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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group <SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU>, permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, Market Farming <marketfarming@lists.ibiblio.org>, Seed Keepers <seedkeepers@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Seed Keepers] OpEdNews - Article: Food Safety Regulations: Intended quicksand for sustainable agriculture
  • Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:18:08 -0400


[Read the whole article at OpEd News and all linked articles. Notice that support resources for this article were provided by the
Organic Consumers Association (OCA), _not_ the Organic Trade Association, who does not appear to be on the side of small and family local sustainable farmers.]

OpEdNews - Article: Food Safety Regulations: Intended quicksand for sustainable agriculture
http://www.opednews.com/articles/FOOD-SAFETY-REGULATIONS--by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090108-947.html

For OpEdNews: Linn Cohen-Cole - Writer

"Hidden inside regulations that are not voted on by any legislators representing the public are massive bars to all involvement in farming by small farmers. The monopolistic, unconstitutional, destructive reality of those regulations appear obvious when time is taken to look carefully.

Monsanto runs the American Seed Trade Association which has influenced the FDA to implement regulations governing seeds that MASSIVELY control importation and limit who can provide them nationally.

The following is excerpted from a speech before the American Seed Trade Association and the American Organization of Seed Certifying Agencies at their Joint Annual Convention. Remarks are by Lester M. Crawford, the Acting Commissioner of the FDA. June 29, 2004

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And in doing so, they throw into disturbing relief what the FDA is doing - with Monsanto by its side - in announcing MAMMOTH regulations that will allow multinational corporations such as Monsanto even greater national and global control over seeds in the now clearly spurious name of "food safety."

The USDA has its own close corporate connections to agribusiness and the USDA is committing on-going raids against farmers, agribusiness' only competition. In these, "food safety" is being used to destroy sustainable agriculture while distracting from the actual problems (click here) and leaving untouched the industrially-sized industrially-caused sources of disease in the corporate feedlots, animal factories and slaughterhouses. This mirrors exactly how the pharmaceutical corporations and the FDA have promoted and/or given a pass to melamine in infant formula, NSAIDs, dental mercury amalgams, Vioxx, Paxil, HRT, etc. while attacking cherry growers and the entire natural substance industry which are the pharmaceutical industry's competition. The attacks on healthy food and safe substances by government agencies in collusion with corporations and those agencies bypassing filthy and/or dangerous industries (click here), combine to expose the use of "food safety" and "drug safety" regulations to destroy corporate competition from all natural sources. Click here.

The Patriot Act has allowed the government to remove constitutional rights using terrorism as the justification. Homeland Security now is working with the FDA on food. So, the police state use of "food safety" in raids on healthy local farming has now become ramped up to a exceedingly strengthened and more vast new scare - "international bio-terrorism," which then providing the FDA (qua Monsanto) a full blown military and global control over seeds, which serves Monsanto's every interest."

<><><><><>
Organic Consumers Association -
6771 South Silver Hill Drive, Finland MN 55603
E-mail: Staff http://www.organicconsumers.org/aboutus.cfm#contact
· Activist or Media Inquiries: 218-226-4164 · Fax: 218-353-7652
Please support our work. Send a tax-deductible donation to the OCA
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_2158.cfm
Ronnie Cummins and Other Reviewers: Mad Sheep--Explosive New Book Exposes USDA's War on Small Farmers and Consumers
Mad Sheep The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm
By inda Faillace
Contact: Alice Blackmer 703-443-9418 blackmer@chelseagreen.com
A gripping story of one family's fight against the USDA
MAD SHEEP is the long-awaited story of a family farm destroyed by the USDA in its effort to protect beef industry sales from the threat of Mad Cow disease. It is an unforgettable chapter in the latter-day history of the family farm.
Linda Faillace, scientist, farmer, wife, and mother of three tells the harrowing story of corruption, gun-toting federal agents, and heart-breaking loss with amazing clarity and skill.
<><><><><>

"FDA is also extensively involved and committed to the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN), a national initiative designed to integrate America's laboratory infrastructure to better detect and respond to bioterror agent threats to the food supply at local, state, and federal levels. The key goals of FERN are:

. Prevention (federal and state surveillance sampling programs to monitor the food supply)
. Preparedness (strengthen laboratory capacity and capabilities)
. Response (surge capacity to handle terrorist attacks or a national emergency involving the food supply), and

* Recovery (support recalls, seizures, and disposal of contaminated food or feed to restore confidence in the food supply)."

