Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 16:41:33 -0600
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: BioDemocracy

BioDemocracy News #31 (Jan. 2001) America's Food Safety Crisis
News & Analysis on Genetic Engineering, Factory Farming, & Organics
by: Ronnie Cummins
BioDemocracy News is a publication of the Organic Consumers Association
<www.purefood.org> <www.organicconsumers.org>
________________________________________________________________
Frankenfoods, Antibiotics, & Mad Cow: America's Food Safety Crisis
Intensifies

Quotes of the Month:

"She is an independent thinker of sound judgment and vast experience. She
knows the science, the politics, and she knows how to make a sound decision
on complicated and difficult issues. We are delighted with her selection, it
is hard to imagine a better choice."

Biotechnology Industry Organization <www.bio.org> commenting on the
nomination of former agbiotech executive Ann Veneman as George Bush's
Secretary of Agriculture

"The StarLink controversy in the United States could cost the food industry
billions of dollars and has thrown the future of genetically modified foods
into doubt... Already, 70 per cent of Americans told a Reuters poll last
year that (genetically modified) GM foods should be treated with caution."
Stuart Laidlaw, "StarLink Fallout Could Cost Billions," The Toronto Star,
Jan. 9, 2001

"agribusiness... fight any effort to tell consumers more about how their
food is made... stories about our food system that do get out don't do much
for the appetite. There's the one about how genetically engineered StarLink
corn deemed unfit for human consumption somehow found its way into tacos and
breakfast cereal. Then there's the mad-cow story, which brought us the
disquieting news that beef cattle in this country routinely dine not only on
hormones and antibiotics but also on bits of other beef cattle (not to
mention pellets made from their own manure)." Michael Pollan, "Produce
Politics," The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 14, 2001
_________________________________________________________________
"Bad Hair" Year for Biotech & Factory Farming

Corporate agribusiness and the biotech industry had a "bad hair" year in
2000. After promising Wall Street that genetic engineering and
American-style factory farming were about to conquer the world and that free
trade, monopoly patents on living organisms, and the enforcement powers of
the World Trade Organization were going to whip consumers and the world's
2.4 billion farmers and rural villagers into line, Year One of the Biotech
Century turned out to be something of a disaster. Behind the bravado of
public relations and the reassurances of government bureaucrats, the food
industry and the Gene Giants are in serious disarray. For the first time in
five years the amount of global acreage devoted to biotech crops has leveled
off and appears headed in 2001 for significant decreases. Longstanding
industrial agriculture practices such as feeding antibiotics and rendered
animal protein to animals are being banned in Europe and are generating
controversy even in the US. The second!
 wave of the Mad Cow crisis is sweeping across Europe, prompting a massive
decline in beef sales--with recent revelations suggesting that North America
may be heading for a similar crisis of its own. As Andrew Kimbrell of the
Center for Food Safety states, a "funny thing has happened" on the way to
the hi-tech future of industrial agriculture:

"Despite untold billions spent in research and advertising, the public en
masse has begun to reject this vision of industrial food and all that
accompanies it. We have begun to understand that these chemical and
biological techno-fixes come with hidden and terrible costs to human health
and to the environment. We have seen cancer epidemics, widespread pollution
of water and air, exponential loss of topsoil and biodiversity, terrible
cruelty to animals and, most directly, tasteless and unhealthy food. Tens of
millions of Americans have decided to vote, day after day, with their food
dollars. More of us are eating organic than ever before, and organic food
production is the fastest-growing segment in US agriculture today." (The
Kimbrell quote is from our new book, Genetically Engineered Food: A
Self-Defense Guide for Consumers by Ronnie Cummins & Ben Lilliston).

Biotech Bytes: FDA Says No Labeling, No Safety-Testing Required

On Jan. 17, the Food and Drug Administration issued its long-awaited
proposed federal regulations on genetically engineered foods and crops. As
anticipated the FDA refused to call for mandatory labeling or mandatory
safety-testing--despite numerous polls showing 80-95% of Americans want
labeling and safety-testing, or, better yet, no genetically engineered foods
at all. There will now be a 75-day period for the public to comment on the
FDA rules, and to demand a moratorium. Stay tuned to
<www.organicconsumers.org> or <www.gefoodalert.org> for guidelines on how to
send a letter or fax to the feds on this issue. In a Washington, DC press
conference on Jan. 17 the Organic Consumers Association's national
coalition, the Genetically Engineered Food Alert, strongly condemned the FDA
for utterly failing to regulate agricultural biotechnology. Unless rigorous,
independent, premarket safety testing can demonstrate that GE foods and
crops are safe, these products must not be allowed on !
the market.

