Is Whole Foods Sincere About its Support for Labeling Genetically Modified Foods?

After months of pressure from the organic community, including thousands of its customers, the leadership of Whole Foods Market on September 11 endorsed Proposition 37 [3], the California Ballot Initiative to require mandatory labels on genetically engineered foods. But the endorsement came with “reservations” and inaccuracies. It also included the false claim that company policy precludes Whole Foods and its executives from providing much-needed financial support to Prop 37, a campaign that consumers – the very people who have made WFM and its executives wildly profitable – overwhelmingly support.

Is it possible that Whole Foods wants to ride the GMO labeling popularity wave while it quietly works behind the scenes to prevent Prop 37, or any other GMO labeling law, from passing? Could it be that a GMO labeling law – especially one like Prop 37 that prohibits the use of the word “natural” on any food containing GMOs – would cut too deeply into the company’s $9.8 billion in sales and almost $246 million in profits? [4]

Right up until the company announced its lukewarm endorsement, Vice President of Global Communications and Quality Standards Margaret Wittenberg and other WFM top brass repeatedly stated that they would not endorse Prop 37. CEO John Mackey has reportedly claimed that “the jury is still out” on whether genetically engineered crops and foods are unhealthy for people or the environment. (Mackey also has stated [5] that “no scientific consensus exists” to support global warming or climate change).

And while the company website states [6] that WFM is “committed to foods that are fresh, wholesome and safe to eat”, nowhere on its list of unacceptable ingredients [7] is there any mention of GMOs.

So why come out with a public endorsement of Prop 37? With national polls showing 90% support for GMO labeling, and voter support [8] for Prop 37 running 67% for and 24% against, it was just common-sense marketing strategy to get behind the initiative. But was it really an endorsement?

When it first came out, WFM’s official endorsement contained misleading information that read straight from the opposition’s playbook. It also contained one glaring error.  Initially, the company listed among its “reservations” about Prop 37 this incorrect statement: The use of 0.5% of the total weight as the upper limit for processed foods that contain one or more genetically engineered ingredients to be exempted from labeling is inconsistent with the long-established international labeling standard of 0.9%.

Not true. The OCA contacted the authors of the official press release and offered this correction, taken straight from the ballot initiative [9] itself: The 0.5% exemption is for one ingredient and a food can have up to ten such ingredients, meaning a 5.0% exemption (until 2019).

It took them several days, but WFM public relations team did finally issue a correction [3]. But the correction did little to strengthen the company’s endorsement, which continues to perpetuate the exact same myths that the NO on 37 campaign is now airing in its $35-million TV advertising blitz. The endorsement echoes biotech industry claims that Prop 37 is “too complicated.” That GMO food labeling is best left up to the pro-biotech federal government and the FDA (don’t hold your breath for this), rather than the states. That if passed, Prop 37 will result in greedy trial lawyers suing innocent grocery stores, farmers, and food processors for not labeling or mislabeling GMO foods.

None of this is true – as has been repeatedly outlined [10] by the YES on Prop 37 campaign.

Also not true? That WFM can’t financially support the most important battle ever waged in the U.S. for consumers’ right to know about GMOs and truthful labeling on so-called “natural” foods. According to its website, company policy precludes donating to political campaigns or ballot initiatives. And yet, in 2009 WFM spent $180,000 lobbying [11] against the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have granted farm workers (the same farm workers who pick the fruits and vegetables sold in WFM stores) and other food workers the right to form unions and enjoy collective bargaining rights with their employers.

Company policy also apparently doesn’t preclude WFM’s wealthy executives from donating to political campaigns. CEO John Mackey has donated $2500 so far this year to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, and has made many personal donations [12] to past political campaigns – yet not one penny to Prop 37.

