Campaigns for labeling genetically engineered food have swept the US from California to Washington and on to Connecticut, Maine, and Alaska, Oregon and Vermont. Actually by January 2014, according to the Center for Food Safety, 26 states had introduced mandatory labeling legislation. People who participated in these campaigns realized with surprise and shock that they were fighting for a right that is already guaranteed in 64 other countries, including all the industrial democracies that we compare ourselves to.
The other shocking discovery was that such a simple and obvious demand, the right to know what food we put into our bodies was challenged wherever it was about to be codified via ballot proposals or state legislation by a powerful and extremely well funded lobby. Foremost among them of course the agrochemical corporations such as Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF and junk food manufacturers such as Kraft Foods, Pepsico and Coca Cola.
Now, at the beginning of the year 2014 these corporations and their lobbyists in Washington and their trade associations, among them the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), have moved their campaigns up by a huge quantitative leap. Instead of fighting pro labeling legislation state by state they are formulating legislation at the federal level outlawing any state's right to label GMOs.
Simultaneously an international trade agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership, that is currently being negotiated, apparently includes language, written by biotech corporations, outlawing GMO labeling for all eleven member states of the TPP. That includes the US, Canada, Mexico, China, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Japan.
Why, one wonders, is the addition of a dozen letters on a food package: contains GMOs, worth millions of dollars to influence the vote, more millions to buy off members of congress to ban labeling across the US and even to ban labeling under international trade for most of the world's populations in the TPP?
And what does the secrecy have to do with the efforts by Dow Chemical corporation, culminating in the first weeks of 2014 to introduce new corn and soy seed that are genetically engineered to be sprayed with 2,4-D, a component of the infamous Agent Orange. During the war on Vietnam the United States used Agent Orange as a chemical defoliant. It caused both lasting environmental damage in Southeast Asia, and birth defects and medical problems for veterans the people of Vietnam. Now Dow Chemical wants approval to use 2,4-D on American Ag land and food.
Vandana Shiva and Andy Kimbrell, who have dedicated their lives to alerting us to the danger of genetic engineering came to California in the Fall of 2013 to explain the hidden history of the corporate experimentation with life.
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