Once you’ve started drinking Monsanto’s kool-aid, it’s hard to stop. In unfortunate news, the sugar beet industry of Idaho, who has bought Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready sugar beet seeds meant to withstand copious spraying with glyphosate-based herbicide, is putting on hold GMO labeling initiatives in the state.
The moneyed corporations running the GMO show certainly don’t make it easy. Now that they have won not one, but four different GMO labeling battles, what makes anyone think we can win against Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta, Bayer, Cargill, and the GMA, just to name a few Round-Up-Ready giants? Though a difficult food war to overcome, we do have the power and collective voice to win – but we must all know what we’re up against.
“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
~ Winston Churchill
State representatives in Arizona have proposed a measure that would require food manufacturers to label some genetically modified foods. Similar to Minnesota, Rhode Island, Indiana, and other states, at least Arizona lawmakers are listening to the people’s choice to have their food labeled as genetically modified when it contains biotech-altered ingredients.
As Oregon, Washington, California, Maui, and Vermont have all struggled against the biotech behemoths to get GMO labeling laws to pass, each with varying success, a surprising advocate for the cause has turned up in Indiana. Here is yet another state that may soon represent the people who want to know what they’re eating.
In yet another move against Monsanto, legislation was introduced on January 15th in Rhode Island which calls for the labeling of any foods created using genetically engineered ingredients. The bill would effectively place a label on any food containing GMOs, stating “produced with genetic engineering,” and would specify what the term ‘genetically engineered product’ means.
As reports from individuals like Chieko Shiina, a supporter of the Fukushima Collaborateive Clinic talk about exploding rates of thyroid cancer in children, as well as an epidemic of leukemia, heart attacks, and other health problems, the Abe-led government and US continue to sweep the fall out of the Fukushima disaster under the rug.
While commenting on the ongoing measles outbreak in the US, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ran into some friction with President Obama, stating that there must be a “balance” from the government between parental choice and views on vaccines and public health interests. Christie stressed that parents and families must have a “measure of choice” on the issue of childhood vaccinations – something I think a lot of us can agree with.
Marijuana and its use has been studied over the course of the last few decades more so than even many leading FDA-approved pharmaceutical drugs, with researchers categorizing the effects of marijuana to a much greater degree than many of the pharmaceutical drugs you or your family may currently be taking.
While many states in the U.S. have successfully passed bills “legalizing” marijuana for medical and even recreational use, cannabis is still illegal on a nation-wide, federal level. In fact, cannabis is still classified as a Schedule I drug with “no medicinal value,” along with heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. But recurring evidence is showing that this could all change very soon.
Many individuals are aware that biotech has developed a seed monopoly largely by patenting genetically modified organisms, but not everyone realizes that Monsanto tried to patent a tomato that had no biotech traits. Now, the European Patent Office (EPO), with help from an international coalition, No Patents on Seeds!, has revoked Monsanto’s fraudulent patent and claim to tomatoes that are naturally resistant to a fungal disease called botryti