Clearly, the executives and big investors who control WFM don’t want to antagonize millions of their customers, so they’ve issued a token endorsement of Prop 37. But here’s the inconvenient truth. WFM sells billions of dollars of non-organic, so-called “natural” products every year that contain genetically engineered ingredients, including thousands of different processed foods, nutritional supplements, meat, and animal products. Once Prop 37 passes on November 6, WFM, just like every other supermarket chain, will face a major dilemma. Are they willing to demand that their suppliers get GMOs out of the 50,000 items sold in their stores, and give WFM legally binding affidavits to prove this? Is WFM willing to stop marketing non-organic GMO-tainted foods as “natural,” when many of them are not?

And the most critical question of all: Is WFM willing to antagonize – and possibly lose - their core customers, consumers who will not want to purchase foods carrying labels that say “produced through genetic engineering”?

Most of the workers, and certainly the overwhelming majority of the customers, at Whole Foods support organic foods and mandatory labeling of GMOs. It’s time for the executives and the top brass to stop the lies and obfuscation, to stop the greenwashing, and to atone for the fact that they’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit over the years by selling non-organic, so-called “natural” foods and supplements that contain GMOs.

It’s also time for WFM to remove misleading information about Prop 37 from the company website. It’s time for this multi-billion corporation and its wealthy executives to put their money where their mouth is, and make a sizeable donation to the California ballot Initiative to label genetically engineered foods. This is the food fight of our lives, and Whole Foods Market is either with us or against us. Please join the 25,000 organic consumers who have already signed this petition [13] asking WFM to throw real support behind Prop 37.

Seed Freedom: A Call To End Corporate Control

In a defiant step against corporate control over food sovereignty, activists issued a report to draw attention to the extreme threat that Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and corporate influence have on the future of food security and individual independence. 

"Seed Freedom: A Global Citizen's Report," was written by over a hundred organizations, experts, activists and farmers under the direction of Dr. Vandana Shiva's organization Navdanya; some prominent contributors include Pat Mooney, Jack Kloppenbur and Salvatore Cecarelli. Hoping to to draw attention to the "serious risk to the future of the world's seed and food security," the document focuses on the imperative to stop laws that are preventing farmers from saving and exchanging their native varieties of seeds by encouraging individuals to pressure governments to roll back patents on seeds and seed laws.

As articulated in a statement on Navdanya's site from 2010:

"Leaving the control over seeds to multinational corporations means leaving decisions on choice in the food market and the way food is produced to those whose first aim is to make a profit, not provide food security."

The report gives examples from movements around the world and grassroots initiatives that have successfully fought for seed freedom, from indigenous women in Chile to organic farmers in Oregon. "Seed Freedom" also gives information on indigenous varieties of seeds by region.

This is one of many measures meant to counter the threat of industrialized food systems. In July, Navdanya hosted a conference that included farmers, activists, scientists, legal experts and students resulting in the foundation of a national alliance of individuals committed to the cause of protecting biodiversity and small farms. The organization has also launched a global campaign on seed freedom from October 2 to October 16, ending on World Food Day.

On her blog, founder and director Vandana Shiva writes, “I started Navdanya to save seeds to prevent the memory in the seeds from being erased forever. For us, that is seed freedom.”

Global Warming Could Affect New York 's Drinking Water

A recent study [1] from Yale University , published in Geophysical Research Letters, indicates that the water quality of lakes and coastal systems "would be altered if hurricanes intensify in a warming world."

Co-authors Bryan Yoon, a doctoral student, and Peter A. Raymond, an ecosystem ecology professor, recorded amounts of dissolved organic matter in the Catskill watershed, which provides the majority of New York City's drinking water.

While dissolved organic matter is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be detrimental to the aquatic environment in excessive amounts, the study found. The matter can bind to metal pollutants and carry them, interfere with ultraviolet processes and aquatic metabolism and can even lead to the formation of carcinogenic disinfection by-products in chlorination.

"All of those problems become more serious as larger quantities of dissolved organic matter are transported to lakes and coastal systems," Yoon said in a statement.

