Since 1961, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—formerly known as food stamps—has provided vital financial help to food-insecure households. Administered by the USDA, it is the nation’s largest nutrition assistance program. But the ongoing government shutdown is making it increasingly likely that starting next week, benefits will stop for more than 42 million Americans, half of them children, who depend on SNAP to help stay fed and healthy. 

Please call your members of Congress and demand that a spending bill is passed immediately to protect both the SNAP program, and the WIC program—aka the Special Supplemental Nutrition program, which is only funded through December. Find contact info for your Senators here. Find contact info for your Representative here.  (And you have these numbers in your phone contacts down by now!)

Some states have stopped accepting new SNAP applications in anticipation of the November cutoff. Others are scrambling to allocate state funds to food pantries to help them prepare for increased demand—at a time when federal funding for food banks has also been cut to provide trillions in tax breaks to the rich and when billions of dollars are allocated to our bloated military budget. 

It’s imperative that Congress pass a spending bill or temporary funding measure to ensure that there is no disruption to the SNAP program. Is it possible? Of course—the Republicans hold majorities in both houses and could pass a bill. Sen. Josh Hawley has filed Senate legislation to do just this. 
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It’s possible that we will have bipartisan agreement that letting 42 million people go hungry is a bad look for the so-called “richest country in the world.” But not without an outcry from voters. Please call today!

Monday, April 30 is the deadline to comment on the Environmental Protection Agency's human health and environmental risk assessments for the herbicide glyphosate—most commonly marketed as Roundup™ and Rodeo™. There is growing evidence that glyphosate products are carcinogenic, and cause other health problems, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, genetic damage, liver and kidney damage, and endocrine disruption. Glyphosate is in nursing mother’s milk, contaminates drinking water sources, and impacts amphibians. Its use on a wide variety of GMO crops resistant to it has contributed to the spread of resistant weeds, and thus the use of even more herbicide. Some of the additional ingredients in commercial formulations are even more toxic than glyphosate itself.

You can comment directly at Regulations.gov or use the form on the BeyondPesticides.org site. 

Glyphosate, invented and still largely made and sold by Monsanto, is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world.  You can read more about it here, along with reporting on Germany's proposed restrictions on glyphosate, and Monsanto's attempt to sue California to keep glyphosate off a state list of probable carcinogens. 

NOTE:  Monsanto at UC Davis
The University of California, Davis receives millions to fund  agricultural research from Monsanto and Bayer. Just recently, US Right to Know donated a huge collection of agrichemical industry documents to the University of California, San Francisco, a pre-eminent research institution and medical center, to be part of their free on-line Industry Documents Library. 

These documents shine a light on the public relations, scientific, legislative and regulatory tactics the industry has used to defend their products and profits. “They offer an inside view of the agrichemical industry communications about the health and environmental risks of its products,” said Gary Ruskin, co-director of US Right to Know. “We hope they will prove to be a valuable resource for policymakers, investigative journalists and the public at large.” According to Right To Know, many of the documents known as the “Monsanto Papers” will also be made available which are surfacing in litigation over whether Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma.