Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 USDA is being run lock, stock, and barrel by agribusiness and has abandoned its duty to protect the public and the farming community. This USDA decision, along with FDA's long-standing refusal to label genetically engineered food, and its recent decision to attempt to label irradiated foods as "pasteurized," is a conscious effort by the Administration to leave consumers in the dark about the dangers lurking in their food. |
| REPPED: The Cornucopia Institute, a non-profit organization that promotes honest food and sustainable farming practices, has revealed details of the USDA's conspiracy with agribusiness interests to mislead consumers over the sterilization of almonds. A press release from the Cornucopia Institute, reprinted below, explains that new rules concerning the pasteurization of almonds are an "inside job," made without any real opportunity for public comment. |
| Here is the full press release from the Cornucopia Institute:
USDA and agribusiness Conspire to Mislead Consumers
"Raw" Almonds Must Soon be Steam-Heated or Treated with Toxic Chemical
CORNUCOPIA, WI: Small-scale farmers, retailers, and consumers are outraged over a new federal regulation that will require all almonds grown in California to be sterilized with various "pasteurization" techniques. |
| Adds Kimbrell, "USDA is being run lock, stock, and barrel by agribusiness and has abandoned its duty to protect the public and the farming community. This USDA decision, along with FDA’s long-standing refusal to label genetically engineered food, and its recent decision to attempt to label irradiated foods as "pasteurized," is a conscious effort by the Administration to leave consumers in the dark about the dangers lurking in their food. |
J. Douglas Bremner
See book keywords and concepts |
 However, the USDA's raison d'etre is to promote the interests of agribusiness, cattlemen, and dairy farmers, not to promote sound nutrition.
That has always been the problem with USDA recommendations, particularly regarding the food pyramid. The USDA's interest in promoting agribusiness is at odds with its attempts to recommend a healthful diet. Historically, lobbyists for the dairy and cattle industries have pressured the USDA to include recommendations for dietary intakes of meat and dairy products that are not always in the best interests of our health. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |
 And though there are many ways to read the facts on milk— it's a complex subject involving not only food but agribusiness, economics, and politics as well as nutrition—my job is to give you my reading of those facts, and my reading is this: Cow's milk is a great food if you're a baby cow, and even if you're a human— provided it comes direct from grass-fed cows untreated with antibiotics, steroids, and hormones, and is raw, unpasteurized and unhomogenized—but even calves probably wouldn't touch the stuff we get in supermarkets. |
David R. Montgomery
See book keywords and concepts |
 Not surprisingly, agribusiness portrays pesticide and fertilizer intensive agriculrure as necessary to feed the world's poor. Even though almost a billion people go hungry each day, industrial agriculture may not be the answer. Over the past five thousand years population kept pace with the ability to feed people. Simply increasing food production has not worked so far, and it won't if population growth keeps up. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that farmers already grow enough to provide 3,500 calories a day to every person on the planet. |
| Over the long run, we simply can't afford not to, despite what agribusiness interests will argue. We can greatly improve conventional farming practices from both environmental and economic perspectives by adopting elements of organic technologies. Oddly, our government subsidizes conventional farming practices, whereas the market places a premium on organic produce. A number of recent studies report that organic farming methods not only retain soil fertility in the long term, but can prove cost effective in the short term. |
Mark Sircus
See book keywords and concepts |
 Cheryl Long and Lynn Keiley writing for Mother Earth News3 tell us that "American agribusiness is producing more food than ever before, but the evidence is building that the vitamins and minerals in that food are declining. For example, eggs from free-range hens contain up to 30% more vitamin E, 50% more folic acid and 30% more vitamin B12 than factory eggs.
"Most of our food now comes from large-scale producers who rely on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and animal drugs, and inhumane confinement animal production. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |
| Now whether or not those measurable differences have any real impact on our health is a matter of huge debate. agribusiness would like you to think that they don't. I suspect that they do.
