If America Only Knew How Much Arsenic Ends Up on the Average Dinner Plate

Food  

AlterNet / By Jill Richardson

If America Only Knew How Much Arsenic Ends Up on the Average Dinner Plate

Our government is perversely protecting the industries that release the killer chemical into society.

October 5, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Zurijeta/ Shutterstock

 

The American right wing loves to hate Big Government, but does size matter? Perhaps the problem is not Big Government, but Dumb Government, Inefficient Government or even Corrupt, Sold-Out, or Inept Government. The recent bombshell Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, dropped – that rice contains dangerous levels of arsenic – illustrates how good, effective government can save lives by keeping deadly toxins out of the food supply whereas our federal bureaucracy (aided, abetted and cajoled by industry) has instead let us down.

Arsenic “is considered the number one environmental chemical of concern for human health effects both in the U.S. and worldwide,” according to information published by Darmouth Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program. It can be divided into two categories: organic and inorganic. While organic arsenic is itself a probable human carcinogen, inorganic arsenic is a definite human carcinogen that is linked to liver, lung, kidney, bladder, and skin cancer as well as “increased risk of vascular and heart disease, type 2 diabetes, reproductive and developmental disorders, low birth weights in babies, neurological and cognitive problems, immunodeficiencies, metabolic disorders, and a growing list of other serious outcomes.”

In short: you don’t want this in your food.

“When you're talking about a carcinogen [like arsenic], there is no safe level,” Consumers Union’s senior scientist Michael Hansen explains. Instead of eliminating all risk, one looks at carcinogens in terms of levels of risk. For example, Consumers Union provides a table explaining how much rice one can eat to achieve a 1 in 1,000 lifetime risk of cancer. The federal government does not limit the amount of arsenic allowed in food, so Consumers Union based its standard on the EPA’s initial recommendation for arsenic limits in drinking water (five parts per billion).

In fact, the drinking water standard – which is now set at 10 parts per billion (ppb) – is a fine place to begin the story of how government, industry and arsenic fit together. Arsenic is a naturally occurring element, but the U.S. has increased the amount of arsenic in our environment and our farmland over the past century by using 1.6 million tons of it in agricultural and industrial uses. About half of that amount has been used since the mid-1960s.

Once in the environment, arsenic – a chemical element and a heavy metal – does not break down and go away as do some toxins. Once so much arsenic was sprayed on farms, it was in the environment for good – and it could find its way into our food and water. U.S. limits on arsenic in drinking water were set at 50 ppb in 1942, before arsenic was classified as a carcinogen. But a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences showed that this level failed to protect Americans from an unacceptably high risk of cancer.

The EPA then proposed lowering the limit for arsenic from 50 ppb to just 5 ppb in 2000. Industry complained, and the Clinton-era EPA settled upon lowering the limit to just 10 ppb instead. Once George W. Bush took office, he initially attempted to block the change, thus keeping the World War II-era limit of 50 ppb. By November 2001, the Bush administration gave in to allowing the 10 ppb limit to go forward. Even still, Sen. Barbara Boxer noted that this 10 ppb limit would allow three times as much cancer risk as the EPA’s usual goal.

Arsenic in food deserves some special concern, and yet there are no regulations limiting it. In addition to arsenic used in industry that finds its way onto farms, there is arsenic used in agriculture that the farmers themselves bring to their farms, a practice almost dating back to the Civil War.

Long before the days of DDT, the first synthetic pesticides were arsenicals. An arsenical paint pigment called Paris green was first used against Colorado potato beetles in 1867. Even then, arsenic’s deadly toxicity was well known – Will Allen tells in his book, The War on Bugs, how farmers lost cattle after they ate potato plants treated with Paris green. Other arsenic pesticides, London purple and lead arsenic, soon followed Paris green onto the market. By the 1930s, “well over a hundred million people in the United States suffered from mild to severe arsenic and lead poisoning,” writes Allen.

Yet the end of arsenic as a favored pesticide did not come from government – it came from nature and from the chemical companies. As pests evolved resistance to arsenical pesticides and as chemical companies supplanted arsenicals with newer products, arsenicals fell out of favor. Only then did the government begin canceling some of the registrations of arsenical pesticides.

And yet, even after arsenicals were displaced by other pesticides for most uses, half of the arsenic used in the U.S. has been in the last half century. Recent uses of arsenic fall into two categories: livestock drugs and pesticides.

Until recently, the arsenical livestock drugs roxarsone, nitarsone, carbarsone and arsanilic acid were all used in chickens, turkeys and swine. Roxarsone was widely used for disease prevention, weight gain, feed efficiency and improved pigmentation in chickens from 1944 until it was voluntarily removed from the market by Pfizer in 2011 following the revelation that chickens fed roxarsone had inorganic arsenic in their livers. The latter three are all still legal, regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Once used in chickens, the arsenic in roxarsone remained in the chickens’ litter, which consists of bedding, droppings, feathers, and dropped feed. Poultry litter, in turn, served as fertilizer on farms and – believe it or not – cattle feed. And, as it turns out, the top rice-producing state in the U.S., Arkansas, is in second place behind Georgia for broiler production. (Of the six rice-producing states, all rank among the nation’s top broiler producers, with Mississippi and Texas among the top five, and California and Missouri among the top 10.)

As pesticides, many arsenicals were phased out over the years, but some uses remain. In 2006, the EPA attempted to essentially ban the remaining uses of organic arsenicals, because "following application, these pesticides convert over time to a more toxic form in soil, inorganic arsenic, and potentially contaminate drinking water through soil runoff." Following outcry from industry, EPA backed away from its initial decision.

All organic arsenicals except one herbicide, monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA), were banned as of 2009. After that time, MSMA could still be used on sod farms, golf courses and highway rights of way until the end of 2013. After that, only one remaining us of any organic arsenical would be permitted: MSMA on cotton.

As luck would have it, the six rice-growing states are among the top cotton-growing states: Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas top the list, with California, Louisiana and Missouri each growing significant cotton acreage as well. Rice is so susceptible to taking up arsenic because it is often grown in fields flooded with water. In fact, a 2008 study found that growers can reduce the amount of total and inorganic arsenic in rice by growing it under “aerobic” (not flooded) conditions. And yet the same states that grow rice are also the cotton-growing states where MSMA is still used.

So why does the EPA still allow MSMA on cotton if arsenicals are so bad that they are banned on absolutely everything else? Two words: Palmer amaranth. Despite years of warnings, biotech and chemical companies and cotton growers have created the perfect weed. Palmer amaranth has evolved resistance to both ALS inhibitor herbicides and to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, and one plant can produce half a million seeds.

Weeds commonly evolve resistance to ALS inhibitors, much more so than for any other class of herbicides. But resistance to glyphosate was almost unheard of before Monsanto first introduced its Roundup Ready genetically engineered crops to the market in 1996. Glyphosate use shot up, giving weeds the evolutionary force needed to develop resistance. Nowhere was this truer than on fields that rotated between two Roundup Ready crops, soybeans and cotton.
Glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth first turned up in GE soybeans and cotton in Georgia in 2005 and before long it was documented across the U.S. including in the rice-growing states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana, and California. In some case, resistance to both types of herbicides was found in the same Palmer amaranth plant. The weed has caused growers to turn to more toxic herbicides, hand-weeding, and even entirely abandoning their fields.

One last direct outlet for arsenic into agricultural lands comes from sewage sludge. Under current EPA regulations, sewage sludge containing 41 parts per million – 41,000 parts per billion – total arsenic can be applied to agricultural land and even sold to consumers for home garden and lawn use. (Full disclosure: I recently worked on the Center for Media & Democracy’s sewage sludge campaign, which opposed the use of sewage sludge in agriculture.) Under existing law, farmers can apply sewage sludge containing up to 41 kilograms of arsenic per hectare of land.

