Results of HR875-type laws in Europe

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Here’s an excerpt from a recent story on dailykos.com which looks at the implications of legislation such as bill HR875 which is now before the U.S. House of Representatives, and examines the potential fallout, using a variety of sources and material from around the world. Here’s an excerpt:

“[This diary, as will be apparent,  was written by a large number of people working together, and is based on work by many others around the world.  This issue is generating efforts by more and more people and has led to a coming together of groups across farming, food, health, families, anti-GMOs, anti-pesticides, justice, indigenous peoples, etc.]

To begin with a reminder.  Food Democracy Now put this out as an alert:  Michael Taylor, Monsanto executive and lawyer, the guy who ran the FDA under Clinton and gave us rBGH and genetically engineered food, is waiting to run “food safety” from an office inside the White House.   
http://www.postcarbon.org/…

All else, no matter how awful (and it is all truly and dangerously awful), becomes trivial detail after the above is understood and the implications taken in.

• Scaredhuman’s diary :: ::

Abject dependence for food is the Kissinger plan – “control food, control people” – and it is what has been done to Iraq, http://www.uruknet.de/…

Normal seed varieties are disappearing from the EU because of standards imposed there (all seeds much be on a registry which it costs thousands and thousands of pounds to get onto so farmers cannot afford get their normal seeds onto it, so the great variety of seeds that are critical to protect for all of us, are not legal to sell and their survival is threatened now.)

Here is a small piece of what someone sent, seeing it on the Crooks and Liars.  It’s almost a joke in its stupidity but serious in how badly it misleads people who are concerned.

There is no language in HR 875 that would regulate, penalize, or shut down backyard gardens or ‘criminalize’ gardeners; the bill focuses on ensuring the safety of food in interstate commerce.

Of course not.  Did George W. Bush say he was taking over Iraq for the oil?  How dumb do we think they are?  And how truly dumb of us to think they would “say” what they are doing.  It is all slyly done, and those places are covered under regulations involving anyone “holding” or “transporting” of food.

In addition, the bill defines all of us, not just farmers, as engaging in interstate commerce.

“Farmer’s markets would not be regulated, fined, or shut down, and would, in fact, benefit from strict safety standards applied to imported food to ensure that unsafe imported food doesn’t compete with locally grown produce.”

Imported food can be exempted.  

Read the bill.  Stop asking organizations to interpret it for you.  They appear to be lousy at it, to have little understanding of laws that must be seen in relation to it, to realize the words there which has harmless lay meaning come with legal definitions that are significant.  Or they may have agendas you don’t know about.  

This article was written to lay the bill open, to relate innocuous looking passages to existing law that make it clear those passages are saying something other than a surface interpretation would give, so it is possible to see what they can actually cover.  What looks benign is not. 
http://www.opednews.com/…

“Strict safety standards” (written by whom?  governed by whom?  for whose benefit?  with what impact already in the EU?  for what purpose?) will apply to Americans and our farms, farmers markets, gardens, etc.

In fact, insidious damage to our ability to raise organic food – using exactly “strict safety standards” – has already begun.  It is happening to THE most essential piece of equipment for sustainable agriculture –  seed cleaning equipment, which allows for the collection of normal seed versus being dependent on only genetically engineered seeds.  

This year, 2009, standard seed cleaning equipment, used for decades with no problems of any kind, is nowillegal for farmers (in some parts of the country so far) to use.  This year they must meet “strict safety standards” imposed by the FDA over seeds – which have just now suddenly been redefined as “food”), and that would require them to purchase a a million to a million and half dollar building and equipment – to cleaneach type of seed.  Seeds cleaned on the normal equipment is illegal for farmers to sell.  

As this is applied across the country, organic seed and heritage seed supplies will start disappearing.  And obviously, this inability to sell seed will destroy some farmers who raise seed specifically and seed companies.

Then, the government need only  apply the same “strict standard” to “storage facilities” and require million dollar facilities (or higher) for anyone storing seeds (and “sorting” and “storing” are both listed in HR 875), and that is the quiet and simple end of all seed banks, seed exchanges, and our own private holding of seed, without anyone ever having had to mention criminalizing a thing.  Just “food safety.”

In fact, in the bill, they never mention seed at all.

These “food safety” standards, applied suddenly to seeds, and coming out of the FDA where Monsanto has had huge influence and announced at the ASTA (American Seed Trade Association) which Monsanto runs, 
http://www.opednews.com/… 
comes on top of Monsanto buying up seed companies across the country and around the world, and attacking the people who do the seed cleaning.

Meanwhile, Monsanto is aggressively taking control of seeds worldwide. 
http://www.seedalliance.org/…

Here is a time line of their take over of seeds. 
http://www.historycommons.org/…

And they own terminator technology, which is a means of making sure no one can grow seed from seeds they purchase, so this would limit seed production to only labs. 
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.ne…

Here is a limited view of the multiple ways Monsanto is putting normal seeds out of reach. 
http://survivingthemiddleclasscrash….

