| Wednesday, July 27, 2005 |  |
| NEWS BRIEFS from the Organic Consumers Association | 0 comments |
| 27 Jul 2005 @ 21:56 NEWS BRIEFS CHEMICAL EXPOSURE IN UTERO A new chemical study of umbilical chord samples from the American Red Cross has found that babies have an average of 200 known toxic chemicals in their blood, including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides and a chemical used in the production of Teflon, even before being born. The tests found that hundreds of chemicals, pollutants and pesticides are stored in body fat over a lifetime and then pumped from mother to fetus through umbilical cord blood. Overall, chemical absorption can be reduced by eating organic foods, and by reducing exposure to toxins at home and at work. --------------------------------- PARENTING ADVICE: EAT YOUR PESTICIDES "Parents Magazine", one of the most influential parenting publications in the U.S., advised parents not to worry about pesticide residues in children's food in its recent August 2005 issue. In an article titled "Food Under Fire," the magazine belittles the benefits of organic foods as a myth, and endorses pesticides in foods as safe, stating: "there's no evidence that these chemicals, used at the low levels found in our food supply, are harmful to children." The author of the piece based his research on the opinion of a single "expert," never mentioning three decades of scientific evidence from academic, government and industry sources that states otherwise. The magazine serves as a "parenting guide" to more than 14 million subscribers. Read some related facts below, and write a quick letter to their editor here: mailbag@parentsmagazine.com ----------------------------------- QUICK RELATED U.S. GOVERNMENT ISSUED FACTS The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that one of the main sources of pesticide exposure for U.S. children comes from the food they eat. According to the Food and Drug Administration, half of produce currently tested in grocery stores contains measurable residues of pesticides. Laboratory tests of eight industry-leader baby foods reveal the presence of 16 pesticides, including three carcinogens. According to EPA's "Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment," children receive 50% of their lifetime cancer risks in the first two years of life. In blood samples of children aged 2 to 4, concentrations of pesticide residues are six times higher in children eating conventionally farmed fruits and vegetables compared with those eating organic food. -------------------------------------------- Woodbury County, Iowa, has become the first in the nation to offer tax incentives to organic farmers. County Supervisors approved $50,000 for helping farmers convert from conventional to organic agriculture. "We think domestic (organic) food manufacturers are going to want a reliable domestic supply," said Woodbury rural economic director Rob Marqusee. "We know that people are making money. It might as well be us, too." -------------------------------------------- TELL CONGRESS TO STOP CAFTA The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Central America and the Dominican Republic, will drive several million small farmers off the land—just as NAFTA has done in Mexico and Canada—as well as encourage U.S. corporations to outsource more jobs to low-wage sweatshops. We need Fair Trade as the global norm, not so-called Free Trade. Call your Congressional Representative toll free 1-800-718-1008. Ask to speak to the person who handles trade issues. Tell the office you want your Representative to vote NO on CAFTA and ask for a response email stating the Rep's position. For more information on CAFTA, please visit Public Citizen's CAFTA page [link] |
| Corn: Used and Abused | 1 comment |
| 27 Jul 2005 @ 21:49 Corn: Used and Abused The Tragic Abuse of Corn By Kelpie Wilson t r u t h o u t | Perspective Wednesday 20 July 2005 The wheel it has circled, time without end, Old life remembers, and welcomes the grain. For the corn and the seed are one and the same, That which has been, will be again. -- from Demeter's Hymn by Lyn Hubert They are exalted for a little while, but are gone and brought low; they are taken out of the way as all others, and cut off as the tops of the ears of corn. -- Job 24:6 It was one of those things that you can't quite believe is real. I was flipping through a magazine and saw an ad for a stove that burns corn kernels. For heat. Corn is food, not fuel, I thought, but the ad assured me that "Corn is replenished annually. It is a never-ending energy source, and thus is the new alternative fuel of choice." Something about it felt very wrong to me. Burning food does not seem respectful. Especially when there are two billion people in the world who don’t get enough to eat. But it is more than that. Corn production uses tremendous amounts of fossil fuel for mechanized labor, irrigation, drying, transport and fertilizer. I sincerely doubted that corn as a fuel could be renewable on a sustainable basis. Almost one quarter of America’s farmland grows corn - maize. At nine billion bushels a year, it is our single largest crop and uses vast amounts of water, pesticides and fertilizer. Erosion and toxic runoff from the fields pollute waterways and kill fish in the Gulf of Mexico where a plume of pollution from the Mississippi Delta creates an ever-expanding dead zone. Raising corn the way we do it today depletes the soil of nutrients and creates an addiction to nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas. Since natural gas prices went up a few years ago, we are producing less and less fertilizer here and importing more of it from the Persian Gulf. Now we must worry about food security as well as energy security. Burning corn in a stove may seem bizarre, but it is no more bizarre than fermenting and distilling it into ethanol to burn in our cars. As gas prices go up, people are looking to ethanol and other biofuels to substitute for oil. Unfortunately, it is a bad bargain - one that is being encouraged by giant agribusiness firms like Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto that reap huge profits from corn and taxpayer’s wallets. Corn is already America's most heavily subsidized crop, sucking up about $10 billion a year (according to OXFAM) along with all that water and fertilizer. About 13 percent of the corn crop is now devoted to ethanol production, but that would increase dramatically if the Energy Policy Act of 2005, now in a House-Senate conference committee, were to pass. The Senate version of the energy bill would require US ethanol production to more than double - from 3.3 billion gallons in 2004 to 8 billion gallons by 2012. Subsidies hide the true monetary cost of production, but the big accounting scandal here is the energy accounting. A study by Cornell ecologist David Pimentel and UC Berkeley engineer Tad Patzek found that when all the inputs to farming and ethanol production are accounted for, ethanol uses 29 percent more fossil fuel energy to produce than it yields in your gas tank. CLICL TO READ More > |
| Harrison 'aided' Sir Paul's song | 0 comments |
 27 Jul 2005 @ 05:47 Harrison 'aided' Sir Paul's song Sir Paul McCartney has suggested late Beatles bandmate George Harrison helped him write a song for his latest album from beyond the grave. Sir Paul said he wrote Waiting For Your Friends To Go with help from Harrison, who died in 2001. "I just got this feeling, this is George," he told Tom Robinson on BBC digital station 6 Music. "I was like George - writing one of his songs." "It just wrote itself very easily because it wasn't even me writing it." Sir Paul said he was remained unsure about the meaning of the song's lyrics. "I thought, OK, the 'waiting on the other side' is also a little bit loaded, it can be crossing the river Jordan or whatever, that sort of thing. There's a little bit of double meaning there," he said. "It was funny, particularly the second verse: 'I've been sliding down a slippy slope, I've been climbing up a slowly burning rope.' I just thought - it's a George song." Sir Paul said the song was one of his favourites on his new album Chaos and Creation In The Back Yard, which is due out in September. The interview will be broadcast on 14 September. |