coop

BC Crushes Local Food Community

The past few days have been very disturbing, with a judge who is obviously in the pocket of the Milk Industry, refusing to even enter into a discourse about the situation of our local Community Supported Dairy. At the end of the trial he ordered our local Agister, Alice to stop milking our cows (poor cows) and she has been forced to resign as our Agister.

From Chilliwack Times:

Ontario dairy farmer Michel Schmidt has taken over Chilliwack’s Home on the Range raw milk dairy so the flow of milk can continue to hundreds of members of the co-operative.

Fraser Health has been trying to shut down Home on the Range for more than two years and on Tuesday succeeded in forcing the cowshare operator Alice Jongerden to officially resign as part of a court-ordered condition.

In a press release issued by Jongerden Friday morning, Schmidt says “We have reached the level of a new and powerful dictatorship called bureaucracy in the name of food safety, and in the favour of multinational corporations.”

The point that Michael Schmidt makes here is key. This isn’t really about health or food safety (Maple Leaf foods would have been shut down for causing 20 deaths if that was the case). It is about the monopoly that the milk industry wishes to maintain – as usual it is about greed.