The Festering Fraud behind Food Safety Reform

By Nicole Johnson

“The general public must recognize that only after the demystification of U.S. agriculture will family farmers, labor, and consumers see beyond corporate agribusiness’ manipulations to the point where they will recognize that both their mutual interests and the future of agriculture can be best decided through a system that not only practices political democracy, but economic democracy as well.” – Ingolf Voegler

Introduction

Readers of the New York Times were recently treated to a rarely glimpsed view of how the globally-sourced industrial food complex assembles the raw ingredients of the omnipresent hamburger. In his startling expose entitled “E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Ground Beef Inspection,” Michael Moss provides a window from which to witness well-hidden meat industry practices that most people, judging from some six hundred comments left on the New York Times website within 24 hours of the article’s publication, find thoroughly repulsive.[1]

Moss’s article tracing the processing history of the E.coli-contaminated hamburger consumed by Stephanie Smith, which left her body ravaged and permanently disabled, has much to commend it. While detailing how Cargill shaves costs by scraping together its “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties” from trimmings and mash-like products sold to it by no less than four suppliers, Moss uncovers how the company failed to follow its own safety plans without facing any interference from the USDA until some one got very, very sick.

However, the article leaves out critical information from its analysis that would help us understand why so much is wrong with the meat inspection process today. Filling in these gaps is important if we want to take the correct measures improve the safety of our meat supply. Furthermore, if we don’t gain a fuller understanding of how and why the meat industry’s inspection process became an essentially unregulated, privatized affair, we are likely to repeat the same mistake and allow Congress to pass food “safety” legislation that will serve to make the world a safer place for the cartels controlling the global produce trade but do nothing at all for the safety of our food supply.

The vested interests behind the creation of the 2009 Food Safety Enhancement Act and its Senate companion bill S. 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, are the same vested interests who were behind the earlier deregulation of the meat and poultry inspection process. They aim to minimize the regulatory obstacles faced by transnational corporations engaged in international trade, which is increasingly becoming the movement of goods from one subsidiary affiliate to another subsidiary affiliate. And they’re using the issue of food safety to con us into consenting to their wishes.

To read more ....

The Battle to Save the Polish Countryside

We're facing the same thing here with S 510 which, in fact, is meant to "harmonize" with laws in the EU already decimating farmers. S 510 also relies on onerous, vicious and false hygiene or food safety standards as part of an WTO plan to eliminate farmers and take control over world food and over farmers' land.

Poland ’s peasant farmers are the true trustees of its countryside

by Sir Julian Rose

Poland is accustomed to fighting rearguard actions to throw off unwelcome invaders. Throughout the 19th century period of “The Partitians” - occupation by Russia and then Austria – the Poles kept in their hearts a longing for a day when they could be freed from the yoke of repression and find genuine independence. After finally succeeding in 1918 to rid themselves of the invaders, they were soon engulfed in conflict again, this time with the invading Nazi Germany. They responded with the 1939-45 resistance movement that sprouted up in the fields, small towns and main cities.

As many will know, the Poles fought alongside the British throughout the Second World War - a time when Poland’s government in exile had its head quarters in London. I remember quite well when I was a boy a Polish exile who lived in our village (Whitchurch-on-Thames) coming regularly to my family home and diligently cleaning the chimneys. He spoke little, but did a very thorough job.

It was only in 1989 that Poland finally threw off the last repressive regime of occupation in their land, the Russian communists. So, the last nineteen years of freedom have been been the longest historical period of non-occupation in a very long time.

The Nobel prize winning author Thomas Mann, who fled Nazi Germany before World War Two, was reported to have remarked just before his death in 1969 that although the Nazis had been defeated, he feared that fascism had not: “I am concerned about the weak position of freedom in post world war Europe and North America,” he said.

We can surely identify with his concern. ‘The weak position of freedom’ is evident throughout our increasingly pacified Orwellian society, and has recently come to undermine the long standing traditions of the Polish countryside, particularly the independence of the peasant and family farms, and the huge biodiversity of the Polish countryside of which they are the prime trustees.

The communists failed to quell the small Polish peasant farmers into submission during their period of occupation, which left the Country with a rich, if rather confusing, legacy of approximately one and a half million small scale family farms (average size 18 acres) dotted around the Polish Provinces, but particularly prevalent in the south and east.

“The European Union is simply not interested in small farms”

When I was first invited in November 2000 by Jadwiga Lopata, founder of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside, to come to Poland as a co-director of this newly established non governmental organisation, the Country was preparing itself, or more correctly, being prepared for entry into the European Union. Opinions were strongly divided concerning the merits of such an action and those most against included the farmers.

One of our first tasks, as I saw it, was to warn the Poles just what ‘joining the EU’ would mean for the farming population, for rural communities and for the renowned biodiversity of the countryside.

Through the auspices of a senior civil servant in Warsaw, Jadwiga and I were able to address a meeting with the Brussels-based committee responsible for negotiating Poland’s agricultural terms of entry into the EU. It proved to be an ominous foretaste of things to come.

The first thing that struck us was the fact that out of the twelve people sitting in the room at the European Commission, not one was Polish. I explained to the attendant body that in a Country where 22 percent of the working population are involved in agriculture, and the majority on small farms, it would not be a good idea to follow the same regime as had been operated in the UK and other EU member countries, in which ‘restructuring’ agriculture had involved throwing the best farmers off the land and amalgamating their farms into large scale monocultural operations designed to supply the predatory supermarket chains. You could have heard a pin drop.

To read more ....

History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job

[This article applies to S 510 or whatever "food safety" bills they may at the last minute, insert.]

