What the hell are they asking us to eat?

Our food products are being poisoned.

The USDA wants to cut pesticide reporting:

A coalition of U.S. public interest groups including Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, Natural Resources Defense Committee (NRDC), Union of Concerned Scientists, and The Organic Center are protesting budget cuts that will kill the collection and public reporting of pesticide use by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), according to the Associated Press. In a letter to USDA Secretary Ed Schafer, 45 public interest groups argued that the NASS’s Agricultural Chemical Usage reports are the only reliable, publicly available source of data on pesticide and fertilizer use outside of California. According to NRDC's Jennifer Sass, "eliminating the program will severely hamper efforts of the USDA, the EPA, and state officials to perform risk assessments and make informed decisions on pesticide use." PAN's Science Department Director Brian Hill commented: "Allowing growers and applicators to use highly toxic pesticides without a comprehensive, national reporting structure is as dumb as flying in a storm without instruments." NASS, a program that has published pesticide use data since 1991, has been dramatically scaled back by the Bush administration. First, the agency’s annual surveys were cut to biennial reviews. In 2007, data collection was reduced to just three crops—cotton, apples and organic apples. Now, NASS has announced it will not collect agrichemical use data on any crops during the 2008 growing season.

Monsanto wants to patent living genetic material that you are going to eat.

And hidden away in a report about rising food prices is this stunner of a sentence: (my bold)

Record prices for farm crops should gradually come down, but they will remain substantially higher than average over the next decade because of fundamental changes in demand, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

[snip]

The report also encouraged countries that have balked at allowing genetically modified crops to reconsider their use as a way to improve yields.

Um... has anyone been reading the news? Genetically modified crops do not give you more yield. In fact, the crops produce LESS.

Buy locally. Grow your own.