By Alexis Baden-Mayer, Political Director, OCA:

Mexico has been making daring coverage strikes in opposition to genetically modified crops and the poisonous pesticides they have been engineered to be grown with, by phasing-out imports of GMO corn and displaying its help for food sovereignty, soil regeneration and agroecology.

However, how critical may Mexico be, whether it is now ceding its nationwide sovereignty to a three-person panel of the Canada-United States-Mexico Settlement (CUSMA) below which america is difficult its 2023 Corn Decree?

Supposedly, Mexico needs meals sovereignty and self-sufficiency, however apparently, it values commerce with america and Canada a lot that it’s prepared to let its democratically enacted legal guidelines be outdated by this so-called “free-trade” settlement. (What’s so “free” about it, if it may be used to power a rustic to import stuff it doesn’t need?!)

That is an absurd and illegitimate course of the place, below the dispute settlement provisions of the Canada-United States-Mexico Settlement, three commerce attorneys will resolve whether or not Mexicans might be pressured to eat america’ genetically engineered corn, soaked with Monsanto-Bayer’s toxins.

Read or Listen: The Three Trade Lawyers Who Will Decide Whether Mexicans Can Be Forced to Eat the U.S.’s Genetically Engineered Corn Soaked in Monsanto-Bayer’s Toxins

The Natural Customers Affiliation (OCA), in addition to the Mexico department of OCA, Asociación de Consumidores Orgánicos, and our sister group, Vía Orgánica, have been basic drivers for the reason that starting of the category motion lawsuit in opposition to GM corn, which started in July 2013 and in September of that 12 months obtained a precautionary measure. The precautionary measure has stopped the industrial planting of genetically modified corn in Mexico, which is the middle of origin and everlasting protector of the diversification of corn. Our director of Vía Orgánica in México Metropolis, Mercedes López, is at present the consultant of this collective demand that has managed to cease makes an attempt to acceptable and contaminate a sacred seed for the Mesoamerican individuals. Corn is not only a staple meals on this a part of the world, however can be a part of the cosmogony, custom, legends, faith and rituals. It will be important that these of us within the US work from this aspect of the border to make our voices heard in help of those teams’ efforts. Please take motion as we speak!

Mexico has banned the home manufacturing of genetically engineered corn since 2013.

In 2023, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a decree banning the usage of genetically engineered corn for dough and tortillas. The 2023 Corn Decree moreover directed Mexican biosafety authorities to part out genetically engineered corn from animal feed and different types of human consumption.

Mexico doesn’t wish to import GMO corn, however utilizing a 2020 so-called “free commerce” settlement between Mexico, Canada and america, the U.S. thinks it could actually power it to take action.

The U.S. has invoked the dispute settlement provisions of the United States-Mexico-Canada Settlement (USMCA), which permits them to show decision-making authority over to a three-person panel, appointed and paid for by the 2 nations.

Now, three trade-lawyers-for-hire (not precise judges) are arbitrating the dispute. They’ve been given the ability to resolve whether or not the U.S. can power Mexicans to eat Monsanto-Bayer’s pesticide-drenched GMO corn.

Read more or listen to this amazing story: The Three Trade Lawyers Who Will Decide Whether Mexicans Can Be Forced to Eat the U.S.’s Genetically Engineered Corn

TAKE ACTION: Tell the U.S. to Withdraw Its Complaint and Leave It Up to Mexico to Block Monsanto-Bayer’s Pesticide-Drenched GMO Corn!

By Jennifer Anandanayagam, Well being Digest:

“Ibuprofen is a well-liked and efficient nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) that many people flip to for ache reduction, bringing down a fever, and tackling one thing like delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) after a very grueling exercise.

Nonetheless, taking ibuprofen every day comes with adverse uncomfortable side effects. Persistent use of this drug has been related to gastrointestinal points like diarrhea, bleeding, nausea, ulcers, and an upset abdomen. It is because common ibuprofen use can have an effect on your intestine well being. Different well being considerations that include overuse of this NSAID are coronary heart failure, hypertension, kidney injury, liver toxicity, and stroke.

With increasingly individuals seeking to different strategies to fight ache with way of life practices like yoga, respiration workouts, and total eating regimen tweaks, one in style spice, particularly, has come to the forefront. We’re referring to the mildly fragrant and deep spicy yellow turmeric.”