Food and Water Watch supports HR 875 and put out a list of things they say are not in the bill, saying they wanted to counter “myths” and “rumors” on the internet that the bill would criminalize organic farming and take over seeds. They give no specifics to back up their “facts,” so people broke the bill apart, added legal help in understanding it, and commentary to offer any reader a chance to decide for themselves what is myth and what is fact.  http://www.opednews.com/…

Given how peculiar FWW’s position is on a bill that that farming communities across the country are desperately trying to stop, it might be useful to look into who funds FWW.  Farmers are clearly right to say the bill and the companions ones are terrible since for them since we only need look across the Atlanta to see that “harmonized” bills (turned into laws) in Europe are wiping out farmers there. 
http://www.iht.com/… 
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/…

I explained to the attendant body that in a Country where 22 percent of the working population are involved in agriculture, and the majority on small farms, it would not be a good idea to follow the same regime as had been operated in the UK and other EU member countries, in which ‘restructuring’ agriculture had involved throwing the best farmers off the land and amalgamating their farms into large scale monocultural operations designed to supply the predatory supermarket chains. You could have heard a pin drop.

After clearing her throat and leaning slowly forward, the chair-lady said: “I don’t think you understand what EU policy is. Our objective is to ensure that farmers receive the same salary parity as white collar workers in the cities. The only way to achieve this is by restructuring and modernising old fashioned Polish farms to enable them to compete with other countries agricultural economies and the global market. To do this it will be necessary to shift around one million farmers off the land and encourage them to take city and service industry jobs to improve their economic position. The remaining farms will be made competitive with their counterparts in western Europe.”

There in a nutshell you have the whole tragic story of the clinically instigated demise of European farming over the past three decades. We protested that with unemployment running at 20 percent how would one provide jobs for another million farmers dumped on the streets of Warsaw? This was greeted with a stony silence, eventually broken by a lady from Portugal, who rather quietly remarked that since Portugal joined the European Union, 60 percent of small farmers had already left the land. “The European Union is simply not interested in small farms,” she said.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/…

As to “food safety,” the bills in Congress actually lower national food safety standards here.  This follows HACCP which Bill Clinton pushed and which is also tied to Monsanto and which also lowered standards, centralizing control over food, substituting regulations and monumental paper work for on the ground inspection, and wiping out, just in Kansas, 72 local meat processors who’d never had any problems.  

Carol Tucker Foreman’s return to the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) to become director of a new Food Policy Institute for CFA after having been an outspoken lobbyist on behalf of Monsanto’s rBGH not only illustrates what can and often does frequently happen to ex-Washington liberals, but also calls into question whether some self-proclaimed consumer organizations now see their constituencies as consumers or corporations. …

“Carol Foreman,” [Rod Leonard, long-time consumer activist and current executive director of the Community Nutrition Institute] writes, “a newly minted Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, approved that year a change in food safety procedures that would have far reaching consequences. Foreman, one of only a few consumer advocates to reach so high a federal post, decided that poultry visibly smeared with fecal matter could be safely eaten after the feces was washed away. …

Thus, seemingly innocuous public health decisions have far reaching consequences not evident until long after. Easing food safety standards a generation ago began a deterioration in the nation’s food safety shield today that is a public scandal. And, bacteria swiftly become resistant to antibiotics when drugs are licensed as feed additives, creating a public health crisis that is just now unfolding.

“Reviewing past mistakes has more than passing historical interest,” Leonard notes, “Foreman is now revisiting the public interest scene as a newly minted consumer advocate, having recently announced her retirement as a Washington lobbyist for various corporate interests, including Monsanto, a corporation that is building its stock value through manipulating genes to make genetically modified foods as well as public policy on food safety, i.e., lobbying.” … 
“There is no mystery here,” he declares.”Over the past six years, even while representing Monsanto and other corporate clients, Foreman has been one of the most vociferous supporters of Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Program (HACCP), an awkward acronym for a program to deregulate food safety.

“The major reason for Foreman’s renewed interest in food safety, however, is contained in her explanation for returning to CFA, i.e., she will seek to develop policies `that assure food safety in a global economy.’ HACCP is the keystone of President Clinton’s globalization strategy to restrict the ability of Congress and of citizens at risk of health to make food safety a political, or policy issue.”

http://www.organicconsumers.org/…

Reading about HACCP will help you see how much it is key to much of the food safety problems we find in industrial settings and key to understanding what the bills in Congress are about.  The dropping of food safety standards allows for a globalization of lower standards that the benefit of multinationals, easing their import and export of anything – Chinese food, diseases animals from south of here, owned by JBS Swift, the largest cattle/beef operation in the world….”

Read the whole thing here.