MONSANTO SHAREHOLDERS REFUSE TO LET YOU LABEL THEIR GE/GMO FOOD PRODUCTS

Published on Tuesday, January 28, 2014 by Common Dreams

GMO Protesters Arrested Outside Monsanto Meeting
Activist shareholders vote on resolutions calling for tally of 'true cost' of GMO production
- Lauren McCauley, staff writer


Protesters outside the Monsanto shareholders meeting were arrested for blockading the event. (Photo: @gmo917/ Twitter)Anti-genetically modified (GM) food activists staged a dramatic dual protest Tuesday at the annual Monsanto shareholder's meeting.

Outside the conference—which is being held at Monsanto headquarters in Creve Coeur, Missouri—at least six protesters were arrested. A live stream of the protest showed demonstrators carrying signs, driving cars topped with over-sized "fishy food" produce, and sitting in the road blockading other cars from entering.

Inside the meeting, activist shareholders—including author Michele Simon and Dave Murphy, founder of Food Democracy Now, among others— attempted to catalyze other shareholders with two resolution votes.

The first, put forth by Adam Eidinger of Occupy Monsanto, called for food labeling guidelines that disclose whether genetic engineering was used to produce the food. The second would compel the biotech giant to prepare a report adding up the true environmental and social impacts of GM organism (GMO) production.

"Stop thwarting the will of the American people," Murphy told the assembly while introducing the second resolution, saying that Americans deserved to know the "true cost" of GMO production, according to live tweets of the event.

Both resolutions failed to pass.

Ahead of the meeting, Food Democracy Now organized a petition calling for mandatory labeling of GMOs.

"For the past 20 years the U.S. government has continued to deny Americans the right to know if their food contains genetically engineered ingredients," they write. "Already, 64 other countries around the world inform their citizens if their food has been genetically engineered in a laboratory with simple labels, and it's time that we share that basic right."

Source:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/01/28-10

SECRET INTERNAL DOCUMENT - INACCURATE TALKING POINTS ON SUING ANY STATE TO ENACT GE FOOD LEBELING BILL

Grocery Manufacturers Association GMO Talking Points 

• By Grocery Manufacturers Association
  Organic Consumers Association, January 22, 2014
  
  

