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This Saturday, May 25, tens of thousands of activists across six continents, 41 countries and more than 330 cities are expected to “March Against Monsanto.”  Instigated and driven completely by grassroots activists, this global day of action hopes to demonstrate that, when many people ban together for justice and transparency, they can fight back against the powerful few. Watch this InfoWars news alert about Monsanto’s CEO feeling threatened by grassroots efforts, particularly social media.

Food & Water Watch supports the solutions that March Against Monsanto advocates for – the need for mandatory GE food labeling and further scientific research on the health and environmental impacts of GE food and repealing the Monsanto Rider that slipped into the recent budget bill (also known as the Monsanto Protection Act).

We too call for more transparency about the undue influence that Monsanto and other biotechnology seed corporations hold over our government and recently released a stunning report about how the U.S. State Department works to promote Monsanto and the biotech seed industry on the taxpayer’s dime. Link to that report as well as a corporate profile on Monsanto and a primer on GE food, below.

Food & Water Watch is proud to be supporting March Against Monsanto activities in various cities across the country – New York City; New Brunswick, New Jersey; Miami, Florida; Portland, Maine; Mystic, Connecticut; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Detroit, Michigan (check out these great pictures from a sign and costume making party earlier this week); Chicago and Springfield, Illinois; Des Moines and the Quad Cities, Iowa; Cincinnati, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle and Ramond, Washington.

Whether or not you’re planning to March Against Monsanto this weekend, arm yourself with the facts. Food & Water Watch reports, fact sheets, blogs, press releases and sharable images can all be found here: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/genetically-engineered-foods/monsanto/, and more information on GE foods here: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/genetically-engineered-foods/.

Statement of Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter 

Washington, D.C.—“Food & Water Watch commends USDA for listening to tens of thousands of consumers and hundreds of farm, consumer, rural, faith, food and environmental groups and releasing a final rule on country origin labeling (COOL) that makes sensible changes to the labeling requirements for meat.

“The final rule eliminates the vague and misleading ‘mixed origin’ country of origin label for meat and ensures that each cut of meat clearly displays each stage of production (where the animal was born, raised and slaughtered) on the label. This commonsense approach improves the usefulness of the information consumers receive from the label and allows livestock producers to distinguish their products in the marketplace. This change also addresses concerns raised in a World Trade Organization challenge to the current rules, and actually improves the integrity of country of origin labels by passing information that is already gathered by meatpackers on to consumers.

“The 2008 Farm Bill established mandatory COOL for beef, pork, poultry, fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables and some nuts, but Canada and Mexico successfully challenged the implemented rules for meat products at the World Trade Organization as a barrier to international trade.

“There is overwhelming consumer support for country of origin labels and a growing interest by consumers in knowing the source of their food. People have the right to know where the food they feed their families comes from. USDA’s new COOL rules significantly improve the disclosure of information to consumers.”

Background:

Feb. 12, 2013, Food & Water Watch released a legal memo that provides a roadmap for COOL: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/pressreleases/consumers-and-farmers-show-usda-how-to-stand-up-for-country-of-origin-labeling/

April 2, 2013, Nationwide Coalition Urges USDA to Protect Integrity of Country of Origin Labels: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/pressreleases/22400/

April 9, 2013, More than 35,000 consumers and farmers support COOL: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/pressreleases/more-than-35000-consumers-and-farmers-urge-usda-to-protect-country-of-origin-labels/

 Contact: Anna Ghosh, aghosh(at)fwwatch(dot)org, 415-293-9905

By Patty Lovera

Confused about the Farm Bill? Click here to read our report, Farm Bill 101.

This week, both the House and Senate Agriculture committees adopted their versions of the 2013 Farm Bill. This is the latest move in the long-running attempt to pass a “normal” 5-year farm bill to replace one that was last passed in 2008. Several attempts to pass a farm bill in 2012 were unsuccessful and the farm bill that is currently in effect is a short-term extension that expires in September 2013.

There are some significant differences between the House and the Senate, in both what their bills actually contain and in the process used to get them through the committee. Both sides had an abbreviated process, skipping the normal step of conducting a series of hearings to explore various issues before writing the bill. But the Senate Agriculture Committee took the streamlining even further, managing to discuss, amend and pass its version of the bill in a little under three hours on Tuesday. The House Agriculture Committee finished theirs in a marathon session that took most of the day, wrapping up just before midnight Wednesday night.

