Comparison of GMO and non-GMO corn - the real statistics will astound you!

The nutrition statistics for GMO corn are bone chilling. Here is what the report indicates:

• Organic corn has 14 ppm of manganese. GMO corn has only 2 ppm.
• Real corn has 7 times more manganese!
• Organic corn has 6130 ppm of calcium. GMO is stripped down to 14 ppm.
• Real corn has 437 times more calcium!
• Organic corn has 113 ppm of magnesium. GMO corn is vacant, with only 2 ppm.
• Real corn has 56 times more magnesium!

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Antibiotic Resistance kills more people than Aids

Leah Zerbe at Rodale reports on the dangerous side effects of doctors over prescribing antibiotics and their use in factory farming:

The World Health Organization recently said resistance to antibiotics might be the end of modern medicine; people could die after routine operations or when a simple scrape on the knee becomes infected.
In fact, we’re already seeing all sorts of antibiotic-resistant infections claim lives and strain the healthcare system. The most common, MRSA, alone kills about 18,000 people a year in the United States—that’s more than AIDS. Gonorrhea is also on the verge of being untreatable, and many common antibiotics no longer cure urinary tract infections.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has reintroduced to Congress the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which aims to reduce the use of human antibiotics in animals. It is estimated that 80% of the antibiotics used in the US go to animal agriculture.

Basically, factory farms are unsanitary, so the animals may get sick unless they are pumped full of antibiotics. This legislation would not only help keep antibiotics working better for humans, but would also encourage factory farmers to create more sanitary conditions for the animals.

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Food

Good - they did it.

Bad - we live in a place where you have to do it.

(NaturalNews) There is a food revolution taking hold all over America, whether it is in the form of demanding labeling of GM foods, the right to produce and sell raw milk and other commodities, or - in the case of Sedgwick, Maine - declaring all local food transactions of any kind free and legal.

According to the website FoodRenegade.com, Sedgwick is the first city in the U.S. to free itself from the constraints of federal and state food regulation. Published reports say the town has passed an ordinance that gives its citizens the right “to produce, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing,” regulations be damned. The ordinance includes raw milk, meats that are slaughtered locally, all produce and just about anything else you might imagine.

And what’s more, three additional towns in Maine are expected to take up similar ordinances soon, said the FoodRenegade.com.

Gee - good, ol’ fashioned buyer-seller agreements?

Observers of the Sedgwick ordinance say it is much more than just “statement” legislation. Writes blogger David Grumpert, at TheCompletePatient.com:

This isn’t just a declaration of preference. The proposed warrant added, “It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance.” In other words, no state licensing requirements prohibiting certain farms from selling dairy products or producing their own chickens for sale to other citizens in the town.

What about potential legal liability and state or federal inspections? It’s all up to the seller and buyer to negotiate. “Patrons purchasing food for home consumption may enter into private agreements with those producers or processors of local foods to waive any liability for the consumption of that food. Producers or processors of local foods shall be exempt from licensure and inspection requirements for that food as long as those agreements are in effect.” Imagine that-buyer and seller can agree to cut out the lawyers. That’s almost un-American, isn’t it?

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Dirt is the Answer to Health

For all the sophisticated analysis involved, the theory that Knip is testing couldn’t be more basic. He thinks the key difference between the two populations is…dirt. In a sense, he wonders if kids in Finland, and in the United States and other developed nations as well, are too clean for their own good.

***

The idea that dirt, or the lack of it, might play a role in autoimmune disease and allergy gained support along another border. In the late 1980s, Erika von Mutius was studying asthma in and around Munich. At the time, researchers thought air pollution was the cause. But after years of work, the young German researcher couldn’t clearly link Munich’s pollution and respiratory disease.

On November 9, 1989, an unusual opportunity came along: The Berlin Wall fell. For the first time since the 1940s, West Germans could conduct research in the East. Von Mutius, of Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, seized the opportunity, expanding her study to include Leipzig, a city of 520,000 deep in East Germany.

