You’ve probably read about Roy Blunt’s giveaway to Monsanto – he slipped a last minute rider into totally unrelated legislation, the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act 2013, which “compels the USDA to ignore federal court decisions that block the agency’s approvals of new GM crops. The amendment was a rich gift to Monsanto which has been trying to get something like this passed for a long time:

Speedy deregulation of the new-generation herbicide-tolerant crops is important for a simple reason: Monsanto’s blockbuster Roundup Ready technology-featuring corn, soy, cotton, sugar beet, and alfalfa (hay) seeds engineered to resist Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide-is failing. Roundup-resistant superweeds are galloping out of control throughout big-farm country. The industry’s only solution to the problem is to roll out seeds resistant to multiple herbicides at once, adding old, toxic ones like 2,4-D and dicamba to the Roundup mix. […]  the strategy will work brilliantly to sell more herbicides and burnish the bottom lines of the Big 6, but it will only put off a reckoning with the problem of resistant weeds while simultaneously harming the environment.

In an effort to undo Blunt’s chicanery, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkeley tried to amend the Farm Bill last Thursday to repeal Blunt’s “Monsanto Protection Act,” as it is popularly known. The amendment was blocked by GOP Senators led by – guess who? – Roy Blunt, who has been dubbed by Mother Jones “Monsanto’s man in Washington.” Nevertheless, in defending the amendment, Blunt, the consummate Washington insider, adopted his best aw shucks demeanor and pretended to be the farmer’s best friend:

Earlier on Thursday, in an interview with The Huffington Post, Blunt said that the point of the provision was to protect farmers who had already purchased seeds that were later deemed unsafe. “I was raised — my mom and dad were dairy farmers. Once you’ve made a decision to plant a crop for that year, you can’t go back and undo that decision,” he said.

Requiring Monsanto or other seed companies to compensate those farmers for lost income wasn’t a viable strategy either, the senator said, if the seeds had previously been permissible. “You can’t sue them for selling a crop that the federal government said is OK to plant,” he said.

Sounds good,right? But then why try to sneak the legislation through congress with no review or debate? Perhaps because, as Blunt admits, he wrote the amendment at the behest of and jointly with Monsanto, whose concern for farmers’ welfare is not exactly overwhelming when it’s a matter of the corporate bottomline:

Monsanto’s alleged “concern” for farmers has its limits. GMO seeds often end up in the fields of unsuspecting farmers who planted crops using traditional seeds. Inevitably, Monsanto’s “seed police” turn up at their doors armed with lawsuits claiming seed patent violations. The farmers are prohibited from recycling their own seeds and forced to pay hefty fines to Monsanto for having GMO crops they never planted in their fields.

Farmers buying Monsanto patented seeds must agree not to save the seeds for replanting or to sell seeds to other farmers. Each year farmers are forced to buy new seeds and more Roundup weed killer from Monsanto. Traditional seeds are disappearing. In the 1990s, pesticide manufacturers purchased seed companies, anticipating potential profits from monopolizing both aspects of farm production,

Blunt also claims that the rider he is fighting so valiantly to defend does nothing. That’s right – he claims that the USDA already has the authority to do what this bill specifies that it must do. Of course, there is, as Senator Merkley has noted, a difference between being able to so something on an as needed basis and being compelled to do it in all instances, regardless of the merits – but that’s perhaps just a little too subtle for our down home boy, Roy.

What Roy does understand all too well, though, is the old payola:

… According to OpenSecrets, Monsanto first started contributing to Blunt back in 2008, when it handed him $10,000. At that point, Blunt was serving in the House of Representatives. In 2010, when Blunt successfully ran for the Senate, Monsanto upped its contribution to $44,250. And in 2012, the GMO seed/pesticide giant enriched Blunt’s campaign war chest by $64,250.

Blunt is also a magnet for PAC money from the agribusiness industry as a whole, OpenSecrets data shows. In 2012, agribiz PACs gave him $51,000-more than any other industry save for finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE). In 2010, the year of his Senate run, agribiz PACs handed him over $243,000, more than any other besides the FIRE and energy industries.