Editor's note: This document was prepared by the Grocery Manufacturers Association for use by industry lobbyists. It contains factually incorrect and misleading information, intended to persuade state lawmakers to reject GMO labeling laws in their states.
I. WHAT ARE GMOs?
•    Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are organisms are organisms whose genetic material has been altered scientifically.
•    Scientists do this to introduce new traits or characteristics to organisms. These alterations are used to improve crop yield by increasing resistance to plant diseases; raising resistance to pests; lowering water requirements—all of which keep production costs down.
•    GMOs are present in nearly eighty percent of the foods consumed in the U.S.
II. WHAT IS THE ISSUE?
•    GMOs have been the subject of legislation that would require manufacturers to label and distinguish all products containing GMOs.
III. WHAT HAS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DONE?
•    The FDA only requires labeling of genetically modified foods if the food’s composition is materially altered (e.g. the food is modified to include an allergen such as peanut proteins that consumers would not expect to be present).
•    “The agency is still not aware of any data or other information that would form a basis for concluding that the fact that a food or its ingredients was produced using bioengineering is a material fact that must be disclosed…FDA is therefore reaffirming its decision to not require special labeling of all bioengineered foods.”- Food and Drug Administration**
IV. WHAT DO INDEPENDENT SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATIONS SAY?
•    “The World Health Organization, The American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.” – American Association for the Advancement of Sciences***
V. WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN OTHER STATES?
•    No state has implemented a GMO labeling requirement.
•    Maine and Connecticut have passed GMO legislation. However, the Maine and Connecticut labeling laws are dormant and do not go into effect until the following conditions are met: (1) Four other Northeastern states (not including Md.) must enact GMO labeling legislation; (2) One of the states passing GMO labeling legislation must border Connecticut/Maine respectively; and (3) The four Northeastern states must have a combined population of at least 20 million.
•    California’s Proposition 37 in 2012 requiring GMO labeling was defeated.
•    Washington’s Initiative 522 in 2013 requiring GMO labeling was defeated.
VI. IS THERE A CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE?
•    Yes, under the First Amendment, commercial speech has protections which prohibit the government from compelling certain statements. See Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm’n of New York, 447 U.S. 557 (1986).
•    State labeling statutes have been overturned for violating the First Amendment. In 1996, the Second Federal Circuit in the case of IDFA v. Amestoy, applied the test found in Central Hudson Gas and blocked a Vermont law that required dairy producers to label milk from cows treated with a growth hormone. The court explained that Vermont’s stated interests in adopting the law – strong consumer interest and the public’s right to know – were not substantial enough to justify the functional equivalent of a warning about a production method that has no discernible impact on a final product.
VII. WHAT IS THE RISK TO YOUR STATE OF ADOPTING A GMO LABELING LAW?
•    The first state to implement a GMO labeling law will be sued on the constitutional grounds seen in IDFA v. Amestoy.
•    Litigation in this area could be long, costly and will probably be decided by the Supreme Court.
•    Your state would proceed with almost no regulatory or scientific basis for a new unique labeling requirement.
•    Your state would proceed despite not being a part of the “trigger” mechanism required in the Maine and Connecticut legislation.
WHY SHOULD YOUR STATE BE THE FIRST TO ADOPT A LABELING REQUIREMENT THAT HAS NO HEALTH BASIS OR REASON?
*GMA is the voice of more than 300 leading food, beverage and consumer product companies that sustain and enhance the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people in the United States, and around the globe. Based in Washington, D.C., GMA’s member organizations include internationally recognized brands as well as steadily growing localized brands.
**http://www.fda.gov/food/guidanceregulation/guidancedocumentsregulatoryinformation/labelingnutrition/ucm059098.htm
***http://www.aaas.org/news/aaas-board-directors-legally-mandating-gm-food-labels-could-%E2%80%9Cmislead-and-falsely-alarm

SOURCE:  http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_29132.cfm

THINK TWICE BEFORE BUYING - AND EATING - ANY FOODS FROM CHINA

6 mind-boggling facts about farms in China

By Tom Philpott

Eurodollers/Shutterstock

Ever since May, when a state-controlled Chinese company agreed to buy U.S. pork giant Smithfield, reportedly with an eye toward ramping up U.S. pork imports to China, I’ve been looking into the simultaneously impressive and vexed state of China’s food production system. In short, I’ve found that in the process of emerging as the globe’s manufacturing center — the place that provides us with everything from the simplest of brooms to the smartest of phones — China has severely damaged its land and water resources, compromising its ability to increase food production even as its economy thunders along, its population grows (albeit slowly), and its people gain wealth, move up the food chain, and demand ever-more meat.

Now, none of that should detract from the food miracle that China has enacted since it began its transformation into an industrial powerhouse in the late 1970s. This 2013 report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) brims with data on this feat. The nation slashed its hunger rate — from 20 percent of its population in 1990 to 12 percent today — by quietly turbocharging its farms. China’s total farm output, a broad measure of food churned out, has tripled since 1978. The ramp-up in livestock production in particular is even more dizzying — it rose by a factor of five. Overall, China’s food system represents a magnificent achievement: It feeds nearly a quarter of the globe’s people on just 7 percent of its arable land.

But now, 35 years since it began reforming its state-dominated economy along market lines, China’s spectacular run as provider of its own food is looking severely strained. Its citizens’ appetite for meat is rising along with incomes, and mass-producing steaks and chops for 1.2 billion people requires tremendous amounts of land and water. Meanwhile, its manufacturing miracle — the very thing that financed its food miracle — has largely fouled up or just plain swallowed those very resources.

