. 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)." Click here.
One must remember that this is the same agency which couldn't find the source of the problems with tomatoes this past summer, shifted to blaming jalapenos, and even attempted in Pennsylvania, to blame raw milk. Did the FDA actually find the source but there were corporations to protect (Monsanto owns tomatoes? Click here.)
Many people were made ill, but notice that the FDA is not banning tomatoes as it has done with raw milk (with no comparable outbreaks and with customers pleased with the milk) or even demanding testing of every bushel.
There are now plans to build a bioterrorism lab which will house the most dangerous disease samples. Where are they building this lab to protect our country from bioterrorism and any escape of food-borne diseases into our food supply? Kansas, a state with more tornadoes than any in the country.
The FDA regulations that Monsanto is pleased with (and one imagines they contributed to directly) are not only international import ones, or warrantless seize and destroy ones under Homeland security but FDA regulations concerning general food contamination.
Keeping in mind that people have been sickened by tomatoes but no regulations were applied for either routine testing or any banned (and NO food should be), and there have been NO such issues with seeds, look now at these FDA regulations for seeds:
"Key sources of contamination in seed production include:
. Agricultural water sources
. Use of manure as fertilizer
. Harvesting, transportation, and seed-cleaning equipment
. Seed storage facilities" Click here.
This short and innocuous looking list is a picture of the deconstruction of organic farming and all sustainable agriculture in this country. When one remembers that this list was presented at a speech to ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association which Monsanto runs, then seeing manure - the gold of organic farming, the non-petroleum-based key to rich soil, listed here as a source of contamination, jumps out - as does the absence on the list of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, both capable of killing and previously used for that purpose. Click here.
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. Click here.
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?
Is this Illinois law, for example, manageable to accomplish by any ordinary person, outside of a corporate bureaucracy - of government or industry? Click here.
At a time of food insecurity and the loss of biodiversity and the public's demand for organic, normal food, should the national and state governments be creating any laws at all which IN ANY WAY AT ALL limit saving of seeds by farmers and all citizens?
Perhaps in looking more carefully at the regulations themselves and at the agencies imposing them and at the corporations at the right hand of those agencies, the regulations no longer look like what they are claimed to be - protection for the public health. In their size and impact on farming, they are appear to be hidden weapons in battle of big against little, or more accurately of MASSIVE, CORPORATE and GLOBAL versus miniscule, human and local. In each regulation, the changes imposed are
1. beyond the capacity of small farmers and human beings to be in the game at all, or
2. to keep up, or
3. to defend themselves from lawsuits and raids.
Notice the immense scope of the regulations, the required costs to be included, the corporate legal level of complexity, the reliance on labs of dubious independence as the means to justify warrantless raids and destruction, and the sheer power involved.
Grape seed extract has just been shown to be enormously effective against leukemia. Click here. Farmers will not be able to clean the seeds or sell them. Only agribusiness will. Storing it or any seeds at your home could potentially make you liable to be raided, as the coop in Ohio was. Same for flax seeds.
Untouched in all this, on the animal side of farming, is a monstrously over-sized corporate surveillance system with penalties large enough to finish off any farmer at a single infraction (click here), one that farmers have been desperately saying will put them out of farming altogether – NAIS. It was promoted as voluntary but people have been been coerced as well as signed on without their knowledge, and now suddenly it is mandatory, though whatever way used to force farmers onto it, it is feared by farmers as underhanded but inescapable means of having them sign away their farmland – our American farmland – as collateral on the bailout. Click here.
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. Click here.
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. Click here.
The poultry industry, in using the crisis to push out small farmers (click here) 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. Click here.
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?
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