Senator Merkley has promised to continue to try to repeal Blunt’s Monsanto Protection Act. It wouldn’t hurt if some of us let Senator Blunt, the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture,  know that we’re tired of his business as usual attitude towards the folks who want to purchase our government. Call or email him today. Credo Action is offering a script for the phone call if you think it would help you.

I made the trip to St Louis to be part of Occupy Monsanto January 24, 2012.  This group was demonstrating for labeling of genetically modified food and happened on the day of the Monsanto Annual Shareholders’ Meeting.

Labeling seems so insignificant, but the economic threat (challenge) for the Monsantos of the world could be significant.  They don’t want labeling, that is why they bought our government.  So protecting Monsanto’s dollars are more important than humans having information of what is in their food.

There were about 60 demonstrators there, and most coming from some distance.  I guess I thought that there would be more St. Louis activists and concerned eaters.  Adam Eidinger from Washington D.C. of Right2KnowMarch arranged to get some investors together so he could speak as shareholder at this meeting.   He delivered a prepared statement to warn the shareholders of lawsuits for damage caused by GMOs.

Below is the video of his comments after presenting at the Monsanto Annual Shareholders’ Meeting.  

He reflects on some interesting comments made by the CEO Hugh Grant.  Mr. Grant informs Adam that they have already looked at liability and potential risk.  Thinking about Monsanto’s history of damaging people and soil, I bet they have calculated how many sick people it will take to cost more than profit.

Thinking about the lack of current published research, if we would begin a research project right now, we would have trouble finding human subjects that have NOT consumed GMOs for the control group!  

The pervasive growth of Roundup Ready crops has been incredible.  Imagine a beautiful Iowa corn field; now imagine all the GMO pollen that this field will make.  All we need is a little pollen drift and soon there will ONLY be GMO corn.

The problem is that everything we eat has GMO in it.  In addition to Frankenstein Food of GMO we are also getting the full treatment of Roundup herbicide.  Roundup does not go away!!  It was a lie, Monsanto lied!

Here’s an odd case for the Supreme Court to hear: Monsanto has asked SCOTUS to overturn a ban on genetically modified, Roundup Ready, alfalfa. What’s odd is that the Department of Agriculture is doing a study on alfalfa GMOs and may well release the results before the SCOTUS decision mid year, making the court case moot. Why, then, are Monsanto and the Court bothering? The answer is that the real concern is a parallel case, that of genetically modified sugar beets.

Alfalfa is, if you’ll excuse the expression, small potatoes. Genetically modified alfalfa is only 1 percent of the U.S. alfalfa crop. But genetically modified sugar beets are 95 percent of the U.S. sugar beet crop–and sugar beets account for half of the sugar in the U.S.

So here’s how the situation on sugar beets stands. The Agriculture Department approved the sale of these GMOs in 2005, but a San Francisco judge (you know, probably some hippy fan of Nancy Pelosi) ruled that the Ag Department’s approval was premature and ordered a more exhaustive study. The Center for Food Safety is expected to seek an outright ban in the next phase of the case.

Not if we can get the Court to rule out such bans, says Monsanto. We’ve got a world to feed and Roundup Ready crops are the efficient (also highly profitable) way to do it. Why these pesky environmentalists have to stick their noses in is a mystery.

One of them did that at stltoday.com. He quoted this analysis from an article in the International Journal of Biological Sciences:

“However, in the three GM maize varieties that formed the basis of this investigation, new side effects linked to the consumption of these cereals were revealed, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others [4]. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity.However, in the three GM maize varieties that formed the basis of this investigation, new side effects linked to the consumption of these cereals were revealed, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others [4]. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity.”

So far, if you want to find studies that contradict Monsanto’s version of the truth, you have to go abroad. The European Union, relying on non-Monsanto studies, classes Roundup as “dangerous for the environment” and so, by extension, doesn’t want Roundup Ready seeds used on the continent. But then, Europeans don’t have Monsanto’s headquarters handing out campaign contributions over there.  

