The Center for Food Safety fights back against the corporatism of Monsanto.
The Center for Food Safety has announced an immediate challenge to the USDA’s unregulated approval of Monsanto’s genetically-modified (GMO) alfalfa.
“All farmers should be on notice that we will be suing again, so before they make their seed buying decisions, I would certainly caution them that we will be in court,” CFS’s Andrew Kimbrell told Agri-Pulse.com. “And I think that anybody who looks at our past record over the last five years will realize that we haven’t lost yet.”
Press Release
Washington, D.C. – January 27, 2011 –
ROGUE AGENCY CHOOSES “BUSINESS AS USUAL” OVER SOUND SCIENCE
CENTER ANNOUNCES IMMEDIATE LEGAL CHALLENGE TO USDA’S FLAWED ASSESSMENT
The Center for Food Safety criticized the announcement today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that it will once again allow unlimited, nation-wide commercial planting of Monsanto’s genetically-engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa, despite the many risks to organic and conventional farmers USDA acknowledged in its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS).
On a call today with stakeholders, Secretary Vilsack reiterated the concerns surrounding purity and access to non-GE seed, yet the Agency’s decision still places the entire burden for preventing contamination on non-GE farmers, with no protections for food producers, consumers and exporters.
“We’re disappointed with USDA’s decision and we will be back in court representing the interest of farmers, preservation of the environment, and consumer choice” said Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director for the Center for Food Safety. “USDA has become a rogue agency in its regulation of biotech crops and its decision to appease the few companies who seek to benefit from this technology comes despite increasing evidence that GE alfalfa will threaten the rights of farmers and consumers, as well as damage the environment.”
On Monday, the Center sent an open letter to Secretary Vilsack calling on USDA to base its decision on sound science and the interests of farmers, and to avoid rushing the process to meet the marketing timelines or sales targets of Monsanto, Forage Genetics or other entities.
CFS also addressed several key points that were not properly assessed in the FEIS, among them were:
Liability, Implementation and Oversight — Citing over 200 past contamination episodes that have cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales, CFS demands that liability for financial losses incurred by farmers due to transgenic contamination be assigned to the crop developers. CFS also calls on USDA to take a more active oversight role to ensure that any stewardship plans are properly implemented and enforced.
Roundup Ready alfalfa will substantially increase herbicide use – USDA’s assessment misrepresented conventional alfalfa as utilizing more herbicides than it does, which in turn provided a false rationale for introducing herbicide-promoting Roundup Ready alfalfa. In fact, USDA’s own data shows that just 7% of alfalfa hay acres are treated with herbicides.
USDA’s projections in the FEIS show that substantial adoption of Roundup Ready alfalfa would trigger large increases in herbicide use of up to 23 million lbs. per year.
Harms from glyphosate-resistant weeds – USDA’s sloppy and unscientific treatment of glyphosate-resistant (GR) weeds ignored the significant contribution that RR alfalfa could make to their rapid evolution. USDA failed to analyze how GR weeds fostered by currently grown RR crops are increasing herbicide use; spurring more use of soil-eroding tillage; and reducing farmer income through increased weed control costs, an essential baseline analysis.
“We in the farm sector are dissatisfied but not surprised at the lack of courage from USDA to stop Roundup Ready alfalfa and defend family farmers,” said Pat Trask, conventional alfalfa grower and plaintiff in the alfalfa litigation.
The FEIS comes in response to a 2007 lawsuit brought by CFS, in which a federal court ruled that the USDA’s approval of GE alfalfa violated environmental laws by failing to analyze risks such as the contamination of conventional and organic alfalfa, the evolution of glyphosate-resistant weeds, and increased use of glyphosate herbicide, sold by Monsanto as Roundup.
The Court banned new plantings of GE alfalfa until USDA completed a more comprehensive assessment of these impacts. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals twice affirmed the national ban on GE alfalfa planting. In June 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ban on Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Alfalfa until and unless future deregulation occurs.
“Last spring more than 200,000 people submitted comments to the USDA highly critical of the substance and conclusions of its Draft EIS on GE Alfalfa,” said Kimbrell. “Clearly the USDA was not listening to the public or farmers but rather to just a handful of corporations.”
The Center for Food Safety is a national, non-profit, membership organization founded in 1997 to protect human health and the environment by curbing the use of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture. CFS currently represents over 175,000 members across the nation.
One of the 'intended consequences' of the war in Iraq was to allow the country, which is considered the cradle of the beginnings of all agriculture, to be taken over by US corporate giants, Cargill and Monsanto through Order 81.
You never heard any of this in the mainstream press and that is because.....? Maybe they were too busy telling us that all Iraq was good for was growing Poppys for narcotics. They did not tell anyone the truth about that, because the US government didn't want them too. Why tell on yourself, right? And besides Monsanto wouldn't like the information being on the evening news, better to just distract the lefties with body bags and dead civilians.
And it worked like a charm.
It has caused the ruin of thousands of acres of some of the world's most fertile land and a way of life that goes back ten thousand years. (video link)
It has caused the ruin of thousands of acres of some of the world's most fertile land and a way of life that goes back ten thousand years. (video link)
For the first time in history, Iraq can no longer feed itself.
America, through the USDA, is handing over the country to Monsanto so that they will have free rein over our agriculture, farming and seed supplies.They have the big farmers on board with their scheme because they're saving money on diesel costs with herbicide embedded crops. We understand that, the saving money part that is, but at what final cost to these farmers? (Read the soil analysis from GMO crops and the irreversible damage to the land to get the point.)
Time to pay attention people and raise some hell with your representatives (who all voted for SB 510) and the USDA. Monsanto is all about profit and control no matter how they spin their message, and the American public does itself a huge disservice by thinking this is an issue isolated to fringe groups and tree-huggers.
This is YOUR issue and it will be YOUR problem if you don't wake up and speak up!
Posted by Winger
Is itjust me or are the real reasons for invading Iraq revealing themselves to be anything but WMD?
ReplyDeleteJust the fact that there are not more comments on this informative article shows you how asleep most people are about Monsanto. The video of Iraq is really good and should be required viewing in wide arenas.
ReplyDeleteThank you for caring enough to cover this.