THE ORGANIC MOVEMENT DEMANDS A RETURN TO "NATURAL" FARMING
This brings us to organic foods. The whole idea of the organic food movement—the "spirit" of the movement, if you will—was a desire to return to basics. |
| Grapefruit growers in one part of the country did not want data out there showing that grapefruits grown in another part of the country had more vitamin C. agribusiness is dedicated to selling us the concept that "carrots are carrots, beef is beef." (Of course, that's demonstrably not true. Just for example: On a gram for gram basis, a California avocado has 77 percent more monounsaturated fat, 44 percent more potassium, and 21 percent more fiber than its Florida brethren. |
J. Douglas Bremner
See book keywords and concepts |
| The USDA's interest in promoting agribusiness is at odds with its attempts to recommend a healthful diet. Historically, lobbyists for the dairy and cattle industries have pressured the USDA to include recommendations for dietary intakes of meat and dairy products that are not always in the best interests of our health. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 Cornucopia Institute reveals agribusiness conspiracy to mislead consumers over almonds http://www.newstarget.com/021783.html
Almond Board of California changes its story following NewsTarget article http://www.newstarget.com/021781.html
 Fraudulent marketing, illegal labeling
The Almond Board of California is right now conspiring with the USDA to allow the fraudulent labeling of almonds that are being sold to consumers. How? |
Jeffrey M. Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
 In this area, the US government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do,' said Dr. Henry Miller ... who was responsible for biotechnology issues at the Food and Drug Administration from 1979 to 1994."5
Following Monsanto's lead, in 1992 the Council on Competitiveness chaired by Vice President Dan Quayle identified GM crops as a promising industry that could increase US exports. On May 26, Quayle announced "reforms" to "speed up and simplify the process of bringing" GM products to market without "being hampered by unnecessary regulation. |
Byron J. Richards
See book keywords and concepts |
 This is an anti-competition scam that is helping multinational agribusiness destroy our rural communities. The New Hunter-Gatherer has a social responsibility to help change this situation through purchasing decisions. If we don't do this, high-quality food may soon disappear entirely from our food supply.
The guardians of the quality of our food supply are not the federal government, the FDA, the EPA, or multinational agribusinesses. This is like having the fox in charge of the chicken coup. The true guardians are the sustainable family farmers; they are the heroes. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
See book keywords and concepts |
 Today's foods are less nutritious than their counterparts of yesteryear, owing largely to methods employed by modern agribusiness to increase agricultural yield and shelf life—at the expense of nutrient content and consumer health.
The combined stresses of nutrient depletion and toxicity lead to liver stress, dysfunction, and ultimately disease. The daily toll that is taken on our livers by undernutrition (often coupled with overeating) and toxic overload is not immediately apparent. |
Gabriel Cousens
See book keywords and concepts |
 This economic reality of high-priced fresh foods is going to encourage you to frequent farmer's markets, co-ops, and locally grown foods where the costs are much lower for higher-quality foods because the prices are not controlled by agribusiness, which tends to push the high-calorie junk foods.
Buying local food straight from the farmer puts you in closer touch with the origin of the food, cuts a significant portion of the time and money spent transporting and "selling" the food, saves you money, and places more dollars in the pocket of those who produce your food. |
Mark Sircus
See book keywords and concepts |
| Most of our food now comes from large-scale producers who rely on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and animal drugs, and inhumane confinement animal production. In agribusiness, the main emphasis is on getting the highest possible yields and profits; nutrient content (and flavor) are, at best, second thoughts. This shift in production methods is clearly giving us less nutritious eggs and meat. Beef from cattle raised in feedlots on growth hormones and high-grain diets has lower levels of vitamins E, A, D and beta carotene, and twice as much fat, as grass-fed beef. |
Stacy Malkan
See book keywords and concepts |
 One of the top government watchdog groups in the US capital, EWG was busy writing exposes about dangerous pesticides in the country's food supply and tracking millions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to big agribusiness. Taking a few weeks out to write a report about nail polish seemed like a good way to get laughed out of the environmental community. But Jane Houlihan's discovery that a chemical linked to birth defects was a common ingredient in nail polish was unsettling. She suspected it wasn't the whole story either. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
See book keywords and concepts |
 With the birth of agriculture approximately ten thousand years ago, and the rise of global agribusiness in the last two centuries, contemporary diets have become progressively more divergent from the diets of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who foraged freely for their food. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Carol Tucker Foreman, Monsanto Biotech Lobbyist and Director of the agribusiness Industry Funded Public Voice to Clinton's Global Consultative Forum as the "Consumer Advocate."
