Why Organic Consumers Association Is Joining the April 5th Protests

If you’re familiar with the Organic Consumers Association, you know we’re equal opportunity opponents of any form of corporate interference in politics or policy. Since our start in the late 1990s, we have protested Democrats and Republicans alike, with literally every change of Congress and the Presidency. Remarkably, the issues remain the same. We stand for health, justice, democracy, peace, and regenerative organic food and farming. And, the corporations consistently infiltrate the government to make us sick, take away our rights to make them obey the law, steal elections, keep us in endless wars for their power and profit, and force-feed us factory farmed Frankenfoods. 

On April 5, 2025, we’ll be joining the Hands Off coalition to protest President Trump and the self-appointed, unelected billionaire dictator Elon Musk.

Why? Here are a few reasons…

Trump, Bribery, Avocados and Deforestation

Illegal logging is one the world’s most lucrative environmental crimes, producing as much as 30 percent of all timber traded globally and worth up to $152 billion annually. At this scale, where timber thieves can’t easily cloak their operations in stealth, the enterprise relies on bribery, corruption, and money laundering. These are forbidden under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which puts the responsibility on regulated corporations to keep their supply chains clean. 

The FCPA could put a big dent in illegal logging, but on February 10, 2025, President Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to stop enforcing the law–bad news for the Organic Consumers Association’s campaign to stop deforestation in Mexico.

Mexico’s most fragile forests are being invaded, burned by arsonists, and illegally logged–all to serve our insatiable appetite for guacamole. Avocado plantations are driving deforestation in Mexico, especially in Michuacán and Jalisco where the drug cartels have cut themselves in on the “green gold” rush. Not even the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve is safe. Deforestation is expected to double by 2050 if the region’s avocado plantations continue to expand. U.S. companies like Fresh Del Monte Produce are cashing in while turning a blind eye to the devastation caused by the avocado boom.

Climate Rights International broke this story in its 2023 report, “Unholy Guacamole: Deforestation, Water Capture, and Violence Behind Mexico’s Avocado Exports to the U.S.. Since then, CRI’s efforts, aided by lawsuits we brought with Richman Law & Policy against the avocado importers, have resulted in three major companies making commitments to stop deforestation. On February 7, 2025, Calavo Growers, Mission Produce, and West Pak Avocado pledged not to buy avocados grown on recently cleared land. (Del Monte hasn’t budged and continues to defend itself against OCA’s legal action.)

This promising development is only as good as the enforcement of the companies’ deforestation-free pledge–and that’s where the problem of bribery comes in.

When CRI first launched its Unholy Guacamole campaign, the hope was that the Biden Administration would help with enforcement. Biden’s Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar publicly stated that avocados grown in illegally cleared orchards should be blocked from the market in February 2024, but the administration didn’t release a policy framework on how to do this (for all agricultural imports) until December when it was clear that the framework was heading straight for Trump’s shredder.

Without a U.S. partner, enforcement responsibilities fall on Michoacán Governor Alfredo Ramirez Bedolla’s “Pro-Forest Avocado” program. Will the avocado companies try to bribe their way into compliance? We don’t have any evidence that the governor is corrupt, but we can’t be so sure about the avocado companies–one of them, at least.

Calavo disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice on January 31, 2024, that its operations in Mexico raised potential issues under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a delicate way of admitting that it’s been bribing Mexican officials. In April 2024, the company volunteered that it had spent $5 million over six months investigating itself for FCPA violations, in anticipation of potential actions that could be taken against it by the SEC, the Department of Justice, or Mexican authorities.

With these uncertainties, it’s best to buy certified organic and fair trade avocados. Equal Exchange maintains safeguards and auditing to keep deforestation out of its supply change.

A likelihood of continued deforestation is just one impact of Trump refusing to enforce one law. Trump probably didn’t even mean to give Calavo this “Get Out of Jail Free” card. To our knowledge, no one at Calavo poured money into Trump’s political action committees or had friends in the Cabinet to do favors for them. As far as we can tell, Calavo just got lucky.

Others are getting special favors.

Based on Rick Claypool’s March 4, 2025, report for Public Citizen, “Corporate Clemency: How Trump Is Halting Enforcement Against Corporate Lawbreakers,” it appears that the intended beneficiary of Trump’s decision to give businesses engaged in bribery a break was Pfizer.

Pfizer is a repeat violator of the FCPA. In 2012, when it paid $60 million in fines for engaging in bribery in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Serbia, it was “permanently enjoined from further violations of the FCPA.”

And yet, Pfizer is back under FCPA scrutiny, this time for misconduct in Mexico and China.

Pfizer has embedded itself within the Trump Administration.

During the last two years of the first Trump Presidency, 2019-2020, one of the people lobbying Pfizer for Trump was Jeff Miller. Then, after the 2024 election, he became the finance chair of Trump’s inaugural committee, to which Pfizer donated $1 million.