The FDA's proposed regulations simply throw more fuel on the fire of the
Frankenfoods debate. But of course the additional controversy that this now
official FDA "no labeling, no safety-testing" policy will generate is just
part of the growing global food fight. Over the past few months, things have
gone from bad to worse for the agbiotech lobby. Among recent developments
are the following:

* An internal industry study, conducted for Kellogg, ConAgra, Unilever, and
Aventis, publicized in the Toronto Star Jan. 9, flatly predicted up to
"billions" of dollars in food industry losses in the aftermath of the recent
StarLink corn scandal (see BioDemocracy News #30). Dr. Ann Clark, a plant
researcher at the University of Guelph (Canada), said StarLink, an illegal
and likely allergenic variety of GE corn found in taco shells and over 300
brand-name products this fall, could prove to be "the beginning of the end"
for genetically engineered crops if food companies decide the costs outweigh
the benefits. "The food companies are not going to bite the bullet on this
one for the industry," Clark said.

* In related news, two potentially massive class-action lawsuits were filed
in December in Illinois and Iowa by farmers against Aventis, the
manufacturer of StarLink seeds. According to the plaintiffs in Iowa, they
suffered severe financial losses after "Japan cut its US corn purchases by
more than 50% and South Korea, the second largest U.S. corn export market,
banned the importation of U.S. corn altogether.'' In late-December, Reuters
reported that Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon demanded that Aventis post
a  $25 million bond "to ensure the company had sufficient funds to
compensate farmers and grain handlers hit financially by StarLink." Of the
340,908 acres planted with StarLink corn in the US last year, 134,910 acres
were in Iowa and 18,702 acres in Missouri. StarLink was also planted on a
significant scale in Nebraska, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Kansas. Last
October a group of consumers filed a lawsuit in Chicago, alleging they were
poisoned by StarLink-tainted Kra!
ft Taco Bell shells, while recently 44 people filed complaints with the FDA
claiming StarLink products caused them to suffer rashes, diarrhea, vomiting,
itching and life-threatening anaphylactic shock.

* In the wake of the StarLink disaster, Monsanto announced Nov. 27 it would
restrict plantings next year of a new herbicide resistant variety of corn
and delay commercialization of another Bt-spliced corn variety until 2002.
On Dec. 17, ConAgra, America's second largest food processor, announced a
recall of 1.5 million pounds of baking ingredients used by restaurants and
institutional food buyers. The same week in a letter mailed to farmers,
giant corn processor A.E. Staley stated, "The only truly safe seed selection
[next year] will be seed corn free of any genetic modification."

* The Wall Street Journal reported on Nov. 20 that Archer-Daniels-Midland
Co. "is beginning to air ads on 24 Iowa and Illinois radio stations warning
farmers that ADM mills will buy only crops 'that have full feed and food
approval world-wide.' "  "We don't want another StarLink," said Larry
Cunningham, an ADM spokesman. In a further blow to the industry, Aventis
announced in late-November that it found some of the same Cry9C protein--the
key component of StarLink corn--in another variety of 1998 corn seed
produced by Garst Seed Co. of Iowa. USDA officials admitted that they
"didn't understand" how this 1998 contamination could have occurred.

*  US activists delivered a blunt warning to the Environmental Protection
Agency on Nov. 16 in San Francisco. Campaigners from Greenpeace, joined by
the Organic Consumers Association, Center for Food Safety, Ruckus Society,
the Ecology Center, and Pesticide Action Network, wearing biohazard suits,
dumped two tons of StarLink contaminated corn in front of the EPA
headquarters, demanding that the agency deny approval of the gene-altered
corn for human consumption and take action regarding the environmental
damage already being inflicted by genetically engineered crops.  "EPA's own
scientific advisors say they don't know if this corn is safe for people,"
said Simon Harris of the Organic Consumers Association. "The health of
Americans should not be put at risk simply for the convenience of the
biotech industry." On November 28, the EPA heard from a Scientific Advisory
Panel that StarLink may be already setting off food allergies. For the full
testimony of Dr. Michael Hansen from t!
he Consumers Union on StarLink and Bt corn allergenicity see
<www.purefood.org/ge/hansenstarlink.cfm>

* On Nov. 14, responding to pressure from Greenpeace and others, McDonald's
announced that by April 2001 all its restaurants in Germany, Denmark and
Sweden will serve only chicken raised on GE-free feed. Five days later
McDonald's UK made a similar announcement. According to the European press,
other large food chains are likely to follow suit. The move by McDonald's is
especially significant since almost all US genetically engineered soybeans
exported to Europe are now funneled into animal feeds. McDonald's is the
largest buyer of agricultural commodities in Europe.