A couple of years ago, I wrote:

Got milk?

If so, maybe you also got hormones and antibiotics you didn’t know about or want. Food and Water Watch sent me an e-mail about a hormone many dairy producers use:

Known as rBGH or rBST, the genetically engineered hormone is injected into cows to make them produce more milk. Besides the documented increase of infections in dairy cows injected with rBGH, which necessitates increased use of antibiotics, there are ongoing questions about links to cancer in humans.  As a result, most of the industrialized countries in the world don’t allow the use of this hormone, including Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and all 27 countries in the European Union.

At the time, Monsanto, having lost its bid to get the Federal Trade Commission to stop dairy farmers from advertising their milk as rBGH free, was trying (unsuccessfully) to get laws passed in several states, including Missouri, to wrap adhesive tape around the mouths of dairy farmers who do the job right. Monsanto believes in doing the job wrong. It believes in putting cows’ health at risk to force them to produce more milk at a time when we’re so awash in milk that the U.S. government has been buying up surplus to prevent a collapse of the market.

Just how wrong was the way it wanted to do it?

Monsanto acknowledges that the possible side effects of rBST for cows include lameness, disorders of the uterus, increased body temperature, digestive problems, and birthing difficulties. Veterinary drug reports note that “cows injected with Posilac are at an increased risk for mastitis,” an udder infection in which bacteria and pus may be pumped out with the milk. What’s the effect on humans? The F.D.A. has consistently said that the milk produced by cows that receive rBGH is the same as milk from cows that aren’t injected: “The public can be confident that milk and meat from BST-treated cows is safe to consume.” Nevertheless, some scientists are concerned by the lack of long-term studies to test the additive’s impact, especially on children. A Wisconsin geneticist, William von Meyer, observed that when rBGH was approved the longest study on which the F.D.A.’s approval was based covered only [on] a 90-day laboratory test with small animals. “But people drink milk for a lifetime,” he noted. Canada and the European Union have never approved the commercial sale of the artificial hormone. Today, nearly 15 years after the F.D.A. approved rBGH, there have still been no long-term studies “to determine the safety of milk from cows that receive artificial growth hormone,” says Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for Consumers Union. Not only have there been no studies, he adds, but the data that does exist all comes from Monsanto. “There is no scientific consensus about the safety,” he says.

In a way, it’s all moot as far as Monsanto is concerned because the company sold Posilac, the brand name for the rBGH supplement, to Eli Lilly in 2008. But as late as last July, the Monsanto website was still making a deal out of how ill used it has been by the false advertising of some dairy farmers. Because guess what those brazen people did. They labeled their milk “rBGH free.” That’s it. How dare they imply with such slanted language that there’s something wrong with rBGH? The chutzpah.

The site says:

Unfortunately in an effort to profit from unfounded fears, many milk processors have labeled their milk to suggest that milk from cows treated with rBST [another term for rBGH] is harmful, or somehow different from milk from untreated cows. We stand by the safety of our products. Therefore we do support legislation requiring that milk labeling be COMPLETE and ACCURATE. We are not alone in this goal. Labeling guidelines published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration state that labels claiming the milk is “not from cows treated with RBST` should also contain the statement that “No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST-treated and non-rbST-treated cows”. It is a simple matter of honesty in labeling.

Fair enough. As long as the dairy farmers in question are also allowed to reprint the paragraph above about pus in the milk and 90 days studies that come from Monsanto itself. Think they could fit that on the milk bottle?

There’s the old Monsanto, the corporate behemoth that trashed the environment with chemicals, then lied about the danger; and the new Monsanto, the one riding on a white charger to the rescue of the world’s hungry with Roundup ready seeds.

And there’s no connection between the two.

In fact, the old Monsanto was renamed Solutia and all of the old corporation’s sins have been transferred onto Solutia’s books, including a still accumulating backlog of lawsuits. The latest incarnation of Monsanto, though, shriven of some fifty-plus EPA Superfund sites, barely refers to its first 100 years in its literature and lists instead its accomplishments since the corporate reorganization in 2002.