The countryside around Leipzig was home to polluting chemical plants and was pocked with open-pit coal mines; many residents heated their apartments with coal-burning ovens. It was a perfect experiment: Two groups of children with similar genetic backgrounds, divided by the Iron Curtain into dramatically different environments. If air pollution caused asthma, Leipzig’s kids should be off the charts.

Working with local doctors, von Mutius studied hundreds of East German schoolchildren. “The results were a complete surprise,” von Mutius says. “In fact, at first we thought we should re-enter the data.” Young Leipzigers had slightly lower rates of asthma than their Bavarian counterparts—and dramatically less hay fever, a pollen allergy.

Puzzling over her results, von Mutius came across a paper by David Strachan, a British physician who had examined the medical records of 17,000 British children for clues to what caused allergies later in life. Strachan found that kids with a lot of older brothers and sisters had lower rates of hay fever and eczema, probably because the siblings brought home colds, flus and other germs.

After learning of Strachan’s study, von Mutius wondered whether air pollution might somehow protect East Germans from respiratory allergies.

Soon, studies from around the world showed similarly surprising results. But it was germ-laden dirt that seemed to matter, not air pollution. The children of full-time farmers in rural Switzerland and Bavaria, for example, had far fewer allergies than their non-farming peers. And a study following more than 1,000 babies in Arizona showed that, unless parents also had asthma, living in houses with dogs reduced the chances of wheezing and allergies later in life. Researchers proposed that the more microbial agents that children are exposed to early in life, the less likely they are to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases later on. Studies also showed that baby mice kept in sterile environments were more likely to face autoimmune disease, seeming to back what came to be called the “hygiene hypothesis.”

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anti-propaganda:

Poison on the Platter (by Jeffrey Smith)

‘Poison on the Platter - A documentary film

Mahesh Bhatt says: Promotion of Genetically Modified Food is an Act of Bio-terrorism!!

Renowned filmmaker and social activist Mahesh Bhatt today launched a scathing attack on biotech multinational companies and their nexus with regulatory bodies for unleashing what he describes as ‘bio-terrorism’ in the country. Speaking at a function organized to launch his new film, ‘Poison on the Platter‘, directed by Ajay Kanchan, Bhatt said, “in their mad rush to capture the multi-billion dollar Indian agricultural and food industry, the biotech MNCs are bulldozing warnings by scientists about the adverse impact of GM foods on health and environment, and hurtling the mankind toward a disaster, which will be far more destructive than anything the world has seen so far, simply because it will affect every single person living on this planet”.

Bhatt’s film makes a mockery of Government of India’s claim of not allowing import of any GM foods in the country as it conclusively demonstrates that supermarkets in India are flooded with harmful food stuff and biotech MNCs are cashing on the ignorance of unsuspecting consumers in India. “Indians are unfortunately kept in dark, and the corporations are hatching strategies to cash in on their ignorance. Poison on the Platter is, therefore, an attempt to generate awareness among consumers and kick start an informed debate on the issue”, said Bhatt.

Trials of GM foods on lab animals across the world have repeatedly shown that they cause bleeding stomachs, and adversely affect brain, lungs, liver, kidney, pancreas and intestine. They have been even linked to higher offspring mortality and causing infertility.

“Are we ready to eat a food that has the potential to stunt our growth, impair our immune system and adversely affect all our vital organs”, asks Ajay Kanchan, director of the documentary, adding that “It’s shocking that instead of protecting the interests of farmers and consumers, regulatory bodies in India are pandering to the greed of biotech MNCs like Monsanto, whose track record is littered with lies, deceptions and notorious ability to corrupt the regulatory bodies all over the world”.

