Worldlog week 49 – 2013

A great breakthrough! The big fashion chains H&M, C&A and WE have indicated last week to (temporarily) stop the production of angora wool. People have protested en masse this week by sending a protest mail via our website among other things. In this email we called fashion chains to stop the sale of angora products. Within 24 hours of the start of the action, already 5,000 mails were sent to the customer service of the big international chains. It is still unclear if the fashion houses are also going to stop selling angora wool products. At H&M you are allowed to return the clothing. To be continued.

With the email action we want to tackle the enormous animal suffering accompanying the production of angora wool. Last week, I already said in my Worldlog that animal welfare organisation PETA revealed some shocking undercover pictures of the angora wool production in China. 90 per cent of the world supply of angora wool is from China, thus, most of the clothing in which angora wool is processed comes from these Chinese, very animal-unfriendly, farms.

News from a completely different domain: Twelve great candidate lists have been approved for the municipal elections on the congress of the Party for the Animals on Sunday 24 November. I am proud that our party will participate in 12 municipalities. It was again a great inspiring congress. It was wonderful to be with so many like-minded people!

Last week was a week of breakthroughs. Because also in the field of agricultural pesticide, a majority of the Lower House members backed up our proposal to start protecting people who live close by agriculturists who intensively use poison. Agriculturists who use the very dangerous soil disinfectant Metam-natrium must stop using it. My colleague Esther Ouwehand will also urge the Lower House to hold a debate early 2014 on the effects of poison use on the people living in the neighbourhood of bulb fields.

Metam-natrium is a highly controversial pesticide that is used for the cultivation of lilies among others. The pesticide presents great dangers for the environment. Animals get poisoned by it and humans can suffer serious health problems from it, such as lung oedema, if they are exposed to the evaporation of pesticide. That’s why Metam-natrium was already destined to be banned by the Dutch government in 1991, as soon as possible but no later than 2000. That didn’t happen. A European ban is in place since 2010, but that’s not observed in the Netherlands either. Dutch governments systematically grant exemptions from use of the poison.

Unbelievable but true: The Netherlands is to start a dairy promotion centre in China while 90 percent of the Chinese become ill from dairy. Most Chinese are in fact lactose intolerant. Apart from that, milk is also a highly environmental damaging product, for which a promotion centre should certainly not be incorporated.

The Guardian reported last week that Al Gore is turning into a veganist! Did he watch our documentary Meat the Truth? 😉

Until next week!

Marianne