In this post from a few weeks ago, I told the story of the dire state of China’s water resources, which are being increasingly diverted to, and fouled by, the country’s insatiable demand for coal to power the manufacturing sector.

Then there’s land. Here are just a few of the findings of recent investigations into the state of Chinese farms:


1. China’s farmland is shrinking. Despite the country’s immense geographical footprint, there just isn’t that much to go around. Between 1997 and 2008, China saw 6.2 percent of its farmland engulfed by factories and sprawl.

2. The United States has six times the arable land per capita as China. Today, the FAO/OECD report states, China has just 0.09 hectares of arable land per capita — less than half of the global average and a quarter of the average for OECD member countries.
3. A fifth of China’s land is polluted. The FAO/OECD report gingerly calls this problem the “declining trend in soil quality.” Fully 40 percent of China’s arable land has been degraded by some combination of erosion, salinization, or acidification — and nearly 20 percent is polluted, whether by industrial effluent, sewage, excessive farm chemicals, or mining runoff, the FAO/OECD report found.

4. China considers its soil problems “state secrets.” The Chinese government conducted a national survey of soil pollution in 2006, but it has refused to release the results. But evidence is building that soil toxicity is a major problem that’s creeping into the food supply. In May 2013, food safety officials in the southern city of Guangzhou found heightened levels of cadmium, a carcinogenic heavy metal, in 8 of 18 rice samples picked up at local restaurants, sparking a national furor. The rice came from Hunan province — where “expanding factories, smelters and mines jostle with paddy fields,” the New York Times reported. In 2011, Nanjing Agricultural University researchers came out with a report claiming they had found cadmium in 10 percent of rice samples nationwide and 60 percent of samples from southern China.

5. China’s food system is powered by coal. It’s not just industry that’s degrading the water and land China relies on for food. It’s also agriculture itself. China’s food production miracle has been driven by an ever-increasing annual cascade of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (it now uses more than a third of global nitrogen output) — and its nitrogen industry relies on coal for 70 percent of its energy needs. To grow its food, in other words, China relies on an energy source that competes aggressively with farming for water.

6. Five of China’s largest lakes have substantial dead zones caused by fertilizer runoff. That’s what a paper by Chinese and University of California researchers found after they examined Chinese lakes in 2008. And heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer takes its toll on soil quality, too. It causes pH levels to drop, turning soil acidic and less productive — a problem rampant in China. Here’s a 2010 Nature article on a national survey of the nation’s farmland:

The team’s results show that extensive [fertilizer] overuse has caused the pH of soil across China to drop by roughly 0.5, with some soils reaching a pH of 5.07 (nearly neutral soils of pH 6-7 are optimal for cereals, such as rice and grain, and other cash crops). By contrast, soil left to its own devices would take at least 100 years to acidify by this amount. The acidification has already lessened crop production by 30-50% in some areas, Zhang [a Chinese researcher] says. If the trend continues, some regions could eventually see the soil pH drop to as low as 3. “No crop can grow at this level of acidification,” he warns.

“If the trend continues …” That, I guess, is the broad question here. A global economic system that relies on China as a manufacturing center, in a way that undermines China’s ability to feed itself, seems like a global economic system headed for disaster.
This story was produced by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
SOURCE:  http://grist.org/food/6-mind-boggling-facts-about-farms-in-china/

FOOD CROP DIVERSITY - PEASANTS LEAD TO WORLD IN SMALL AG BOUNTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

Published on Monday, January 27, 2014 by Common Dreams

Today’s Peasant Movement – Sophisticated, Threatened, and Our Best Hope for Survival

by Carol Schachet

(Image: La Via Campesina)The term peasant often conjures up images of medieval serfs out of touch with the ways of the world around them. Such thinking is out of date. Today, peasants proudly and powerfully put forward effective strategies to feed the planet and limit the damages wrought by industrial agriculture. What’s more, they understand the connections between complex trade and economic systems, champion the rights of women, and even stand up for the rights of gay men and lesbians.

These are not your great ancestors’ peasants.