Read about how turmeric may be able to help with combat chronic pain

Past Pesticides stories:

“In keeping with a brand new evaluation by Client Studies, the U.S. Division of Agriculture (USDA) Pesticide Information Program (PDP) Annual Abstract has as soon as once more didn’t precisely painting the protection of among the mostly bought vegatables and fruits in america. A overview of seven years of PDP information present that 20% of the meals examined pose a “excessive danger” to the general public and 12 particular commodities are so harmful that kids or pregnant individuals shouldn’t eat multiple serving per day, in response to Client Studies evaluation. Client Studies contend that U.S. Environmental Safety (EPA) pesticide residue tolerances are too lenient.

The Client Studies outcomes fly within the face of the rosy outlook reported by the USDA in its 2022 PDP Annual Abstract, which discovered that 99% of the vegatables and fruits the company examined “had residues beneath the established [EPA] tolerances.” Companies usually level to acceptable or authorized residues as protecting of well being and the setting, regardless of potential opposed results related to insufficient evaluation of well being outcomes, resembling endocrine disruption, susceptible inhabitants teams, publicity to mixtures and synergistic interactions, and extra.”

Read the full article here: EPA’s methodology for calculating acceptable levels of pesticides in food has long been criticized as inadequate and more

Sally Baker, Creator, Chelsea Inexperienced Publishing:

“Award-winning therapist Sally Baker shares her skilled and private expertise of what it takes to outlive trauma, offering sensible steering within the strategies she has refined working with a world array of shoppers – hypnotherapy, mind wave recursive remedy, EFT and extra.

To fight bodily nasties we’d like a powerful immune system. To fight adverse life occasions we’d like resilience. In The Getting of Resilience from the Inside Out, award-winning therapist Sally Baker offers us a sensible information to growing a wider understanding of resilience and to fostering it in order that we’ve got the important perseverance and drive to emerge efficiently when confronted with life’s inevitable and sometimes surprising challenges. Sally explores among the key household dynamics that can lead to unhelpful methods of interested by oneself which can undermine the pure growth of resilience and as a replacement impose a cycle of self-sabotaging conduct.”

This book provides gentle, perceptive insight along with tried and tested self-help therapeutic tools

Dr. Joseph Mercola writes:

“Story at-a-glance:

• Pollinator Advocates (PA) is an advocacy program based by Andrea Montoya to reintroduce 1000’s of native crops to public areas round Boulder, Colorado. The objective is to offer wild pollinators with a pure habitat that enables them to thrive for a lot of generations to come back
• With 35% of the world’s crops and 75% of flowering crops depending on honeybees and different pollinators to breed, any such advocacy is indisputably probably the most essential actions we must always actively help
• A 2022 examine revealed within the journal Environmental Well being Views estimates the lack of meals manufacturing because of lack of pollinators led to 427,000 extra annual deaths worldwide
• There are small however impactful practices that you are able to do to assist save the bees and different pollinators — extra ideas beneath”

Read more: How One Woman’s Mission to ‘Rewild’ Urban Spaces Is Saving Native Bees

Ronnie Cummins, Natural Customers Affiliation:

Along with highlighting constructive options, it is very important needless to say individuals’s conditions and views are totally different. All of us have totally different passions or priorities. One measurement or one method doesn’t match all. Due to this fact, we have to combine our inexperienced justice and Regeneration messages with the particular points and considerations which can be most vital to grassroots constituencies, after which lay out, in on a regular basis language, a technique that makes individuals perceive that we are able to truly clear up the issues they care about probably the most, whereas additionally fixing a bunch of different urgent issues on the similar time. Solely by ranging from the place individuals are at, after which connecting the dots, can we seize the eye and creativeness of a vital mass of the worldwide grassroots and get them to begin interested by how they’ll take part in our new Motion and new economic system.

Goal and subjective situations for change are totally different in each nation on the planet, and to some extent differ as nicely within the sub-regions and native communities of those 195 nations. On a regular basis individuals in all places, together with probably the most impoverished and susceptible communities, have their burning points in addition to their secondary points, and an inherent need to alleviate and, if potential, clear up the issues which can be urgent down on them, in lots of circumstances threatening their very survival. Within the activist neighborhood, main focus areas, usually reflecting the considerations of on a regular basis individuals, embrace inflation and the excessive value of residing, freedom of alternative and Constitutional liberties, local weather change, environmental air pollution, well being, social justice, jobs and financial justice, peace, and democracy. Sadly, campaigners, each on the native and nationwide/worldwide ranges, typically work in isolation from different sectors, every in their very own separate silos. This perpetuates tunnel imaginative and prescient within the physique politic, parochial or sectarian attitudes, political polarization, and an total weak spot in international civil society.

