Have you seen the ads on TV? The little girl skipping through vineyards and orchards, only to be vaporized by the presence of bugs? The HungryPests.com campaign is one of the most ghoulish efforts I have ever seen made by the USDA/CDFA to frighten people and hide the truth about the health of our ecology in California.

The truth is, the little girl won’t be hurt by a light brown apple moth, a gypsy moth, a glassy winged sharp shooter. She won’t be devoured by lady bugs or butterflies. But, she just may develop an autoimmune disease, Autism or cancer from walking in orchards and vineyards, parks or forests that the California Department of Food and Agriculture has flooded with endocrine-disrupting, carcinogenic herbicides and pesticides. With the exception of a very sick mosquito or tick, little bugs don’t kill little children – just think of the millennia during which Native American children played across the fields, beaches and woods of California, learning to love all of the diverse insects present here, and certainly not being killed by them.

What’s Really Happening In California?

The narration of this ghastly ad campaign warns that “California’s environment and agriculture are under attack,” and truer words were never spoken. Since the end of World War II, when the toxic leftovers of the war were put to use in agriculture as a money-making scheme, California’s air, water, soil, plants and inhabitants have been under attack by the deadly pesticides, herbicides and fungicides being sprayed daily by state and federal agencies and conventional farmers across the state. The honeybees, bats, frogs, oysters, fish, birds and butterflies are being shoved toward extinction and the human beings are losing their health and their lives because state and federal agencies turned the need to get rid of leftover toxins from the Second World War into a full-time job, an industry and a tremendous way to make vast sums of money.

And now, our state economy has collapsed. Our DMV and post offices may have to be closed several days a week. The governor has threatened to close 80% of our state parks. Funding for all kinds of human-interest programs has been taken away. Unemployment is skyrocketing while foreclosures dot the land with empty houses. And the California Department of Food and Agriculture is scared. Scared of losing their jobs because they cannot prove that they are essential to California’s bureaucratic structure.

Just recently, I watched Senator Dean Florez grilling CDFA reps at a hearing in which CDFA was being asked to justify the millions of dollars they wish to be given to continue their scandalous Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) program – a program which has been condemned by scientists, doctors, local government leaders and the public as unnecessary, unsafe and unwanted. California has no money, and it was very interesting watching the CDFA reps grasping for those dollars, attempting to use their well-documented scare tactics which insinuate that California will be devoured by insects unless we all pay into the pockets of this agency.

What’s really happening in California is that state and federal agencies have pushed their chemical-based control programs to the limit, killing off the healthy, natural balances and checks that keep eco-systems diverse and well. They now want to be given more money to use more herbicides and pesticides to ‘fix’ the situation and they are low enough to show a little girl being demolished in order to make a grab for the money. These agencies are immoral. Their 2007 aerial spraying of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties put children in the hospital and killed thousands of sea birds, honey bees, wild birds and domestic animals. Those counties awoke after the night of the spraying to a world devoid of bird song. This is the truth about CDFA/USDA’s methods of ‘managing’ agriculture and the natural world and they do not deserve money, trust or respect.

The USDA Uses Social Media To Get Their Dark Message Out There

Social media is a form of marketing that encompasses blogging, video distribution and the use of platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. It can be used to promote good and worthy causes and it can be used to influence the public for ill. The HungryPests campaign has launched a blog at hungrypests.com (no link from me, but go see it) and they are posting their manipulative videos here on YouTube. The purpose of social media is to create buzz and draw public comment. The USDA/CDFA has just put their message out there. Please, go right ahead and start leaving your comments and let these unwanted agencies know what you think about organizations that use images of children disintegrating in order to scare people and make money. Tell them exactly what you think about that. That’s what social media is for.

And, should you attempt to post comments that mysteriously disappear, please, copy those comments into a document on your computer and feel free to paste them in here in the comments field on this blog post. We will gladly publish them.

VeganReader has been covering the CDFA’s LBAM program for over a year now, and in that time, I have heard from the people, the doctors and scientists who have been harmed and scandalized by the practices and tactics of this agency. If you’ve not been following the LBAM disaster, this post will serve as your crash course, and it is an accurate representation not only of the course of the Light Brown Apple Moth campaign, but all of CDFA’s ‘eradication’ programs. The bottom line is the the USDA/CDFA want to continue drowning the state and the nation in deadly herbicides and pesticides and simply will not make the vital change over to organic farming and forestry practices that create a strong and healthy environment with the power to balance itself.

Here is our planet, beginning to feel the effects of global warming while our children drop one by one into chemically-induced states of mental and physical illness, our honeybees which are responsible for nearly all of the food we eat are being exterminated and our water is so polluted, it is unfit for human consumption. Here we are with incredible numbers of human beings experiencing such reproductive dysfunction that they end up in doctors offices trying to figure out why they are unable to fulfill biological functions. Here we are with our mothers, sisters, aunts and daughters dying of cancer and our uncles, brothers, fathers and sons going to prison because of random acts of psychotic and possibly chemically-induced violence. Here we are with our markets purveying genetically modified substances that are no longer food and which the government will not label in case people wouldn’t buy them. Here we are with corporations owning our government and our nation’s first people dying in poverty on reservations hidden behind our national monuments.

Yes, there is all kinds of terrible, bad stuff happening right now in America. The last thing we need to add to this is further funding from our empty pockets for state and federal agencies who think that deadly chemicals are such a wonderful idea that they have sprayed them directly onto human beings, up and down the state and across the nation, under the guise of ‘invasive’ insect eradication. We don’t accept this. We don’t support this and we will not be fooled into thinking that our current economic or ecological peril has been brought about by butterflies!

We know that pesticides kill. We know that like suicide, regicide, homicide and genocide, words ending with ‘cide’ mean a dreadful death. We reject substances that cause death to insects, death to birds, to fish, to animals and people and we reject this wicked TV ad campaign, designed to brainwash the public by means of fearmongering and deception.

If you, too, reject the tactics and practices of the USDA and CDFA, please comment here and on their hungrypests.com blog and YouTube videos. By putting their message out there, these agencies are now open for your comments. What do you have to say about the HungryPests campaign?