President Obama’s nominee for the Chief Agricultural Negotiator in the office of the US Trade Representative, Islam Siddiqui is currently a vice president at CropLife America, a coalition of the major industrial players in the pesticide industry, including Syngenta, Monsanto, and Dow Chemical.

What can you do? Sign of petition of course. Various organizations are opposing this nomination. Take action at pesticide Action Network to oppose Siddiqui's nomination.

Siddiqui’s record and statements, quote, "show his clear bias in favor of chemical-intensive and unproven biotechnology practices that imperil both our planet and human health while undermining food security and exacerbating climate change.”

Read more about this important issue and the possible consequences at American's only independent new source. The primary reason for opposing this nomination is "Putting a pesticide pusher in charge of US agriculture, particularly in the Trade office, is bad government."

the basis of the administration’s agriculture policy is a commitment to a fundamentally flawed industrial model of agriculture that is chemically intensive, energy and water intensive, and that is not the solution for the kinds of changes that the planet and US farmers, in particular, are facing in the coming years and decades with climate change, water scarcity and this rapidly diminishing supply of fossil fuels. What we really need to be doing is getting off the pesticide GMO treadmill and moving as quickly as possible on to the right kind of agroecologically based farming that history and science now tells us is really the most robust way forward.

The rest of the world does not want our GMOs. They have made that clear. Trying to push them forward, in the face of history, in the face of science, is not the best solution.

This isn't change I can believe in. It isn't a change from business as usual per the previous administration.