“I can say with absolute confidence that there is irrefutable and overwhelming evidence that genetically engineered foods are harmful and that they are not being evaluated properly by the governments of India, United States, the European Union, or anywhere in the world.” Said Jeffrey M. Smith, Founder Director, Institute of Responsible Technology and author of two widely respected books on health impact of GM foods – Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette, adding that “this is one of the most dangerous technologies ever introduced on earth, and it’s being deployed in our food supply. It’s madness, what we need is a political willingness to say no more”.

Noted food policy analyst Devinder Sharma said, “India is fast becoming the world’s biggest dustbin for this risky and unwanted technology. We are being told that these crops are essential for feeding the growing population, but there is not even one GM crop that produces higher yields. In fact, many of the GM crops produce less than the existing crops. And yet, as many as 56 foods crops are being genetically modified in India.” In spite of a number of independent scientific studies pointing out the potentially damaging impacts of Bt crops, Government of India is about to approve the first food crop, Bt brinjal. “So far we were told that by proper washing the veggies you could get rid of the harmful pesticides residues. That may not hold true anymore, because with genetic modification, the toxins will be right inside the vegetables”, Sharma added.

In India, the only commercially cultivated GM crop Bt Cotton, has so far proved extremely harmful for human beings and animals. Hundreds of farmers working in Bt Cotton fields developed skin allergies that were not known before, while thousands of cattle, sheep and goats that went for grazing there died in no time. “What we need is a moratorium on release of any GM crop and sale of any GM seed for at least next 5 to 7 years, till their safety is not assured through stringent and impartial tests, because what’s at stake here is not just our health but our very survival”, said Dr Pushpa M. Bhargava, Founder Director, Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology and Supreme Court’s nominee in the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC).

Concluding a panel discussion following the screening of the film, Mahesh Bhatt said, “We cannot remain a mute spectator and let the biotech companies fill their coffers by using our bodies as their slaves in India. If the Government and regulatory bodies continue to ignore warnings by scientists and release any GM food crop, I won’t mind spearheading a countrywide campaign on the scale that India has not seen since the days of Independent movement for one simple reason that we all feel hungry and we can’t live without eating food”.’

