Are you aware of the current pressing threat to your rights to natural foods, herbs and nutritional supplements? Did you know that we stand to lose the right to know which of our foods are irradiated, pesticide-sprayed or Genetically modified? As an issue we are passionate about, we are supporting Join Hands in Health, which is an independent, non profit, voluntary health awareness campaign. Their mission is to guide us back towards a more natural way of living, without depending on pharmaceutical drugs, GM and non-organic foods. Their current goal is to expose the life threatening policies posed by the European Commission, through the ‘Codex Alimentarius’, and to protect the ancient principle that natural foods are meant to feed and heal; they are not a threat, they only accompany us on our journey towards optimum health, and we are at risk of losing the right to use them for good.

Watch the film "we become silent" narated by Dame Judi Dench to find out more.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established in 1963 to develop food standards and guidelines. The main intention behind the Codex was to protect the health of consumers and to ensure that all foods and medicines were fairly traded. In the 90’s, the Codex began to look into creating internationally harmonised standards in the food trade. However, it seems that the obscenely damaging effect of this will be that our access to all vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and most other essential nutrients will be severed. They will do this by re-classifying them all as pharmaceutical drugs, that will eventually only be available by prescription, and will only be manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, from synthetic materials, including genetically engineered substances. These new regulations were expected to come into global fruition on 10th January 2010. Unusually enough, not many people are aware of the Codex Alimentarius, or any of its implications. Interesting seeing as it is such a monumental movement, which is striving to strip us of our freedom, of health and of choice. The powers that be are doing a fine job of covering up their actions, and keeping their movements quiet and the nation unaware. It is of the absolute highest importance that we work as a community to spread the awareness of this attack on our freedom.

Important issues which Codex affects that impact our ability to manage our health naturally:
(this information has been taken directly from the website of the Alliance for Natural Health)

Genetically modified (GM) food

• Driven by GM interests which argue world food requirements cannot be met without global implementation of GM
• Led by USA and Canada; EU may cave to pressure

• GM food plants being given the green light on safety

• Terminator’ seeds could be approved for international trade

• GM food animals are on the way

Organic food

• ‘Dumbing-down’ of organic standards to suit interests of large food producers

• Promotion of large-scale, high-input agriculture and international freight

• Approval of various synthetic chemical additives and ‘processing aids’ in organic foods

• No outright ban on use of irradiation post-production

• Labelling allows use of hidden, non-organic ingredients

Food additives

• Approval as safe around 300 different food additives (mainly synthetic) including aspartame, BHA, BHT, potassium bromate, tartrazine, etc.

• No consideration given to potential risks associated with long-term exposure to mixtures of additives

Pesticide residues

• Allows significant residues of over 3,275 different pesticides, including those that are suspected carcinogens or endocrine disruptors, e.g. 2,4-D, atrazine, methyl bromide

• No account taken of long-term effects of exposure to mixtures of residues in food

Food/dietary supplements

• Setting very low maximum daily doses for supplements using scientifically flawed risk assessment methods

• Effectively establishing international borderline between foods and drugs for nutrients, forcing therapeutic nutrients into drug category

• Requirement for clinical trials to substantiate health claims; too expensive for small companies. Therefore provides passport system for big corporations and acts as obstacle to freedom of speech for smaller ones

• Setting of unnecessarily low Nutrient Reference Values which seriously understate requirements for long-term optimum health for given sub-populations, age groups and genders

Aldous Huxley once said, "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it through brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."

How very true his words are, and how sad that we can say they have become a reality. As a nation, we are strong if we work together. Please sign the ‘Join Hands in Health’ petition and be a part of this movement. These are your rights that are at risk. Don’t wait for the change to happen, be the change. Contribute towards the protection of our rights for natural approaches to healthcare.

Apart from signing this petition, according to the Alliance for Natural Health, the things we can do to influence the situation are put forth below:

What can you do to influence Codex?

The short answer is that it’s extremely difficult to influence Codex. It's even harder if you're in Europe, as European Member States don't just act individually, they are also 'spoken for' by the European Commission which acts on behalf of the EU trading bloc. So even if you get the ear of the bureaucrats within your Member State delegation, this delegation is just one of 27 in the EU that is largely represented by a single European Commission bureaucrat. This is one of the reasons that it’s so important for concerned individuals in the EU to have an aligned view on what the problems are so that maximum influence in relation to the same key issues can be applied both to Member States Governments and the European Commission.

We would go one step further and argue that the difficulty in influencing Codex is likely to be the result of deliberately engineered decision-making process that prevents or at least greatly complicates individuals’ capacity to exert their democratic right.

One of the key requisites in having influence is to ensure that complaints about Codex are both accurate, and can be substantiated.  There are many examples to show that misinformation on Codex has acted as a smoke screen to conceal genuine complaints, and this enables politicians and bureaucrats to have a reason to reject people's concerns. Too often, we’ve had feedback from members of the public telling us that when they have approached their elective representative with their concerns they've been told that their facts are wrong and that they have misunderstood the problems so there is nothing that can, or need, be done.

Bearing this in mind we have the following advice:

1)   Inform yourself about Codex using reliable sources such us documentation available from the official Codex website and our own site. Inaccurate information or disinformation can be more damaging to the cause than no information

2)   Focus on the following issues

• Codex’s support for the global trade of simplified, nutritionally-inadequate, chemically-contaminated and increasingly genetically-modified foods
• Codex’s lack of support or interest in community-based farming and food supply infrastructures which are known to offer high quality foods better adapted to local environments
• The increasing ‘dumbing down’ of organic agricultural principles making them less environmentally sustainable while making them more amenable to large agri-businesses
• Codex's lack of interest in the agricultural self-sufficiency of poorer countries
• Codex’s support for hazardous food technologies such as GMO’s, chemical additives, pesticides and irradiation
• Codex’s desire to limit beneficial and therapeutic nutrients delivered as supplements
• The acceptance of risk analysis principles that are fundamentally defective scientifically when it comes to the consideration of nutrients, and foods with health benefits
• Codex’s attempt to harmonise health claims using excessively onerous criteria to support claims which flies in the face of approaches that support the education of consumers in the field of healthy eating and nutritional supplementation
• Pressure from World Trade Organization (WTO) for countries to harmonise to Codex recommendations, guidelines or standards, or face sanctions which might be sufficient to cripple the economy of smaller countries

3)   Communicate these concerns (above) to as many of your contacts as possible both within, and outside your country

4)   Write to and/or meet with your elected representative and ensure s/he works on your behalf to influence your government

5)   Where possible work to influence representatives from the Codex delegation, their names and addresses being publicly available in the annual reports of individual Codex Committee meetings

6)   Work to influence national laws such as those on GMO’s, food additives, food safety, pesticide residues, organic farming, food supplements and health claims that are likely to influence the development of Codex guidelines and standards.

In essence, some of the most influential laws are derived form the EU, the USA and Canada. This is therefore a call to citizens and food producers and suppliers from these three countries to engage with the law making system to the maximum possible extent in the genuine interest of public health.

For more information on the Codex alimentarius and the other important work of the Alliance for Natural Health, check out their website http://www.anh-europe.org/