NEWSBYWENONAH HAUTER

This is a guest post from Wenonah Hauter, the Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. If you would like to join the non-profit's campaign for fair farm rules, sign the petition here.

President Obama made a promise back when he campaigned in farm states. He needs to keep it.

The President told farmers that his administration would help fix the rules that allow the meat industry to take advantage of the people who raise the animals Americans eat. But, under pressure from Big Meat, the Obama Administration has failed to implement the fair farm rules (also known as GIPSA rules, named for the branch of the USDA that would oversee the rules, the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration).

Fair farm rules and GIPSA might sound wonky, but implementing them is crucial to leveling the playing field for farmers. As is often the case, the devil is in the details. If we want to move towards a more sustainable and regional food system, we need a fair market. We need to start fixing the nuts and bolts of what keeps farmers from being able to fairly market their products. And consolidation of the food industry is one of the major factors in why our food system is dysfunctional.

Wenonah Hauter is Executive Director of Food & Water Watch

Energy industry executives and even some environmentalists are touting natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to our sustainable energy future. But hydrofracking, or fracking—the risky technology that has made once inaccessible deposits of natural gas accessible—puts our drinking water, local communities, and the environment at risk. Fracking is anything but sustainable, which is why we’re calling for a national ban.

The drilling technique involves injecting millions of gallons of fracking fluids — a mixture of nearly 600 chemicals, water and sand — into a gas well to create pressure that cracks open rocks underground, releasing natural gas.

The Marcellus Shale, which includes parts of Pennsylvania, New York, is a huge target for gas companies. But, unlike the gas sources energy companies have been extracting for years, the methane gas found in shale formations is, at best, difficult and risky to extract — even with Halliburton’s now well-known extraction methods. Conducting this business comes at a cost to public health and the environment due to the use of these dangerous chemicals.

Wenonah Hauter is the executive director of the national consumer organization Food & Water Watch.

Right now, almost 90 days into the spill that devastated the Gulf of Mexico, BP Atlantis—the largest oil and natural gas platform in the world—remains in operation.

BP Atlantis isn’t just any offshore facility. Located 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana and drilling at a depth of 7,000 feet, the BP Atlantis is the largest oil and natural gas platform in the world.

And, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Last year, Food & Water Watch learned from a whistleblower that BP lacked proper up-to-date and engineer-approved safety documentation for Atlantis—a situation that could cause “catastrophic Operator error,” according to one manager at BP.

In other words, in the case of an emergency like the one that befell the Deepwater Horizon before it exploded, workers on the production facility would be without the proper operating manuals—or road maps of how components of the facility actually worked—to prevent the emergency from escalating to disaster-like proportions.

We began informing policy makers and regulators about the situation on Atlan