By: Gmhealthriskweek.org, 08/09/2013

Claire Robinson is editor of GMOSeralini.org, a public information website to counter misleading spin about the Séralini study. She is an editor at GMWatch and research director at Earth Open Source.

The most detailed scientific study ever conducted on the health effects of a genetically modified (GM) food was published last year. The findings of the study, led by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini at the University of Caen in France, were shocking. Rats fed over a two-year period with two Monsanto products, a GM maize and tiny amounts of the Roundup herbicide that the maize is engineered to tolerate being sprayed with, had increased rates of severe organ damage, tumours, and premature death.

For more on this story visit www.gmhealthriskweek.org

Commondreams.org By: Andrea Germanos, 07/17/2013

Farmworkers and their advocates from across the nation descended on Washington, DC this week to demand better protection from the pesticides they're exposed to while picking the nation's produce. Their specific target, the Center for Public Integrity reports, is the Worker Protection Standard, a set of EPA rules meant to reduce the risk of pesticide-related injuries for some 2.5 million agricultural workers and pesticide handlers at 600,000 agricultural establishments nationwide. Yet, even as the perils of pesticides have become better known, EPA protections have not been seriously updated in 20 years.

For more on this story visit www.commondreams.org

By: centerforfoodsafety.org, 07/01/2013

Today, the Oregon Senate passed a bill to ban commercial production of canola (rapeseed) until 2019 inside the 3 million acre Willamette Valley Protected District, one of the world’s pre-eminent vegetable seed producing regions.

HB 2427, which passed the Senate 18-12 after passing the Oregon House last week 37-22, rolls back a controversial new policy adopted by the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) in February 2013 that would have allowed 25,000 acres of canola to be planted over the next decade in a region where the production of the plant for its seed has been banned since 2005.

For more on this story visit www.centerforfoodsafety.org

By Tory Field and Beverly Bell, Other Worlds | Harvesting Justice Series 6/03/13

“At one point ‘agriculture’ was about the culture of food. Losing that culture, in favor of an American cultural monocrop, joined with an agricultural monocrop, puts us in a perilous state…” says food and Native activist Winona LaDuke.[1]

Her lament is an agribusiness executive’s dream. The CEO of the H.J. Heinz Company said, “Once television is there, people, whatever shade, culture, or origin, want roughly the same things.”[2] The same things are based on the same technology, same media sources, same global economy, and same food.

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