But while its officers enjoy selective memory loss, citizens in many locales are still living with the depredation the old Monsanto caused.

From 1929-1971, for example, one of its plants in Anniston, Alabama produced PCBs as a byproduct of manufacturing lubricants, hydraulic fluids and sealants. Those PCBs–though the plant workers and townspeople didn’t know it at the time–can adversely affect liver function as well as several of our systems, namely neurological, reproductive, immune and endocrine. And that’s just the effects on humans. It doesn’t do the environment much good either.

People in Anniston find themselves in this fix today largely because of the way Monsanto disposed of PCB waste for decades. Excess PCBs were dumped in a nearby open-pit landfill or allowed to flow off the property with storm water. Some waste was poured directly into Snow Creek, which runs alongside the plant and empties into a larger stream, Choccolocco Creek. PCBs also turned up in private lawns after the company invited Anniston residents to use soil from the plant for their lawns, according to The Anniston Star.

So for decades the people of Anniston breathed air, planted gardens, drank from wells, fished in rivers, and swam in creeks contaminated with PCBs-without knowing anything about the danger. It wasn’t until the 1990s-20 years after Monsanto stopped making PCBs in Anniston-that widespread public awareness of the problem there took hold.

Studies by health authorities consistently found elevated levels of PCBs in houses, yards, streams, fields, fish, and other wildlife-and in people. In 2003, Monsanto and Solutia entered into a consent decree with the E.P.A. to clean up Anniston. Scores of houses and small businesses were to be razed, tons of contaminated soil dug up and carted off, and streambeds scooped of toxic residue. The cleanup is under way, and it will take years, but some doubt it will ever be completed-the job is massive. To settle residents’ claims, Monsanto has also paid $550 million to 21,000 Anniston residents exposed to PCBs, but many of them continue to live with PCBs in their bodies. Once PCB is absorbed into human tissue, there it forever remains.

Naturally, Monsanto was loath to admit that it knew before 1971 the dangers to which it was exposing the countryside and the residents of Anniston. But it could hardly have failed to know.

The evidence that Monsanto refused to face questions about their toxicity is quite clear. In 1956 the company tried to sell the navy a hydraulic fluid for its submarines called Pydraul 150, which contained PCBs. Monsanto supplied the navy with test results for the product. But the navy decided to run its own tests. Afterward, navy officials informed Monsanto that they wouldn’t be buying the product. “Applications of Pydraul 150 caused death in all of the rabbits tested” and indicated “definite liver damage,” navy officials told Monsanto, according to an internal Monsanto memo divulged in the course of a court proceeding. “No matter how we discussed the situation,” complained Monsanto’s medical director, R. Emmet Kelly, “it was impossible to change their thinking that Pydraul 150 is just too toxic for use in submarines.”

Ten years later, a biologist conducting studies for Monsanto in streams near the Anniston plant got quick results when he submerged his test fish. As he reported to Monsanto, according to The Washington Post, “All 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3½ minutes.”

As soon as the Food and Drug Administration caught on, in 1970, to what was happening in Anniston, Monsanto official Paul Hodges issued an internal memo titled: “confidential-f.y.i. and destroy” that outlined the plan for quashing the story. That plan called for the Secretary of the Alabama Water Commission to keep the story under wraps. When that didn’t work, when the story leaked out anyway, the company–with the help of the Water Commission Secretary–convinced a local reporter to write that the danger was recent and that Monsanto would correct the problem quickly. The newspaper story reassured residents that there was no cause for public alarm.

Oh really? 39 years hence, the environment in that part of the country is still toxic. With that sort of history at its back, no wonder the officials of the new Monsanto have become amnesiac.