As you can see, between them, the USDA, FDA and EPA have allowed pesticides, pharmaceuticals and practices that led to the toxic load of arsenic Consumers Union found in rice. The EPA regulated pesticides, the FDA regulated drugs, and the USDA worked with farmers in many aspects of agriculture and gave the green light to Roundup Ready crops. It was no secret that arsenic was going into farms and fields where our food is grown, and yet the question of where the arsenic went was mostly ignored. The FDA recently released its own tests, confirming Consumers’ Union’s findings. As their data shows, even organic rice contains arsenic. (Organic farmers cannot use arsenical pesticides, but they can use manure from chickens fed roxarsone and other arsenical drugs.)

So is the government to blame for this massive oversight and public health risk? Michael Hansen doesn’t think so. “The issue in the larger context isn't so much that it's bad government,” he says. “If you put it in the proper context, it's not only the gutting of the regulatory agency but also the control by industry and outside forces. I think there are definitely people within the agency who would like to take action on a number of things but they can't because of the reaction by industry… The power of industry is so strong, you can't expect the government to take action when they are trashed left and right.”

Consumers Union recently sent and published three letters, one to the EPA, one to the FDA and one to the USDA, asking them to rectify all of the problems named in this article so that no more arsenic finds its way into U.S. farms and so that standards are set for how much arsenic is allowed into our food supply. They also commend Congress for introducing the R.I.C.E. Act (Reducing Food-Based Inorganic and Organic Compounds Exposure Act) and they advocate its speedy passage (which is not likely in the current politically charged environment).

When citizens reflect on the size of their government, surely most would agree that it ought to be “big” enough to keep arsenic out of the food supply. But the comedy of errors between three different agencies that allowed so much arsenic onto our farms and then our dinner tables is exactly the sort of disaster that causes voters to throw up their hands and wish the government would go away altogether. Yet, if Hansen is correct, the incompetence shown in this case was not a matter of bureaucratic ineptness but one of industry’s capture over the agencies charged with regulating it. Voters going to the polls need to recognize the problem. Instead of voting for candidates who vow to get government out of our lives we should be voting for leaders willing to take a stand against undue corporate influence.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..

Why Your Health Is Bigger Than Your Body

Ecosystems  |  Happiness  |  Health & Healing

Why Your Health Is Bigger Than Your Body

New findings explain how politics, economics, and ecology can help or hurt our bodies.

by Claudia Rowe

posted Aug 21, 2012

Talking with Dr. Ted Schettler is probably unlike any conversation you have had with your physician. Raise the topic of breast cancer or diabetes or dementia, and Schettler starts talking about income disparities, industrial farming, and campaign finance reform.

The Harvard-educated physician, frustrated by the limitations of science in combating disease, believes that finding answers to the most persistent medical challenges of our time—conditions that now threaten to overwhelm our health care system—depends on understanding the human body as a system nested within a series of other, larger systems: one’s family and community, environment, culture, and socioeconomic class, all of which affect each other.

It is a complex, even daunting view—where does one begin when trying to solve problems this way?

Schettler is an exceedingly logical thinker, and his vision for a more evolved kind of health care came from the down-to-earth experience of helping to clean clam flats along the St. George River in Maine during the 1980s. “I was living and practicing on the coast there, and working with a local organization to clean up the river because we had these rich clam flats that had been closed for years because of periodic spikes of E. coli. If anyone ate the clams they would get very sick.”

Meanwhile, paper mills were dumping dioxins into other rivers nearby, and Schettler learned that fish from those rivers sometimes had even higher chemical levels than fish caught in urban harbors. But factory bosses claimed that regulating waste from the pulp mills would cost community jobs, which prompted dozens of young factory workers to protest. Schettler, despite being steeped in traditional medicine, was unable to ignore these interrelationships: a degraded natural environment, a precarious local economy, and perennially sick people. “These things—the effect of the environment on peoples’ health—were never discussed at the medical conferences,” he said. “So it caused in me a major re-examination.”

Schettler went back to school, earned a master’s degree in public health, and began applying a scientist’s rigor to his wide-ranging pool of interests. Since then, he has researched connections between poverty, iron deficiency, and lead poisoning; insecticide use, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease; income disparities and asthma.

He calls this new approach to medicine “the ecological paradigm of health.”

“It sounds like tree-huggers or something,” Schettler said in an interview. “But I mean ‘ecological’ in the sense that there are these multiple systems, one within the other—a family within a community, within a society, within a culture—and that’s the way ecologists tend to talk about ecosystems. It’s accepting up front that humans do not stand apart from the environment. We’re a major species, along with the mosquitoes and fish and trees and bacteria. And there are all of these wonderful interrelationships.”

Our Health and Ecosystem Health

 

Currently getting over a case of Lyme disease, Schettler notes that the condition wasn’t even on the radar three decades ago. Likewise, West Nile Virus. And dengue fever, first identified in the late 18th century, has soared since the 1960s, now infecting up to 100 million people worldwide each year.

“Can there be any doubt that human health is enormously dependent on ecological systems that we are having a major influence on?” Schettler says. “It’s all one world. Our tendency to describe the natural world as something without humans is part of the problem.”

When economic inequality gets this wide it has an adverse effect on people’s health.

Such a holistic approach to human health is often received as heresy within traditional medicine, but Schettler is hardly a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. He has testified before the U.S. Senate about links between Parkinson’s and pesticide use. He has been interviewed on public radio and co-authored two oft-quoted books, Generations at Risk: Reproductive Health and the Environment and In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development. Both explore Schettler’s belief about the environmental underpinnings of a host of disorders, from learning disabilities to cancer. And both lay out the limitations of Western medicine in coming up with clear causes and effective treatment.

Breast cancer is a prime example. Dissatisfied with research into the origins of the disease, Schettler began to wonder whether chemicals found in cancerous breast tissue actually encouraged tumor growth. He found that a girl’s exposure to DDT before the age of 14 corresponded to a greatly increased risk for breast cancer later in life. “If we’re looking only at adults, we’re missing this important window of susceptibility,” Schettler says. “But in medicine we weren’t going there. We were responding only to the illness. I was interested in its origins.”

Food is another favorite “wedge issue,” a way of examining diseases like diabetes in relation to agricultural policies. Schettler, noting America’s current epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes, began examining not only blood sugar levels in children but also the neighborhoods in which they lived. He found that many did not have a single market selling fruits and vegetables.

That led his musings a step further, to inquiry into the agricultural policies guiding food into stores. Which flowed naturally into an examination of conditions for agricultural workers who, it turned out, had high rates of cancer.

In Schettler’s analysis, each of these factors—the mass production of processed food, the lack of easily accessible fruits and vegetables, the health condition of farm workers—is fused with the others: “It’s fine to give people dietary advice, and advise them to exercise—in this country we have a long history of telling people how to change their own lives,” he says. “But it’s not just a matter of an individual making a poor choice. It’s what our system has provided to them, so it needs to be changed at the systems level. Diabetes and obesity are big-ticket items with huge implications for the federal budget.”

Thinking that way, it’s no stretch for the physician to segue into a discussion of federal farm subsidies for chemically produced foods. Or, on a more personal level, to question colleagues in health care about their failure to advocate for changes to the food served in schools.

Schettler’s approach touches everyone: He asks school districts that cut physical education programs as soon as budgets get tight, “What’s the message we’re giving to kids? This is really troubling. We’re facing an obesity and diabetes epidemic that’s going to overwhelm our health care system. And if there’s one thing that we should be doing it’s stressing the importance of diet and exercise for young people.”

You might think that a physician like Schettler—unafraid of skewering sacred cows wherever he finds them—would be a lightning rod for criticism. And indeed, the American Council on Science and Health issued a sharp rebuke in 1999 after Schettler attacked a report issued by the organization (and co-authored by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop) for its stand on phthalates: “The American Council on Science and Health is disappointed, but not surprised, by activists’ continued attempts to discredit a panel of well-respected, nationally and internationally recognized scientific and medical professionals,” the statement said. “Once again, there has been an attempt to shift attention from sound science to misrepresentations and half-truths.”

