Please see and sign petition:
"Stop Vilsack's Confirmation as Secretary of Agriculture"
at
http://www.care2.com/news/member/363754298/989157
He supports genetically modified food.
He supports biopharmaceutical crops.
"Just one mistake by a biotech company and we'll be eating other people's prescription drugs in our corn flakes."
Vilsack is an ardent support of corn and soy based biofuels, which use as much or more fossil energy to produce them as they generate, while driving up world food prices and literally starving the poor.
He is known as a friend to Monsanto.
His record is one of aiding and abetting factory farming.
Ronnie Cummins, executive director of Organic Consumers Association:
"Vilsack has been an ardent promoter, not only of genetically engineered foods and crops, but also of the extremely controversial biopharmaceutical crops, which involves [inaudible] pharmaceutical drugs or industrial chemicals into food crops. Even, you know, quite a few people in the biotech industry are alarmed by these biopharmaceuticals, since you could get dangerous drugs throughout the food supply. But Vilsack supported biopharm crops when he was governor."
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OH BRAVE NEW WORLD OF BIOTECH CROPS
Biopharmaceuticals: growing antibodies and vaccines in genetically altered crops like corn.
These crops are gown outside in a field, not in a laboratory.
So what happens when the wind carries a seed into a neighboring crop, which then winds up in the food supply?
Biotech crops approved only as animal feed have found their way into human food. And plants engineered to make medicines in their tissues have escaped from their test plots.
They could enter the food supply causing toxic or allergic reactions in human beings.
As Larry Bohlen, director of health and environment programs at Friends of the Earth, says, "Just one mistake by a biotech company and we'll be eating other people's prescription drugs in our corn flakes."
The US rice supply has already been contaminated with experimental, unapproved DNA, making other countries wary of importing it, and showing how vulnerable the $1 million agricultural economy is to genetic pollution.
Increasingly, farmers are concluding that early assurances that engineered varieties could be kept segregated from conventional crops were overstated.
And he has a growing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto.
ellenR