With Hurricane Irene's record rainfall, Yoon and Raymond found that the water dispelled from Esopus Creek, which feeds into the one of the Catskill watershed's two reservoirs, increased 330-fold, causing an unparalleled amount of dissolved organic matter to flow into the water supply. Yoon likened the immense amount of drastic increase to someone eating 40 percent of his annual food within a few days.

"Hurricane Irene was a prime example that there is no limit to the amount of dissolved organic matter that can be exported by extreme rain events," Yoon said.

Though the study focuses on the detrimental effects of Hurricane Irene on the Catskills watershed, it does not specify the breadth of the potential damage to New York 's drinking water. With the New York City Department of Environmental Protection actively monitoring the city's water supply system, there's no reason to think New York 's water is unsafe to drink.

However, the implications of the study's outcome do not bode well for New York if another hurricane of equal or higher intensity were to hit the coast in the future.

The study follows a recent report commissioned by 20 governments that indicates more than 100 million people could die by 2030, if crucial climate change issues are not addressed. Experts predicted a rise in extreme storm and weather conditions, but are still hesitant to attribute individual extreme weather events directly to climate change.

Yet with more reports on the hazards of climate change appearing – from food distribution risks to threats against the quality of drinking water supplies- the outlook for the future becomes increasingly serious.

Leading World Bank Demographer: Vaccination Campaigns Part Of Population Reduction Policy

On October 2nd a retired demographer at the World Bank admitted that vaccination campaigns are an integral part of the World Bank’s population policies. John F. May, the Bank’s leading demographer from 1992 to 2012, told the French web journal Sens Public (and in turn transcribed by the think-tank May works for) that vaccination campaigns, especially in so-called “high-fertility countries”, are means to achieve population reduction in those countries. May:

“The means used to implement population policies are “policy levers” or targeted actions such as vaccination campaigns or family planning to change certain key variables.”

Defining “population policy” as “a set of interventions implemented by government officials to better manage demographic variables and to try to attune population changes (number, structure by age and breakdown) to the country’s development aspirations”, May continues to explain that the World Bank is taking up the lead role in achieving general population reduction.

It is not the first time that World Bank officials boast about their willingness to implement strict population control policies in the Third World. In its 1984 World Development Report, the World Bank suggests using “sterilization vans” and “camps” to facilitate its sterilization policies for the third world. The report also threatens nations who are slow in implementing the bank’s population policies with “drastic steps, less compatible with individual choice and freedom.”:

“Population policy has a long lead time; other development policies must adapt in the meantime. Inaction today forecloses options tomorrow, in overall development strategy and in future population policy. Worst of all, inaction today could mean that more drastic steps, less compatible with individual choice and freedom, will seem necessary tomorrow to slow population growth.”, the report states.

Some of those steps are now being taken.

A study published in Human and Experimental Toxicology in May of 2011 concluded that “nations that require more vaccine doses tend to have higher infant mortality rates.” (page 8).

After an in-depth study into the effects of vaccine-coverage in relation to mortality rates among infants, the authors Neil Z. Miller and Gary S. Goldman came to this disturbing conclusion and advised that “a closer inspection of correlations between vaccine doses, biochemical or synergistic toxicity, and IMRs, is essential.”- but naively concluded that “All nations—rich and poor, advanced and developing—have an obligation to determine whether their immunization schedules are achieving their desired goals.”

The authors cannot be expected to know that, actually, that the desired goals are exactly being achieved. Their final point is significant in this regard, that they obviously were not working on the notion that vaccines were harmful and obviously drew their final conclusions on the basis of the idea that the increase in high mortality rates among infants were unintended. The opposite is the case. The World Health Organization, the World Bank, The UN environmental department, the UN Population Fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and all the other arms of the creature we call the scientific dictatorship are closing in on all of humanity with mass-scale vaccination programmes and genetically engineered food.

