Jim Hightower

Open wide here comes another great big glob of globaloney they want to shove down your throat.

This time, something called the Codex Alimentarius Commission want us to swallow a new "safety standard" on food irradiation. It might surprise you to know that this international commission sets global food safety standards for 160 nations including the US of A. I don't remember voting for this, do you?

Nonetheless, what won't surprise you is that this commission mostly exists to do what global food corporations want done, rather than to serve the public interest, and that's exactly what the Commission's new irradiation standard does. Irradiating food is itself a ploy by agribusiness giants to cover-up their filthy processing methods, which have led to nasty outbreaks of food diseases. Rather than clean up the process, they simply want to zap our food with heavy doses of radiation.

As I've reported before, this is not good for food or humans, and surveys show consumers to be overwhelmingly against it. Agribusiness corporations don't care, however, and they're stealthily trying to rig the global rules so food irradiation essentially is left unregulated. In recent closed door meetings, far away in the Netherlands, a subcommittee of the Commission has quietly proposed new standards stating that food irradiation facilities need not comply with "good hygiene practices," or be limited in the amount of radiation they use, or be staffed by "adequate, trained, and competent personnel," or be licensed and inspected by government officials. And if even this is too much for the irradiators, the proposal states that corporations "should" rather then "shall" comply with these standards.

This is Jim Hightower saying...Our country currently has stricter rules than this, but food corporations could use these new global standards to force us to comply with the Codex Alimentarius. To fight this, call Public Citizen at 202-588-1000.