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thepeoplesrecord: Uprooting racism in the food system: Communities organize for justiceMarch 11, 2013 A shovel overturned can flip so much more than soil, worms, and weeds. Structural racism - the ways in which social systems and institutions promote and perpetuate the oppression of people of color – manifests at all points in the food system. It emerges as barriers to land ownership and credit access for farmers of color, as wage discrimination and poor working conditions for food and farmworkers of color, and as lack of healthy food in neighborhoods of color. It shows up as discrimination in housing, employment, redlining, and other elements which impact food access and food justice. Many people involved in creating food - from Haitian tomato pickers organizing in Florida, to Native Americans saving seeds in Arizona, to Black Detroit residents growing gardens in fractured neighborhoods – are simultaneously chipping away at structural racism. In the Harvesting Justice series we touch on many of these issues, starting with a look at African-American farmers and what they doing to win justice in the food system. In 1920, one in every seven farmers in the U.S. was African-American. Together, they owned nearly 15 million acres. Racism, violence, and massive migration from the rural South to the industrialized North have caused a steady decline in the number of Black farmers. So, too, has, institutional racism in the agricultural policies of the USDA. By 2007, African-American farmers numbered about one in 70, together owning only 4.2 million acres. Over the years, studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission (CRC), as well as by the USDA itself, have shown that the USDA actively discriminated against Black farmers, earning it the nickname ‘the last plantation.’ A 1964 CRC study showed that the agency unjustly denied African-American farmers loans, disaster aid, and representation on agricultural committees. But organizations like the National Black Farmers Association, the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, the Land Loss Prevention Project, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives have been challenging racism in agricultural policy through legal action. In 1997-98, African-American farmers filed class-action lawsuits against the USDA for unjustly denying them loans. The lawsuits were consolidated into one case, Pigford v. Glickman, which was settled in 1999. But due to delays in filing claims, nearly 60,000 farmers and their heirs were left out of this settlement. In November 2010, the U.S. Congress passed the Claims Settlement Act (known as Pigford II) to compensate Black farmers who were left out of the first settlement. President Obama signed the bill a month later, making $1.25 billion available for claimants in the form of cash payments and loan forgiveness, though the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association has filed an appeal because Pigford II provides smaller payments and places limits on claimants’ future legal options. bell hooks wrote, “Collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the way of our ancestors… Living in modern society, without a sense of history, it has been easy for folks to forget that black people were first and foremost a people of the land, farmers.”[1] Some who are still farmers are carrying on the fight for economic and civil rights for land-based African-American people, a fight which dates back to the days of slavery. Probably the most impressive contemporary example of such organizing has been the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. An outgrowth of the civil rights movement, it formed in 1967 when 22 cooperatives met at Atlanta University. The federation has used collective action ever since to support Black and other small farmers and rural communities. Today, their members include over 100 coops in 16 states across the South. A fast-growing movement is African-Americans reclaiming their connection to their urban land and their food, as part of food justice and food sovereignty movements. People’s Grocery and Mo’ Better Food in Oakland, Growing Power, Rooted in Community, Detroit Black community Food Security Network, and many others are organizing with farmers and connecting African-American growers and consumers. Many of these, such as the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, are working forcommunities of color to have democratic control over their own food systems. Their work includes youth programs and urban gardening in areas where access to healthy, affordable food is limited, as is the case in many low-income and people of color neighborhoods. These groups are also raising awareness of the ways that African-American communities, and communities of color in general, have been sidelined within the food movement itself. Inclusion and participation of people of color has come slowly and late. Often, African-American neighborhoods are targeted as ‘intervention’ areas by outside organizations that - though well-meaning - are neither led by nor accountable to the community and its most urgent needs and goals. The prevailing white culture of the food movement as a whole creates barriers: the typical image of farmers presented often reflects a white archetype and the types of food solutions presented are not always culturally relevant or practical. A critical element of many African-American groups’ work thus involves nation-wide education and organizing on structural racism as it impacts health, farming, food, and land. Among other elements, these organizations are committed to knocking down barriers to food production and food access. Some have joined the world-wide movement for food sovereignty, in their own communities and through the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, so that citizen control over food and agriculture can exist across global economic systems. Ultimately, we all eat, and we are all implicated. Achieving racial justice in the food system is not the sole burden of African-Americans organizing but will take multiracial alliances of people raising awareness of systemic disparities, and working together to end them. SourcePhoto I want to add many Latino & low-income communities have started community farms as well. It’s a huge step toward autonomy, mutual aid & collectivism in these areas where healthy food isn’t readily available or it’s very expensive. I recently began working with a women’s collective & migrant farm workers to develop a community farm in south El Paso near the Texas/Mexico border. I would really encourage people with the time & resources to start organizing a community farm because food justice is a human right’s issue!

thepeoplesrecord:

Uprooting racism in the food system: Communities organize for justice
March 11, 2013

A shovel overturned can flip so much more than soil, worms, and weeds. Structural racism - the ways in which social systems and institutions promote and perpetuate the oppression of people of color – manifests at all points in the food system. It emerges as barriers to land ownership and credit access for farmers of color, as wage discrimination and poor working conditions for food and farmworkers of color, and as lack of healthy food in neighborhoods of color. It shows up as discrimination in housing, employment, redlining, and other elements which impact food access and food justice.

Many people involved in creating food - from Haitian tomato pickers organizing in Florida, to Native Americans saving seeds in Arizona, to Black Detroit residents growing gardens in fractured neighborhoods – are simultaneously chipping away at structural racism. In the Harvesting Justice series we touch on many of these issues, starting with a look at African-American farmers and what they doing to win justice in the food system.

In 1920, one in every seven farmers in the U.S. was African-American. Together, they owned nearly 15 million acres. Racism, violence, and massive migration from the rural South to the industrialized North have caused a steady decline in the number of Black farmers. So, too, has, institutional racism in the agricultural policies of the USDA. By 2007, African-American farmers numbered about one in 70, together owning only 4.2 million acres.