“A peasant is a scientist. The amount and quality of knowledge we have been developing and practicing for centuries is highly useful and appropriate,” said Maxwell Munetsi, a farmer from Zimbabwe and a member of the Via Campesina.
“Unlike agribusiness, peasants do not treat food as a commodity for speculation profiting out of hunger. They do not patent nature for profit, keeping it out of the hands of the common man and woman. They share their knowledge and seeds, so everyone can have food to eat.”
The Via Campesina is perhaps the largest social movement in the world, consisting of more than 250 million farmers and small producers from over 70 nations. At the top of the Via’s agenda is supporting peasant agriculture, which in today’s era of globalization also means seeking agrarian reform, challenging neoliberalism and corporate-friendly trade agreements, and working to stop climate disruption.

“Peasant organizations today – from Haiti to Brazil to Mali to Indonesia – are tremendously sophisticated in their political analysis, not just their impressive knowledge of seeds, natural pesticides and fertilizers and sustainable agricultural practices,” says Nikhil Aziz, Executive Director of Grassroots International.

“In fact,” Aziz continues, “the methods used by peasant farmers out-produce the far more destructive and costly practices of industrial agriculture. They can grow more food, at less cost, and actually help cool the planet. Meanwhile the massive plantations planted with seeds from Monsanto and other agrochemical giants and flooded with toxics produce less food, create more greenhouse gases and literally are making the farmers, consumers and planet sick.”

A global assessment spearheaded by the United Nations and including the World Bank and the United Nations Environment Program agree. Their 2008 report (the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, or IAASTD for short) concludes that small-scale agriculture produces more food at less cost to the farmer and the environment than does industrial agriculture.

The conclusion of the IAASTD Report comes as no surprise to Carlos Hernriquez. When a member of UNOSJO (the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, a Grassroots International partner) first reached out to Carlos, he was unconvinced.

“UNOSJO told us we did not have to rely on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I was hesitant, thinking that buying fertilizers was a faster way to get results," Carlos said. "I was hesitant for two years, until 2004 when I was motivated to make the organic fertilizer. In 2005, for the first time, I used the organiic fertilizer [in a small plot of land].”

Seeing is believing – and soon Carlos switched completely to agroecological methods that included heirloom seeds, natural fertilizers and pesticides, and intercropping. All of those techniques rely on the farmers’ knowledge. To succeed, farmers need to learn new and sustainable methods, share their knowledge, adapt to changing climate conditions, and maneuver politically at a time when global policies favor massive corporate agriculture and chemical giants.

The change in Carlos’ life is profound. Now he and his family have healthy food to eat and to sell at local farmers’ markets, they can afford to send all their children to school, and he is eager to share his expertise with others.

Carlos and other peasant farmers are part of a movement for food sovereignty – the right of peoples and communities to control the seeds they plant and the food they grow and consume in an ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate way. This is the central concept of peasant agriculture, and it offers the potential to boost our global food system and protect the planet from climate disruption.
“Not only do peasant farmers feed communities, they also cool the planet and protect Mother Nature,” explains Via Campesina a statement on International Peasant Day last year saying. “Unlike agribusiness, peasants do not treat food as a commodity for speculation profiting out of hunger. They do not patent nature for profit, keeping it out of the hands of the common man and woman. They share their knowledge and seeds, so everyone can have food to eat.”
Food is central to our culture and our civilization, which is precisely the analysis that the small producers – farmers, fishers and foresters – of the Via Campesina bring. As long as corporations control the food system in order to produce short-term profit, our collective lives are in danger. Systems of injustice that uphold the corporate food system include trade agreements, water privatization schemes, land grabs and gender inequality. These are the connections that peasants like Carlos see every day.