Other than this, there is virtually no public criticism of Schettler’s work. And even that fracas left him singularly unperturbed.

“Some of these chemical groups might label me an ‘enviro’ but that’s about it,” he said. “Still, this is an area of great debate—whether our job is merely to identify and treat disease or whether it is also to be advocates in public policy.”
Clearly, Schettler has made his decision. “You really do get into down-and-dirty politics here. That’s where this all plays out.”

Inequality Makes Us Sick

 

Wherever Schettler turns his focus, drilling down to the root causes of illness inevitably means confronting social problems, foremost among them economic inequality.

How Does Inequality Define the Health of a Nation?

Richard Wilkinson discusses inequality and the effects it can have on a country’s citizens.

Take lead poisoning: Poor diet leaves children from lower-income families more likely to suffer iron deficiencies. And an iron-deficient diet allows more lead to be absorbed in the intestinal tract, transporting more of the damaging metal to the brain and leading to increased neurological impairment among kids whose families are least able to counter those effects.

“If you just address the lead itself, without looking at diet and social circumstances, you don’t get very far,” Schettler says. “So yes, it’s important to make sure that kids aren’t being exposed to excessive amounts of lead and neurotoxins, and we need to keep doing that work. But we also need to be looking at housing, income disparities, the food system, energy production—things that are likely to have a bigger impact on a larger set of conditions and diseases.”

In short, poverty leads to increased exposure, which is exacerbated by heightened vulnerability (in this case, the iron-deficient diet) and an impaired ability to respond—“a toxic triad,” Schettler calls it.

The link between socioeconomic status and poor health is widely acknowledged. But perhaps less obvious is the finding that income disparities within a community also appear to have a deleterious effect, making one family susceptible to illnesses that another living in the same area—but at a higher income level—might escape.

As proof, Schettler cites research on asthma that found poorer kids—even when symptom-free—had higher levels of inflammatory markers in their blood than youths from wealthier families in the same neighborhood. Meaning that it took fewer irritants to push the poorer children over the threshold into a full-blown attack. Once sick, they were also less resilient—that is, less able to quickly recuperate—than wealthier children, either because they lacked treatment at home or were unable to get to a doctor.

“Higher income is protective—even in the same community,” Schettler says. “That’s why it’s so concerning to see this income gap in America now. We know it’s setting the stage for adverse health outcomes for people. Is that class warfare? Well, yes. When economic inequality gets this wide it has an adverse effect on people’s health. That’s what the literature tells us. We shouldn’t shy from saying it.”

Show Me the Progress

 

After spending 30 years as an emergency medicine physician, Schettler now serves as science director for two organizations, the Science and Environmental Health Network and the Collaborative on Health and the Environment. The latter is a partnership of some 4,000 health practitioners and scientists committed to promoting discussion of the connections between the environment and learning disorders, birth defects, infertility, childhood leukemia, endometriosis, and various cancers.

Admittedly, it’s a pretty bleak vision, this tangled web of social, medical, and political problems. And looking at it, you might expect Schettler to be wracked with hopelessness. Yet he is not.

“I actually think it’s a very important time in the world now,” he says. “There’s something here for everyone to do.”

He points to examples of significant change already underway within the health care industry itself, where the incineration of hospital waste has long been a leading source of dioxin emission. Hospital food, too—traditionally a fatty rotation of grilled cheese, burgers, French fries, and milkshakes—has been little more than “a joke,” Schettler says.

But since its founding in 1996, the international collective Health Care Without Harm has steadily been chipping away at these problems, and has now seen the closure of thousands of medical waste incinerators. It has initiated a Green Building program geared toward creating energy-efficient medical centers; and it has begun to change the way hospitals, with their enormous purchasing power, buy food to promote more locally grown and sustainable agriculture practices.

“The medical industry itself has been a great place to look at cleaning up,” says Schettler, who advises Health Care Without Harm. “Particularly as health care is almost 20 percent of the GDP.”

 

Make the Connections: Poverty, Obesity, and Diabetes

Even as a high school student in 1950s Ohio, the seemingly mild young man showed a talent for leadership. (“Ted’s ability to organize his pals has made him a leader in the senior class,” notes his yearbook. “His sincere, fun-loving personality will draw friends to him.”) These days, Schettler puts those skills to work before crowds of students, researchers, and policy makers. Yet nearly every conversation circles back to same question: How is anyone to make a difference when confronted with Schettler’s vision?

“I encourage people to recognize that they’re working in common cause with others,” he says. “Many people are carrying a common message, just coming at it from different angles.”

By way of example, he cites Detroit, long a metaphor for urban blight, ingrained misery and societal failure. Though there is not a single major-chain supermarket within the city limits, Schettler focuses instead on a crop of urban gardens now dotting the broken blacktop. “People are starting to grow their own food, healthy food!” he exclaims. “There are wonderful things going on.”

---

Claudia Rowe wrote this article for It's Your Body, the Fall 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Claudia has been an award-winning social issues journalist for more than 20 years. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 

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Food MythBusters Take on Big Ag's Worst Lies

Food  

AlterNet / By Anna Lappé

Food MythBusters Take on Big Ag's Worst Lies

For those who are tired of the ad campaigns, the trade-group public relations machines, the lobbying, the front groups and the myth-making from Big Ag and Big Food.

October 3, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Gunnar Pippel/ Shutterstock.com

 

 

 

It’s a tired old refrain you’ve probably heard before: “Industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the world.” Even if you shop at your weekly farmers market, and love your local kale and carrots, maybe you also secretly worry: Are you cursing people to more hunger around the world for your organic proclivities?

Well, folks, the research is in. Study after study is showing the opposite is true: we can onlyensure a well-fed world if we start shifting away from an agricultural system dependent on fossil fuels, mined minerals, and lots of water—all of which will only get more costly as they run out. Some of the most esteemed global institutions have documented that the best way to fight hunger—and grow food abundantly—is to go for organic and ecological production methods andget people eating whole, real food again.

So if we have scientific consensus, why don’t we have more public consciousness? You can find the answer in the marketing budgets of Big Ag. Thanks to well-funded, multi-decade communications campaigns by the very corporations profiting from chemical agriculture, many of us are still in the dark about the true costs of industrial agriculture and the true potential of sustainable agriculture.

Thanks to these efforts, we are inundated with messaging that we need their products—chemicals, fertilizer, genetically engineered seeds—to ensure the world is fed. We hear it all the time.

We hear the grain trader, ADM, is supermarket to the world—while the company’s price-fixing scandals were so outrageous they became fodder for a Matt Damon, Hollywood film.

We hear Monsanto is going to “squeeze more food from a raindrop”—that its genetically engineered crops will help farmers deal with extreme drought—even though no genetically engineered drought-tolerant seeds have been commercialized.

We hear pharmaceutical behemoth, Bayer, is "helping to feed a hungry planet" while at the same time it’s one of the biggest distributors of antibiotics to the livestock industry, leading to a public health crisis of antibiotic resistance. And it’s the maker of a toxic pesticide, now covering nearly 90 percent of all U.S. corn seeds, and a likely culprit in  colony collapse disorder—the fancy name for the disappearance of bees. It doesn’t take a PhD in agronomy to know that pollinators like bees are an essential part of being able to feed the world.
I don’t know about you, but I’m increasingly frustrated by all this spin: by the ad campaigns, the trade-group public relations machines, the lobbying, the front groups—the myth-making. And, while I don’t have $817 million (that’s what Monsanto spent on advertising in just one year), I do have some powerful allies—great food, farming and labor groups who share my frustration and want to do something about it. So together, we’re launching Food MythBusters: a one-stop shop to get your burning questions about food answered through short films, Q&As with experts and links to essential research.