By Nicole Johnson

“The vested interests – if we explain the situation by their influence – can only get the public to act as they wish by manipulating public opinion, by playing upon the public’s indifference, confusions, prejudices, pugnacities or fears. And the only way in which the power of the interests can be undermined and their maneuvers defeated is by bringing home to the public its indifference, the absurdity of its prejudices, or the hollowness of its fears; by showing that it is indifferent to dangers where real danger exists; frightened by dangers which are nonexistent.”

– Sir Norman Angell (1872 – 1967)

Introduction

Vested interest groups have orchestrated a legislative lullaby to hush the public’s growing unease with the safety of its food supply. Their enablers in the mainstream corporate controlled media amplify a chorus of government officials and non-governmental organizations admonishing that the public must be confident that the food it buys is safe. But having confidence our food is safe is not the same as having food that is safe and wholesome to eat.

The American public has a great and unmet need to understand the true impacts (that is, the predictable consequences) of the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, before the Senates passes its version of this dangerous bill. The US Congress has a long, tragic history of passing legislation that promotes the industrialization of our food supply, effectively implementing the wishes — both stated and unstated — of agribusiness, and it’s about to do it again.

Using the pretext of food safety, those behind the Food Safety Enhancement Act seek to institute changes the American public would not condone if it understood what is at stake. The country is being duped into believing that the pseudo-scientific measures prescribed by the bill will prevent new outbreaks of food-borne illnesses when in reality FSEA will usher in a number of undesirable outcomes, none of which do a thing to improve food safety. On the contrary, these measures will permit large processors to become an essentially unregulated segment of the industry by privatizing the inspection process, and — at the same time — the new regulations will constitute a cost-prohibitive barrier for small players to remain in business, making them easy targets for indiscriminant enforcement and greater market consolidation.

To read more ....

Monsanto's Baby: S 510

The 2009 Food ‘Safety’ Bills Harmonize

Agribusiness Practices in Service of

Corporate Global Governance

By Nicole Johnson

“I think it’s time to de-professionalize the public debate on matters that vitally affect the lives of ordinary people. It’s time to snatch our futures back from the “experts.” Time to ask, in ordinary language, the public question and to demand, in ordinary language, the public answer.” – Arundhati Roy, Power Politics

It’s enough to make you so queasy you lose your lunch. HR 875, the “Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009,” is a head-spinning piece of legislation that would radically change the structure of the US government’s regulatory agencies, usurping states rights to federalize food inspection and determine what agricultural practices are permissible. Considerable concern has been voiced about what this bill would mean for small and medium sized farmers, organic farming, the future of conventional and organic seeds, the food localization movement, and even home gardens. HR 875 would give regulators the power to enter private property, which is conveniently redefined as “premises,” and impose enormous fines for noncompliance. Though not discussed in the corporate media, numerous articles about it appear on the internet, launching a debate about whether or not Monsanto is behind the bill.

In response to these articles, Brad Mitchell, a member of Monsanto’s public relations staff who writes for the company’s new blog — a less-than-stealth effort to counter the public’s deep distrust of the predatory corporation — has gone on record stating that Monsanto has absolutely nothing at all to do with the bill.

Brad’s assurances aside, experience dictates that taking Monsanto at its word is patently foolish.

To read more ....

Canadian Lessons That Apply to S 510 Here

Canadians rallied and stopped C-51

The Latest News on Bill C-51 as of September 1

September 2008 Features

by Helke Ferrie

In April, the federal government informed Canadians that they were going to protect the nation’s children, and the rest of us, against unimaginable harm and potential fraud, in exchange for the loss of our most basic Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms. Towards this end Prime Minister Harper introduced legislation that would effectively outlaw natural health products and give the food, drug, and chemical industries license to saturate our food, medicines, air, water, and soil with as much poison as their cost-benefit calculations might suggest are profitably manageable. Unfortunately, this is no exaggeration.

The Harper government’s proposed Bills C-51 (to amend the Food and Drugs Act) and C-52 (to amend the Hazardous Products Act) appear to have been crafted very carefully along the lines of Hitler’s prescient observation that people are more likely to believe a Big Lie than little ones. Fortunately, unlike Germany in the 1930’s, Canadians have a century and a half of experience with democracy and almost eight hundred years of ancestral memory of Common Law.

For me, as a medical science writer used to analyzing the cognitive dissonance between verifiable scientific facts and government and industry obfuscation of those facts, C-51 and C-52 are so far the lowest of all low points I have encountered.

To read more ....

In Poland, 'green' fields besieged

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

Published: Thursday, April 3, 2008

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STRYSZOW, Poland — Depending on your point of view, Szczepan Master is either an incorrigible Luddite or a visionary. A small farmer, proud of his pure, high-quality products, he works his land the way Polish farmers have for centuries.

He keeps his livestock in a straw-floored "barn" that is part of his house, entered through a kitchen door. He slaughters his own pigs. His wife milks cows by hand. He rejects genetically modified seeds. Instead of spraying his crops, he turns his fields in winter, preferring a workhorse to a tractor, to let the frost kill off pests residing there.

While traditional farms like his could be dismissed as a nostalgic throwback, they are also increasingly seen as the future - if only they can survive.

Master's way of farming - his way of life - has been badly threatened in the two years since Poland joined the European Union, a victim of sanitary laws and mandates to encourage efficiency and competition that favor mechanized commercial farms, farmers here say.

To read more ...

In the US, the "sanitary laws" come in the form of S 510, and like in Poland, it is based on transparent absurdity, is a threat to the existence of farmers safely providing local food people desire, and is being driven by corporations intent on global control over food.