Read about how the degenerate system that needs to be replaced, and can be replaced

By Alexis Baden-Mayer, Political Director, OCA:

Mexico is taking motion! It has a brand new legislation guaranteeing the best to satisfactory and sustainable meals! The brand new Basic Legislation of Sufficient and Sustainable Meals (LGAAS by its Spanish acronym) took impact on April 18, 2024 and implementing rules shall be established inside 180 days.

This new legislation follows Mexico’s 2023 Corn Decree to step by step remove genetically engineered corn used for human consumption and animal feed and it consists of obligatory warning labels on genetically engineered meals.

Read more: Mexico Includes GMO Labeling Requirements in Ambitious New Food Sovereignty Law

In an period of company globalization and growing industrialization and contamination of the meals provide, inexperienced and progressive-minded individuals don’t have any alternative however to arrange and marketing campaign on a transnational foundation. Remoted and fragmented residents are not any match for the Monsantos and the multinational grain cartels. However collectively we are able to win.

OCA’s sister group, Through Organica, and our Mexico crew (over 50 workers members), have labored tirelessly for the final 15 years south of the border to ban GMOs and to advertise natural and regenerative meals and farming.

One of many coalitions that Through Organica works with, Sin Maiz No Hay Pais (“With out Corn There Is No Nation”) has demonstrated the ability of over 300 organizations efficiently working collectively, using public training, GMO boycotts, and litigation.

Please think about making a donation to assist us proceed our work to cease U.S. plans to bully Mexico into shopping for GMO corn and work in direction of meals sovereignty for all:

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

Matthew Zuras writes for Epicurious:

“How did this icon of spring go from seasonal treasure to year-round grocery store staple? Free commerce and the struggle on medication present some clues.

There’s a Christmastime scene in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama The Holdovers, set in a fictional Massachusetts boarding faculty within the early 1970s, through which a bunch of scholars grumble over platters of hen, potatoes, and vibrant, agency stalks of asparagus. It’s the setup for a joke as puerile because the schoolboys—the punchline being the slender inexperienced vegetable’s infamous potential to provide pee that smells just like the mouth of hell.

The joke additionally depends on a delicate but gorgeous anachronism: There’s virtually zero probability that any Bay Staters have been consuming recent asparagus in December of 1970. Canned, possibly—however recent? Nah.

It’s unusual to think about such a situation now. As I write this in late winter in New York Metropolis, it’s potential for me to put an internet grocery order and have hand-delivered earlier than daybreak tomorrow not one however a number of sorts of recent asparagus: natural asparagus, pencil asparagus, jumbo asparagus (at present marketed as “peak high quality”), microwavable luggage of trimmed asparagus, non-microwavable luggage of similar, and simply plain ol’ asparagus.”

Read more about how this seasonal treasure has become to year-round supermarket staple

Dr. Vandana Shiva writes for Navdanya Worldwide:

“Over the previous few a long time, GMO crops have been imposed in nations world wide, touted as an answer to meals insecurity and malnutrition crises. Nonetheless, starvation, illness and malnutrition have elevated, whereas biodiversity has declined and toxins have unfold. GMO imperialism has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of small farmers and biodiversity within the facilities of origin. These facilities of biodiversity origin are the cradles of the world’s meals provide and safety in opposition to illness, local weather challenges, pure disasters or different obstacles to meals manufacturing.

In Mexico, which is the middle of origin of corn, there was an extended wrestle by society and arranged communities in opposition to GMO imperialism which threatens the subsistence and tradition of native peoples. It’s following this mobilization that the Mexican society obtained a ban on planting genetically modified corn by a collective lawsuit introduced in opposition to the businesses Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta and Corteva Agriscience. This ban continues to be in impact.

Lately, the Mexican authorities issued an govt order phasing out the usage of glyphosate and banning the usage of genetically modified corn in tortillas, a staple meals. Confronted with this choice, the US authorities, on the idea of the United States-Mexico-Canada Free Commerce Settlement (USMCA), activated the dispute decision mechanism with the purpose of canceling the order and forcing the introduction of GMOs into the nation.”

Read why citizens are rising up against the unscientific, anti-democratic and anti-ecological imposition of GMOs by multinationals and the US government

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