Our first film takes on the myth that we need industrial agriculture to feed the world. We’re offering sneak peeks at SXSW Eco in Austin and with partners in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston and culminating with a national launch on Food Day, October 24th.

We’re inviting you – yes you – to help join us in spreading the word about the potential for sustainable food, farming and the exciting work springing to life across the country to remake our food system. This will ensure more and more of us have access to good, healthy,sustainably raised food.

Please join us by screening our first film wherever you are—on college campuses, in church basements, at CSA pickups and family rooms. We hope screenings will stimulate conversation, educate more about the real story of our food and compel people to get involved in transforming our food system—in their communities and across the country.

Visit www.foodmyths.org to see a teaser trailer and download a step-by-step toolkit for organizing a screening—it’s not too late. Or tune on October 4 at www.SXSWEco.com to watch a livecast.

Contact JGordon@StopCorporateAbuse.org if you’d like more information about how to join the many groups around the country hosting a screening on Food Day, or any day this fall.  Together, we can take back the story of our food from the marketing machine of Big Agriculture.

NATURAL NEWS

The top 10 breakfast cereals most likely to contain Monsanto's GMO corn Tuesday, September 25, 2012 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)

By now, nearly everyone interested in healthy living is aware of the recent research linking Monsanto's GMO corn to cancer tumors and an increase risk of premature death in both men and women. News of the research is spreading like wildfire across the 'net, and support for Proposition 37 -- which seeks to label GMOs in foods -- is growing by the day.

But the media has not yet reported on the everyday foods being sold in grocery stores right now and made with Monsanto's genetically modified corn (GM corn). Which foods are most likely to contain Monsanto GM corn? To answer this question, I visited a local grocery store in Austin, Texas and purchased 10 breakfast cereals made with high levels of non-organic corn.

According to the Center for Food Safety, up to 85% of the corn grown in the United States is genetically modified. This means corn-based cereals that use non-organic corn have a very high likelihood of containing GM corn.

The following list presents the top 10 popular breakfast cereals most likely to contain Monsanto's genetically modified corn. For the record, none of these cereals claim to be GMO-free, nor made with organic corn. The exact GMO content of these cereals remains a mystery precisely because manufacturers of these cereals refuse to label them with their GMO content. This lack of full disclosure by the food industry underscores the urgent need for a labeling law so that consumers can make an informed decision.

Legal note: In no way are we claiming these cereals will cause cancer tumors to grow in your body or that they pose an immediate risk to your health. Those studies have not yet been done on humans. GM corn is an experimental crop with unknown long-term effects of humans. Breakfast cereals made with GM corn may turn out to pose a significant long-term risk to human health, but that has not yet been determined. This article is presented in the public interest, reflecting reasonable caution over a common food ingredient which French scientists have now convincingly linked to cancer and premature death in studies conducted on rats.

The top 10 popular breakfast cereals most likely to contain Monsanto's GM corn

Cocoa Puffs and Corn Chex


Frosted Flakes and Honey Graham Oh's


Honey Nut Chex and Kashi Heart to Heart


Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Kellogg's Corn Pops


Kix and Barbara's Bakery Puffins Peanut Butter

Which cereals contain no GMOs? Nature's Path

There is only one brand of breakfast cereal I know of that's 100% non-GMO and 100% organic across their entire product line. That company is Nature's Path:

If you buy breakfast cereal, and you don't want to eat Monsanto's GM corn, always choose cereals from Nature's Path. This is my No. 1 most highly trusted cereal company.

Many "natural" brands that appear to be healthful and natural are actually not organic or GMO-free. For example, "Barbara's Bakery" cereals are not organic. Although they are positioned in store shelves alongside other organic cereals, they are actually made with conventional crops grown with pesticides which may include Monsanto's Roundup.

You may also notice that most of the cereals most likely to contain GM corn are children's cereals. It is the children in America who are being fed the most GMOs. This represents a highly unethical food experiment being conducted on an entire generation, and the long-term effects of human consumption of GMOs are simply not known.

What we do know is that rats fed this very same Monsanto GM corn developed shockingly large cancer tumors.

The photo released by the French research team, showing large cancer tumors growing at a strongly heightened risk in rats fed a "lifetime" of Monsanto's GM corn, is shown below. According to that study, 70% of females died premature and showed significant damage to their liver, kidneys and other organs.



Pretty crazy, huh?

Beware! 5 Depressing Stories About Food in the News This Past Week

FOOD 

AlterNet / By Alyssa Figueroa

Beware! 5 Depressing Stories About Food in the News This Past Week

As we continue to manipulate nature in detrimental ways to ensure our comforts, we put one of our great needs at risk.

September 21, 2012  |  

 

As we continue to manipulate nature in detrimental ways to ensure our comforts, we put one of our great needs at risk: food. From creating polluted environmental conditions that both contaminate and deplete food, to putting weird chemicals in our food that just do not belong, we continue to take everything natural out of nature; and it’s biting us in the you-know-what.
Here are five stories about food in the news this week that you should be concerned about:

1. GM Foods May Cause Tumor Growth, Premature Death

Genetically modified foods — foods developed by altering an animal or plant’s DNA via genetic engineering — most likely make their way onto your dinner plate in the form of corn, tomatoes, potatoes or soybeans. And now, a new controversial study states that these GM foods are linked to tumor growth and premature death.

In a new study led by Gilles-Eric Séralini at the University of Caen in France, Séralini used 200 lab rats (rude) to test the effects of GM corn as well as an herbicide called Roundup — both of which are used by industrial agriculture giant Monsanto. Séralini said that what made his study different was the amount of time he spent conducting it — two years, which is much longer than the 90-day period standard for feeding studies. In this time frame, he found that rats fed GM corn or given water containing Roundup were much more likely to develop tumors or die before they would have from normal age.

While many scientists have called Séralini’s methods into question, supporters of a ballot measure that would require GM foods to be labeled have used the study as support for their cause. The Californian measure, called Proposition 37 (or The California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act) aims to “help consumers make informed choices about the food they eat.”

Nutrition scientist Marion Nestle wrote that she had concerns about Séralini’s “weirdly complicated” study, but that the contentious science behind GM foods shouldn’t derail Proposition 37 and its labeling campaign.
She stated:

The California Prop. 37 proponents (and I’m totally with them) already have a strong “right to know” argument.  They don’t need to be distracted by the kinds of scientific arguments that are already raging about this study.

2. Arsenic in Your Rice 

Consumer Reports recently released new research that found high levels of arsenic in rice as well as other rice products such as rice breakfast cereals, rice baby cereal and rice pasta. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, arsenic is a Group 1 carcinogen known to cause bladder, lung and skin cancer. Consumer Reports tested more than 200 samples of rice products — traditional and organic, notable brands and store bands — and found significant levels of arsenic levels in all of them.

Popular brands tested in the study included Goya, Uncle Ben’s, Gerber, General Mills, Kellogg’s and Quaker. The study found that consuming a single serving of rice could contain one and a half times more arsenic than drinking a day’s worth of water containing arsenic at 5 parts per billion — the Environmental Protection Agency’s originally proposed limit for arsenic in drinking water.
So how does arsenic get in rice? While the USA Rice Foundation is claiming arsenic is a “a naturally occurring element in soil and water,” Consumer Reports stated that humans are mainly to blame. U.S. agricultural and industrial producers have used about 1.6 million tons of arsenic since 1910, making the United States the world’s leading arsenic user. We use arsenic for a variety of purposes, such as to treat lumber and to manufacture glass.  Also, the practices we use to make more food faster and cheaper cause arsenic to contaminate rice. For example, arsenical pesticides and fertilizers linger in the soil, while animals are fed food-containing arsenic to make them plumper.

Consumer Reports has demanded that the EPA phase out pesticides and fertilizers containing arsenic and that the Food and Drug Administration ban feeding of arsenic-containing drugs to animals. In the meantime, the group stated that consumers should test their water for arsenic, lessen their rice intake and switch from brown rice to white, which contains less arsenic. Rinsing rice thoroughly until water is clear also lessens arsenic intake.

