September 9th, 2009 - Gerald "Gerry" Pugliese
Monsanto, your friendly neighborhood producer of genetically modified organisms, is catching some heat for its water-hungry ways on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.
Molokai is where much of the research into the seed corn takes place, making Monsanto the largest employer on the island.
Putting people to work is awesome, but Monsanto’s massive farming operations gobble up a bunch land and suck down a lot of water. That’s the problem.
Monsanto wants to make money and maximize profits, so these research and farming facilities need to run full-steam ahead, which demands the lion share of the island’s water supplies.
So when a drought on Molokai dried up reservoirs, prompting the local irrigation company to demand water cutbacks of 20%, Monsanto petitioned for the right to take more water—threatening small farmers.
By law, two-thirds of Molokai’s water must go to homestead farmers, but companies like Monsanto drink up 84% of the irrigation system. That’s why local farmers are currently seeking legal action against Monsanto.
Via Fred Pearce’s Greenwash.
Image credit: ismaSan
Tags: GMOs, Monsanto, water
Posted in Organic Food, Political Action | 3 Comments »
March 19th, 2009 - Gerald "Gerry" Pugliese
Studies show minorities in America eat way too much junk food, resulting in higher rates of diabetes and heart disease, but yet many McDonald’s commercials seemed aimed to inner city youth.
Where’s the social responsibility? What about compassion for the consumer? Clearly profits win out.
Agribusiness is no different. The market for organic foods is growing. So big corporations like Monsanto rig the game, influencing food regulations and making it impossible for small independent farmers to operate:
And how will those who contaminate our country’s food with pesticides, hormones, antibiotics and more, do that? Why, by setting standards for “food safety” that are so grotesquely and inappropriately and even cruelly applied to a local, independent farmers and ranchers that there is no way they can manage. Imagine your being faced with a 100 page IRS form and facing a million dollar a day penalty for screwing up. That would be in the ball park of the impossible complexity mixed with threat facing our farmers. Imagine having the government and corporations deciding every single thing you can do and must do in your kitchen and backing that up with the threat of 10 years in prison for screwing up – though you have never made anyone sick, and those corporations have. Imagine being surveilled 24 hours a day by GPS tracking devices that feed into…a corporate data bank, one they have now moved out of the country so no one here can have legal access to see what is in it.
Imagine the devil himself – or a whole boardrooms of them, dressed in suits – defining the only safe and healthy food in this country as dangerous and burdening hard working farmers with more work then anyone could bear, while his own, their own, food is so dangerous at this point that in the last 10 years alone, diabetes has gone up 90%.
And how did they get this far with such a scheme to apply insane industrial standards to every farm in the country? Through fear of diseases and of outbreaks of food borne illnesses, both of which they cause themselves.
Via OpEdNews.com.
Tags: agribusiness, antibiotics, diabetes, fast food, heart disease, hormones, Monsanto, pesticides
Posted in Health, Organic, Organic Food, Political Action | 2 Comments »
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