Now each bill (HR 1947 and S 954) has to go to the floor for the whole body to vote on. The Senate is going first, with leadership claiming they will do the Farm Bill as early as next week. The full House may see their bill in June.

Read more…

By Wenonah Hauter

Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch Executive Director

Originally posted at The Guardian’s Comment is Free

If you have a feeling that genetically modified (GM) foods are being forced upon the population by a handful of business interests and vociferously defended by the scientists that work in the ag industry or at the research institutions it funds, you might be onto something. The zeal with which GMO proponents evangelize transgenic seeds (and now, transgenic food animals) is so extreme that they are even pouring vast sums of money to defeat popular efforts to simply label GE foods—like the nearly $50 million spent to defeat the popular ballot measure to label GE foods in California, Prop 37. What’s more, it’s not just happening in the United States. A new report by Food & Water Watch shows the extent to which the U.S. State Department is working on behalf of the GM seed industry to make sure that biotech crops are served up abroad—whether the world wants them or not.

The report analyzes over 900 State Department diplomatic cables from 2005 to 2009 and reveals how far the U.S. government will go to help serve the seed industry’s agenda abroad, knowing that resistance to GMOs worldwide is high. It lobbies a vociferously pro-biotech agenda, operates a rigorous public relations campaign to improve the image of biotechnology and challenges commonsense safeguards and rules — including opposing popular GM food labeling laws.

Here are some of the tidbits gleaned from our comprehensive look at the cables:

• Between 2007 and 2009, annual cables were distributed to “encourage the use of agricultural biotechnology,” directing U.S. embassies to ”pursue an active biotech agenda”.
• There was a comprehensive communications campaign aimed to “promote understanding and acceptance of the technology” and “develop support for U.S. government trade and development policy positions on biotech” in light of the worldwide backlash against GM crops.
• Where backlash was high, some embassies downplayed efforts. In Uruguay, the embassy has been “extremely cautious to keep [its] fingerprints off conferences” promoting biotechnology. In Peru and Romania, the U.S. government helped create new pro-biotech nongovernmental organizations.
• The State Department urged embassies to generate positive media coverage about GE crops. Diplomatic posts also bypassed the media and took the message directly to the public; for example, the Hong Kong consulate sent DVDs of a pro-biotech presentation to every high school.
• The State Department worked to diminish trade barriers to the benefit of seed companies, and encouraged the embassies to “publicize the benefits of agbiotech as a development tool.”

Click here to read the report, “Biotech Ambassadors: How the U.S. State Department Promotes the Seed Industry’s Global Agenda”.

Monsanto was a great beneficiary of the State Department’s taxpayer-funded diplomacy, helping pave the way for the cultivation of its seeds abroad: the company appeared in 6.1 percent of the biotech cables analyzed between 2005 and 2009 from 21 countries. The embassy in South Africa even informed Monsanto and Pioneer about two recently vacated positions in the agency that provided biotech oversight, suggesting that the companies advance “qualified applicants” to fill the position. Some embassies even attempted to facilitate favorable outcomes for intellectual property law and patent issues on behalf of the company.

The cables also show extensive lobbying against in-country efforts to require labeling of GM foods. In 2008, the Hong Kong consulate “played a key role” in convincing regulators to abandon a proposed mandatory labeling requirement. One in eight cables from 42 nations between 2005 and 2009 addressed biotech-labeling requirements.

What’s more, the U.S. government is now secretly negotiating major trade deals with Europe and the countries of the Pacific Rim that would force skeptical and unwilling countries to accept biotech imports, commercialize biotech crops and prevent the labeling of GM foods.

The vast influence that Monsanto and the biotech seed industry have on our foreign affairs is just one tentacle of a beast comprised by a handful of huge corporations who wield enormous power over most food policy in the United States. My new book, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America (which is being launched in Europe this week) deals extensively with this corporate influence over our food system.

It’s no accident that we’re here: a farm policy of “get big or get out” that has been going on for decades has only benefited big companies that are becoming more and more consolidated. They wield unprecedented power over the market, putting small and midsized farmers out of business and favoring factory farms and the cultivation of GM commodities that fuel them—GM corn and soy, which are also the cornerstone of junk foods produced and sold worldwide (fueling an obesity epidemic in America and beyond.)

