Posts Tagged ‘industrial agriculture’

Article from the New York Times on November 5, 2009

As many as 25 percent of the American farmers growing genetically engineered corn are no longer complying with federal rules intended to maintain the resistance of the crops to damage from insects, according to a report Thursday from an advocacy group.

The increase in farmers skirting the rules, from fewer than 10 percent a few years ago, raises the risk that insects will develop resistance to the toxins in the corn that are meant to kill them, the report says. And it raises questions about whether the Environmental Protection Agency and the agricultural biotechnology industry are adequately enforcing the rules.

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Article from Fair Food Fight, September 24, 2009

It’s a testament to Pollan’s wild success that the pushback against his books, opinions, and celebrity is sharpening and deepening. The In Defense of Farmers group in Madison, which is planning to counter Michael Pollan’s speach there, is probably the grassroots farmer-based group that it claims to be — and that’s going to make Pollan’s task more challenging in the months to come.

Because it’s one thing to write books for likeminded readers, or to persuade readers to become likeminded readers, and it’s another thing entirely to turn and face the industry that one has so matter-of-factly dismantled and discredited — not only in books (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, etc), film appearances (Food Inc, King Corn, etc), and many NYT articles, but in the mass rejuvenation of the food and farming movement itself.

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Article from The Huffington Post, September 23, 2009

The industrial agriculture complex has been doing back flips for the last few weeks, first because of the ascendance of Blanche Lincoln (ConservaDem-AR) to the high throne of the Senate Agriculture Committee, where she promises to pinch climate legislation (or at the very least shove it aside until next year) and push a southern Big Ag agenda in the Senate for rice and cotton interests. Now, the White House has announced Islam A. Siddiqui, current Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America (you will remember the organization as the one that sent the First Lady a letter admonishing her for not using pesticides on the White House garden) as nominee for Chief Agricultural Negotiator, who works through the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to promote our crops and ag products abroad.

Why does it matter if the Vice President from the trade association representing pesticides and other agricultural chemicals takes over the Office of Agricultural Affairs at the USTR? Well, because that office, according to the USTR website “has overall responsibility for negotiations and policy coordination regarding agriculture.”

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