Environmental for Food Justice

Centeotl, ‘ maize Lord’, per Codex Borgia CALIFORNIA BIOSAFETY ALLIANCE A social movement to heal cultural memory in the struggle to restore the indigenous tortilla Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA   | September 20, 2013 I think most of us with a ‘life in corn’ – as farmers, plant breeders, or seed savers – understand that the culture of corn is the key to appreciating why Z. Mays conveys a sacred concept of an obligation to care and nurture seed diversity and thus why for such native ethics genetic alterations of maize for ultimately commercial purposes are unethical and contrary to the cultural, ecological, and juridical orders of the community. Three decades of involvement with indigenous producers of maíz de concho in Colorado’s San Luis Valley led me back to Grandmother Knowledge and so I came to understand that corn embodies a life-giving and ancient relationship between people, plants, and place. Yet, the past thirty years have witnessed the development of a distinct threat i...

Moderator’s Note: Our continuing coverage of struggles by workers in the food chain turns to the work by our esteemed colleague, David Bacon, who has been documenting the working and living conditions of migrant farm workers for several decades now. In this photo-essay, Bacon focuses on strawberry seedling farm workers in California’s Tule Lake region. These workers do not produce strawberries but rather strawberry plants – the seedlings bound for other farms directly involved in berry production. There is more than bitter irony to the fact that this Tule Valley strawberry seedling operation is located on the site of a former World War II internment camp where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during the 1940s. We can take this as a case of inadvertent symbolism or accept the fact that the conditions facing farm workers today are as oppressive as the travails faced by the Japanese American internees of WW II. Truthout first posted this story on September 16, 2013. A worker picks flow...

Credit: Redicecreations USDA QUIETLY APPROVED NEW GMO Bayer product is more dangerous than Monsanto’s Roundup Ready line Devon G. Peña | San Luis, CO | September 5, 2013 The transgenic treadmill is reliable in only one sense: Regardless of results, it keeps cranking out more products. The products may not be fully tested for biosafety or human health effects; they may not even be effective as a long-term response to weed or insect control; and the transgenic crops may not even present productivity or economic advantage to growers; but you can rest assured that the Gene Giants will keep cranking out more products under the guise of innovation, technological advances, and dubious claims about feeding a hungry planet and saving the environment. With a measured degree of glee, we have been observing and reporting on the decline of Monsanto’s Roundup® Ready transgenic product line as a consequence of the spreading resistance of weeds like Lambs Quarters and Pigweed to glyphosate. Recent r...

Moderator’s Note: About a year ago, I posted an essay in which I criticized Whole Foods Market (WFM) for its mistreatment of workers, anti-union history, and ‘greenwashing’ of its actual ecological or carbon footprint. In the post of September 4, 2012 , I argued that: From a structural violence and social equity vantage point, there are plenty of good reasons to focus…on Whole Foods Market as an oppressive and exploitative corporation…Here are my top three reasons that Whole Foods Market is really just another capitalist corporation with more interest in the bottom line than in the wellness of farmers and their communities or even their own store workers and consumers: 1. Whole Foods has a long history of being anti-union. 2. Whole Foods is against universal health care. 3. Whole Foods now stocks conventional and even GMO (transgenic) products and is failing to support the campaign for labeling of GE-foods. There are, of course, many other reasons to object to the labor-management, su...