Where the mantra used to be “to combat global warming, we need a one world government”, now it sounds something along the lines of “when we wish to eradicate poverty, we must have a global government and reduce human numbers, by the way.” Any pretext will do. More recently it were oceans in need that prompted the World Bank to initiate a global “alliance”. The same argument can of course be applied and is being applied to every other possible calamity.

Following this line of reasoning will inevitably bring you to pretexts under which global population control can be sold. Want to reduce victims of drunk driving? Reduce human numbers. Looking to cure cancer? Reduce the birthrate so less people will die as a result of it. The scientific community has joined the effort, attempting to sell population reduction to stop poverty and disease worldwide.

Under the guidance of Ban Ki-moon’s top advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, several studies have been published which call for mass population reduction in the name of poverty-reduction. In 2009 Sachs and his protégé’s Pejman Rohani and Matthew H. Bonds wrote the paper Poverty trap formed by the ecology of infectious diseases. They write that the “poverty trap may (…) be broken by improving health conditions of the population.”

The question that arises, of course, is how to improve “health conditions”. In another study from 2009 Bonds and Rohani say:

““(…) the birth of a child in the poorest parts of the world represents not only a new infection opportunity for a disease, but also an increase in the probability of infection for the rest of the susceptible host population. Thus, epidemiological theory predicts that a reduction in the birth rate can significantly lower the prevalence of childhood diseases.”

Earlier that same year, Bonds wrote a dissertation entitled Sociality, Sterility, and Poverty; Host-Pathogen Coevolution, with Implications for Human Ecology. The study concludes that the best way to eradicate poverty and disease is to, well… eradicate humans.

“We find that, after accounting for an income effect, reducing fertility may result in significantly lower disease prevalence over the long (economic) term than would a standard S-I-R epidemiological model predict, and might even be an effective strategy for eradicating some infectious diseases. Such a solution would make Malthus proud”, Bonds writes.

“(…) the new model, which accounts for an economic effect, predicts that a reduction in fertility may be significantly more effective than a vaccine. It also illustrates that a sustained vaccination policy would be more likely to eradicate a disease if done in conjunction with decreased reproduction.”

“This model”, Bond continues, “is likely to understate the true benefits of reduced fertility because the effect of reducing the birth rate is to reduce the flow of susceptible for all diseases, which is the equivalent of a vaccine for all infectious diseases at the same time.”

If you eradicate the human, you eradicate the disease- problem solved:

“Infectious diseases, however, continue to be most significant in developing countries, which experience relatively rapid population growth. The effect of this influx of children on the persistence and dynamics of childhood diseases, as well as on the critical vaccination coverage, is reasonably well-established (McLean and Anderson, 1988a; Broutin et al., 2005). But it is now warranted to turn this framework on its head: can fertility reduction be an integral element of a disease eradication campaign?”

The answer to that question is given by Bill Gates in 2010 when he promoted using vaccines to lower the population by 10 to 15%:

Disease and poverty, intertwined as they are, can therefore be eliminated by mas-scale fertility reduction. The religion of the scientific dictatorship in a nutshell.

It wasn’t the first time that Mr. Sachs called for global coordination in regards to population control. In a September 2009 UN press release, Sachs not only lamented human activity on the planet, but argued for scientists and engineers to take the steering-wheel in this process:

“We’re in the age of this planet where human activity dominates the earth’s processes. Humanity has become so large in absolute number and in economic activity that we have overtaken earth processes in vital ways to the point of changing the climate, the hydrologic cycle,” he told the UN Conference on Trade and Development.”

“We don’t necessarily need diplomats around the table”, Sachs continued. “We need engineers around the table, scientists around the table. We need to put the cards down and have a new kind of process.”

What kind of model does Sachs envision for his usurping utopia? He stated in an Economist publication in 2000:

“The model to emulate is the Rockefeller Foundation, the pre-eminent development institution of the 20th century, which showed what grant aid targeted on knowledge could accomplish.”

