Our Childrens’ Future Looks Grim Without Real Food from Local Farms

We were promised a distinction between corporations and small farms in any food safety bill.  It is not there.  This is why we need to forcefully oppose this bill.  Today I am giving you another easy way to do so.

I am urging you to call your representatives to vote no on HR 2749 which will come before the House today for a vote, with limited discussion (only 40 minutes) and no amendments possible.

And this is why:  NAIS is in HR 2749.

And it lets the government – using regulations designed to sell industry’s pesticides and GMOs and antibiotics – go onto farms and decide everything done there, and put farmers in prison for non-compliance or administrative errors which harmed no one.

Here is a tool to use in calling, which provides the numbers to call and keeps a record that could be valuable for making clear how much people across the country oppose this.

HR 2749 People’s Phone Lobby:
http://www.peaceteam.net/lobby.php?bill=HR2749

DeLauro and others said those writing the bills “didn’t mean to” impact small producers.  She promised group after worried group that went to her that “they” would make a distinction between farmers and corporations so American farmers would be safe.

THIS BILL CONTAINS NO DISTINCTION and no amendments are allowed so no distinction can be put in.

Representatives are listening to that, because they see clearly that rules for corporations cannot be applied safely to small farmers.  They also hear that we actually need fewer regulations for farmers SO YOUNG FARMERS CAN COME INTO FARMING because we all want more farmers, not less.

It is very simple.  Farmers were PROMISED they would be protected from a bill claiming to go after corporate contamination, but they have not been protected in any way whatsoever.

(Under the current bill, farmers, without having harmed anyone, could face prison for things are small as clerical errors.  The same is true for nutrition companies.  The civil rights violations are immense.  The bill does not include the critical distinction between farmers (and small businesses) and multibillion dollar corporations which was promised.)

From Ronnie Cummins at the Organic Consumers Association, written years before, when things were not as bad as now.

“What we are confronted with … is a government conspiracy. A politically inspired ritual of fabricated charges, manipulated science, and doctored evidence. A modern witch-hunt to sacrifice the innocent in order to protect the massive profits and scandalous practices of the guilty. A diabolically orchestrated, media-scripted … operation  … designed … to fan the flames of fear and ignorance, and to foster our continued dependence on an abusive Big Brother government that has promised to protect us from the contemporary terrors that lurk, well, nearly everywhere.

“USDA bureaucrats like [fill in the blank], CDC bureaucrats like [fill in the blank], indentured politicians, and their puppet masters behind the scenes‹the leaders of the corporate-industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical complex‹are the real offenders.

“After campaigning in the trenches for thirteen years to get the USDA and FDA to stop the hazardous feeding of billions of pounds of blood, slaughterhouse waste, and manure every year to farm animals, and to require mandatory testing of cattle for mad cow disease at slaughter, I had lost or repressed some of my anger and frustrations. But then I read this book, and like post-combat stress, a flood of memories rushed back. …

“Hate mail arriving at my Washington office in 1993 along with a series of anonymous telephone death threats to my colleagues, just after we launched a national campaign against McDonald’s and filed a legal petition to stop the feeding of animals to animals. A creepy ex-military intelligence agent provocateur who infiltrated our campaign and followed me around Washington, posing as a representative from the World Council of Churches. A private investigator in Wisconsin reporting that our office telephones were tapped, probably by the beef industry. A national news producer sheepishly apologizing to me for “alterations” in the script of a nationally televised ABC News story on mad cow disease that aired in 1997‹following what he described as a “call from the White House.”

“And more. Fruitlessly petitioning the Centers for Disease Control to make the human equivalent of mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt- Jacob Disease (CJD), an officially reportable disease. Petitioning the CDC, again in vain, to require autopsies for a significant number of the 50,000 Americans who die every year from Alzheimer’s disease, to determine whether they actually had CJD (CJD is often mistakenly diagnosed as Alzheimer’s, because its symptoms are similar). Watching the Bush administration USDA blame the Canadians for our first mad cow cases, and shortly thereafter threaten a Kansas meat packer, Creekstone Farms, for the “crime” of wanting to test all of their cows at slaughter for Mad Cow disease.

“But voting with our consumer dollars is not enough. … Armed with $90 billion in taxpayer money each year, the USDA [and FDA] is waging war against all of us‹consumers, family farmers, farm animals, and the environment. The direct and collateral damage of this war includes rampant water, air, and food pollution; an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, obesity, and hormone disruption; pollution by genetically engineered crops; an unsustainable, massive venting of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases; pesticide and antibiotic contamination; proliferation of junk food; systematic exploitation of small farmers, farm workers, and slaughterhouse workers; and the dumping of millions of tons of subsidized crops and meat at below the cost of production on developing nations, thereby destroying the livelihoods of millions of small farmers and rural communities.

“… It’s time to stand up and fight, not only for ourselves, but also for future generations.”

Here is the link again:  http://www.peaceteam.net/lobby.php?bill=HR2749

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This post is part of the Real Food Wednesday blog carnival, hosted today by Cheeseslave blog.