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The United States and the European Union are secretly negotiating a trade deal that could make it easier for the world’s biggest water companies to privatize our public water systems. The Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) — officially called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — could allow EU corporations to take over local government services like water and sewer systems in the United States. Privatized water systems — including notable takeovers by European water companies — generally deliver worse service at higher prices.

Roundup, an herbicide produced by Monsanto that contains the active ingredient glyphosate, has been vigorously applied to crops for years. Most genetically modified (GM) crops are designed to be tolerant of specially tailored herbicides. Farmers can spray the herbicide on their fields, killing the weeds without harming the GM crops. With the development of Roundup Ready crops, the application intensity of Roundup has only increased.

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Despite the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) approval of many genetically modified (GM) foods, questions persist about the safety of eating these foods or using them for animal feed. These safety concerns should result in a halt to all sales of genetically engineered foods until these safety concerns are addressed. At the very least, consumers in the United States should have the right to know if the foods they are buying and eating have been genetically engineered, as they do in Europe.

GM crops are modified by transferring genetic material from one organism to another to create specific traits, such as resistance to treatment with herbicides or to make a plant produce its own pesticide to repel insects. As of now, most GM food crops are genetically engineered to produce a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that repels insects, or to allow the crop to withstand treatment with an herbicide, such as glyphosate (often sold as Roundup).

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When it comes to labeling genetically modified (GM) foods, the United States lags behind nearly 50 developed nations, including all European Union member states, Australia, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The European Union requires all food, animal feeds and processed products with biotech content to bear GM labels. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not require the labeling of GM food products because the agency’s policy is that GM foods are not different from conventional foods. While many manufacturers voluntarily label foods that do not contain GM ingredients (known as “absence labeling”), almost no companies voluntarily label their foods to affirm the use of GM ingredients.

Right now, if farmers, food companies, retailers or consumers are harmed by contamination or loss of their markets, it is virtually impossible for them to recover from these damages.

Neither the U.S. federal govern-ment nor EU authorities have dealt with this burden, even as the USDA continues to approve a steady stream of new GM crops for cultivation.

Regulating authorities must address the issue of liability for contamination by GM crops and require that the costs of GM contamina- tion be borne by the biotech companies that created the technology and hold the patents on these seeds.

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The biotechnology industry is aggressively promoting the environmental sustainability of genetically modified (GM) crops. The industry claims that GM crops can reduce herbicide use, increase yields to feed a hungry planet, and develop new crops that are adapted to climate change.

Monsanto advertises that biotech crops can feed the world “from a raindrop,” suggesting that GM crops are especially climate change resistant. But this greenwashing doesn’t change the reality of “agribusiness as usual:” using GM crops along with more agrochemicals, more fossil fuels and more intensive agricultural production.