During the 2024 election year, one of the lawyers representing Pfizer was Pam Bondi at the law firm Panza, Mauer & Maynard. Then, Bondi became Trump’s attorney general, responsible for deciding whether and how to pursue current FCPA investigations.

And, it’s not just the FCPA.

Trump has also frozen the enforcement actions of the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division, including its case against a DuPont neoprene plant that’s been poisoning a Black neighborhood in Louisiana with chloroprene since the 1930s. (It’s now owned by the Japanese company Denka.)

Even in this part of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, a corridor of petrochemical plants that make it the nation’s top hotspot for toxic air pollution, the DuPont-Denka neoprene plant stands out. The neighborhood it sits on top of has the highest risk of cancer in the nation and people who live within 1.5 km of the plant have even higher cancer rates than those who are 2.5 km from it. On a single day, they can breathe in more chloroprene than they should be exposed to in a lifetime.

One of the most important cases in the nation against toxic pollution and environmental racism, this case Trump is dropping could have brought justice to a company that has known since the 1940s that it exposes its employees and neighbors to a deadly gas on a daily basis. A 1941 DuPont memo, not given to the EPA until 1992, revealed the company knew chloroprene was deadly at high doses, based on tests it did on dogs and guinea pigs. To DuPont, its workers were guinea pigs, too. It first published a study on chloroprene causing cancer in its workers in 1978. The author of “Mortality of workers exposed to chloroprene” was Sydney Pell, Ph.D., who spent 30 years at the grim work of tracking the deaths of DuPont employees, as head of its in-house Medical Division’s epidemiology section.

That Trump is letting this diabolically criminal company off the hook now is just unconscionable.

Trump’s second go at the presidency may have been rebranded “Make America Healthy Again,” but he’s letting DuPont call the shots on toxins, just like he did the first time. After the 2016 election, Dow gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. That money greased the skids for Dow’s $130 billion merger with DuPont, overriding objections that monopolies like that violate antitrust laws.

Dow-DuPont ruled the Environmental Protection Agency in Trump’s first term. One of its coups was reversing President Obama’s ban on chlorpyrifos (Lorsban), an insecticide linked to learning and behaviour problems in children. In 2024, Dow-DuPont split into three monopolies, one for ethylene, propylene and silicones (Dow), one for agricultural chemicals (Corteva), and one for synthetic materials and, ironically, water filtration (DuPont). DuPont is infamous for its PFAS fire-retardant and non-stick chemicals. The reorganizations it has been through, starting with its Chemours spin-off in 2015, were largely a shell game designed to manage its multibillion-dollar liability for the health harms of these “forever” chemicals, but DuPont continues to use PFAS compounds.

The DuPont veteran who’s returned for a second run at Trump “new” EPA is Lynn Dekleva, who worked for DuPont for 32 years, and then the American Chemistry Council, a trade group that lobbies for DuPont and the chemicals industry. She’s now deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, a role that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. The New York Times reported that her mandate is to “abolish a program under which the agency assesses the risks of chemicals to human health.”

Calavo, Pfizer, and DuPont are just three of hundreds of companies Trump is letting run amok. 

Public Citizen’s Corporate Enforcement Tracker includes nearly 500 cases against more than 420 corporations running afoul of the law. As of March 27, 2025, the Trump Administration has halted, dropped, or withdrawn 106 of these cases, including all of the cases of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Public Citizen had to go to court to preserve the CFPB as an institution after Trump tried to end it altogether.) Trump has also blocked cases and investigations at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board. (Suspiciously, as Public Citizen’s Rick Claypool reports, this is benefitting Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Sundar Pichai’s Alphabet (Google/Verily), Tim Cook’s Apple, Shou Zi Chew’s TikTok, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Dara Khosrowshahi’s Uber, and Elon Musk’s Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, and xAI.)

Our federal law enforcement agencies are essential to preserving our collective power to stand up for the employees, customers, and investors of these corporations, as well our health and the environment. We must hold them accountable when they break the law. Trump’s unconstitutional attack on the rule of law in this arena is aimed at subverting our democratic institutions to put us at the mercy of the corporations.

With Trump’s approval rate split 50-50, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing the country is divided along party lines, but there’s one thing we can all agree on: corporate power is one of the biggest problems facing America. In a poll of swing-state voters taken right before the election in 2024, 68 percent of voters agreed, including 54 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of Independents, and 80 percent of Democrats.

The other thing that unites us is our economic situation. There are 341 million of us with an average yearly income of $61,000. There are only 813 billionaires, but Trump has sixteen of them running his government. They don’t represent us, the 99.9999 percent.

On Saturday, April 5, we’ll be rallying, as we’ve always done, to defend justice, health, democracy, peace, and regenerative organic food and farming, against the continued corporate assault. Please join us!

Visit Public Citizen’s Hands Off! coalition website to find a rally near you.