* The safety of genetically engineered foods once again came into question
Dec. 15 when the prestigious journal, Science, published an article by two
fellows from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The
article, by Dr. LaReesa Wolfenbarger and Dr. Paul Phifer, emphasized that
there has been almost no peer-reviewed scientific research published which
shows that GE crops are safe for the environment. In their study,
Wolfenbarger and Phifer state that researching environmental risks is likely
to be complicated, with risks varying over time among crops, among strains
of a single crop, and between environments. Some risks, they say, may be all
but impossible to assess. In a related story, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, the UK's
most well-know critic of biotech, after surveying the world scientific
literature on animal feeding studies, found a grand total of only four
peer-reviewed articles on genetically engineered foods, despite Monsanto and
industry claims that scores of!
 scientific papers have proven their safety. Pusztai's own safety studies in
the late 1990s, conducted at the Rowett Institute in Scotland, caused a
major stir in Europe, when lab rats fed genetically engineered potatoes
spliced with lectin suffered serious damage to their vital organs.

* In other science news, an Expert Panel of the International Cotton
Advisory Committee reported in November that in the Yauggu and Xiuxiang
provinces of China, cotton boll worms, a major pest, are developing
resistance to genetically engineered cotton plants spliced with Bt. Critics
of Bt crops have warned for years that "superpests" will inevitably develop,
threatening the livelihood of organic or low-chemical input farmers who use
non-genetically engineered Bt sprays as an emergency pest control tool on
cotton, corn, and other crops. Meanwhile Bt-resistant pests have been
reported in Australia and perhaps at a "threateningly high level" according
to scientific experts. For more information see
<www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex>

* Barbara Keeler and Marc Lappe reported in a potentially explosive story in
the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 7 that the FDA apparently ignored troubling
data which Monsanto published in the Journal of Nutrition in March
1996--data which strongly suggests that Roundup Ready soybeans, the world's
most widely cultivated genetically engineered crop, may set off food
allergies in humans. According to the authors, data in Monsanto's study
"shows that, relative to conventional soy meal, raw Roundup Ready soy meal
contained 27% more trypsin inhibitor, a potential allergen that interferes
with protein digestion and has been associated with enlarged cells in rat
pancreases." According to Keeler and Lappe "This important measurement was
camouflaged in a table on unrelated information." After toasting the GE soy
meal several times, the levels of another allergen, called lectin, were
nearly double those in conventional soybeans. Scientists have warned for
years that conventional soybeans con!
tain low levels of 14 proteins that can potentially set off food allergies
in humans and that genetically engineering soybeans could possibly cause the
level of one or more of these 14 proteins to significantly increase.
However, hiding behind the doctrine of "substantial equivalence," the FDA
did not require Monsanto to submit comprehensive data on herbicide resistant
Roundup Ready soybeans before they were brought on the market. In effect
this means that RR soybeans may already be setting off food allergies among
large numbers of people, given that 54% of America's soybean crop is
genetically engineered, while 60% of all processed foods contain soy or soy
derivatives. In 1999 the York Nutritional Lab in the UK, commenting on a
mysterious 50% rise in soy allergies among British consumers, attributed the
increase in food allergies to the fact that consumers the previous year had
begun ingesting large amount of imported GE soybeans. For the LA Times
article see <www.purefood.or!
g/gefood/fdaignoredata.cfm>

* On Nov. 11, speaking to a massive crowd at the Vatican, Pope John Paul II
urged extreme caution concerning genetically engineered food, stating that
the use of biotechnology in agriculture, "cannot be evaluated only on the
basis of immediate economic interests. It is necessary to subject it in
advance to rigorous scientific and ethical checking to prevent it ending up
in disaster for... the future of the earth." On Nov. 14, the Commission on
Social Action of Reform Judaism passed a resolution on labeling of
genetically engineered food. The Commission called on the government to
"monitor the health, ecological and religious liberty implications of
genetic engineering." Among Protestant denominations the United Methodist
Church recently called for mandatory labeling of all GE foods, with
pre-market safety testing required. According to Jaydee Hansen of the UMC,
"We call for policies that encourage the gradual transition to sustainable
and organic agriculture."