For instance, more than 60 percent of the world’s farmers are women, yet women cannot own land in many nations. To confront this institutional violence against women, as well as domestic violence, the Via launched the Global Campaign to End Violence Against Women in 2008. The movement conducted trainings at the grassroots and also required co-gender leadership at all levels, including the highest level.  Farmers are also calling for a dismantling of the World Trade Organization and its manipulation of food commodity structures.
The success of peasants means success for all of us, because they are leading the way in feeding the world, counteracting greenhouse gas emissions and other environmentally toxic poisons, conserving water and biodiversity and expanding social and economic justice. The peasant movement chant of "Globalize the struggle, globalize the hope" is a roadmap toward a sustainable, dignified future.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Carol Schachet, MDiv, is Director of Development and Communications at Grassroots International and a longtime organizer. Her writings have appeared in the Resist Newsletter,  Ecology Today, Insights and community journals.

Source:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/27-8

DDT PERSISTS AS HEALTH HAZARD 40 YEARS AFTER BEING BANNED - NEW ALZHEIMER STUDY

Published on Tuesday, January 28, 2014 by Environmental Health News

DDT Linked to Higher Risk of Alzheimer's

People with high levels of exposure to the banned insecticide DDT were four times more likely to have Alzheimer’s disease than people with low levels, according to a study of patients in Georgia and Texas published today. The research is among the first to report a connection between Alzheimer’s, which is the world’s most common neurodegenerative disease, and chemicals in the environment.

by Lindsey Konkel, Environmental Health News

A study of Alzheimer's patients linked high levels of exposure to the pesticide DDT to a fourfold increase in risk of the disease. (Photo: Rosie O'Beirne/flickr)People with high levels of exposure to the banned insecticide DDT were four times more likely to have Alzheimer’s disease than people with low levels, according to a study of patients in Georgia and Texas published today.

The research is among the first to report a connection between Alzheimer’s, which is the world’s most common neurodegenerative disease, and chemicals in the environment.

The traces of the insecticide found in the study’s Alzheimer’s patients are comparable to the amounts found in most Americans today. Although it was banned more than 40 years ago in the United States, DDT still persists in the environment worldwide, and it is still used in malaria-infested areas of Africa.

DDT remains in use in some developing countries, and persists in the environment worldwide. (Photo: Smithsonian Legacies)“Our findings suggest that genetically susceptible individuals with higher levels of DDT exposure may be more at risk,” said Jason Richardson, a Rutgers University researcher who led the study.

In recent decades, Alzheimer’s research has focused heavily on finding genetic causes of the disease. But fewer than half of cases can be blamed on genes alone, so researchers are now looking at how lifestyle and environmental factors may interact with genetic factors.

“We know hardly anything about environmental contributors to Alzheimer’s disease so this study is a step in the right direction,” said Beate Ritz, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research.

Experts said more research is needed because the study involved only 86 Alzheimer’s patients.

“Our findings suggest that genetically susceptible individuals with higher levels of DDT exposure may be more at risk.” –Jason Richardson, Rutgers University“While the research is very suggestive, I would not say there is yet cause for concern,” said Gayatri Devi, a neurologist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “They looked at a small number of patients. More research must be done before any conclusions are made.”

Richardson said it’s likely that any environmental exposures that may have contributed to the disease happened long before the patients had symptoms. Alzheimer’s is a slow-moving disease that develops over the course of decades.

Because DDT takes many years to break down and leave the body, “our results suggest that cumulative lifetime exposures may be important,” said Richardson, an associate professor at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

More than 5 million people in the U.S. alone are living with Alzheimer’s, and cases are expected to triple over the next few decades.

The researchers analyzed blood samples from patients treated for late-onset Alzheimer’s at Emory University in Atlanta or the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. Levels of DDE – a breakdown product of DDT – were 3.8 times higher in people who had the disease than in those who did not, according to the study, which was published in JAMA Neurology.

Participants with the highest DDE levels were 4.18 times more likely to have Alzheimer’s than those with the lowest levels.

That quadrupling of risk was surprising, said study co-author Alan Levey, director of Emory University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “The association between elevated DDE levels and Alzheimer’s disease risk was as great or greater than the strongest genetic risk factor known,” he said.