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"If regulations over "harvesting, transport equipment and seed cleaning equipment" are implemented so as to require FDA-approved industrial equipment - as now is being with seed cleaning equipment - the costs are beyond their capacity, so such corporate-driven regulations effectively and silently eliminate small farmers from "participating" in farming.

If agricultural water and manure are defined as sources of contamination, any CSA capable of sustaining the cost of the equipment could be charged at a whim for violating "food safety" regulations and be raided and shut down as co-ops (click here) as is happening to small farmers now.

And getting seed storage cited as a source of food contamination is a redundant or back up method on Monsanto's part for keeping organic (normal) seeds out of farmers and the public's hands because it has already pushed seed laws across the country that make seed collecting, saving, selling, so complex, costly and ridden with potential for errors that would allow for shut someone down or suing them, that those laws are already removing seeds from human access.

Prior to genetic engineering and patenting of seeds, the collecting of seeds was a simple thing, without such laws. As you look through each section of this law, ask a few questions:

What are the absolute surveillance of and intense control over all varieties of seed about?

Are the laws being written so where still-existing normal varieties will be know and they can be bought up or wiped out by Monsanto and others?

Are the laws setting farmers up to fail and then be sued by government or biotech companies?"

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"It provides a mechanism to do with animals what Monsanto did with seeds – find the major sources, eliminate them, reduce the genetic diversity available and substitute genetically engineered seeds, so farmers have no alternatives and seeds (or nature) is then patented and “owned” by Monsanto or other biotech companies. In this way, farmers end up as tenant farmers on their own land, never able to collect seeds and benefit from the bounty of nature. Monsanto is making the ultimate industrial move and treating seeds as factories - mere means of production - and farmers become workers.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Raids-on-Seeds-life-itsel-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-081215-45.htm

While dong getting rid of normal animals and replacing them with genetically engineered patented ones may seem far-fetched, it is already happening in Asia. The industrial side of farming – the giant poultry factories – is implicated in causing Bird Flu through its terrible practices around disposing of contaminated waste. Wild birds got sick. Small farmers were blamed, their small stocks eliminated, and GE-poultry is substituted.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ENG20051127&articleId=1333span%C2%A0%C2%A0

The poultry industry, in using the crisis to push out small farmers
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-27-01.asp
and substituting patented poultry, retains ownership of all future “intellectual property” – and babies born to that poultry. The poultry farmers, like the seed farmers, own nothing and are reduced to renting the birds and working for the transnational poultry companies, and no longer free.

One need only look at the fact that the data from NAIS is fed into a corporate data bank from which corporations have 24 a day surveillance and detailed records on every small farmer in the country with even a single chicken, to understand how such a spying and record keeping system could assist in the elimination of diverse animal stock here through “surge capacity” warrantless searches, seizures and destruction, using food scares and bioterrorism scares as a convenient means.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_2158.cfm

So, whether it is seed laws and food contamination regulations for seeds and elimination of all seed equipment and everything necessary for organic agriculture that pleases Monsanto, or assaults on raw milk dairy farmers using “food safety” as the justification while industrial milk with rBGH linked to three cancers is approved, or a mega-spy system over every farm animal in the country, controlled by the very agribusinesses which caused Mad Cow through their disgusting practices, lowering of contamination standards, and blocking of inspections, all sectors of farming – crops, dairy and animals – are covered.

The question arises - what provides real "food safety"? Is it access to local farmers we know personally who are growing food we have decided we want and our choosing to take the risk, or is it "protection" for all risk by agencies which are close to the filthy corporations actively blocking inspections and lowering contamination standards, and with their help are writing oversize regulations which, right now, are already silently dismantling all aspects of small, local farming itself?"








  • [Seed Keepers] OpEdNews - Article: Food Safety Regulations: Intended quicksand for sustainable agriculture, Lawrence F. London, Jr., 08/23/2010

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