Antibiotic Bytes: Factory Farm Practices Threaten Public Health

Factory Farm proponents suffered a major blow on Jan. 8 as the Union of
Concerned Scientists (UCS) released an important study in Washington, DC by
Charles Benbrook and Margaret Mellon showing that 70% of all antibiotic
drugs in the US are being fed to farm animals as growth promoters or
production aids.  The study, which generated significant headlines and TV
coverage across the nation, points out that 25 million pounds of valuable
antibiotics--roughly 70 percent of total US antibiotic production--are fed
to chickens, pigs, and cows every year for nontherapeutic purposes like
growth promotion. The drug- dependent US meat industry has tried to downplay
its massive use of antibiotics--a practice which is now starting to be
banned in Europe--claiming that it was using "only" 18 million pounds a year
of antibiotics in animal feed each year. Recent research has shown that the
overuse of medical prescriptions and the routine agribusiness practice of
adding antibiotics to animal fee!
d are giving rise to virulent antibiotic-resistant strains of disease in
millions of Americans every year, such as salmonella, campylobacter,
pneumonia, meningitis, and ear and blood infections. According to statistics
released by the Centers for Disease Control several years ago approximately
6% of all hospital
infections are now showing signs of antibiotic resistance. The figure today
is probably closer to 10%.

"The meat industry's share of the antibiotic-resistance problem has been
ignored for too long," said Dr. Margaret Mellon, of UCS . "Antibiotics are a
precious resource and should be used in animals only when necessary."

"The excessive use of antibiotics by the livestock industry is sobering,"
said Dr. Charles Benbrook, an independent economist and co-author of the
report. "Feeding antibiotics to animals from birth to slaughter may modestly
improve meat industry profits, but it puts everyone's health at risk. It is
time to rethink how pigs, cattle and poultry are raised in the United
States."

The Factory Farm lobby counterattacked with a series of op-ed pieces and
editorials of its own, claiming that the UCS were exaggerating the problem
and that European-type measures to ban the feeding of antibiotics to animals
would cause unnecessary economic hardships to modern agribusiness. Meanwhile
sales of organic meat, eggs, and dairy products, which ban the use of
antibiotics, are booming, not only across the US, but in the entire
industrialized world. A full copy of the UCS report can be found at
<www.ucsusa.org>

Mad Cow: Will the Nightmare Spread to the US?

Mad Cow panic has once again swept across the European continent, provoking
drastic declines in beef sales, economic insecurity among farmers,
trepidation in the meat, drug, cosmetic, and plasma industry, and
near-hysteria among consumers. Recent revelations of cattle testing positive
for Mad Cow disease (also known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE)
in Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Ireland,
Portugal, and Italy, and the expose in the press that thousands of tons of
BSE-infected cattle feed were exported from Britain to other nations over
the past decade, have set off the largest food scare in history.

In Germany where 13 cases of Mad Cow have been confirmed since January in
the nation's 15 million cattle, government officials have announced plans to
slaughter 400,000 at-risk cattle, while 300,000 bovines are slated to be
killed in Ireland. In France consumers have reacted angrily to reports that
the meat from infected cattle has been sold in supermarkets and restaurants,
and that tons of suspect animal feed have been imported from the UK.
Effective Jan. 1, Japan announced a ban on all beef imports from the EU,
with other major meat importers expected to follow suit. Last year Japan
imported 642 tons of beef from European Union nations. A cow from the
company that supplies McDonald's in Italy tested positive for BSE on Jan.16,
prompting massive declines in hamburger sales.