3. Popcorn Can Cause Respiratory Problems

When Wayne Watson, 59, went to the doctor after having trouble breathing, he was shocked when she asked him, “Have you been around a lot of popcorn?” Watson had. In fact, he had been eating two bags of microwave popcorn a day for the past ten years. The doctor diagnosed him with “popcorn lung,” a respiratory disease in which small airways of the lung become scarred and tighten up, making it difficult to breathe. Workers at plants who inhale diacetyl, an artificial flavoring that gives popcorn its buttery taste, are usually the victims of the disease. A recent study even linked diacetyl to Alzheimer’s.
Watson was recently awarded $7 million in damages, with the popcorn’s manufacturer, Glister-Mary Lee Corp., being 80 percent at fault. The jury stated the supermarket where he purchased the popcorn was 20 percent at fault.
Watson said he barely eats popcorn any more.

He said: “Occasionally we'll pop some on the stove the old fashioned way."

4. Mercury in School Lunches

Do you like your tuna sandwiches? Well, they may contain something not so delicious. A council of consumer groups are now urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get tuna out of school lunches after studies show tuna may contain high levels of mercury. The Vermont branch of the Mercury Policy Project, an organization that raises awareness about the health and environmental threats of mercury, tested 59 canned tuna samples sold to schools in 11 states. The Project found highly variable levels of mercury, even among tuna that came from the same can; the average methylmercury content ranged from 0.02 to 0.64 parts per million in light tuna, and between 0.19 and 1.27 parts per million in albacore tuna.

Methylmercury is a more hazardous type of mercury, formed after bacteria contacts the mercury in fish. Fish become contaminated with mercury due to industrial pollution. Because albacore live longer than other species of tuna, they accumulate more mercury in their bodies and are therefore more dangerous to consume. According to the EPA, even tiny levels of methylmercury have been linked to learning disabilities in children. They limit methylmercury intake to a tiny amount. The Project stated that a 44-pound child who eats merely two ounces of albacore tuna might already be consuming 47% of the limit.

Pregnant women should also be concerned, as studies have shown the EPA’s recommendation for pregnant women — of eating fish no more than two meals a week — may still be too high. The Project is urging schools to limit tuna servings to twice a month and then phase it out.

5. Atlantic Ocean Fish on Decline 

Besides tuna, it may still be safe to eat fish — but what happens when there’s no more fish to eat? According to the environmental publication, Grist, something (not very) fishy is happening in the Atlantic Ocean this year. In their new video, reporters traveled to Gloucester, Mass. to talk to people in the fishing business about how climate change is affecting their work.

They spoke with Angela Sanfilippo, president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association, which works to protect and promote the Gloucester, New England fishing industry. Sanfilippo talked about the bizarre happenings in the Gloucester Harbor.  

“There is a strange phenomenon in the ocean this year,” she said.
Sanfilippo said that the warm water has caused lobsters in the harbor to shed earlier than usual. There was also a huge increase of lobsters along the New England coast this year, which actually drove prices down and was troublesome for fisherman.

In terms of fish, Sanfilippo said they’ve seen a 20 percent reduction in ground fish and next year they’re predicting a decrease of 70 percent.
“We see that it’s hard to find a great abundance of ground fish. In the summer there are usually herring that the ground fish feed on.” Now, she said, “There is nothing. It’s like somebody swept everything away.”

Sanfilippo also mentioned that small squid have appeared in the harbor — a species rarely seen there before. She called what is happening a “natural disaster,” and that we need to care about the environment if we want to continue to have fish to eat.

“We know that if we keep the ocean clean we will always have fish,” she said, adding that fishermen have been fighting with oil companies to keep out of waters. “We can control the damage we do to the environment … [but] there are people in the world that, for money, they’re willing to do anything — they don’t care about the environment.”

Alyssa Figueroa is an editorial fellow at AlterNet. She is a recent Ithaca College graduate who double-majored in journalism and politics. Follow her on Twitter @alyssa_fig.

How Mitt Romney and Bain Helped Grow Monsanto Into a Biotech Giant

FOOD 

Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute / By Wayne Barrett

How Mitt Romney and Bain Helped Grow Monsanto Into a Biotech Giant

If Romney is elected, this bête noire of environmentalists will have a very old friend in a very high place.

September 17, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: AFP

 

 

This article was reported in collaboration with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, where Barrett is a reporting fellow. 

Though Mitt Romney has been campaigning for president since 2006, it’s alarming how little is known about critical chapters of his business biography. Nothing spells that out more clearly than his ties to Monsanto—the current target of a mid-September Occupy nationwide action—whose dark history features scandals involving PCBs, Agent Orange, bovine growth hormone, NutraSweet, IUD, genetically modified (GM) seed and herbicides, reaching back to the 1970s and ’80s. That’s when Monsanto was the largest consulting client of Romney’s employer, Bain & Company, and when Romney helped move Monsanto from chemical colossus to genetic giant, trading one set of environmental controversies for another.

The romance between Romney and Monsanto began back in 1977, when the recently minted Harvard Law and Business School graduate joined Bain, the Boston-based consulting firm launched in 1973, the same year Monsanto became one of its first clients. One of Bain’s founding partners, Ralph Willard, described to theBoston Globe in 2007 how “Romney learned the technical aspects of the chemical business so thoroughly that he sounded as if he had gone to engineering school instead of business school,” and that Monsanto executives soon began “bypassing” him to go directly to Romney.This history matters not just because of the light it sheds on Romney’s self-ballyhooed business experience but because of the litany of Monsanto corporate objectives that clash with planetary concerns. If Romney is elected, this bête noire of environmentalists will have a very old friend in a very high place.

John W. Hanley, the Monsanto CEO at the time, has said how “impressed” he was with the 30-year-old Mitt. Hanley became so close to Romney that he and Romney’s boss Bill Bain devised the idea of creating Bain Capital as a way of keeping Romney in the fold. Unless Mitt was allowed to run this spin-off venture firm, Hanley and Bain feared, he would leave. Hanley even contributed $1 million to Romney’s first investment pool at Bain Capital. Monsanto’s Hanley is in fact the only business executive outside of the Bain founding family to so shape Romney’s career—jumpstarting the two companies, Bain & Company and Bain Capital, that account for all but two years of Romney’s much-ballyhooed business experience. Bain and Romney whispered in Monsanto’s ear until 1985, when Hanley’s successor Richard Mahoney says he “fired” them and when Romney moved on to Bain Capital.

A year before Romney began to work with Monsanto, Congress passed a 1976 bill banning PCBs, a liquid chemical monopoly of Monsanto’s, exposing the company to an onslaught of litigation throughout the Bain years. Monsanto was also besieged by charges that its decade of Vietnam War defoliation with Agent Orange dioxins—branded by a Yale environmentalist “the largest chemical warfare operation” in human history—had contaminated as many as 10 million Vietnamese and American people, leading to a $180 million settlement covering the claims of 52,000 troops in 1984.

Dr. Earl Beaver, who was Monsanto’s waste director during the Bain period, says that Bain was certainly “aware” of the “PCB and dioxin scandals” because they created “a negative public perception that was costing the company money.” So Bain recommended focusing “on the businesses that didn’t have those perceptions,” Beaver recalls, starting with “life science products that were biologically based,” including genetically engineered crops, as well as Roundup, the hugely profitable weed-killer. “These were the products that Bain gave their go-ahead to,” Beaver contends, noting that Romney was a key player, “reviewing the data collected by other people and developing alternatives,” talking mostly to “the higher muckety-mucks.”

But Beaver, who left Monsanto and eventually became chair of the Institute for Sustainability in New York, said that the Monsanto/Bain teams “did not put an adequate emphasis on esoteric or societal factors” because they were “focused on this quarter or that quarter or next year’s financials.” People who have a long-term horizon, Beaver concluded, “consider different factors than what’s going to be reported in the stock section of the newspaper.”

The first Monsanto biotech product, bovine growth hormone, became another headache for the firm, crippling cows, alarming parents concerned about the health effect on kids, meeting with rejection among developed countries outside the United States and sparking bans by American retailers from Starbucks to Walmart. Monsanto announced it invented the hormone in 1981, midway through the Bain period, but didn’t get FDA clearance for it until 1993. By 2008, the company got out of the business altogether, ostensibly selling it for far less than it invested in the technology.

Now the king of GM corn, soybean, alfalfa and other seeds, engineered to resist Roundup and increase yield, Monsanto is awash in global disputes, having lost two recent, at least $2 billion, court decisions in Brazil, for example, where 5 million soy farmers sued them. The Brazilian farmers’ issue is also a source of frustration for US farmers—the contracts farmers are forced to sign pledging not to save seeds for future harvests, a common farm custom that resale-fixated Monsanto has hired a seed police army to stop.

While Monsanto can trot out its own and FDA findings to support its seed safety claims, there are independent studies linking its corn to organ damage, obesity, diabetes and allergies. The company’s profits plunged in 2010 as evidence mounted that GM seeds, 90 percent of which originate with Monsanto, weren’t boosting yields as promised. Consumer resistance has already forced Monsanto to retreat from the GM potato, tomato, wheat, rice, flax seed and bio-pharmaceutical crops. Peru recently banned GM products for ten years and Hungary destroyed all its Monsanto cornfields, joining ninety countries that aggressively monitor and restrict, or ban, GM imports, according to the Center for Food Safety.

The Union of Concerned Scientists criticized the absence of independent and long-term research findings on GM safety, charging that we are placing “a huge wager” on this little-examined technology. Monsanto’s onetime communications director shrugged his shoulders to this kind of concern, telling the New York Times: “Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.” In fact, Monsanto pressured the Reagan administration, starting during the Bain years, to develop a friendly regulatory framework it could exploit as a seal of approval.

The critical shift to “life sciences” started in 1979, when Monsanto installed a University of California biologist, Howard Schneiderman, as its research director and began investing hundreds of millions a year in biotech hormones and seeds. Monsanto’s website reports that by 1981—when Bain was intimately involved in determining the company’s strategic direction—biotech was “firmly established as Monsanto’s strategic research focus.”

Roundup Ready seeds, of course, are inextricably tied to the success and safety of Roundup itself. But “super-weeds” are developing a Roundup tolerance, requiring more and more spraying to work, which is harmful ecologically and financially damaging for farmers. Introduced in the Bain years with Bain boosting, Roundup’s supposedly “biodegradable” and “nontoxic” claims have led to false advertising findings in France and by the Attorney General of New York. Studies are also now beginning to link Roundup to cancer and birth defects, the first indication that it may be going the way of Lasso, another Monsanto herbicide endorsed by Bain that was forced from the market because of health hazards.

* * *

During the presidential primaries this past March, Romney named an eleven-member Agricultural Advisory Committee that was packed with Monsanto connections, including its principal Washington lobbyist Randy Russell, whose firm has represented Monsanto since its founding in the 1980s and has been paid $2.4 million in lobbying fees since 1998.

Among those also appointed to the panel were another Russell client and Monsanto partner in the marketing of GM alfalfa, Land O’ Lakes CEO Chris Policinski; and Chuck Conner, whose National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC) is closely linked to Land O’ Lakes. Conner and Policinski, an NCFC director, publicly supported Monsanto’s 2010 attempts to win USDA approval for its alfalfa. Other members of the initial Romney council were Tom Nassif, whose Western Growers Association receives annual grants from Monsanto, and A.G. Kawamura, the former California agriculture secretary who championed Monsanto’s alfalfa despite a federal court ruling in the state against it.

Romney has also cultivated close relations with three Republicans who hail from Monsanto’s home state of Missouri—Senator Roy Blunt, former governor Matt Bluntand former senator Jim Talent. In 2011, Romney picked Roy Blunt to be his campaign’s point man in the Senate and named Talent to his four-member economic policy team. Matt Blunt, son of the senator, became a senior adviser at Solamere Capital, the investment firm headed by one of Romney’s sons. (Roy Blunt’s wife Abigail, a Romney bundler, is the in-house lobbyist for Kraft Foods, also represented by Russell and a sometimes ally of Monsanto’s on key food issues.) Monsanto, its spinoff Solutia, and Russell’s firm have long been top donors to the three, contributing a combined $246,170 to them over the years (Monsanto executives are modest donors to Romney but give nothing to Obama).
Katie Smith, a Talent aide for four years who was director of Missouri’s agriculture department under Governor Matt Blunt until 2008, was also named to Romney’s council. Smith is now director of public affairs for Osborn & Barr, a Missouri-based public relations firm created by Monsanto executives whose founding client was Monsanto. Matt Blunt was such a champion of Monsanto’s GM products that its CEO presented him with the annual leadership award of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a Monsanto-backed group. Talent is the co-chair of a Washington lobbying and strategic advice firm whose clients include Land O’ Lakes and was once a partner in a Missouri lobbying firm that represents Monsanto now.

Nebraska senator Mike Johanns, a beneficiary of $9,500 in Monsanto-related contributions, was selected by Romney to co-chair the advisory group. Johanns was George Bush’s agriculture secretary in between his six years as Nebraska governor and three years in the Senate. In 2002–03, he headed two associations of governors, one of which included Romney, and went abroad to push GM foods and assail European Union efforts to require labeling of them. While Johanns ran USDA in 2005, it approved Monsanto’s alfalfa without obtaining the minimal environmental impact statement required under Reagan’s regulatory framework, a decision overturned by the federal courts. Johanns’s agency did the same for Monsanto’s sugar beets.

Johanns and Blunt joined all but one Republican in the Senate, and many Democrats, in defeating Bernie Sanders’s bill amendment this year to require GM labeling—disclosure that’s favored by more than 90 percent of polled Americans, the food safety arm of the United Nations and sixty-one countries. Monsanto has so far spent $4.2 million to defeat a labeling referendum on the ballot in California this November, more than any other opponent, and several of the organizations connected to members of Romney’s advisory council have also opposed the referendum. President Obama supports a labeling requirement, though he’s done nothing to make it happen, while Romney’s campaign declined to respond to The Nation’s questions about his position on labeling or the California referendum.

Romney won’t answer our questions, or anyone else’s, about where he stands on the two pending farm bills—the Senate version backed by Obama that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support (including Johanns and Blunt), or the House bill that made it through the agriculture committee with two Republican amendments dubbed “Monsanto riders.” Having lost the alfalfa and other GM lawsuits, Monsanto spent more on lobbyists, including Russell, than any other non-tobacco agribusiness and convinced House Republicans to add these riders, which would virtually immunize its products from regulation, allowing farmers to plant crops even if a court has ordered an environmental review and short-circuiting the reviews, as Johanns tried to do.

Congressmen Jack Kingston and Frank Lucas, each of whom sponsored a Monsanto rider, were listed in August as national co-chairs of a new general election committee called the Farmers and Ranchers for Romney coalition, which also includes all eleven members of the March group and Roy Blunt. Johanns, Conner and Nassif are among the six National Chairs of the group, as is Romney’s recent Iowa tour guide Bill Northey, the elected agriculture secretary whose biggest donors include Monsanto ($12,000). In a hotly contested 2010 race, Republican Northey was backed by Democratic lobbyist Jerry Crawford, whose firm made almost $1 million as Monsanto’s top Iowa-based lobbyist.

