In October, the Madison City Council unanimously passed a resolution declaring the city a “TPP-Free Zone,” and promising that if Congress passes the Trans Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement, “We will not obey” it….
The Berkeley Peace & Justice Commission (PJC) has approved a TPP-Free Zoneresolution, and says the Berkeley, Calif. city council could take it up this month….
There’s a long list of reasons to oppose the TPP. Food safety is right at the top—especially with a former Monsanto lobbyist leading U.S. negotiations on agricultural issues.
Specifically, the TPP would require countries to accept food that meets only the lowest safety standards of the collective participants. That means consumers could soon be eating imported seafood, beef or chicken products that don’t meet even basic U.S. food safety standards. And the (FDA) would be powerless to shut down imports of these unsafe food or food ingredients.
Countries, including those in the European Union, could also find it increasinglydifficult to ban, or even require the labeling of, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) if biotech companies determine that those countries’ strict policies restrict fair trade and infringe on the companies’ “rights” to profit.
To top it off, corporations would be allowed to resolve trade disputes in special international tribunals, effectively wiping out hundreds of domestic and international food sovereignty laws. Products labeled fair trade, organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare approved, or GMO-free, could all be challenged as “barriers to trade.”
With the world’s food supply, and consumers’ health, already endangered by chemical-intensive industrial agriculture and climate change, the U.S. and other governments should be looking for ways to promote sustainable food and agriculture policies, not restrict governments’ abilities to do so. Instead, the Obama Administration is subverting the principles of democracy in favor of handing a few transnational corporations unprecedented power to put profits above the health and well-being of consumers.Truthout
Fortunately citizens are protesting. And city and county governments are claiming the power to resist.
Secret Trade Deal Spawns 'We Will Not Obey' Movement
Zack Kaldveer, Organic Consumers Association | News Analysis
Is food safety the last straw?
1 comment:
The ignominious failed rollout of ObamaCare has been a blessing in disguise. It has seriously damaged the brand of the neoliberal technocrats - showing them not just as wrong-headed but incompetent - and this is rapidly dissolving the remaining bands of misguided loyalty attaching progressives to the Obama administration, the Clinton machine, the Podesta policy factory, the Davos and Wall Street economic elite and others.
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