U.S. consumers want and need country-of-origin labels on food. Recent food-poisoning scandals, linked to contaminated pet, pork and poultry food ingredients from China, along with tainted produce and seafood, have taken away many Americans' appetites for cheap imported foods.

Although polls indicate that the overwhelming majority — 82 percent — of Americans want to know where our food is coming from, Big Food and Washington bureaucrats have united to deny us this right.

Lobbyists for corporate agribusiness such as the American Farm Bureau; giant food manufacturers such as Cargill, Smithfield and Con-Agra; and supermarket chains have handed over millions of dollars to an industry-indentured Congress to keep us in the dark about the country of origin of the hundreds of billions of dollars of foods we buy every year in supermarkets or consume in restaurants.

Shocked by media reports that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspects only 1 percent of all imported food shipments, increasing numbers of health-minded consumers have complained to their elected public officials. They are demanding that the government increase food-safety inspections — which unfortunately have been reduced by almost 50 percent under the Bush administration — and require mandatory country-of-origin labels for foods.

With the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitting that Americans suffer from more than 78 million cases of food poisoning every year, resulting in 5,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations, food safety and lax government regulation have become an important issue for many consumers.

Compounding growing food safety concerns, the public is becoming aware of the fact that greenhouse gas pollution, in large part derived from coal plants, automobiles, trucks, energy-intensive industrial agriculture and long-distance food transport, are disrupting our climate with likely dire consequences, some of which are already becoming evident.

The average food item in a U.S. supermarket today has traveled 1,500 to 3,500 miles from farm to store, with sales of imported food doubling over the past decade.

Meanwhile, thousands of North American family farmers are being forced off the land every month, mainly because giant retailers and manufacturers find it more lucrative to buy food products from overseas producers such as China, where environmental and labor exploitation are the norm, and where farmers are lucky to make a dollar a day.

Given all of these considerations, it's no wonder that millions of Americans are turning to safer, less energy-intensive, local and U.S.-produced organic food for their families, and now for their pets as well.

Europe and most industrialized nations require mandatory country-of-origin labels on food. Reacting to the longstanding concerns of their constituents, reflected in polls indicating that 80 percent of Americans want country-of-origin food labels, Congress finally incorporated such labels into the 2002 Farm Bill, supposedly to go into effect in September 2004.

Unfortunately, corporate agribusiness and supermarket chains bribed an ethically impaired Congress with millions of dollars in campaign contributions to block implementation of the labels.

As a result, Americans continue to buy billions of dollars of imported foods every year — often without even knowing it. To safeguard public health and environmental sustainability, and to save North American family farms, we need to restore our basic right to know where our food is coming from.

To do this, we must be willing to raise our voices, both in the marketplace and in the political arena. We must demand that Congress respect the desires of the nation's consumers and require country-of-origin labels for both conventional and organic foods.

At the same time, we need to vote with our pocketbooks for health and sustainability by patronizing those food companies, natural food stores, co-ops, independent grocers and restaurants that are already voluntarily labeling food products according to their country of origin.

Ronnie Cummins is national director of the Organic Consumers Association.