The Romney coalition also includes John Block, Russell’s mentor who appointed him deputy secretary when Block was Reagan’s agriculture secretary in the ’80s and now hosts a national radio show that’s sponsored by Monsanto and features denunciations of Monsanto opponents as “environmental wackos.” The president of the United Fresh Produce Association and the past president of the National Pork Producers Council—two other Russell clients and Monsanto allies—are also part of the Romney group. And the list includes the past head of the American Soybean Association, which backed Monsanto’s riders to the farm bill; and Steve Troxler, North Carolina’s agriculture commissioner, who collected $3,000 in Monsanto contributions, grows GM soybeans (probably Monsanto’s) on his own farm, and sponsored a bill to stop counties from banning GM foods.

Another coalition member, Jay Vroom, heads a Monsanto-funded, aggressively pro-GM trade association of pesticide makers called CropLife America, a large donor to Kingston and Lucas. The two top directors of CropLife’s regional partner in St. Louis e-mailed associates that they “shuddered” when they learned that Michelle Obama was planting an organic garden on the White House lawn, writing her a letter suggesting that she was impugning chemical agriculture. Monsanto itself has been coy about Obama, especially after he appointed its longtime ally former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary. Unlike his USDA predecessor Johanns, Vilsack put Monsanto’s alfalfa through a court-mandated EIS process, but then deregulated it entirely. Close to Monsanto lobbyist Crawford, Vilsack has also partially deregulated sugar beets.

As deliberately vague as Romney is, he’s moved publicly in Monsanto’s direction on the company’s genetically engineered ethanol and farm subsidies, appears aligned with it on labeling, and his spokesman Shawn McCoy said this month that the candidate was “concerned by the effect that the Obama administration’s crushing onslaught of regulations is having on agriculture,” a suggestion that he might favor the regulatory relief in the Kingston/Lucas riders.

* * *

Frank Reining, the Monsanto executive who was designated by Hanley in 1973 to interface with Bill Bain and his partners, says Bain’s “relationship with Monsanto” began “before Bain even existed,” noting that it was among the firm’s first and biggest clients. Patrick Graham, a Bain founder, agrees that Monsanto was an “early client,” soon delivering millions in annual fees. According to Reining and eleven other former Monsanto and Bain executives interviewed for this article, Bain took a companywide approach to its restructuring of Monsanto, focusing over the succeeding years on one product after another—“confirming,” as Reining put it, the corporate consensus to get out of polyester, plastics and synthetic fibers.

Just as job reductions would later become a common, controversial result of Bain Capital investment, Monsanto went from a peak of 64,000 employees in 1979 to 20,000 today, a consequence in part of the $4 billion of businesses that Bain, Hanley and others decided to dump. While the press office at Monsanto refused to answer most of our questions, one current official said that Bain “worked in divestitures, acquisitions, streamlining, layoffs and cost reductions.”
Earle Harbison, who ran five divisions of Monsanto during the Bain years and eventually became its president, says: “Romney was part of the team that came in to study the whole company, and they worked day and night. They were down in the factories, the sales offices, accounting systems, the whole works.” Harbison says he and Romney “had at least a dozen meetings,” and that the Bainies were “armed with a bunch of flip charts.”

Arthur Fitzgerald, another former top executive, says: “Romney was involved in several individual projects. I remember Romney only because he was one of the leaders and stuck out as someone who was particularly curious.” Hanley’s successor Mahoney said Bain “did some good work” but that he dumped them because “the consultants were getting in my hair.” Asked about Romney, the press-shy Mahoney would only say: “One presidential person made calls on occasion as did many Bain executives.”

Graham, who claims credit for recruiting Romney to Bain, described him as “an important guy in delivering the work” at Monsanto, saying he “cut his teeth” at the company. Graham also laid out how he and the Bain team worked with Monsanto: “We worked on the seed business, the herbicide business, some of the basic chemical businesses. We’re kind of the right-hand man. We present to the board of directors. We’re friends and partners. We understood it down to its roots.” Bain’s brass, recalled Graham, would meet “Hanley and his five top people every time we went to St. Louis,” which he said was as often as “two to three times a week.”

Dan Quinn, another former partner recruited at Bain by Romney in 1983, called Monsanto a “prized” client that Bain “thought of as one of their biggest successes.” Romney, says Quinn, was “a key framer “ of the continuing conversation with Monsanto, especially “on the marketing side,” where he was “in charge of several of those teams,” just a notch below the Bain founders in the chain of command.

The most important contribution Bain made to Monsanto, Graham contends, was concluding that “the biggest opportunity” was to bring “an entirely new value product,” namely biotech and herbicides, “to the whole farming industry in America, soybeans and stuff.” Graham exalts in what Bain did—saying it “completely changed the economics of farming in America” and made Monsanto “the biggest agricultural business in the world.” He concedes that the GM seeds, herbicides and other products were “Hanley’s vision,” adding “we did the analysis to make him comfortable that it was right and how to do it.”

John Qualls, who worked closely with Bain in Monsanto’s office of economic forecasting, credits the consulting firm with looking “at the whole schmear,” but adds they were particularly focused on getting “the cash cow” product lines, mostly chemicals, to “funnel” their profits into “the wildcats, the comers,” like biotech. “The major thing that I think Bain contributed to was the division of Monsanto into two major units and spinning them off,” says Qualls, though he acknowledges that the actual spinoff didn’t occur until 1997, when Monsanto created a freestanding company called Solutia, run by ex–Monsanto brass and selling Monsanto’s remaining chemical commodities. “It was a natural evolution” of Bain’s strategy, he said, with “Bain picking the stars” early on, including biotech and Roundup, that wound up staying with Monsanto, while Solutia was left with “the superfund cleanup stuff and the environmental disasters.” (Solutia, which filed for bankruptcy in 2003, was recently acquired by Eastman Chemical.)

Combined with Graham’s analysis, this would make Bain, and consequently Romney, the doctors whose surgery eons ago is responsible for the Monsanto we know today, a financial giant whose biotechnology products are enormously controversial all over the world.

When The Nation questioned Monsanto spokeswoman Kelli Powers about the role played by Bain and Romney at the company, she said that “Monsanto is a different company than the one” of the Bain period. That’s partially because of the Solutia spinoff and partially because the “Old Monsanto” briefly went through two acquisitions around 2000, only to recreate itself in 2002. But the “New Monsanto” has many of the same product lines, facilities and executives as the old one, and much of the same problems. Geneva-based Covalence ranked the company dead last of 581 multinationals in its 2010 reputation and ethics index, which is distributed by Reuters and Bloomberg. Powers said a search of its archives found “no reference to Bain anywhere.”

Research assistance was provided by Danielle Bernstein, Loretta Chin, Alina Mogilyanskaya, Joseph O'Sullivan, Nadia Prupis, Stephanie Rogan and Elizabeth Terry.

Wayne Barrett is a Nation Institute Fellow who has been covering the presidential election for the Daily Beast and Mother Jones. He was a senor editor and investigative reporter at the Village Voice for nearly four decades, and has written several books, including Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudy Giuliani.

The evil of Monsanto and GMOs explained: Bad technology, endless greed and the destruction of humanity

NaturalNews.com

The evil of Monsanto and GMOs explained: Bad technology, endless greed and the destruction of humanity

Sunday, September 23, 2012
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)

(NaturalNews) By now, nearly all informed people recognize that Monsanto is widely regarded as the most evil corporation on our planet. But what, exactly, makes Monsanto so evil? Why is Monsanto worse than a pharmaceutical company, a pesticide company or even a weapons manufacturer?

The answer to this question is found in probing the virtue of the corporation in question. As virtuous people, we expect corporations to act with a sense of fundamental human decency. We expect them to behave within the boundaries of respecting human life, honest business practices and reliable science. We (naively) wish that corporations would act like decent human beings.

But they don't. In their quest for profit at any cost, they violate the basic tenants of virtue. They betray humanity. They destroy life. They malign Mother Nature herself, and in doing so, they threaten the very future of sustainable life on our planet.

Here, I unravel the fundamental "violations of virtue" that Monsanto practices on a daily basis. It is these things, I think you'll agree, that make Monsanto a despicable corporate entity and a threat to all humankind.