Will Monsanto dominate the world using Roundup Weed Killer? I’m kidding of course. Sort of. But Monsanto is using its popular weed killer to entice farmers to buy its Roundup ready seeds. These are seeds that aren’t killed by Roundup, so they simplify a farmer’s life by sparing him labor-intensive weed control and plowing. Instead, he plants the seeds and applies Roundup whenever necessary. There’s a glitch, though. Even if he believes that–or doesn’t care whether–Roundup does no environmental damage; even if he believes that genetically modified seeds present no health or environmental risks–and there’s reason to doubt that Roundup and G.M. seeds are safe–the farmer still has a problem. He’s not allowed to do what farmers have done for millennia: harvest the seeds at the end of the growing season and use them next year. He’s required to buy new seeds every year.

That requirement has enriched Monsanto in the last decade or more to the point that it has bought up other seed companies at such a rate that it has become the largest seed company in the world. And it is using every muscle in its corporate body to shove others around, even to the extent of keeping farmers from saving non-G.M. seeds:

1. They’ve bought up the seed companies across the Midwest.
2. They’ve written Monsanto seed laws and gotten legislators to put them through, that make cleaning, collecting and storing of seeds so onerous in terms of fees and paperwork that having normal seed becomes almost impossible.
3. Monsanto is pushing laws that ensure farmers and citizens can’t block the planting of GMO crops even if they can contaminate other crops.
4. There are Monsanto regulations buried in the FDA rules that make a farmer’s seed cleaning equipment illegal because it’s now considered a “source of seed contamination.”

Those laws are only one of the ways Monsanto is making itself unpopular with farmers. Lawsuits against individual landowners are the other. The corporation sues anyone it suspects of breaching the contract farmers sign not to harvest and use the seeds, even occasionally suing farmers who didn’t buy the seed but whose acreage was simply contaminated by GM crops. To protect its patents, Monsanto uses its huge legal department to intimidate the little guy:

Pilot Grove, Missouri, population 750, sits in rolling farmland 150 miles west of St. Louis. The town has a grocery store, a bank, a bar, a nursing home, a funeral parlor, and a few other small businesses. There are no stoplights, but the town doesn’t need any. The little traffic it has comes from trucks on their way to and from the grain elevator on the edge of town. The elevator is owned by a local co-op, the Pilot Grove Cooperative Elevator, which buys soybeans and corn from farmers in the fall, then ships out the grain over the winter. The co-op has seven full-time employees and four computers.

In the fall of 2006, Monsanto trained its legal guns on Pilot Grove; ever since, its farmers have been drawn into a costly, disruptive legal battle against an opponent with limitless resources. Neither Pilot Grove nor Monsanto will discuss the case, but it is possible to piece together much of the story from documents filed as part of the litigation.

Monsanto began investigating soybean farmers in and around Pilot Grove several years ago. There is no indication as to what sparked the probe, but Monsanto periodically investigates farmers in soybean-growing regions such as this one in central Missouri. The company has a staff devoted to enforcing patents and litigating against farmers. To gather leads, the company maintains an 800 number and encourages farmers to inform on other farmers they think may be engaging in “seed piracy.”

Once Pilot Grove had been targeted, Monsanto sent private investigators into the area. Over a period of months, Monsanto’s investigators surreptitiously followed the co-op’s employees and customers and videotaped them in fields and going about other activities. At least 17 such surveillance videos were made, according to court records. The investigative work was outsourced to a St. Louis agency, McDowell & Associates. It was a McDowell investigator who erroneously fingered Gary Rinehart. In Pilot Grove, at least 11 McDowell investigators have worked the case, and Monsanto makes no bones about the extent of this effort: “Surveillance was conducted throughout the year by various investigators in the field,” according to court records. McDowell, like Monsanto, will not comment on the case.

Not long after investigators showed up in Pilot Grove, Monsanto subpoenaed the co-op’s records concerning seed and herbicide purchases and seed-cleaning operations. The co-op provided more than 800 pages of documents pertaining to dozens of farmers. Monsanto sued two farmers and negotiated settlements with more than 25 others it accused of seed piracy. But Monsanto’s legal assault had only begun. Although the co-op had provided voluminous records, Monsanto then sued it in federal court for patent infringement. Monsanto contended that by cleaning seeds-a service which it had provided for decades-the co-op was inducing farmers to violate Monsanto’s patents. In effect, Monsanto wanted the co-op to police its own customers.

