Wellspring Seasonal Newsletter - Spring 2012
Farm and Food Bill 2012
This is the year Congress is scheduled to pass a new Farm (and Food) Bill. With too many families going hungry, with a pandemic of food related diseases, and with conventional and factory farms polluting our water, air and food, we need a healthier food system that reinvents ways to eat, farm and cook.
With an active social structure made up of a network of CSAs, food policy councils, community gardens, family farms and food co-ops. we can effect social, economic and cultural values robbed by the industrial food system. To do this, the movement must become political.
We need changes to the rules and regulations that govern the food system, such as Wall Street, the US Farm Bill, World Trade Organization and the US Dept of Agriculture. They favor global monopolies; they control seeds as well as food processing, distribution and retail. We see a revolving door between government and corporate food monopolies.
We need to articulate a broader vision, occupy web sites, blogs, list serves and social media. We need to be a powerful political voice for the hungry, the farmer, the consumer, the environment, local communities and local economies.
In this election year, we have a chance to make our voices heard and our vote count. We need a Farm Bill that
- Creates jobs and spurs economic growth through food and farms
- Invests in the next generation of farmers and ranchers
- UnordMakes healthy food widely available to all Americans
- Protects our natural resources and helps farmers care for their land
- Drives innovation for tomorrow’s farmers and food entrepreneurs
- Reforms outdated subsidies and restores fiscal responsibility in farm policy
Let’s make this the year that food safety, food security and food sovereignty find new legs.
If you are interested in coming together to discuss these issues and seek support in making a change to our food system, please join us on Sunday May 20 at 2:00pm at Wellspring. A phone call expressing your ability to come would be appreciated. (262) 675–6755
Consumers’ Right to Know and GMO’s
Background - “In 1992 the Food and Drug Administration released its policy on genetically modified organisms, claiming that “the agency is not aware of any information showing that [GMO] foods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way”.
The government’s green light fueled the rapid spread of GMOs and monopolies - so now most US corn and soybeans are GMO, with genes patented largely by one company: Monsanto. The FDA position helped make GMOs’ spread so invisible that most Americans still don’t believe they’ve ever eaten them - even though the grocery industry says they could be in 75% of processed food.
Even fewer Americans are aware that in 1999 attorney Steven Druker reported that in 40,000 pages of FDA files secured via a lawsuit, he found “memorandum after memorandum containing warnings about the unique hazards of genetically engineered food,” including the possibility that they could contain “unexpected toxins, carcinogens or allergens.”
Yet at the same time, public education campaigns have succeeded in confining almost 80% of GMO planting to just three countries: the United States, Brazil and Argentina. In more than two dozen countries and in the European Union they’ve helped pass mandatory GMO labeling. Even China requires it.
“The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities”
by Frances Moore Lappe’, The Nation, 9–14–11