Although only 92 Europeans have thus far officially died since 1996 from new
variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human equivalent of Mad Cow,
British scientists admitted last year that, due to the long latency period
of the disease (up to 30-40 years in humans), and due to the fact that the
majority of meat eaters have probably been exposed to Mad Cow, several
hundred thousand Britons (and an indeterminate number of Europeans from
other countries) and perhaps many more may die from the incurable
brain-wasting disease over the next few decades. Trying to keep the
situation under control, German officials have proposed mandatory testing
for all cattle over 24 months old for BSE, while EU authorities have placed
a complete ban on the feeding of animal parts (in industry terminology,
rendered animal protein) back to animals, a controversial practice still
routine in American agriculture. EU officials are pleading for calm, telling
consumers that the discovery of new cases!
 of BSE outside Britain are simply the result of the fact that authorities
are testing more cattle than ever before.

Commentators have noted for years that the Mad Cow crisis in Europe has been
a significant contributing factor fueling opposition to genetically
engineered foods. Seeing how industry and government scientists have
systematically lied to them about the dangers of feeding animals to animals
has made many consumers lose faith in industrial agriculture altogether.
Noting that the same government officials who have repeatedly tried to
reassure them that the BSE crisis in under control are now saying that
genetically engineered foods are safe has brought on a profound skepticism
and anger at the grassroots level. Now a similar crisis of confidence may
start to develop in the United States as well.

Bogus FDA Feed Ban

Sandra Blakeslee of the New York Times reported on Jan. 11 that the US Food
and Drug Administration's supposed 1997 ban on feeding rendered animal
protein to cows and other ruminant animals is full of loopholes, and
moreover that the so-called ban is not being enforced among the thousands of
companies involved in the $3.2 billion dollar rendering industry and the $20
billion dollar animal feed industry. As Blakeslee wrote: "Among 180 large
companies that render cattle and another ruminant, sheep, nearly a quarter
were not properly labeling their products and did not have a system to
prevent commingling, the FDA said. And among 347 FDA-licensed feed mills
that handle ruminant materials--these tend to be large operators that mix
drugs into their products--20 percent were not using labels with the
required caution statement, and 25 percent did not have a system to prevent
commingling.  Then there are some 6,000 to 8,000 feed mills so small they do
not require FDA licenses. They a!
re nonetheless subject to the regulations, and of 1,593 small feed producers
that handle ruminant material and have been inspected, 40 percent were not
using approved labels and 25 percent had no system in place to prevent
commingling."

In other words millions of US cows, sheep, game farm deer and elk, and pigs
(pigs and cow's blood were inexplicably exempted in the so-called FDA feed
ban of 1997), not to mention household pets, are still being fed billions of
pounds of animal feed or pet food containing meat and offal from ruminant
animals--despite the obvious danger to human and animal health and despite
the fact that the FDA and the USDA for the past three years have been
reassuring the public that this was no longer happening.

But the story gets scarier. In the Times on the front page of the Sunday
Jan. 14 edition, (tucked under a misleading headline "Stringent Steps Taken
by US on Cow Illness") Blakeslee drops the bombshell. Not only has the US
Mad Cow feed ban been a joke, but apparently US feed companies, pet food
companies, pharmaceutical firms, and nutritional supplement manufacturers
have been carrying on with business as usual by importing large quantities
of possibly contaminated bovine parts and rendered animal protein--no doubt
at bargain basement prices--in 1989 and 1997. It appears that the same thing
that has European consumers' blood boiling, that their government and
industry stupidly or greedily imported tons of likely contaminated rendered
animal protein from Britain since 1989 has also been happening in the United
States, and likely other nations as well. After British authorities made it
illegal to feed rendered animal protein to ruminant animals in their own
country, the UK feed !
industry simply sold it overseas.

As Blakeslee states, quoting from export records, "British export statistics
show that 20 tons of 'meals of meat or offal' that were 'unfit for human
consumption' and probably intended for animals were sent to the United
States in 1989. And 37 tons were exported to the US in 1997, well after the
government banned imports of such risky meat." Blakeslee goes on to point
out what BioDemocracy News and other critics of industrial agriculture have
been saying for years, that even if the US hadn't been importing 57 thousand
tons or more of suspect British offal in the 1990s, there is mounting
evidence that US rendered animal protein and bovine, sheep, deer, and elk
parts are themselves likely carriers of BSE and other Mad Cow-like diseases.
As Blakeslee relates, scientists have generally agreed that BSE or BSE-like
diseases "spontaneously" appear in "one out of every million humans, cows,
sheep and many other mammals. "Since 36 million cattle are slaughtered
annually in the United S!
tates, about 36 cows spontaneously infected with mad cow disease could be
entering the nation's food chain each year." Thirty-six domestic US Mad Cows
a year being ground up and fed back to other animals may not sound that
alarming until you consider the fact that an average cow, pig, chicken, game
farm deer, elk, fish farm fish, or household cat and dog--because of the
commingling of many different animals' body parts at the rendering plant and
the feed mill--will be consuming the body parts of literally thousands of
different animals in their feed over their lifetime.

