5/5/06

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1. ACTION! Tell USDA to Close the Organic Loopholes!
2. The Meatrix II: Revolting
3. Conservation Could Get Squeeze in Next Farm Bill
4. John Kenneth Galbraith: 1908-2006

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ACTION: TELL USDA TO CLOSE THE ORGANIC LOOPHOLES

If you want to help keep integrity and honesty in our national organic standards - please take notice – then take action! The USDA National Organic Program has issued a major rule proposal with a very brief comment period. According to the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, the rules the USDA has proposed are suspect. They are asking people to tell the USDA to "Close the Loopholes! Get more information on how to submit comments, more background information, or sample talking points from the Sustainable Ag Coalition.

THE MEATRIX 2: REVOLTING

"You've done well Leo, in the past two years we've freed over 10 million minds from the Meatrix – people are waking up to where their food comes from….." 

If you didn't catch the first Meatrix or if you want to see creative use of the internet to help generate awareness to the evils of factory farming, go to the website below and see the latest sequel to the on-line animation that has become corporate agribusiness' on-line nightmare – the Meatrix 2: Revolting. 

Featuring Moopheus, Leo and the usual suspects, this animation directs a digital eye towards the dire effects of factory dairy farming. This humorous, enlightening and inspiring animation by Sustainable Table and Free Range Graphics also features a supportive website that includes a blog; a forum and specific actions citizens can take to translate their horror into social change. 

One of my favorites was the Meatrix Interactive. Check it out. Along side of the road is a sign to Washington D.C. If you go right you get deeper into the toxic quagmire of concentrated farming. If you go left your screen abounds in a verdant utopia.

With perhaps intended poetic justice, if you go too far left, you circle round to the right and vice verse. Quite a hoot. Watch, enjoy and pass along.

CONSERVATION COULD GET THE SQUEEZE IN NEXT FARM BILL

House Agriculture Conservation Subcommittee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) and ranking member Tim Holden (D-Pa) said this week that the conservation programs in the next farm bill are more likely to be pared down than expanded. At hearing in Harrisburg PA focused specifically on the farm bill's conservation programs, the two indicated that the tight federal budget situation will be an important dynamic in 2007. "There won't be that kind of increase"

that conservation programs saw in the 2002 farm bill, Lucas told reporters after the hearing. "If we can hold what we have, we'll be doing good." Meanwhile, a rift may be brewing between the House and Senate over the timing of the next farm bill. Yesterday, a bipartisan group of Senators from Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Minnesota and North Dakota introduced legislation in the U.S.

Senate to extend the 2002 farm bill until the Doha round of World Trade Organization talks. Lucas, however, has said that he opposes any such extension. Learn more.

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: 1908-2006

Pioneering liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith died on April 29 at the age of 97. 

Dr, Galbraith was a Harvard professor, the author of nearly 50 books, and an advisor to four presidents. In one of his most famous books, "The Affluent Society," (1958) "he depicted a consumer culture gone wild, rich in goods but poor in the social services that make for community," and warned that artificially created demand for consumer products would weaken the ability of the public sector to provide necessary services. In that same book, he also asked, "Is the added production or the added efficiency in production worth its effect on ambient air, water and space — the countryside?" 

First and foremost, however, Galbraith was an agricultural economist, and one of his main areas of investigation was "how America changed from a nation of small farms and workshops to one of big factories and superstores." He was sharply critical of USDA policies which, starting in the 1950s, promoted a "get big or get out" philosophy, policies he considered to be "sonorous boondoggling." 

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Scotty Johnson and Aimee Delach
National Rural Community Outreach Campaign
sjohnson@defenders.org