Support sustainable agriculture

I'm worried. I had--and still have--great hope with Obama being elected to president. His grassroots campaign was effective and his dislike of lobbyists admirable. But he has Michael Taylor on his transition team for the USDA, and Taylor spent many a year working for Monsanto, king of all seeds GMO.

Tell Obama you want sustainable agriculture: http://www.fooddemocracynow.org.

In November, a longitudinal study on the effects of GMOs was released and its news wasn't shocking--it was horrifying. According to Grist:

"On Nov. 11, Austria's Ministries for Agriculture and Health released the results of a long-term study of genetically modified organisms [GMOs]. A widely used strain of GM corn, they found, appears to decrease both birthrates and the size of offspring in mice -- and the problems seem to grow with each generation.

This is a troubling conclusion. U.S. farmers planted the first commercial GMO crops in 1996. Today, upwards of 90 percent of U.S. soy, and 60 percent of U.S. corn, come from GMO seeds. Those crops suffuse our food supply -- they provide the bulk of our cooking oil and sweetener, and feed the animals that feed us. By 2003, as much as 75 percent of processed food available in the United States contained GMO ingredients, according to an estimate cited by the USDA. GM corn and soy acreage have only expanded since then.

Of course, the reproductive function is complex and intimately linked to the body's other systems. If GMOs are affecting our ability to reproduce, then it seems likely they're affecting our health in other ways, too.

Yet the Austrian study dropped with a thud in the U.S. media. The New York Times didn't mention it; on The Washington Post website, it rated a few paragraphs in the midst of a daily health round up."

Tell Obama to support sustainable agriculture, not GMOs.

My thanks to Green Bean for pointing out this petition.