Mad Sheep, Deer, & Elk

And in fact the story gets worse. Scrapie or Mad Sheep Disease has been
endemic in US sheep herds since 1947, and the government has done little or
nothing to eradicate it. Significant numbers of scrapie-infected sheep have
undoubtedly been ground up every year and fed back to other animals. In
addition the US currently has a raging epidemic of Mad Deer Disease and Mad
Elk Disease (technically called Chronic Wasting Disease) in parts of
Colorado and Wyoming. There are already several documented cases of young
deer hunters in their 20s and 30s dying from CJD, the human equivalent of
Mad Cow. Mad Elk Disease has recently spread into Saskatchewan, unnerving
elk ranchers and the nutritional supplements industry, who sell three
billion dollars worth of supplements each year (mainly to Asia) made from
elk antlers. Consider the fact that at the height of the first Mad Cow
crisis in Britain 1-2% of all cows were being diagnosed with BSE, while the
Times reports that up to 18% of mule-!
tail deer in the Fort Collins area of Colorado are now carriers of Chronic
Wasting Disease. Hunters that kill deer in Colorado are required to turn in
the heads of these animals so that they can be tested for CWD or Mad Deer
Disease. Officials tell hunters not to eat the meat of infected animals,
(lab tests can take as long as six weeks) but have stubbornly refused to ban
hunting or eating venison, despite calls from consumer groups such as the
Center for Food Safety and the Organic Consumers Association to do so.
Meanwhile several million people are eating venison and venison sausage
every year in the US, while several million more in the US and overseas are
taking "glandular supplements" or body-building hormones which contain
concentrated brain and pituitary material from US, British, and European
cows. For the full Jan. 14 Blakeslee article see
<www.purefood.org/meat/madcowexplosive.cfm>

Another FDA Ban?

The FDA warned US drug companies, cosmetic companies, and nutritional
supplements firms Dec. 6 to stop using European bovine parts in most of
their products as of Jan. 1. It may already be too late. As Blakeslee points
out, even this ban--assuming it actually gets enforced--still has loopholes.
As she writes, nutritional supplements "must have labels listing ingredients
like bovine pituitaries and adrenals, but manufacturers are not required to
list the country of origin. Other beef byproducts that are still allowed in
the country include milk, blood, fat, gelatin, tallow, bone mineral
extracts, collagen, semen, amniotic fluid, serum albumin and other parts of
European cattle that are widely used in vaccines and medicines."

For more information on Mad Cow and Mad Cow-like diseases see our website
<www.organicconsumers.org> as well as the following sites <www.prwatch.org>
and <www.mad-cow.org>

The best book on the threat of Mad Cow in the US is the book by John Stauber
and Sheldon Rampton called Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? You
can order hardback copies of the book from the Organic Consumers Association
for only $10 (this includes shipping). Or you can access the entire book for
free on the internet by going to the excellent website of the Center for
Media and Democracy <www.prwatch.org>

America and the world's 50-year experiment with chemical-intensive
industrial agriculture and genetic engineering may soon be moving into its
final, terminal stage. Mad Cow Disease and the growing global opposition to
factory farming and genetic engineering may turn out to the harbingers of a
new era of sustainable living and organic agriculture. One can only hope
that we make the necessary transition to organic farming and ban the most
dangerous practices of genetic engineering and industrial food production
before it is too late. In the meantime, stay tuned to BioDemocracy News and
the Organic Consumers Association website <www.organicconsumers.org> for the
latest news and analysis.

By the way you can still get to the OCA website by going to
<www.purefood.org>  We're now using <www.organicconsumers.org> as our
primary internet address simply because our adversaries have set up a
counterfeit internet site, filled with lies and industry propaganda, at
<www.purefoods.org>  Take a look at this site if you want to see what we're
up against. Keep in mind, however, that the "Bad Guys" wouldn't be doing
this except for the fact that we're winning the battle.

### End of BioDemocracy News #31 ###

Organic Consumers Association
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