World Food Day: Monsanto On Trial
Ronnie Cummins- Organic Consumers Assoc.
No Kangaroos Here
Sunday, October 16, is World Food Day. It’s also the day that the International Monsanto Tribunal will conclude, in The Hague, Netherlands—and mark the beginning of justice for Earth and its inhabitants
Monsanto and its friends in the pesticide industry will try to characterize this historic citizens’ initiative as a “kangaroo court.”
But those of us who are already here, preparing for the opening of the People’s Assembly (October 14), and the formal Tribunal (October 15-16), can attest to the fact that there are no kangaroos in sight. There are only distinguished judges and lawyers, people who have been harmed by Monsanto’s products, and concerned citizens from all over the world.
Citizens’ Tribunals are not mock trials. They have a long history of bringing justice to issues where governments either act corruptly or fail to act. It is the legal right of citizens to ensure the carriage of justice, when governments do not.
The Tribunal will be based on the “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights” adopted by the United Nations in 2011. It will be an international court of lawyers and judges that will assess the potential criminal liability of Monsanto for damages inflicted on human health and the environment.
The court will also rely on the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2002, and it will consider whether to reform international criminal law to include crimes against the environment, or ecocide, as a prosecutable criminal offense. The International Criminal Court, established in 2002 in The Hague, has determined that prosecuting ecocide as a criminal offense is the only way to guarantee the rights of humans to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be protected.
While the Tribunal can’t impose penalties, its final verdicts will serve as the foundation for future legal cases against not only Monsanto, but also Bayer, Syngenta, Dow and others. The panel of judges will issue their advisory opinions on the six terms of reference within a month or so, after they’ve had sufficient time to weigh the testimony they will hear during the two-day Tribunal.
This initiative, long overdue, follows on the heels of a new “state of the science” review released this week by PAN International. The review, which presents a large body of research documenting the adverse human health and environmental impacts of glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides, calls for a global “phase-out” of Monsanto’s Roundup.
Want to show solidarity for the International Monsanto Tribunal? Here’s how!
Find a Monsanto Tribunal/World Food Day event near you
Join the Monsanto Tribunal Thunderclap
Join the Monsanto Tribunal Twitter Rally
Sign on as a supporter of the Monsanto Tribunal (no donation required)
Make a donation to the Monsanto Tribunal
Watch up-to-the-minute videos of the People’s Assembly on the Monsanto Tribunal website www.monsanto-tribunal.org or on Facebook www.facebook.com/MonsantoTribunal
Livestream the People’s Assembly and Monsanto Tribunal
Like Monsanto Tribunal on Facebook
Follow Monsanto Tribunal on twitter
Hope and Switch?
On July 31, President Obama turned his back on the 90 percent of Americans who want companies to be required to clearly state on food packages, in plain English, whether or not their products contain GMO ingredients.
Instead, the President signed into law the misleading, confusing and loophole-ridden-DARK (Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act.
So much for “hope and change” and “Yes We Can!” (apparently, we can’t) from a President who, before he was elected, told us he supported mandatory labeling of GMOs.
We all know what happened. Monsanto’s minions in Congress passed a law that nullified Vermont’s mandatory GMO labeling law and essentially guarantees that here in the U.S., food companies will never be required to tell us if the products we buy contain ingredients grown with massive amounts of Monsanto’s cancer-causing Roundup.
Can we repeal the DARK Act, which is now officially referred to as the “National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard?” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) thinks so. And even though it's a long shot, we need to join forces with our allies to repeal this law.
Just the Beginning We’ve been planning it for nearly a year. Beginning Friday, the People’s Assembly and the International Monsanto Tribunal will take place in The Hague, Netherlands. Thousands of people will convene to participate in self-organizing workshops, to discuss films and ideas, and to hear testimony from 30 witnesses and experts traveling to The Hague from five continents. The Tribunal will be a show of international solidarity for a regenerative food and agriculture system—the antithesis of Monsanto’s toxic, degenerative model. It will be meaningful. It will be constructive. And it will be just the beginning. Because even before the official Tribunal wraps up on World Food Day, October 16, and even as we await the judges’ final opinions (which will be released in late November or early December), we will already be hard at work sowing seeds of hope for a regenerative future. To all of you who have supported this project, whether through donations, through spreading the word, through organizing or participating in World Food Day events, or by piling on joining in twitter rallies and thunderclaps, thank you. This is your initiative. Your day in court. Thank you. Donate to the Organic Consumers Association (tax-deductible, helps support our work on behalf of organic standards, fair trade and public education) Donate to the Organic Consumers Fund (non-tax-deductible, but necessary for our GMO labeling legislative efforts) Support OCA's Regeneration International Project (tax-deductible, helps support our work on behalf of organic, regenerative agriculture and climate change) |
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Down and Dirty “There’s a misconception that we’ve begun to address the climate problem. The misapprehension is based on the Paris climate summit where all the government leaders clapped each other on the back as if some great progress has been made, but you look at the science and it doesn’t compute. We are not doing what is needed.” – James Hansen, climate scientist, October 2016 Climate scientist James Hansen is finally getting down and dirty. In a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, submitted October 4 (2016) to the Earth Systems Dynamics Journal , Hansen and 11 other climate scientists argue that the Earth has warmed by about 1.3°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and that the atmospheric concentration of the most potent greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide — has accelerated in recent years. The last time the Earth was this hot, the scientists warn, was during the last inter-glacial period, known as the Eemian, when sea level was about 20 to 30 feet higher than it is today. Hansen and others have been sounding alarms about the climate for some time now. But this time, something was different. This time, Hansen proposed the solution that our Regeneration International project has been promoting since we launched the project in June 2015—soil. From an article on the ThinkProgress website: Speaking to reporters, Hansen suggested a better method for achieving negative carbon emissions could be through sequestering carbon dioxide in the Earth’s soil. Soil currently stores three times as much carbon as is contained in the atmosphere, and some studies suggest that through better management and restoration practices, the soil could sequester the majority of fossil fuel emissions generated by humans. Support OCA's Regeneration International Project (tax-deductible, helps support our work on behalf of organic, regenerative agriculture and climate change) |
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'Street Farm'
How do you grow food, jobs and hope on the “urban frontier?”
In his new book, “Street Farm,” Michael Ableman recounts stories about the residents in the notorious Low Track in Vancouver, British Columbia—one of the worst urban slums in North America—who joined together to create an urban farm to help them address the chronic problems in their neighborhood.
It’s a story of recovery, of land and food, of people, and of the power of farming and nourishing others as a way to heal our world and ourselves, according to the publishers at Chelsea Green.
In a Q&A about the book, Ableman says:
“I think that anyone who has had to deal with addiction knows that just getting out of bed each day can be challenging, let alone keeping a job, having relationships, etc. Many of our Sole Food staff have come through some heavy stuff—poverty, violence and abuse, mental illness. No one gets a pass on suffering, but my own life has been relatively privileged, and so I am truly inspired by these people who show up to work, grow good food, and demonstrate real caring for each other and for what we are doing.”