Sunday, December 10, 2006

The Month's FEED

I highly encourage everyone to read this month's FEED from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

There's info on the GE rice that was released by Bayer CropScience (yes that would be the same Bayer that makes the asprine). Due to the contamination of food supply rice crops that USDA rushed through approval which it was in the process of denying at the time of the contaimination. Because of the contamination, Europe closed it's borders to American rice and have cost rice producers in the US millions of dollars. Rice farmers have filed a class-action law suit against Bayer. In the meantime, rice that was genetically engineered for some to resist Bayer's weedkiller chemcials, has been released into the wild in Arkansas and Missouri. By getting fast track approval, after they were going to be turned down, Bayer gets to skip a lot of the safety checks and other proceedures they normally would have had to comply with. They are being rewarded for "accidentally" contaminating the food supply. This, even after 15,000 people wrote letters to the USDA asking for sanctions... "The people's department," my ass. Yet more evidence that the USDA has been bought and the individual farmers have been left out in the cold.

There's also a petition to sign for turkeys and some other stuff... I have to go eat dinner now... TTFN.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm glad dad doesn't work for them anymore... USDA, that is.

RaeS said...

Wow! I've never heard of someone who worked for the USDA before... you know, personally and outside of contacting officials. Did he retire?

Anonymous said...

He retired while the divorce was going on, which was about six years ago. When I was still in elementary school, I think he worked for the sugar branch of USDA; when I was in high school, he transfered to a different branch and was eventually made head of Fibers and Rice Analysis. It doesn't actually have anything to do with analyzing the objects themselves, but it has to do with price controls on import/exports, and legislation for farm aid and stuff like that. I don't really know all the ins and outs of what he did, but yeah, he did work for USDA once upon a time. :P If you have any questions about the news, I can pass them on to him and see if he'll answer them.

RaeS said...

That's really cool! I can't think of any questions at the moment, but I'll let you know if I think of any...