The Food Fight of Our Lives.
Dear Friend,We've just passed the halfway mark in our special fundraising campaign to label GMOs, and we are still far short of our goal. I need your help today in our fight to stand up to Big Biotech and Big Food, and demand that they tell us when they put GMO-tainted ingredients in our food.
If you have already contributed, thank you! If not, can you pitch in today?
We need to raise $150,000 by March 27 to help get the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act on the ballot and pass it in November.
Please make your secure online donation today. Or, you can donate by phone or mail.
Every dollar you donate today will help pay for signature gatherers, attorneys, media experts - whomever and whatever it takes - to get this law in front of the voters, pass it, and ultimately force GMO labeling nationally.
The Organic Consumers Association, Organic Consumers Fund, along with other coalition partners, have already raised over one million dollars to get this initiative on the ballot. But it's not enough.
Our opposition – led by the Council for Biotechnology Information, whose members include Monsanto, DuPont, Dow AgroScience, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association - recently contributed $375,000 and $250,000 respectively, to the Coalition Against the Costly Food Labeling Proposition - a front group aimed at misinforming the public about GMOs, in order to defeat this initiative.
And that's just the beginning. Big Biotech and Big Food will spend millions on Big Lies in order to defeat this initiative. They have huge profits at stake – and deep pockets.
Let's take back our food, and our government
This is the seminal battle for the right to know what's in our food. If we pass this labeling law in California, it will be only a matter of time before Big Biotech and Big Food will be forced to get GMOs out of our food supply for good.
Remember Proposition 65? In 1986, Californians approved a ballot initiative that required companies to label products containing potentially cancer-causing ingredients. Rather than tell consumers in California that the products they were buying might cause cancer, most companies reformulated their products to eliminate any potential carcinogens. And they did this on a national scale, not just in California
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When Californians got fed up with cancer-causing ingredients in their food, they didn't wait for their elected officials - many of whom had sold out to Big Business - to protect them. They took matters into their own hands.
It's time to do it again. It's time stop being victims, to stop letting Big Biotech use us as lab rats. It's time to start writing and passing laws that protect us - not the Monsantos and Wal-Marts of the world.
This is how we make grassroots activism and direct democracy work for us - the 99% who are sick and tired of being victimized by greedy corporations and the politicians who pander to them.
Study after study indicates that GMOs are bad for our health, bad for the environment.
We have a right to know what's in our food. It doesn't get any more basic than that.
Please donate today to the Organic Consumers Fund to help pass this historic Genetically Engineered Food labeling initiative.
And please - forward this email to your friends, share it on Facebook. Diggit. Stumbleupon it. Pin it. Let's tell the world: This is how movements - and history - are made.
Thank you for your help.
For an Organic Future,
Ronnie Cummins
Director, Organic Consumers Association and Organic Consumers Fund
P.S.: The Organic Consumers Fund is a 501(c)4 allied organization of the Organic Consumers Association, focused on grassroots lobbying and legislative action. Donations are not tax-deductible. If you need to make a tax-deductible donation, you can contribute to the Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)3. Your donation to the OCA will be used for general public education and grassroots mobilization.
Twenty-two leading scientists, experts in pest resistance, have written an urgent letter to the EPA asking the agency to warn farmers about the hazards of Monsanto's genetically engineered Bt corn, planted on millions of acres across the U.S. and Canada. The corn has been gene-spliced with bacterial DNA that produces Bt insecticide in every cell of the plant. Monsanto's misleading promise was that farmers could plant Bt crops and not have to spray pesticides, but predictably, corn rootworms have begun to develop resistance. Scientists warn of massive yield loss and surging corn costs if the EPA doesn't act quickly to drastically reduce Bt crops' acreage and force Monsanto to make non-GMO varieties of its high-yielding hybrid corn available to farmers.
"You have a right to know what you eat, especially when it's better…After several months of debate, Europe has just adopted a new law for the labeling of food that comes from genetically engineered plants…We believe that products that come from biotechnology are better and that they should be labeled."
A petition targeting Michael Taylor, a former lawyer/lobbyist for Monsanto who currently serves as President Obama's Food Safety Czar, has made national news. Taylor was instrumental in the early 1990s in ramming through the controversial FDA policy that genetically engineered foods did not need to be labeled, utilizing the bogus argument that genetically engineered foods are "substantially equivalent" to non-GE foods. USA Today reported that the petition to fire Taylor had already gathered more than 400,000 signatures with the help of MoveOn.org. The petition, begun by Frederick Ravid, currently has nearly 427,000 names. The article gave equal time to Taylor's supporters, quoting a letter from food safety "experts" who called the petition a "factually untrue Internet smear campaign" and argued against the statement in Ravid's petition that biotech foods may be contributors to colon, breast, lymphatic, and prostate cancers. Reporter Elizabeth Weise let the criticism stand, failing to cite evidence that Monsanto's Bovine Growth Hormone, rBGH increases levels of IGF-1, a powerful growth hormone and cancer tumor promoter.
Popular TV health expert, Dr. Oz, recently covered the GMO issue, explaining to his viewers that they've probably been eating genetically engineered food without knowing it. Guests on the show included Jeffrey Smith of the Institute for Responsible Technology and Michael Hanson of the Consumers Union. Please watch the segment and then take action, asking your Congressional Representative to co-sponsor Rep. Dennis Kucinich's bill to label GMO foods.
After years of campaigning for GMO labeling laws, we are closer than ever to getting this issue on the ballot in California in November - and finally getting GE-tainted foods out of our nation's food supply for good.
The more than 30,000 attendees arriving at the Anaheim Convention Center Friday for Expo West, North America's largest trade show for the natural products industry, were greeted with activists in bio-hazmat suits. It was Occupy Monsanto's Genetic Crimes Unit on the look out for toxic contamination and genetic modification. The group sees this as a necessary civil defense against the unknown long-term effects of eating GMO foods. Their method is to identify GMO victims by asking them what they've eaten recently. If they've ingested non-organic soy, cotton, canola, corn, alfalfa, sugar beets, papaya, zucchini, squash, or animal products, they're considered contaminated and tagged with bracelets.
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