Also, the researchers found that people with both risk factors – high exposure and genetic susceptibility – “might have a more severe form of the disease,” Richardson said. Patients scored lower on a mental test if they had the highest DDE levels and a particular genetic variation associated with Alzheimer’s than if they had high DDE but did not have the genetic factor.

Seventy percent of the non-Alzheimer’s patients had detectable DDE in their blood, compared with 80 percent of the Alzheimer’s patients. Nationwide, 75 to 80 percent of all Americans tested have measurable levels in their blood.

Because some of the Alzheimer’s patients had no DDE and some without the disease had high levels, “this suggests that exposure to DDE may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease only in a subset of cases, perhaps those with genetic polymorphisms that render them more susceptible to DDT/DDE exposure,” the authors wrote.

More than five million people in the U.S. alone are living with Alzheimer’s, and cases are expected to triple over the next few decades.DDT already has been linked in other studies to reduced fertility, diabetes and other health effects. But little has been known about its potential effects on the brain.

The researchers discovered by testing 11 deceased Alzheimer’s patients that the DDE levels in their blood closely matched the levels in their brains. Then, by exposing brain cells to the pesticide, they found that it increased an important protein involved in Alzheimer’s. That may explain how it could raise the risk of the disease.

“It gives us confidence that the association we saw was real and that there is a plausible mechanism by which the chemical may be contributing to the disease process,” Richardson said.

If animal and human studies confirm this link, “it may provide an avenue for a targeted treatment of individuals with high levels of DDE,” such as drugs that prevent changes in the protein, the authors wrote. Levey said it also could “help identify people at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s” who could be enrolled in experiments to try to prevent the disease.

Used for three decades, DDT was banned in the US in 1972. (Photo: Brad Smith/flickr)Nevertheless, the researchers could not rule out that the patients in their study also were exposed to other, newer pesticides and chemicals that could harm the brain. They were limited to studying only chlorinated compounds, which persist in human tissues.

It’s unclear whether there are periods early in life during which exposures to certain chemicals in the environment would be more likely to increase a person’s risk of eventually developing Alzheimer’s.

The findings build upon previous study led by Richardson in which elevated levels of DDE were detected in the blood of 20 Alzheimer’s patients. Another small study from India found high levels of DDT and several other pesticides in Alzheimer’s patients.

While only a few studies have looked at potential environmental risk factors for Alzheimer’s, researchers have found links between pesticides and Parkinson’s, another degenerative brain disease.

Levels of DDT have decreased in Americans but the pesticide is still used in some countries to control mosquitoes. In Africa, where malaria kills hundreds of thousands of children every year, DDT is sprayed indoors on walls, which leaves many people highly exposed.

In addition, other chemicals behave like DDT, Ritz said. “There are other agents that may be playing similar games in our body. This study helps us know where to look next,” she said.

__________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

SOURCE:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/01/28-1

FOOD STAMPS TO BE CUT $8 BILLION WHILE MASSIVE CORPORATE TAX CUTS AND SUBSIDIES FLOOD TO RICHEST AMERICANS

Published on Tuesday, January 28, 2014 by Common Dreams

As Congress Targets Food Stamps, Working Poor Get Whacked Again

Both major political parties agree: What poor and working-class Americans need is to be kicked in the face

- Jon Queally, staff writer

Maggie Barcellano plays with her three-year-old daughter, Zoe, at Lakeway City Park in Lakeway, Texas on Saturday, Jan. 25, 2014. Barcellano enrolled in the food stamps program to help save up for paramedic training while she works as a home health aide and raises her daughter. Working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps, a switch from a few years ago when children and the elderly were the main recipients. (Photo: Tamir Kalifa/AP)A new compromised Farm Bill that passed the House of Representatives on Monday and has received backing from prominent senators of both parties will make deep cuts to the nation's food stamp program, betraying the rhetoric of both Republicans and Democrats who say they would like to address issues that plague working people or the rampant income inequality pervasive in the U.S. economy.

