California is the first U.S. state to require Monsanto to label its blockbuster weed killer, Roundup, as a possible carcinogen, according to a ruling issued Friday by a California judge.

Fresno County Superior Court Judge Kristi Kapetan previously issued a tentative ruling on Jan. 27 in Monsanto Company v. Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, et al.

AquAdvantage salmon were the first genetically engineered animal product meant for human consumption to be approved by the FDA. It combines the genetic material of Chinook and Atlantic salmon with eelpout to make it grow nearly twice as fast as its conventionally farmed counterparts.

“And it was done without a single consultation with tribes who have organized our lives around salmon for thousands of years,” said Valerie Segrest, with the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Program. She says despite a resolution passed by the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians opposing the introduction and submitted to the FDA, tribal concerns have been ignored.

Antonio Roman-Alcalá, currently the sustainable food campaigner for Friends of the Earth US, shares why agrichemical and seed mega-mergers are harmful to the food system.

The agricultural seed and pesticide market is already extremely concentrated. Three impending mergers between six of these corporate giants (Bayer/Monsanto, Dow/DuPont, and ChemChina/Syngenta) will further consolidate market and political power, leading to even greater corporate control of our farms and plates.

The companies involved are confident that the mergers will be approved, and President Trump’s pre-inauguration meeting with CEOs from Bayer and Monsanto indicates that politics might trump antitrust legal procedure and precedent. Still, there is widespread opposition to the merger from farmers, consumers, workers, environmentalists, and regulators, as evidenced by the 320 organizations and farmers who recently sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice asking them to block the mergers. The mergers are far from a done deal.

Honolulu — Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it is launching an investigation into whether the Hawaiʻi Department of Agriculture (HDOA) and Agribusiness Development Corporation (ADC) have been violating Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act by engaging in practices that have the effect of discriminating against Native Hawaiians. Title VI prohibits a recipient of federal funds from acting in a manner that has a disparate impact on the basis of race, color, or national origin, regardless of whether the impact is intentional.

Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons? —Dr. Jane Goodall

Two new reports published in recent weeks add to the already large and convincing body of evidence, accumulated over more than half a century, that agricultural pesticides and other toxic chemicals are poisoning us.

Despite continuing interest in organic feed production, organic crops production is not keeping pace, says analyst.

However, non-biotech or non-GM feed crops have been expanding more quickly to meet increased market demand, said Dan Kowalski, director in the knowledge exchange division at CoBank.

He published a report recently on both organic and non-GMO specialty grains, assessing the impact and opportunity for growers. It is estimated that it would require an additional one to five million acres of US agriculture land to meet the domestic demand for organic corn and soybeans for feed.

US feed producers have been turning to imports organic feed ingredients to meet their needs, he said.

“US producers still have financial incentive to grow organic crops,” he told FeedNavigator. “However, the strong US dollar, and lower costs associated with organic production in some other countries could cause more foreign organic acreage to be added. If organic production continues to rise overseas, and imports are abundantly available in the US, it will drag on prices, reducing domestic incentive for growers.”

GMO-free production

A former Environmental Protection Agency official may not be able to escape testifying about his alleged role in helping Monsanto Co. suppress inquiries into whether its Roundup weed killer causes cancer.

A manager who left the agency’s pesticide division last year has become a central figure in more than 20 lawsuits in the U.S. accusing the company of failing to warn consumers and regulators of the risk that its glyphosate-based herbicide can cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

As the linked article below this article points out, Monsanto’s new super-toxic GMO dicamba-resistant cotton is already wreaking havoc across the U.S. But even beyond Monsanto’s latest “Frankencotton,” there are a myriad of reasons why we need to start paying as much attention to what we wear as we do to what we eat.

We are not only what we eat, but also what we wear. The U.S. is the largest clothing and apparel market in the world, with 2016 sales of approximately $350 billion. The average American household spends about four percent of its income on clothing, more than one-third of what we spend on food.

If Americans are what we wear, then we—even the most rebel youth, conscious women, organic consumers, and justice advocates—judged by what we wear (not just what we say) are increasingly corporatized. The fashion statement we’re apparently making with what we wear is that we don’t care. A look at the labels in our clothing, or the corporate logos on our shoes, reveals that the brand name bullies, the transnational giants in the garment and apparel industry, reign supreme.

A Minnesota judge will let some farmers seek punitive

damages against the Syngenta seed company for selling genetically modified corn seeds before China approved imports of crops grown from them.

In an order unsealed Tuesday, Hennepin County District Judge Thomas Sipkins wrote that there’s evidence Syngenta knew the risks of commercializing Viptera and Duracade corn containing a trait that China had not approved for imports, and intentionally disregarded the high probability of losing the Chinese market

for U.S. corn farmers.

ELLENDALE, N.D. — Law firms are making one last sweep to gather in clients to participate in individual lawsuits in historic actions against Syngenta. The suits allege farmers are owed reparation for billions in lost markets because the company allegedly improperly released genetics into the marketplace before it was approved in key foreign export markets, including China.

Teams of legal assistants for Phipps Anderson Deacon LLP of San Antonio, Texas, are in the midst of a series of meetings in corn states offering an update for farmers enrolled as plaintiffs on the Syngenta legal case.

The claimed losses are due to corn exports that were rejected by China since November 2013, because Syngenta introduced a trait called MIR162 corn seed that wasn't yet accepted there and couldn't be filtered out of U.S. shipments.