| Dear Friend, ![]() We knew we must be doing something right. Agribusiness interests have targeted EWG's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides with an expensive, misleading public relations campaign. The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF), the public relations arm of big, pro-pesticide agricultural producers has made the nonsensical claim that the EWG Shopper's Guide to Pesticides influences people to eat fewer vegetables. Now federal and California officials have handed the AFF a $180,000 federal grant to support its phony accusations. That's right. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and California Department of Food and Agriculture have forked over $180,000 of your tax dollars to an industry front group to attack "claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides." If you agree that it's outrageous to use taxpayer dollars to finance attacks on independent food safety watchdog groups like EWG that educate the public about pesticides in food, the USDA needs to hear from you today. Click here to sign our petition telling USDA to stop funding disinformation campaigns and investigate whoever approved this grant! The grant isn't a one-off. Just last week, executives of the United Fresh Produce Association, a Washington-based Big Ag lobby, boasted that Obama administration officials had promised to "look into" how the government releases laboratory tests that have detected pesticide on produce. EWG urges people to eat more fruits and vegetables, whether conventional or organic. But many people don't want to eat pesticides with their produce if they don't have to. With EWG's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides, they can make informed choices. Most recently, a study by a prestigious team of public health researchers from Harvard and Emory universities and the FDA, highlighted in last week's Environmental Health News, documented 14 types of pesticides in the daily diets of 46 Georgia and Washington state children; about one-fifth of the food prepared by the kids' parents contained at least one pesticide. Click here to sign our petition telling USDA officials that taxpayers' money shouldn't be used to undermine public health and the country's growing organic industry. The grant to the Alliance for Food and Farming comes out of the USDA Specialty Crops Block Grant program. Help us convince USDA officials to use this program to promote locally grown, organic and sustainably-produced fruits and vegetables -- not to bulk up the public relations budgets of pesticide-dependent corporate farming interests. The AFF has a long history of putting pesticide-dependent profits ahead of healthy food choices. When the EPA phased out methyl bromide -- a powerful pesticide that damages Earth's protective ozone layer -- representatives of the AFF called the phase-out "a big concern." They then embraced a replacement, methyl iodide, that EPA officials call "highly toxic." Click here to sign our petition today. Thank you for standing with EWG. Sincerely,
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Ken Cook
President, Environmental Working Group |
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