Protecting Food. Empowering Whistleblowers.
Protecting Food. Empowering Whistleblowers.
Idaho has a $2.5 billion dairy industry … with a lot to hide, apparently. The state Senate passed Idaho’s anti-whistleblower Ag Gag bill (S.1337) last Friday, which would make it a crime to photograph or videotape wrongdoing on a farm. The state has a history of enacting laws that make it easier for CAFOs (concentrated […]
According to a 2014 Harris Poll, 73 percent of Americans think there should be more government oversight of the food supply. Someone should alert the USDA, since the agency is proposing the exact opposite: the removal of government inspectors in poultry plants and transferring their duties to private industry workers (who are not empowered to speak […]
Several biotech/pesticide companies kept their word by filing a lawsuit on Friday against the County of Kauai to block implementation of the recently passed pesticide disclosure bill (now Ordinance 960). This news is very disappointing, but not entirely surprising, as the industry shows where its real priorities lie – certainly not with public health. FIC […]
We already got a taste of it last year, but according to Food Safety News, Big Ag has revamped its legislative strategy for 2014 when it comes to silencing whistleblowers. As evidenced by the defeat of all 11 anti-whistleblower Ag Gag bills in 2013, it’s clear that the states won’t allow the animal agriculture industry […]
Below is from Section 6: Taking animals off drugs. See the full report here. Most chicken raised in the U.S. today comes from large-scale commercial farms optimized to produce the most meat at the lowest cost. To meet domestic and global demand, the industry slaughters almost 9 billion chickens a year. A new USDA rule […]
(LIHUE) – The Government Accountability Project (GAP) submitted several information requests to Hawaii state and county officials about meetings and communications with large biotech companies during the debate over Kauai’s pesticide and disclosure legislation, Bill 2491. The bill, now law, requires biotech companies to disclose pesticide use information and establish buffer zones between their fields […]
The Government Accountability Project is probing whether biotech companies exerted improper influence over Hawaii government officials while the Kauai County Council debated GMO and pesticide disclosure legislation this year. The Washington D.C.-based government watchdog group has submitted several information requests to Hawaii state and county officials asking them to disclose meetings and communications with biotech […]
Where there’s risk of animal cruelty at slaughterhouses, food safety concerns are probably not that far behind, and vice versa! USDA whistleblowers have revealed in the last two years the threats to public health caused by the agency’s poultry processing inspection plan (which would increase line speeds to 175 birds per minute), but now poultry […]
By JEFF ZALESIN For years, opponents of so-called ag-gag legislation across the country have been saying that it is unconstitutional to pass laws aimed at restricting hidden-camera reporting on factory farms. Soon, they’ll tell it to a federal judge in Utah. A coalition of journalists and animal-rights activists, led by the Animal Legal Defense Fund […]
(Washington, DC) – The Government Accountability Project (GAP) welcomes the comprehensive whistleblower protections included in the Safe Meat and Poultry Act of 2013, introduced today by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The bill provides gold standard whistleblower protections for corporate meat and poultry workers who report food violations enforced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). […]