Over the years, studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission (CRC), as well as by the USDA itself, have shown that the USDA actively discriminated against Black farmers, earning it the nickname ‘the last plantation.’ A 1964 CRC study showed that the agency unjustly denied African-American farmers loans, disaster aid, and representation on agricultural committees. But organizations like the National Black Farmers Association, the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, the Land Loss Prevention Project, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives have been challenging racism in agricultural policy through legal action. In 1997-98, African-American farmers filed class-action lawsuits against the USDA for unjustly denying them loans. The lawsuits were consolidated into one case, Pigford v. Glickman, which was settled in 1999. But due to delays in filing claims, nearly 60,000 farmers and their heirs were left out of this settlement. In November 2010, the U.S. Congress passed the Claims Settlement Act (known as Pigford II) to compensate Black farmers who were left out of the first settlement. President Obama signed the bill a month later, making $1.25 billion available for claimants in the form of cash payments and loan forgiveness, though the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association has filed an appeal because Pigford II provides smaller payments and places limits on claimants’ future legal options.

bell hooks wrote, “Collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the way of our ancestors… Living in modern society, without a sense of history, it has been easy for folks to forget that black people were first and foremost a people of the land, farmers.”[1]

Some who are still farmers are carrying on the fight for economic and civil rights for land-based African-American people, a fight which dates back to the days of slavery. Probably the most impressive contemporary example of such organizing has been the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. An outgrowth of the civil rights movement, it formed in 1967 when 22 cooperatives met at Atlanta University. The federation has used collective action ever since to support Black and other small farmers and rural communities. Today, their members include over 100 coops in 16 states across the South.

A fast-growing movement is African-Americans reclaiming their connection to their urban land and their food, as part of food justice and food sovereignty movements. People’s Grocery and Mo’ Better Food in Oakland, Growing Power, Rooted in Community, Detroit Black community Food Security Network, and many others are organizing with farmers and connecting African-American growers and consumers. Many of these, such as the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, are working forcommunities of color to have democratic control over their own food systems. Their work includes youth programs and urban gardening in areas where access to healthy, affordable food is limited, as is the case in many low-income and people of color neighborhoods.

These groups are also raising awareness of the ways that African-American communities, and communities of color in general, have been sidelined within the food movement itself. Inclusion and participation of people of color has come slowly and late. Often, African-American neighborhoods are targeted as ‘intervention’ areas by outside organizations that - though well-meaning - are neither led by nor accountable to the community and its most urgent needs and goals. The prevailing white culture of the food movement as a whole creates barriers: the typical image of farmers presented often reflects a white archetype and the types of food solutions presented are not always culturally relevant or practical.

A critical element of many African-American groups’ work thus involves nation-wide education and organizing on structural racism as it impacts health, farming, food, and land. Among other elements, these organizations are committed to knocking down barriers to food production and food access. Some have joined the world-wide movement for food sovereignty, in their own communities and through the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, so that citizen control over food and agriculture can exist across global economic systems.

Ultimately, we all eat, and we are all implicated. Achieving racial justice in the food system is not the sole burden of African-Americans organizing but will take multiracial alliances of people raising awareness of systemic disparities, and working together to end them.

Source
Photo

I want to add many Latino & low-income communities have started community farms as well. It’s a huge step toward autonomy, mutual aid & collectivism in these areas where healthy food isn’t readily available or it’s very expensive.

I recently began working with a women’s collective & migrant farm workers to develop a community farm in south El Paso near the Texas/Mexico border. I would really encourage people with the time & resources to start organizing a community farm because food justice is a human right’s issue!

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Nukes are Forever

60 nears misses over the last 3 years! It only takes ONE.

Click on the source link to see the map.

