NATURAL SOLUTIONS FOUNDATION
RIMA E. LAIBOW, MD – THE DR. RIMA INSTITUTE
THE NATURAL SOLUTIONS CENTER
VOLCAN, CHIRIQUÍ, PANAMA
Index: Action Item – Open Letter – Dr. Rima Video
Open letter to Michelle Obama from Dr. Rima
I am writing to you because you are a mother, a champion of childhood health and the wife of the current President of the United States. One of your first acts upon assuming the third of those roles, as First Lady, was to install an organic garden on the White House grounds. We applaud that demonstration of intent.
Although there were problems — (the EPA said that the ground in which the garden was planted was too toxic for human agricultural use because of the chemicals used on it previously, in order to manicure the lawn) — and opposition (the pesticide industry felt – correctly – that your decision to grow an organic garden indicated that chemical-free food was healthier than food produced using those chemicals). Thus, your decision to plant an organic garden was an act of wise, even courageous, leadership.
We note your background interest in wholesome food and decry the much-weakened, but still unacceptable mis-named “Food Safety” bill, passed [after being passed back and forth between House and Senate, like the hot-potato is was].
This new law industrializes food production in the United States. The weak local farm distribution exemptions are, in fact, nearly meaningless and the playing field is sharply tilted against the only source of clean food in the United States: the small grower who might, until the implementation of this bill, have chosen to grow clean, unadulterated food, but now will find ever more expensive barriers against continuing in business.
To be truly clean food it must be free of chemicals, genetic modification and odious secret regulations by the Department of Homeland Security. That locally produced and distributed clean food is, in fact, a food source which has NEVER produced a single major outbreak of food borne illness, while commercial, industrialized, GMO and chemically gown “phactory phud” [“It taste something like real food, but it ain’t.”] is responsible for every single episode of such illness.
Not counted in the statistics on food borne illness, however, is what the World Health Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization list in their joint 2003 publication (http://www.who.int/hpr/NPH/docs/who_fao_expert_report.pdf) as PREVENTABLE, NON COMMUNICABLE DISEASES OF UNDER-NUTRITION: cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke, diabetes and obesity.
These are also food borne diseases, Mrs. Obama, and they are killing us, and our children, at increasing rates because the oversight of the FDA, now newly empowered by this new legislation with 4000 new agents intruding on small farmers to bring their practices into “compliance” with those of the same agribiz operations which are killing us by damaging our food. This will not improve food safety!
Secret regulations (permitted in section 104) promulgated by the most inefficient and non-transparent organ of the US Government will not improve food safety. Relying on local inspectors with local interests, and on local producer organizations would continue the best food safety record in the world, from which our localities already benefit. If this bill is signed into law, the regulations issued under the new law will determine whether local production and distribution can continue to meet consumer needs. These regulations need to protect important interests, including:
a. Implementing the exemption for local production and distribution in the least burdensome way.
b. Assuring that Section 104’s “in the interest of national security” clause is not used to create secret regulations favoring Big AgBiz and,
c. No “back-door” HARMonization of our food freedoms with international Codex Alimentarius restrictions.
What will improve food safety is for the President of the United States, who, like you, is a parent, and who eats food which either makes him sick or promotes his health, to veto this bill. That would be the best outcome for the People, but not for Big AgBiz.
The industrialization of the food supply, which this bill accelerates, has brought the US epidemic degenerative, preventable, tragic and costly disease. The acceleration of this process through this unnecessary and profoundly unwise bill will aid the pharmaceutical companies and their agricultural/biotech arms, but will hasten and intensify the incidence and prevalence of the preventable illness and death, including the epidemics of diabetes, obesity, cancer and cardiovascular diseases killing us at younger and younger ages.
Mrs. Obama, I urge you in your capacities as wife, mother and First Lady, to bend every effort to urge President Obama to veto this legislation and bend his every effort to create true food safety in the United States by supporting clean agriculture, banning the use of GMO foods in the United States and restoring health to the American people by preserving their Food Freedom — restoring clean food on their tables.
Sincerely,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
www.DrRima.net
