EPA to Test for Glyphosate Residues

From the Volatility blog:

“The FDA is required by law to test and regulate food additives. As part of the product design and intended use of herbicide tolerant GMOs such as the Roundup Ready system, pesticide residues such as those of glyphosate suffuse the cells of the crops including any eventual food products. These are food additives according to any reasonable definition.

The same is true of the insecticidal endotoxins in Bt crops. The FDA has directly flouted the law in refusing to regulate these highly toxic additives or even to require their listing among the ingredients of food. One reason why the FDA has refused to test glyphosate residues is to help give it the pretext of ignorance. A surprisingly common excuse among regulators is to say in effect, “We can’t do anything, because we don’t have any information, because we refuse to test for that information (and reject it when others test for it and offer it to us).” Listen to what the likes of the FDA and EPA say and you’ll come across it frequently. So it is with glyphosate levels in food.

Growing threats to human life on earth

Alex Jones thinks GMO foods are part of a “soft kill” solution:

From Willie Nelson and Anna Lappe on Reader Supported News:

“Why we must occupy our food system

Our food is under threat. It is felt by every family farmer who has lost their land and livelihood, every parent who can’t find affordable or healthy ingredients in their neighborhood, every person worried about foodborne illnesses thanks to lobbyist-weakened food safety laws, every farmworker who faces toxic pesticides in the fields as part of a day’s work.

When our food is at risk we are all at risk.

What is “organic”?

From Russ on his “Volatility” blog:

“For food or anything else to be organic is for it to exist and evolve in harmony with the rest of nature and human history. Our natural history, in its culinary aspect, can be called grass farming. We worked hard to maintain the savannah as the best habitat for our food and for our safety.

Over thousands of years we were forced by elites into the strait jacket of agriculture based on annual grasses with giant seed pods: wheat, corn, rice. Although agriculture had many potential forms, on account of the malevolence of the hierarchies in control it became politically and socially destructive and environmentally unsustainable.

Walmart’s donation to Growing Power

From Andy Fisher on Civil Eats blog:

“Everyone hates fundraising. I am one of those rare souls who actually likes it, but I know how time-consuming, disheartening, and frustrating it can be. Having been the main fundraiser for the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) for 14 years, I am intimately familiar with the realities of non-profit fundraising. So, the recent news that Growing Power was accepting a million dollar donation from Wal-Mart was not so surprising. A million clams is, as they say in D.C., “real money.”

U.S. farm bill to favour the big guys

From Russ on the Volatility blog:

“It’s that time again. Farm Bill season is upon us! It’ll actually be an agonizing, protracted process; the unlamented previous House Agriculture chairman Colin Peterson had wanted to get much of the work done in 2011; new and unwanted chairman Frank Lucas says there’s no hurry. The thing probably won’t be done before the election, and maybe never.

At any rate, we’re off to a stuttering, smoky start with the first official hearing in the Senate committee last Thursday. Ag Secretary Vilsack promised or threatened that the next Farm Bill will be “smaller”. This echoes the previously congealed conventional wisdom.

Although most of the rhetoric has focused on cutting the direct payment program, we know that favorite targets will also be the crumbs for relocalization, small farmers, organic production, sustainable practices, and other things which got some modest support in the 2008 Farm Bill. These are already being targeted by the crafters of the Appropriations Bill.

If food sovereignty was a basic right…

From Russ, on his “Volatility” blog:

“The mostly unspoken basis of the 1787-88 Constitution, in the minds of its framers, was to establish a monopoly on political and economic power by elites: Landed, merchant, creditor elites. Their success depended mostly on their having a coherent ideology and plan.

In the same way, if we envision a New Constitutional Convention, it won’t do to be scattershot, starting on an ad hoc basis, speculating about how this or that sounds good. That’s sort of what I did in this post, proposing a list of possible amendments. Let’s review:

* The enshrinement of Food Sovereignty as a basic right. (This would certainly have been the First Amendment if anyone in 1788 could have contemplated a day when the federal government would explicitly deny we have a right to grow and eat the foods of our choice. But even the opponents of the centralized government who demanded the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, as suspicious as they were, never contemplated such an obscene assault on our liberty and dignity.)

New review of the movie “Fresh”

Russ reviews the movie “Fresh” on his “Volatility” website:

“Last week I went to a screening of the movie, “Fresh”, about the corporate food system and how to restore sane farming practices. It’s an excellent primer on the basics, with lots of inspiring as well as harrowing images.

Much of the attack is against CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), AKA factory farms. These are a physical, moral, aesthetic, and socioeconomic disaster. They’ve been the form of concentration of cattle, hogs, and chickens, destroying innumerable autonomous farmers in America, Eastern Europe, indirectly in Africa, and elsewhere.

Food sovereignty in the post-oil future

Russ at Volatility blog, from a post titled “What’s Our Affirmative”:

“…1. Food Sovereignty: This is the philosophy that we have a human right, not just to food but to the land to grow the food, and to a polity and economic structure which supports and enhances this right. Then it’s also the practice of this right, including the political struggle to attain it.

There’s the core of my whole program. Agricultural science has proven that medium and small size organic agriculture is more productive than corporate monoculture. This fact will become ever more critical for our physical survival as we enter the post-oil age, since industrial agriculture is overwhelmingly dependent upon fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, mechanical harvesting and processing, and transportation. So this agricultural transformation is a physical necessity. 

The neo-feudalism of corporations

From Russ on the Volatility blog:

Contrary to propaganda, there’s nothing modernistic about corporations. On the contrary, they’re a carryover phenomenon from feudalism.

This feudal vestige persisted through the early heyday of capitalism, soon becoming the preferred mode of organization to prevent the full textbook logic of capitalism from developing. The result was that the economy never evolved beyond a feudal-capitalist hybrid.

And once capitalism reached its terminal stage starting in the 1970s, where the combination of Peak Oil and the terminally declining profit rate threatened to attenuate forms of economic domination completely, the corporation became the basic unit of class war, and the anti-social, anti-political, anti-sovereign form around which full feudalism is intended to be restored.

The Myth of the Green Revolution

From Russ’ post on “The Corporatism of Food and the Sustainable Solution” on his “Volatility” blog:

The so-called Green Revolution was one of the great myths of our time. The Big Lie is that there was great famine around the world, caused, as Malthus would say, by the depraved profligacy of the poor. According to this lie the Green Revolution, i.e. monocropping with massive fossil fuel and chemical poison inputs, all of it under the auspices of multinational corporations, brought food to these benighted, helpless masses.

The truth is that for thousands of years the growers of the world always produced enough food for themselves and their communities. This has remained true in modern times. Natural famines are practically unrecorded in history. On the contrary, almost all mass famines have occurred in modern times, and they have all been the purely artificial result of food being stolen by non-productive classes from the productive class, under those same corporate and globalized-government distribution structures which the GR now claimed would save its own victims. But the GR was really intended to further impress this corporate global control upon them. It was really a vast example of disaster capitalism.