Thanks, Monsanto. And thanks, State Department. Not only are you selling seeds—you’re selling out democracy.

Read the Full Report

Agricultural development is essential for the developing world to foster sustainable economies, enhance food security to combat global hunger and increase resiliency to climate change. Addressing these challenges will require diverse strategies that emphasize sustainable, productive approaches that are directed by countries in the developing world. 

But in the past decade, the United States has aggressively pursued foreign policies in food and agriculture that benefit the largest seed companies. The U.S. State Department has launched a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology, often over the opposition of the public and governments, to the near exclusion of other more sustainable, more appropriate agricultural policy alternatives. 

The U.S. State Department has also lobbied foreign governments to adopt pro-agricultural biotechnology policies and laws, operated a rigorous public relations campaign to improve the image of biotechnology and challenged commonsense biotechnology safeguards and rules — even including opposing laws requiring the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods.

Food & Water Watch closely examined five years of State Department diplomatic cables from 2005 to 2009 to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the strategy, tactics and U.S. foreign policy objectives to foist pro-agricultural biotechnology policies worldwide. Read the full report to learn more.

By Patty Lovera

Read the report, “Monsanto: A Corporate Profile”

If you’re following what Monsanto’s up to these days, it’s a truly mixed bag. Today, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a farmer had infringed on Monsanto’s patent by saving biotech seeds and replanting them. The farmer, Vernon Hugh Bowman, was ordered to pay Monsanto $84,000. Thus, Monsanto’s bullying of farmers who don’t play by their rules continues.

The good news? Last Friday, the USDA announced that it would be doing environmental impact statements for crops tolerant to dicamba and 2,4-D—the chemical that Monsanto and Dow, respectively, are seeking to commercialize to deal with superweeds that have evolved to become tolerant of applications of Roundup. The industry currently estimates that at least 60 million acres of crops are now resistant to at least one herbicide.

This more rigorous review of the chemicals is good news and shows that the USDA can be pressured to do the right thing if enough people speak up.

The USDA received over 400,000 petitions against Dow’s applications to deregulate 2,4-D corn and soybeans, and 500 individual comments and 31,000 letters on Monsanto’s petition to deregulate dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton. Food & Water Watch supporters submitted more than 50,000 comments opposing the approval of these crops.

This delay in commercialization is a victory for people concerned about industrial agriculture. So far, the Department has failed to address the critical need for a new approach to evaluating biotech crops and the chemical use that accompanies them. To fully address all of the environmental impacts of crops engineered to withstand applications of harsher herbicides, USDA must also review the evolution of superweeds that become resistant in droves to any and all herbicides matched with these biotech crops and the danger posed to the environment, farmer and farm worker health and neighboring crops that could be damaged by drift.

Finally, stay tuned tomorrow for the release of our new report that analyzes State Department diplomatic cables between 2005 and 2009. You’ll be interested to see how many times the name Monsanto comes up in official State Department communications about biotech crops.

By Anna Ghosh

Thanks to Michael Pollan’s new book, there’s a lot of buzz right now about Americans’ meals being outsourced, but a connected and equally troubling trend – with even riskier food safety implications – is that Americans’ food is increasingly being imported from countries with abominable track records for food safety. And the country on the top of the list is China. 

This week, Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats to discuss China as the leading producer of many foods Americans eat: apples, tomatoes, peaches, potatoes, garlic, seafood, processed food and food ingredients like xylitol and vitamin C.

Headlines about risky food from China have become all too common – melamine in milk, a chicken for beef swap, toxic juice, exploding watermelons (really, you can’t make this stuff up). Even our pets are threatened. Since 2007, chicken jerky treats imported from China are suspected to have caused more than 600 cases of canine illness and deaths to date.me

In her testimony, Patty explains how combining trade policy with a food safety regulatory system that’s not up to the job of dealing with the rising tide of imports is a recipe for disaster. She warns about the risks involved when cash-strapped agencies turn to third party certifiers (doubly outsourced), and how consumers’ only tool to be able to make informed decisions about where their food comes from – Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) – needs to be improved and expanded.

