Back to the Future with Tom “Mr. Monsanto” Vilsack
December 30th, 2020
Via: Organic Consumers Association:
President-Elect Joe Biden has nominated Tom Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary.
For anyone who is familiar with our Millions Against Monsanto campaign or who participated in March Against Monsanto during the Obama-Biden years, you know why this is bad news.
For everyone else, this is the first installment in our series of articles that will recount this history to explain why we opposed Vilsack’s nomination in 2009 and why we still do in 2021.
Tom Vilsack was “Mr. Monsanto” even before he started at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2009. As Iowa’s governor (1999–2007), he had been named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Today, he continues to serve agribusiness as the head of the US Dairy Export Council, which is deeply invested in perpetuating the system of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), the use of pesticide-drenched genetically modified feed, and the practice of keeping prices paid to farmers below the cost of production to drive the consolidation of ever-larger factory farms.
As USDA Secretary from 2009-2017, Vilsack approved more new genetically modified organisms (GMOs) than any Secretary before him or since.
