Press Releases: All

Media Statement: “For several years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s trade promotion arm, Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), has been working with China to allow the country to export its poultry products to the U.S. despite China’s deep-rooted health and safety problems and woefully inadequate food safety laws and regulations.

“Since 2005, Food & Water Watch has criticized these negotiations for prioritizing trade over the public’s health. We have monitored the situation closely and became particularly alarmed earlier this year when we learned that FAS was exerting undue influence over the food safety review process. Which is why Food & Water Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request on January 5. While we have received regular apologies from FAS, we have yet to receive one document from them pertaining to the imports of food products from China.”

“Today, the State of Maryland became the first in the nation to ban arsenic additives in chickens thereby bolstering the growing grassroots movement to remove dangerous chemicals like arsenic from food.

Media Statement: “Today the Maryland State Senate passed a bill that improves upon the House of Delegates’ attempt to ban arsenic in the state’s poultry industry. The bill passed last week by the House was gutted by the poultry and pharmaceutical industries.

Media Statement: “Today Food & Water Watch joins food inspectors, other food safety advocates and consumers in front of the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters to protest plans to privatize and hasten the inspection of poultry slaughter plants. The USDA wants to cut back on its meat and poultry inspection program and let company employees do the job currently done by 800 professional federal inspectors.

“Cutting the budget does not justify putting the health and safety of consumers and workers in the balance. USDA inspectors receive extensive training to protect public health in poultry facilities, but there is no similar requirement for company employees to receive training before they assume these inspection responsibilities in the proposed privatized inspection system. This short-sided thinking could actually cost the federal government more to deal with a potential increase in foodborne illnesses caused by unsanitary, defective poultry and meat.”

Press Release: Food & Water Watch today expressed alarm over reports that UK biotech start-up Oxitec intends to release results from their controversial genetically engineered mosquito trial at a workshop in Bahia, Brazil, that have not been peer-reviewed, and challenges that the company’s own studies are biased to show results that enhance its bottom line.

Press Release: At a press conference today, Bark and Food & Water Watch, members of the Keep Nestlé Out of the Gorge Coalition, announced that they are appealing the Oregon Water Resources Department’s (OWRD) approval of permit applications that move Nestlé one step closer to bottling Oregon’s water. The two permits must be approved by OWRD before a water exchange application can be considered that would lead to a giveaway of Oregon’s public water resources for Nestlé’s profit. The coalition, representing labor, religious, environmental, public health and consumer advocacy groups, maintains that this water exchange is not in the public interest.

Media Statement: “For the third year in a row, the Maryland State House has failed consumers and their vital resources by undermining groundbreaking legislation that would have banned the use of arsenic in the state’s poultry industry.

Media Statement: “The Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization and Improvement Act recently introduced by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Tim Holden (D-Penn.) is designed to ignore the real problems underlying pollution in the Chesapeake Bay: industrialized agriculture and urban sprawl.

Media Statement: “Today’s announcement that the United States has filed an appeal to defend country of origin labels on food at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is good news for consumers and farmers. We are heartened that the Obama administration has finally stood up against the meat industry’s attack on common-sense rules that let people get vital information about what they are eating.

Media Statement: “It is both sad and ironic that on World Water Day, an occasion in which we celebrate grassroots efforts to uphold and protect water as a human right, that we’d also see several powerful nations undermine this movement. At the Rio+20 negotiations currently taking place at the United Nations, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel have called for weakening or taking away the human right to water and sanitation.