In the majority of cases where Monsanto sues, or threatens to sue, farmers settle before going to trial. The cost and stress of litigating against a global corporation are just too great. But Pilot Grove wouldn’t cave-and ever since, Monsanto has been turning up the heat. The more the co-op has resisted, the more legal firepower Monsanto has aimed at it. Pilot Grove’s lawyer, Steven H. Schwartz, described Monsanto in a court filing as pursuing a “scorched earth tactic,” intent on “trying to drive the co-op into the ground.”

Even after Pilot Grove turned over thousands more pages of sales records going back five years, and covering virtually every one of its farmer customers, Monsanto wanted more-the right to inspect the co-op’s hard drives. When the co-op offered to provide an electronic version of any record, Monsanto demanded hands-on access to Pilot Grove’s in-house computers.

Monsanto next petitioned to make potential damages punitive-tripling the amount that Pilot Grove might have to pay if found guilty. After a judge denied that request, Monsanto expanded the scope of the pre-trial investigation by seeking to quadruple the number of depositions. “Monsanto is doing its best to make this case so expensive to defend that the Co-op will have no choice but to relent,” Pilot Grove’s lawyer said in a court filing.

In July of 2008, Pilot Grove finally caved. The co-op settled by paying $275,000 to a fund to be used for scholarships. How very magnanimous of Monsanto to put the money to community use. But then the corporate giant can afford that minor generosity.

As for world domination, Monsanto is well on the road to controlling the world’s seed supply, as well as aiming to control its milk supply–more on that in a later posting. Who needs weapons when you control the food?

We’re not number one. No, we’re number 485 and 494 out of 500. Newsweek did a year long study of the nation’s 500 largest companies and rated them according to how “green” they are. The only Missouri companies I saw on the list were Monsanto at 485 and AmerenUE at 494.

You can check out the entire list of 500 as well as the explanation of how Newsweek arrived at the rankings.

The article doesn’t go into details about the reasons for the rankings of particular companies in the list, so I don’t know specifically why Ameren would rate as one of the worst large corporations in the U.S., environmentally speaking. I suspect, though, that the recent lawsuits against Monsanto for its operations in Sauget, IL (right across the Missouri border) didn’t help its rating any.

Five lawsuits have been filed this year against Monsanto and a group of its spinoff companies by groups of cancer victims living in or within two miles of Sauget.

The legal complaint alleges that up until 1997, “more PCBs were produced at the Monsanto Facility than at any other site in the United States, and perhaps even the free world.”

(…..)

Carcinogens have been continuously released into the atmosphere from the Sauget locations since as early as 1935, the lawsuit claims.

“Defendants each knew or should have known that their conduct was causing the release of millions of tons of carcinogenic substances into the environment,” stated a 15-page complaint filed Aug. 21. The carcinogens are listed as PCBs, dioxin and furans, the byproducts of copper recycling and other industrial procedures that allowed the poisons to escape into the atmosphere or contaminate groundwater, the complaint alleged.

(…..)

The complaint involving the 32 women and one man recently filed in St. Clair County, alleges that Monsanto AG Products LLC, also called the “Monsanto defendants,” conspired with Industrial Bio-test Labs of Northbrook, Ill., “to falsely certify that the substances being released (in Sauget) were not carcinogenic, despite empirical evidence to the contrary.”

So Monsanto is number 485 out of 500, eh? Newsweek forgot to mention that its executives for these last fifty years also belong in the fourth circle of hell.

The endeavor to rein in CAFOs is the classic political battle between grassroots organizing and big money.

Big ag took some hard punches to the midsection in the last couple of weeks with the publication of two reports critical of CAFOs: one from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the other a two year study from the Pew Research Group and Johns Hopkins University. Between them, those reports spent about 400 pages documenting what grassroots activists have been shouting about the harm to family farmers, the harm to the environment, and the harm to public health.

Big deal. Smithfield and Tyson just tightened their abs and absorbed the blows. It’ll take a lot more than that to topple them.