Corporate greed over service to humanity

Monsanto's actions are designed to maximize its corporate profits, not to serve the people. Its entire seed-and-herbicide business model is designed to trap farmers in a system of economic dependence... to turn farmers into indentured servants who can never return to traditional farming after their soil has been destroyed with Roundup.

Death over life

Monsanto's products cause death. They compromise and violate life. Monsanto's GM corn grown a toxic chemical right inside each and every corn kernel. This corn is what is subsequently eaten by humans.

Rats fed this corn grew horrifying cancer tumors as shown here:



In a recent scientific study, a shocking 70 percent of female rats died prematurely when fed GMOs. Fifty percent of males died early. Almost all of them died from cancer tumors.

Read more about the link between GMOs and cancer tumors at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/037249_GMO_study_cancer_tumors_organ_damag...

Secrecy over transparency

Monsanto is spending millions of dollars to try to defeat Proposition 37 in California -- a bill which would simply require GMOs to be indicated on food labels.

But Monsanto and other companies such as those that own Larabar, Silk and Kashi do not want consumers to know the truth about GMOs in the foods they buy. (See the GMO boycott infographic here.) They're also spending huge sums of money to try to defeat Proposition 37 so that the food companies can keep GMOs a dirty little secret about the poison in your food.

Plainly stated, these companies do not want you to know what you're eating. And why? Because you're eating poison!

Domination of technology rather than sharing of wisdom

Monsanto does not create technology and then share wisdom with farmers; instead the company patents its GE seeds and thereby claims monopolistic ownership over them. This patent is used to punish farmers!

When Monsanto's GMO seeds blow into the fields of farmers who are trying to avoid growing GMOs, Monsanto uses its patent "rights" to sue the farmers and claim they "stole" Monsanto property!

This is an example of the kind of pure evil Monsanto engages in on a regular basis. From the top company executives to the bottom of the corporate ladder, people who work for Monsanto are engaged in promoting a sickening, unprecedented evil that's spreading across our planet like a black slimy cancer tumor.

That's no coincidence, either, considering that eating GMOs causes massive cancer tumors.

Artificial manipulation of nature rather than honoring of nature

Instead of working with the beauty, the genius and the abundance that has already been engineered into nature, Monsanto seeks to violate nature, overriding healthy plant genes with poison genes that generate insecticides right inside the crops.

Instead of honoring the natural ability of seeds to reproduce generation after generation, Monsanto develops "terminator seed" technology that causes seeds to self-terminate after one generation. This, by itself, is a heinous crime against nature, humankind and planet Earth. It is a crime worse than the Nazi holocaust, for terminator seeds threaten ALL human life on our planet... billions of lives are threatened by the behavior of Monsanto.

Environmental destruction over environmental stewardship

Roundup herbicide devastates soils, rendering them contaminated and unable to produce healthy crops using traditional (or organic) farming methods. Once a farm plot is destroyed with Roundup, that farmer is forever enslaved to a chemical-based farming protocol. It's unhealthy, it's a disaster to the environment, and the actual crop yields are LOWER than with organic farming, over a period of five years or more.

By encouraging farmers to spray literally millions of acres of farmland with Roundup, Monsanto is engaged in a conspiracy to destroy our agricultural heritage and turn us all into "food slaves" that must pay tribute to Monsatan.

Scientific deception over scientific truth

The so-called "science" coming out of Monsanto is some of the most inane, malicious and brutally deceptive junk science ever fabricated by corporate science sellouts. Instead of testing GMOs for long durations on animals, Monsanto-funded scientists test GMOs for a mere 90 days and then adamantly declare the food to be "safe" for a lifetime of consumption by humans.

It's no wonder they didn't run long-term tests: The real acceleration in cancer tumors only emerged after the 90-day milestone in rats.

Even if Monsanto-funded scientists found GMOs to be safe in a "lifetime" feeding study, you couldn't trust those results anyway: Any scientist, politician or media group with financial ties to Monsanto must now be assumed to be compromised and lacking any credibility whatsoever. Monsanto has bought off countless scientists, experts, media writers and politicians. But paying them off doesn't alter reality. Poison in the corn is still poison in the corn, even if you pay a group of sellout scientists to foolishly declare otherwise.

The CHANGE we really need: Corporations with virtue

Something is terribly, terribly wrong with corporate behavior in America, and Monsanto is just one of thousands of corporations which demonstrate highly irresponsible, extreme, destructive behavior.

The very design of corporations is missing something: HUMANITY. Sure, corporations are great at generating profits, streamlining logistics, manufacturing, marketing and so on. But where's the humanity in all that?

It's nowhere to be found. Corporations don't care WHO they harm, WHAT they destroy, HOW they behavior or even HOW FAR they have to go to make another buck.

Here at NaturalNews.com, we've documented corporations engaging in the most despicable, anti-human behavior imaginable, including using little children as vaccine guinea pigs, secretly testing diseases on prisoners, routinely falsifying evidence, bribing physicians, lying to regulators, engaging in efforts to deny consumers access to more affordable products, inventing fictitious diseases ("disease mongering") to market toxic drugs, and even hiring P.R. firms to spread lies and disinformation online through social networks and websites.

And that's just the pharmaceutical industry. Think about the evils perpetrated by the agricultural giants, weapons manufacturers and globalist banks. There is no end to their destruction.

A corporation is like a cancer tumor. It wants to tap into more and more resources, growing larger and larger until it kills everything. That's the innate drive of nearly every large corporation you've ever heard of: Get big, destroy the competition and DOMINATE! Even if it means killing our future.

When corporations become so powerful that they practically run the government -- as they do now -- the correct descriptive term for that arrangement is Fascism.

How do you stop Fascism? With a revolution, of course. And a peaceful one would be far preferable.

The revolution we need is a revolution against the corporation

As we see our present-day society being utterly destroyed by corporations -- banking, agriculture, pharmaceutical, etc. -- we must get serious about what needs to happen to change the structure of corporations so that they serve humanity rather than destroying humanity.

Here are some suggestions worth considering:

#1) Strip away corporate personhood protections.

#2) Deny all patents on seeds, genes and medicines. Such things should belong to everyone, not to a monopolistic few. This would also take the profit out of medicine, meaning drug companies would no longer have a financial incentive to fabricate and promote fictitious diseases.

#3) Ban all corporate lobbying and campaign contributions. No corporation should have access to lawmakers, period. Lawmakers should serve the people who elected them and no one else.

#4) Disband all corporations that currently function as a danger to humanity. This would include, of course, Monsanto, Merck and many others. Who decides this? Whoever wins the revolution, of course. (Isn't that always the case?)

#5) Nationalize the Federal Reserve and make it "America's bank" so that Fed money is owned by the People and benefits the People instead of globalist banks.

#6) Halt the "revolving door" where government regulators take high-paying jobs at the very corporations they've been regulating. Once a person works in an influential position for a government regulator, they should be forever restricted from working for the industry they once regulated.

#7) End "Free Speech rights" for corporations. Corporations are not people. They have no God-given rights. By ending this fabricated "right," we could institute strict advertising limits that would prevent corporations from advertising harmful products to children and adults.

Stop supporting evil

The ultimate solution, of course, is a consumer solution: Stop purchasing products from evil corporations! This means you need to stop buying non-organic corn products such as breakfast cereals, corn tortillas, and corn snack chips.

Stop buying lawn pesticide chemicals. Stop buying medications. Stop buying toxic perfumes, cosmetics and personal care products. Stop buying soda pop and aspartame!

YOU help shift the world in a more positive direction by shifting your own personal purchasing habits. And that's something you can control right now, today, starting with the very next dollar you spend at the store.

BUY ORGANIC, non-GMO products wherever possible. You'll be changing the world one purchase at a time. That's a genuine, practical way to diminish the power of evil corporations starting right now.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037289_Monsanto_corporations_ethics.html#ixzz27Ijb7Rux