Two years ago today, floodwaters from a massive, deadly earthquake/tsunami combo in Japan knocked out cooling equipment at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in what experts were quick to deign the second-worst nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl), after radioactive contamination touched everything from tuna to baby formula to butterflies. The $125 billion incident precipitated an identity crisis among the world’s big users of nuclear power, particularly Germany, which was so spooked that it vowed to shut down every one of its nuke plants by 2022.

But here in the US, there’s no sign of any impending nuclear phaseout, despite the steady parade of meltdown scares reported in a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS dug into public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nuclear industry’s top federal regulator, and found that in 2012 twelve different nuclear power plants experienced “near miss” events, defined as an incident that multiplies the likelihood of a core meltdown by at least a factor of 10. The reasons range from broken coolant pumps to fires to “failures to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering secure areas;” in some cases aging equipment was at fault, and two plants were repeat offenders. One, a California plant, already ranks high in vulnerability to earthquakes. In most cases, the study charges, weak oversight from the NRC was to blame.

In the map below, click on a plant to see what caused it to have a brush with meltdown in 2012:

The UCS study found nearly 60 such “near misses” over the last three years. Still, the NRC chair told the Associated Press on Sunday that the performance of most nuke plants is “quite good,” and pointed to its own study from last week, which found 99 of the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants to be in top-tier performance.

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More Consequences of Civilization

Chemicals from California’s long history of industrial and agricultural development have made their way into groundwater, particularly in the Inland region, which logs some of the worst contamination in the state, according to a recent government report.

Toxic substances such as nitrate from fertilizer and perchlorate from military and manufacturing operations have polluted the region’s drinking water sources, a problem that has cost hundreds of millions of dollars to remedy, water industry officials said.

San Bernardino County ranked third worst in the state for the number of community water systems dealing with contaminated groundwater; Riverside County was fifth, according to a January report to the Legislature by the State Water Resources Control Board. The one-time report was required by AB222, a state law that establishes a publicly accessible database of groundwater contamination.

“Just because we can’t see it or smell it, doesn’t mean it’s not there,” said Celeste Cantu, general manager at the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, which protects the water quality of the drainage basin that starts in the San Bernardino Mountains. “Whatever we have out there will find its way into the groundwater. Nothing is exempt.”

The report by the Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment Program found 680 community water systems in the state relied on contaminated groundwater sources from 2002 to 2010. Most agencies treated or blended the raw water with cleaner sources to meet health standards before serving it to customers, said John Borkovich, the program manager.

However, 265 systems statewide delivered unsafe water to taps during the eight-year period, according to the report. Ten of those were in San Bernardino County, including East Valley Water District in Highland; nine were in Riverside County, including the cities of Corona and Norco and Elsinore Valley Municipal Water Department.

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EPA Reverses Stance on Polluting Texas County’s Water

It is always about money; not people.

When Uranium Energy Corp. sought permission to launch a large-scale mining project in Goliad County, Texas, it seemed as if the Environmental Protection Agency would stand in its way.

To get the ore out of the ground, the company needed a permit to pollute a pristine supply of underground drinking water in an area already parched by drought.

Further, EPA scientists feared that radioactive contaminants would flow from the mining site into water wells used by nearby homes. Uranium Energy said the pollution would remain contained, but resisted doing the advanced scientific testing and modeling the government asked for to prove it.

The plan appeared to be dead on arrival until late 2011, when Uranium Energy hired Heather Podesta, a lobbyist and prolific Democratic fundraiser whose pull with the Obama administration prompted The Washington Post to name her the Capitol’s latest “It girl.”

Podesta — the sister-in-law of John Podesta, who co-chaired President Obama’s transition team — appealed directly to the EPA’s second in command, Bob Perciasepe, pressing the agency’s highest-level administrators to get directly involved and bring the agency’s local staff in Texas back to the table to reconsider their position, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through the Freedom of Information Act.

By the end of 2012, the EPA reversed its position in Goliad, approving an exemption allowing Uranium Energy to pollute the aquifer, though in a somewhat smaller area than was originally proposed.

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