Here’s how the battle’s being waged in Missouri.

Last year, then-Republican Chris Koster led a failed attempt in the Senate to pass a bill that would have hurt Missourians in two ways. First, it would have outlawed “nuisance lawsuits”. Sure, such lawsuits are a “nuisance” if you’re MOArk. Otherwise, they are attempts by John Q. Citizens to stand up against CAFOs that are ruining their lives. Second, the bill would have wrested the only vestige of local control of CAFOs away from citizens. Grassroots pressure was so heavy that the bill didn’t even come up for a vote.

The battle on the lawsuit front continues to rage. Premium Standard Farms came out of a particularly bloody round last year when the court ordered it to pay 4.5 million dollars to three plaintiff families. Last month a leaked memo revealed how Smithfield, which just bought Premium Standard Farms, plans to handle the threat of future suits. With hundreds more families waiting in the wings to sue, the corporation has decided not to settle out of court and not to try any suit brought by several plaintiffs at one trial. Instead, Smithfield will try each case separately.  

Few suits are as successful as the one that garnered $4.5 million, and Smithfield figures to wear out the opposition: try the cases separately so that each family has to hire legal help and hang in through all the company’s appeals, thus forcing plaintiff attorneys, whose resources may be spread thin, to wait years for any payoff.

Of course, that tactic will also be expensive for Smithfield:

When considering the acquisition of Premium Standard, Smithfield estimated its financial exposure to the litigation at $150 million to $200 million, according to the memo.

You get some idea of how lucrative CAFOs are when you see that Smithfield still considered PSF worth buying despite a $200 million legal downside. The reason CAFOs are so lucrative is that they’re heavily subsidized by you and me. And besides, like most polluting industries, they slough the cost of their pollution onto taxpayers.

Grain growers are heavily subsidized by the government, so CAFO owners get cheap food for their hogs and chickens. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that “from 1997 to 2005 taxpayer-subsidized grain prices saved CAFOs nearly $35 billion in animal feed.” You can bet that family farmers who raise their own grain to feed their livestock could use those kinds of subsidies.

Keeping CAFO animals alive long enough to be slaughtered requires antibiotics, and that practice is creating drug resistant strains of pathogens. You don’t think Land O’ Lakes or Tyson will pay your bill at St. John’s Mercy or your funeral bill when one of those bugs picks you off, do you? No, nor will they clean up the streams in MacDonald County either.

On top of that, whatever few improvements big ag does have to make, it expects us to pay for them. Twin bills sponsored by Rep. Munzlinger (R-Williamstown) and Senator Clemens (R-Marshfield) would have granted tax credits for odor abatement programs. Aside from the fact that such technology is generally ineffective, there’s no reason why you and I should pay for the privilege of helping run farmers out of business who would raise antibiotic-free animals that don’t pollute the streams or raise a stench nobody can live near.

That bill (as well as the Monsanto-sponsored bill that would have prevented dairy farmers who don’t give their cows hormones from mentioning that fact on the packaging) have stalled in the legislature because of citizen pressure.

Watch out, though. True, it’s an election year, and legislators are as leery of controversy as a mouse who spies a cat. But some of those little rodents are sneaky. They like to give the impression that a bill is dead, only to attach the language as an amendment to an unrelated bill.  

With the legislature due to wind up in the next couple of weeks, activist groups such as the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and the Sierra Club will be watching carefully for end runs. Opponents can sometimes stop such a move by behind-the-scenes lobbying, basically getting enough support together and saying, “We don’t want to vote on this. It’s too hot.” Another tactic is to amend the amendment, taking out the objectionable language.

If the activists keep big ag from getting tax credits or keep Monsanto from preventing honest labeling of dairy products, we’ll call the ’08 legislative round a draw. Jeff Harris’s bill to grant local entities control over licensing CAFOs went nowhere, of course. He knew it wouldn’t. But we’ll settle for stopping odor abatement tax credits this year and hope for support of Harris’s idea in next year’s legislature. Or the year after.

Photo: farmsanctuary.org