¦ L. Val Giddings, former USDA biotechnology regulator negotiator, now Vice President for Food and Agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO).
¦ Margaret Miller, former Laboratory Supervisor Monsanto, now
Deputy Director Human Food Safety, Center for Veterinary Medicine, FDA.
¦ Lidia Watrud, former Monsanto biotech researcher, now senior scientist EPA Environmental Effects Laboratory. |
Carlo Petrini
See book keywords and concepts |
 A gastronome who has an ecological sensibility and who tries to promote forms of social justice through his choices cannot remain indifferent to a system of this kind, which is simply a global economic-financial pendant of the agribusiness model. As I have mentioned, this system has caused immense damage in the past and continues to do so: we must reject it out of hand. |
| La tera Ve basa, "the land is low," they say in Piedmont: the farmers life is a hard one, and the conditions to which many of them have been reduced cry out for revenge. agribusiness has turned small farmers into factory workers, slaves, paupers with no hopes for the future. Millions of farmers in the world do not even own the land they work.
We must create a new system that will give these people due recognition for the vital role they play: we cannot do without the farmers, the producing communities. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| Based in part on the agribusiness Examiner Newsletter, June 16, 1999.
Appendix IV
Jane Akre and Steve Wilson vs. Fox TV and Monsanto
In November 1996, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, a highly experienced and prize winning husband and wife reporter team, were hired by Florida Fox station WTVT to head the station's news investigation unit. Their first major assignment was to conduct a detailed investigation of the potential, if any, risks of rBGH and rBGH milk. |
Carlo Petrini
See book keywords and concepts |
| In Africa, farmers are dying of hunger; Indian peasants commit suicide, crushed by the competition of agribusiness. Agricultural production in many parts of the world is indistinguishable from industrial production before the advent of the trade unions. Peasants die on the job or leave the country to go to live in miserable conditions in huge cities like Mexico City, Lima, Sao Paulo, New Delhi, and Beijing. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| The agreement included a pledge to divest about 20 percent of Monsanto's agribusiness interests, reflecting adverse publicity and consumer acceptance of the company's genetically engineered food particularly in Europe.
January 1, 2000: The European Union (EU) converted its 1990 moratorium on the uses and marketing of rBGH into a formal ban.
April 3, 2000: Monsanto and Pharmacia & Upjohn merged to form the new Pharmacia Corporation, with an autonomous Monsanto agricultural subsidiary. |
Michele Simon
See book keywords and concepts |
 Never mind those pesky government subsidies and tax breaks to big agribusiness and food manufacturers that make unhealthy food so cheap and ubiquitous. Thank goodness Uncle Sam has created a Web site to counter all that.
At a press conference unveiling the new pyramid, USDA Secretary Mike Johanns shared the stage with fitness guru Denise Austin. Introduced by Johanns as a "wife and mother," Austin, overflowing with energy, implored reporters to join her in a stretching routine. That the federal government's unveiling of a $2. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| This endorsement was coupled with insistence that the public has an absolute right-to-know of information on avoidable causes of cancer, a democratic right which the agribusiness and FDA continue to subvert.
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. Chairman
Cancer Prevention Coalition
Use of rBST in South Africa SAMPRO Press Release November 1,2005
SAMPRO (The South African Milk Processors Organisation) has decided to formally oppose the use of rBST in dairy herds. As a result, SAMPRO will submit a formal application for the deregulation of rBST to the relevant Government institution. |
Carlo Petrini
See book keywords and concepts |
| In the areas that have been conquered by agribusiness, we must give small producers back their dignity and encourage "clean" small-scale production.
But in order to make this possible, those who exceed the limits will have to be penalized, and governments must support the birth—the rebirth—of a new rurality. By this I mean a countryside that is "clean" and attractive, and not only in the aesthetic sense of the word: a pleasant place to live where the quality of life is guaranteed. |
Email this page to a friend
