On Halloween, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a truly scary announcement -- the agency decided to continue its registration of Monsanto’s (now merged with Bayer) highly controversial dicamba-based herbicide, Xtendimax. The chemical has damaged millions of acres of farmland over the past two seasons of use, and with this decision, the devastation will continue.
In mid October, the Food Sovereignty Prize was awarded to two organizations recognized for their commitment to food sovereignty or, “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”
The Farmworker Association of Florida (FWAF) has been building power with Florida’s farmworkers for more than 25 years, and is led and governed by farmworkers in the communities in which it works. PAN Senior Scientist Margaret Reeves recently chatted with Jeannie Economos, FWAF’s Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project Coordinator.
Calls have intensified for California regulators to take state-level action on the brain-harming pesticide chlorpyrifos.
In response to a legal challenge by PAN and our allies, the judges gave agency officials 60 days to ban the brain-harming pesticide chlorpyrifos. But last week, the federal administration appealed a recent court decision ordering EPA to ban chlorpyrifos nationwide.
In mid September, two large-scale climate events converged in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both were oriented around climate change and potential solutions, but the stakeholders involved and their visions for change were often quite different.
In a historic ruling in the San Francisco Superior Court earlier this month, a jury found the Monsanto corporation (recently merged with Bayer) fully liable for health damages caused by its herbicide, Roundup. The plaintiff, DeWayne Johnson, was awarded $289 million in damages.
As of Thursday morning, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has 60 days to finalize its ban of the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos.
The PAN Fellowship Program supports a pathway to leadership for food and farming activists from frontline communities. Leaders with a deep and personal understanding of the issue —including their social, political and cultural context—can craft meaningful and appropriate solutions for their communities and the system as a whole.
It's been clear for years that the pesticide industry has too much influence on public officials and the policies they set. Veteran journalist Carey Gillam’s new book Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science digs into one egregious example of this: Monsanto’s (now Bayer) aggressive efforts to protect their RoundUp Ready seed and pesticide empire.
The widely criticized House version of the 2018 Farm Bill, HR2, narrowly passed in the House late last week. This version of the bill fails to invest in sustainable farming or rural and urban communities across the country. A better (but still flawed) version of the Farm Bill is expected to be taken up in the Senate this week.
