighting for every comma, period, jot and tittle of territory it could find to make sure that the strength of the pro-GM labeling folks was mitigated. But our side was doing a good job of playing the same game to mitigate the US position to prevent labeling, as it does so effectively in the US.
More to follow!
Now we are flying to New York to take a plane very early in the morning to Panama. We will hook up with Ralph Fucetola, one of our trustees, and with Tyson Phillips, a member of our team, to fly to Panama for a meeting with people interested in becoming participants in the demonstration project there. If you are interested in that project, which is part of the Natural Solutions Foundation’s International Decade of Nutrition, visit www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org.
Day 17, May 3, 2008
We left JFK (New York) at 6:31 AM (which meant we had to be there at 4:30 AM – YUCK!) and arrived in Panama at about 10:35 AM. We took a taxi to the Country Inn and Suites Hotel and learned, to our pleasure, that our reservations were being honored. This has not always been the case here, I can tell you! So we took our bags up to the rooms and started planning for this week coming in which people will be gathering who are interested in the Santa Clara project.
After we got settled in, we met with our Panamanian lawyer and had a very good meeting lasting several hours in which we asked all of our unanswered questions and got knowledgeable and useful answers. We are very much encouraged about how this project can be put together from the legal and regulatory point of view.
This was a lunch meeting that went on for several hours so none of us were particularly hungry. But all of us were desperately tired and wound up wishing we were asleep long before we were!
We could not go to sleep, however, because we were in the midst of a very interesting meeting shortly after the first one ended. We met with an architect who is VERY concerned over organic and natural issues and is highly supportive of our project. She works for the Government and knows exactly whom we need to talk to and what we need to do. That is great news. Even better news is that she feels that the project as we see it is exactly in line with what the Panamanian Government wants to encourage and that we will not have any difficulty with setting it up from the regulatory point of view.
The Panamanian Government will conduct the Environmental Impact Statement we need and she suggested that we should work with Panamanian Universities to get a great deal of what we need done. We had not thought of that but were very grateful for her suggestions. We will certainly stay in touch with her! Good meeting. By the time it was over, though, all of us were moving through a fog of fatigue which we could barely see through. My bed was sweet to lie in!
Day 18, May 4, 2008
Tyson, General Bert, Ralph and I spent the entire day conferencing on Natural Solutions Foundation issues until Tyson suggested, wisely, that we needed a handbook for the people coming down for the Santa Clara Project. We realized that he was right and set to work to produce one. (Members of the NSF-Panama Forum can see it under “Files” in electronic format). We raced off to the nearest mall to get copies made and bound and got back just in time to meet with two of the people who had come to Panama for the gathering, had dinner with them and then raced back to do the Sunday Conference Call for the Santa Clara Project.
The ability to demonstrate and teach sustainable agriculture and to create a community around that agriculture is an important part of the concept of reclaiming the production of food and the Natural Solutions Foundation is proud to be creating this community as part of its health freedom work. Interested? Send an email to Ralph Fucetola at ralph.fucetola@usa.net with “PANAMA” as the subject line and ask for an invitation to the NSF-Panama Forum. We’ll send an invitation and you can join the discussion to become a part of this amazing project.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedomUSA.org
www.Organics4U.org