As the bill—which would cut $8 billion (a full one percent) from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known as SNAP) over ten years—now heads to the Senate, new data reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday shows that the food stamp program is increasingly being utilized by working class Americans, those stuck in low-wage jobs, drowning in debt, and unable to get by in an economy in which the wealthy are lavished with subsidies and tax breaks while workers, students, the elderly and the poor get further squeezed.

From AP:

In a first, working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps — a switch from a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main recipients.

Some of the change is due to demographics, such as the trend toward having fewer children. But a slow economic recovery with high unemployment, stagnant wages and an increasing gulf between low-wage and high-skill jobs also plays a big role. It suggests that government spending on the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program — twice what it cost five years ago — may not subside significantly anytime soon.

Food stamp participation since 1980 has grown the fastest among workers with some college training, a sign that the safety net has stretched further to cover America’s former middle class, according to an analysis of government data for The Associated Press by economists at the University of Kentucky. Formally called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or SNAP, the program now covers 1 in 7 Americans.

The findings coincide with the latest economic data showing workers’ wages and salaries growing at the lowest rate relative to corporate profits in U.S. history.

________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

HAWAII'S OWN LEGISLATORS DENY OWN CITIZENS - STUMP FOR GE CHEMICAL CORPS

Stop Hawaii’s “Monsanto Protection Act” On the heels of the passage of two recent county bills regulating GE crops and pesticides in Kauai and Hawaii, state legislators have introduced a bill that would wipe out these important laws.  As a direct result of our victories in Kauai and Hawaii improving regulation of pesticides and GE crops, some Hawaii state lawmakers have now introduced a bill (HB 2506) which would take away the rights of all Hawaii counties to regulate their local agriculture. If HB 2506 becomes law, all local control of agricultural would be removed – replaced by a “one size fits all” policy dictated by the state. This bill, like similar bills introduced in several other states, is a thinly veiled attempt by the chemical companies to silence concerns over genetically engineered (GE) foods and pesticides, and gut all county efforts at addressing the growing of GE crops and their accompanying pesticides. We’ve beaten similar bills before, and we can beat this one, too--but your state lawmakers need to hear from you!Local oversight such as county ordinances have been instrumental in restricting GE crops in Hawaii and other states. Numerous counties and cities in California, Hawaii, Washington, and Maine have already adopted ordinances to ban or limit the growing of GE crops in their counties. But HB 2506 would give exclusive power over agriculture to the state, preempting local authority. This would make it impossible to establish local restrictions or prohibitions on genetically engineered crops grown in Hawaii, or the spraying of pesticides. This bill would also affect local control of agriculture well beyond the scope of pesticides and GMOs. Counties also regulate grading and grubbing that impacts agriculture, storm run-off into streams, as well as property taxes and zoning that affect agriculture. HB 2506 is short-sighted and will have far-reaching consequences. The bill was mainly prompted by a 2013 Kauai County law that regulates pesticide use, and a 2013 Hawaii County law that bans the cultivation of new GE crops on the Big Island. The bill would eliminate the Kauai and Hawaii Island laws, and would preclude other counties from ever taking any similar action to regulate pesticides or GE crops. Hawaii has numerous county ordinances that would be eliminated if this bill passed, including: In 2008, the Hawaii County Council banned the cultivation of genetically modified coffee and taro. In October 2013, the Kauai County Council passed Bill 2491, which requires companies to report and publicly disclose the pesticides used on the island. Through the imposition of buffer zones, the bill prevents all pesticide use near schools, medical facilities, parks, and waterways that flow into the ocean, and calls for the County to prepare a detailed analysis of the numerous environmental and health impacts of pesticides and GE crops. On the Big Island, Bill 113 was signed into law in December 2013, banning the growing of any new genetically altered crops. If passed, HB 2506 would eliminate these and other laws, effectively handing all decisions over agriculture to the state in order to protect chemical company interests. Tell state lawmakers to reject this undemocratic bill!