Through the haze of ongoing discouraging attacks on environmental and food safety regulations, a few potential rays of hope recently shone through.
Your voices may not yet be moving our corporate lobbyist-owned politicians to ban dangerous agricultural chemicals … but public pressure may be finally driving at least a few corporations to stop marketing poisonous chemicals that have contaminated our foods and environment.
Last week, the manufacturer of chlorpyrifos announced it would stop making the pesticide, widely used in food production despite causing neurological damage in children.
Corteva Agriscience, spun off from DowDupont last year, made the announcement on the same day that California made it illegal to sell chlorpyrifos.
Corteva called it a “business decision.”
But ever since federal lawmakers under the Obama administration passed a law to ban chlorpyrifos — only to have the Trump administration overturn the ban — you and millions of other conscious consumers have been steadily bombarding federal and state lawmakers with petitions to get this dangerous chemical out of our food.
Reports also surfaced last week that Bayer, beleaguered by tens of thousands of Roundup lawsuits, may stop retail sales of its lethal weedkiller as part of a settlement deal. The company, formerly Monsanto, also said it’s investing $5.6 billion to create an alternative to Roundup.
It’s unclear what a Roundup alternative might look like, or what Corteva might come up with to replace chlorpyrifos. Will they be better — or worse — than their predecessors?
Those questions, plus the need to eliminate all toxic poisons from the food system, are why we can’t let up the pressure anytime soon.
The consumer education and corporate campaigning you help us do, and the one-of-a-kind investigative work by U.S. Right to Know — an organization we help fund — is more critical than ever right now.
You may not always realize it. But you helped pressure these poison-makers to act.
The late activist and writer, Howard Zinn, once wisely said:
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
Zinn was right.
Every petition you sign, every phone call you place, when multiplied by millions of people, moves us closer to getting these life-threatening chemicals out of your food.
Source: OrganicConsumers.org