• Watch Patty’s testimony here (beginning at 00:55:00): http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-hearing-threat-china%E2%80%99s-unsafe-consumables
• Read Patty’s testimony (complete with charts and graphs) here: http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/china_house_testimony_may_2013.pdf
• Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at The Cornucopia Institute also testified, which you can read more about here: http://www.cornucopia.org/2013/05/not-good-enough-for-pet-food/#more-8370
• Want more background about food imports from China? Read the report A Decade of Dangerous Food Imports from China

Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera

By Patty Lovera

It’s time for another installment in the saga of the never-ending Farm Bill debate. In previous episodes, Congress passed a terrible bill to extend portions of the last Farm Bill as they tried to escape the “fiscal cliff” on New Year’s Day. That kept some parts of farm policy alive until the end of September, 2013, but abandoned important programs for organic and sustainable agriculture, conservation and beginning farmers.

And now, Congress is once again working to try to pass something before the short-term Farm Bill expires. Both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees say they will develop their versions of the bill this month (Exactly which day or week isn’t quite clear). The committees say they will “mark up” the bills quickly and get them out of committee so the full House and Senate can vote on them this summer.

At this stage of the game, we don’t know exactly what will be in the bills the committees work on. But we can make some predictions on what will need improving.

On competition, we will be urging the committees to include a ban on packer ownership of livestock, creation of a special counsel at USDA to deal with competition in agriculture markets, and to not include any measures that limit USDA’s ability to enforce rules on contracts for poultry growers that were in the 2008 Farm Bill.

There will once again be battles over the food safety net for low-income families, especially in the House, where there will likely be multiple attempts to make big cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps), the main federal nutrition program (background info on SNAP).

Organic and sustainable agriculture were victims of last year’s political gridlock, which allowed some important programs to expire and be abandoned by the last Farm Bill extension. This version of the bill should restore these programs for beginning farmers and ranchers and conservation. Specifically on organic agriculture, the bill should restore funding for the organic certification cost-share program (which helps operations that are new to organic pay for initial certification costs), and organic data collection and research programs at USDA.

Senator Gillibrand (D-NY) is offering an important addition to the Farm Bill that would require USDA to develop and implement a mechanism for employees of the Food Safety and Inspection Service to coordinate the reporting, evaluation, and abatement of potential occupational safety hazards. This is a critical improvement, given the recent news about health threats to workers and USDA inspectors in poultry plants due to the chemicals used to disinfect chickens. This problem will only get worse if the USDA is allowed to go forward with its proposal to deregulate poultry inspection and speed up the lines in poultry slaughterhouses, with likely increases in chemical use to pick up the slack.

Let your members of Congress know that you expect them to do a better job this time around on the Farm Bill. You can take action here: http://fwwat.ch/FBMay

By Anna Ghosh

Warning: do not read this while eating a chicken sandwich. Discussing the privatization of poultry inspection is gross, but letting the USDA get away with it is even more disgusting, not to mention makes our food less safe and puts workers in danger. Tell Secretary Vilsack not to privatize poultry inspection!

According to the National Chicken Council, “Americans buy more chicken than any other food at the center of the plate.” It’s safe to assume that Americans would like that chicken to be healthy, wholesome and free of fecal matter, bile, scabs, bruises and other unappetizing contamination. But the USDA isn’t concerned about these things. They call them “quality defects” and would rather leave it up the company employees to deal with; compensating for less inspection with more anti-microbial chemicals. But as the Washington Post uncovered, this is a deadly solution.

Since 2011, Food & Water Watch and its allies have been fighting plans to privatize poultry inspection as a matter of consumer and worker safety. In March of 2012, Food & Water Watch analyzed the USDA’s HACCP-based Inspection Models Project (HIMP), the pilot that the current privatization scheme is based on, and found that large numbers of defects are routinely missed when company employees instead of USDA inspectors perform inspection tasks. In April of 2012, inspectors and more than 150,000 consumer spoke out about HIMP, prompting investigative stories from ABC News and the New York Times. We’ve also spent some time fact checking USDA officials, and former officials as Food & Water Watch Senior Lobbyist Tony Corbo did today in Food Safety News:

A year ago, Food & Water Watch was contacted by a consumer in Georgia who had bought a package of chicken that he intended to barbeque for his family on Mother’s Day.  When he opened up the package, he found that some of the chicken breasts had some hard yellow substances on them.  He sent us photos of the packaging and of the suspect chicken breasts.  It turned out that those yellow substances were of partially digested chicken feed or ingesta.  That product should never have been allowed into commerce.  The package wrapper had the USDA-Inspected legend on it with the establishment number P-177.  P-177 happens to be the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Gainesville, Georgia.  That plant also happens to be one of the 20 HIMP broiler plants that Dr. Raymond is so proud of where the privatized inspection model is being piloted by USDA.   You can take a look at the photo of the ingesta on that chicken on our website and an analysis of the inspection data from some of the HIMP plants we did that revealed that not only feathers were missed by the company employees, but a whole host of other “defects” such as visible fecal contamination.

I showed the photos that we had received from that consumer to Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia who at the time was the Chairman of the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee and the main congressional advocate to privatize poultry inspection, and to the current USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety Elisabeth Hagen and FSIS Administrator Alfred Almanza.  I explained what the photos represented and I told all of them that when I go to KFC to order fried chicken, the cashier always asks:  “Do you want original recipe or crispy?”  Not “Do you want original recipe or CRUNCHY?”  Yes, Dr. Raymond, I want my taxpayer dollars to go to government inspectors to keep the food I feed my family safe and wholesome.

As Mother Jones Food Blogger Tom Philpott points out, while the Obama administration boasts about the minor government savings and major savings for big poultry companies, the USDA’s claims of food safety are shaky and concern for worker safety nonexistent. No matter how many chemical dunks are used, privatized poultry inspection will lead to unsafe food and unsafe working conditions. Period. Let Secretary Vilsack know how you feel about foul privatized foul here: http://fwwat.ch/ickychix

Washington, D.C.—Food & Water Watch joined nearly 1.5 million consumers last Friday in submitting federal comments to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on GE salmon. In their public comment to the FDA, Food & Water Watch cited dozens of inadequacies in the agency’s risk assessment, highlighting the FDA’s failure to meaningfully examine growth rates of GE salmon, which purportedly grows twice as fast as conventional salmon. All of the available evidence strongly suggests that GE salmon—whose trade name is AquAdvantage salmon—offers no growth-rate advantage over conventional salmon already in commercial production.

“The debate in Washington over GE salmon isn’t cold, hard science versus irrational consumers,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “It’s cold-hard science versus the biotechnology industry and its hype. If GE salmon really can grow fast, let’s see the science behind it.”

The FDA only examined GE salmon’s growth rates to the size of a quarter-pound hamburger—about one-fortieth the normal harvest weight. This comparison was only made between GE salmon and a partially domesticated fish, not the fast-growing, highly domesticated salmon that dominate commercial production. Even the company now admits it has never done a head-to-head comparison with fast-growing Norwegian salmon, which appear to grow faster than GE salmon.

“FDA shouldn’t wait for the marketplace to determine if GE salmon is a dud, while treating consumers like guinea pigs” said Hauter. “There is simply no reason for FDA to introduce unnecessary environmental and food safety risks into our food supply.”

Food & Water Watch’s federal comments to the FDA, submitted last Friday, also offer a new statistical analysis of the FDA’s impoverished data review of GE salmon, which was widely attacked by the agency’s own advisory board in 2010. Conducted with assistance with a faculty member of in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the new statistical analysis shows that FDA has not studied nearly enough fish to make confident conclusions about the safety of GE salmon. The FDA would need to triple—or in some cases quintuple—the number of salmon it examined in order to make confident conclusions about safety dimensions like hormone and allergy levels, which appear dramatically elevated in GE salmon.

“Our new statistical analysis shows that the FDA hasn’t examined nearly enough data to make any meaningful conclusions about critical food safety concerns like hormone levels and allergies,” said Hauter. “The FDA’s decision to move forward with GE salmon based on data from only a handful of fish is extremely irresponsible from a consumer protection standpoint and totally unjustified from a scientific perspective.”

To view the public comment Food & Water Watch submitted to the FDA:

GE Salmon Public Comment 

FWW salmon EA Appendix 1

FWW salmon EA Appendix 2

Contact: Rich Bindell, Food & Water Watch, 202-683-2457, [email protected]