I don’t have to remind readers that it was the Rockefeller Foundation that funded and developedvaccines designed to reduce your fertility, and intended to distribute these vaccines on a mass-scale.

In his commentary The Specter of Malthus Returns, Sachs gives an adequate description of Agenda 21 without actually mentioning the UN plan for wealth redistribution and global population reduction:

“We will need to rethink modern diets and urban design to achieve healthier lifestyles that also reduce consumption. And to stabilize the global population at around eight billion, we will have to help Africa and other regions in speeding their demographic transition. We are definitely not yet on such a trajectory. We will need new policies to push markets down that path and to promote technological advances in resource saving. We will need a new politics to recognize the importance of a sustainable growth strategy and global cooperation to achieve it.”

As Paul Joseph Watson reported in his September 2010 article Global Tax Scam Shifts From Climate Change to Poverty, the pretexts under which the ongoing effort to establish a world government is moving forward is undergoing a transformation. The focus has now drifted away from the thoroughly debunked global warming myth to poverty-reduction. As usually is the case, once the pretext is sold to the unsuspecting, the eugenicists move in to “reduce fertility.” Global government, in other words, to facilitate global scientific dictatorship.

Is The End of Monsanto Near? Prop 37 Succeeding as Nations Ban GMO Crops

Is the end of Monsanto within reach? It has certainly been a rough couple of weeks for the mega corporation as the real dangers surrounding GMOs are being brought to the attention of consumers on a global scale like never before. It all started with the monumental French study finding a serious link between the consumption of Monsanto’s Roundup-drenched GMOs and massive tumors. Being called the ‘most thorough’ research ever published on the real health effects of GMOs, the study led to even larger victories.

After the study not only did France call for a potential worldwide ban on GMOs pending the results of their in-depth analysis, but Russia’s major consumer rights organization announced a ban on both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn.

Prop 37 Can Label Monsanto Out of Existence

And now, the Proposition to label all GMOs in the state of California is showing massive success. If Prop 37 passes, it won’t just affect California. It is very likely that other states will not just take note, but adopt similar legislation. Through this legal mechanism, we can essential label Monsanto out of existence.  This is possible when considering that the average consumer is actually opposed to GMOs and heavily in favor of proper labeling.

In a major Los Angeles Times poll, registered California voters in favor of labeling outnumber pro-GMO voters by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Altogether, a whopping 61% of those polled reported supporting the Prop 37 labeling initiative. Only 25% reported opposing it.

If GMO-containing products are properly labeled, the simple fact of the matter is that less people will buy them. As of right now, very few people are even aware of what they are putting in their mouth. In fact, if the public knew that they were consuming GMOs which were linked to massive tumors and organ failure, the overwhelming majority would abandon such products. Without labeling, however, they have no idea. The same can also be said for other ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and aspartame.

As Yes on 37 campaign manager Gary Ruskin explains:

“Monsanto, DuPont, and Coca-Cola do not want Californians to know what’s really in their food and drinks, because they fear consumers will turn away from their genetically engineered ingredients and pesticides that go with them.”

If they knew they were eating mercury in the HFCS and consuming an artificial sweetener with over 42 associated diseases, then major change would occur – change that includes forcing manufacturers to abandon these ingredients in order to stay profitable. And after all, Monsanto’s number one goal is profit. This is a company that has been caught running ‘slave-like’ working conditions in which ‘employees’ were forced to buy only from the company store and were not allowed to leave the area or their pay would be withheld.

If Monsanto’s profits were to plummet, their political reign would likely follow as well. Without an endless amount of cash to throw at crushing Prop 37, already contributing $4 million to fuel anti-labeling propaganda in California, the corporation’s massive grasp on the world of science (continually censoring studies and funding pro-GM research) and politics would virtually cease to exist.

It is essential that we ensure the passing of Prop 37 in a bid to generate the literal end of Monsanto. Once consumers actually know that they’re putting genetically modified creations into their body, real change will occur within the food supply.