Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery
My last posting asking questions about the Cornucopia Institute’s financial and other links with the $160+ million dollar Organic Valley behemoth generated several comments this past month; all but one were positive. The one critical comment was a not-so-thinly veiled threat of litigation from Cornucopia’s lawyers at Garvey & Stoddard claiming our comments were “inaccurate” and thus “damaging to the reputation” of their client. Cornucopia’s lawyers demanded we apologize, publicly retract our statements, and remove them from our Web site lest we face “magnified” damages.
Heavens to Betsy, apparently I was about to be taken out to the woodshed for a whoopin. As I take the accuracy of my commentaries very seriously I immediately wrote back to Cornucopia’s legal browbeater Ed Garvey and asked him to specifically spell-out any inaccuracies in my column. To date I’ve received no response. No response to the fact that Cornucopia’s Web site was registered at the same time that Mark Kastel was being quoted as an official spokesman for Organic Valley, and no response as to our question wondering how much money Organic Valley contributes/pays Cornucopia and/or Mr. Kastel. While we’re back on this subject perhaps Mr. Kastel can explain why Cornucopia used a UPS Store post office box in California back in 1999 to register their Wisconsin-based organization Web site - was it because they wanted to mask their links to him his bosses at Organic Valley at the time? I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer this time.
While Cornucopia and their lawyers have yet to get back to us to us, they did post some previously unreported clarifications regarding their funding to other online discussion groups. Without disclosing amounts or names, Cornucopia admitted to being financially supported by several organic dairy companies in comments they posted to an organic dairy industry-sponsored O’Dairy online newsletter, stating:
“We have received financial support from somewhere around 10 different organic dairy organizations but all these donations total only about 10% of our budget combined. The majority of our funding comes from foundations and individual contributors, mostly farmers. We’re proud to have received contributions from farmers shipping to all the major organic dairy processors…”
As I frequently repeat here and every other time this false allegation is raised (which I guess would be defamatory - Attorney Garvey, perhaps we should talk?), CGFI is a project of the non-profit Hudson Institute. All of our money - and I can tell you our very small budget pales in comparison to those of the activist groups attacking us - comes from Hudson in the form of unrestricted grants. Publicly available tax returns and annual reports show that Hudson’s financial support comes from a wide range of philanthropic foundations and other donors. Many of the foundations supporting Hudson’s various efforts - including our work at CGFI - are the same foundations supporting agricultural research at America’s colleges and universities, funding food pantries, child nutrition advocacy and sustainable farming programs. Are all these groups tainted, or just those who disagree with the organic-only zealots like Cornucopia and those who profit from their activities like Organic Valley?
Cornucopia’s law firm Garvey & Stoddard apparently also works in the realm of food scares and organic black marketing. Last year they helped sponsor a conference on Food Law in the 21st Century with such noted food fear activists as Organic Consumers Association’s Ronnie Cummins; Mad Cow USA author John Stauber, and Center for Food Safety’s Doug Gurian-Sherman. Garvey & Stoddard’s lead partner and the author of the warning letter sent to CGFI Ed Garvey is the publisher of “Fighting Bob.com” which had CGFI on their radar screen long before Cornucopia came on ours. Among the dozen or so articles attacking conventional agriculture and promoting organic found at Fight Bob, they published a Cornucopia authored attack on the Center for Global Food Issues‘ (CGFI) public education campaigns last December asserting we were corporate shills. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Garvey & Stoddard’s related commercial activities include counseling activist groups on dairy coop legislative lobbying, legal counsel to the local environmental action league, and serving as legal committee chair for the local Sierra Club - a group which is suing dairy farmers. So, I guess we’re going to be in the same mix of victims like family dairy farmers and ranchers being chased off the land by activists and zealots who oppose safe, higher-yielding and sustainable food production.
Sixty years ago Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a call for “a second bill or rights” among which he called for “the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.” Whether conventional or organic, dairy producers do deserve the right to use whatever legal tools and practices are available to them to economically and responsibly produce safe, affordable milk. Cornucopia’s attacks on traditional and organic producers who don’t meet their standards - standards which benefit their financial sponsors - deny farmers a simple right and freedom to farm in a manner that can sustain their family while sustaining food production to meet today’s demands. I’m happy to stand with farmers, traditional or organic, who are under attack by Cornucopia, Organic Valley and their lawyers.