Monsanto Took Over NOFA-VT Convention
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Ripton, Vermont – February 14, 2010 – Vermont State Senate independent candidate Robert Wagner has exposed the deep links between the offices of Bernie Sanders, Monsanto and the USDA. A Monsanto insider, lobbyist & litigator, Tom Vilsack is the US Secretary of Agriculture and gave the keynote speech at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) convention yesterday.
“Sanders’ office directed NOFA to dedicate their Keynote Address to Monsanto’s man-in-Washington”, Wagner said, referring to his conversation with NOFA’s executive director Enid Wonnacott. “There was no choice in the matter.”
Wagner described how no member of the public or the press were permitted to ask any questions of a panel of Vilsack, Senators Sanders and Leahy, and Rep. Peter Welch. The event was precisely choreographed and controlled by Sanders’ office, whose suit & tie flunkys were clearly giving the orders, not NOFA. The allowed questions had to be submitted in advance, and any mention of Monsanto or the recent sharp increase in federal regulation, were censored. “My question, as a candidate for public office, was also censored. I was pushed around by a Sanders staffer. The NOFA board must take full responsibility.”
Even the two allowed questions were evaded rather than answered. Speeches by the panelists were a mixture of threats toward farmers for additional regulation, offers of grant money, reference to additional plainclothes inspectors coming onto our farms, jokes, and finally a pull-your-heartstrings anecdote by Secretary Vilsack. Wagner called this, “psychological conditioning. This was a slap in the face to our effort of the last 30 years to build a sustainable food system from the bottom up. The senators declared that the food system is now top-down… and by the end the audience were applauding their own emasculation.”
Before his elevation to Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack represented agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto in support of genetically engineered pharmaceutical crops, especially pharmaceutical corn. Vilsack was the origin of the Seed Pre-Emption bill in 2005, which many people in Iowa fought. The bill took away local government’s possibility of ever having a regulation on seeds such as where GE would be grown, having GE-free buffers. Tom Vilsack was also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.
Wagner asserts that ‘Monsanto are taking control over Vermont’s organic and sustainable farms through the act of co-opting NOFA. This step logically comes after the falsely named “Food Safety” bills were introduced by Rosa DeLauro whose husband, Stanley Greenburg got rich working for Monsanto.’
Time magazine described current farm policy as “a welfare program for the megafarms that use the most fuel, water and pesticides; emit the most greenhouse gases; grow the most fattening crops; hire the most illegals; and depopulate rural America.”
According to the Organic Consumers Association (OCA):
* NOFA’s keynote speaker Vilsack has been a strong supporter of genetically engineered crops, including bio-pharmaceutical corn.
* The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.
* When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.
* The undemocratic and highly unpopular 2005 seed pre-emption bill was Vilsack’s brainchild. The law strips local government’s right to regulated genetically engineered seed (including where GE can be grown, maintaining GE-free buffers or banning pharma corn locally)
* Vilsack is an ardent supporter of corn and soy-based biofuels, which use as much or more fossil fuel energy to produce them as they generate, while driving up world food prices and literally starving the poor.
* Overall, Vilsack’s record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms and promoting animal cloning.
Robert Wagner is running for the Vermont Senate, representing Addison County, as part of THE THIRTY Independents.
Contact:
Robert Wagner
robert@senatorwagner.com
Box 174
Ripton,
Vermont
Ph: +1 802 388 0670
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