Monsanto knew from the very first that this chemical was bad news, but went ahead anyway. Problem is that the agribusiness has completely converted to its usage. As i have posted, i suspect this is the direct cause of the global amphibian die off and the decline in male fertility.
We chose then to never use it. This was back in 1965.
That is almost three generations of farmers who now need to give it all up. This is difficult.
We are converting to a complete organic agribusiness or at least we are well begun. All subsidies need to be shifted in that direction. It will still take three generations to complete. At least the toxins will slowly leach away.
The original thinking was around using this stuff to process soil once at most to clean it up and perhaps several years later. That still does not work if you are turning the soil as plenty of dormant seeds are in the soil stack.
Glyphosate Worse than We Could Imagine. “It’s Everywhere”
Glyphosate residues have been found in tap water, orange juice, children’s urine, breast milk, chips, snacks, beer, wine, cereals, eggs, oatmeal, wheat products, and most conventional foods tested. It’s everywhere, in brief.
As new studies continue to point to a direct
link between the widely-used glyphosate herbicide and various forms of
cancer, the agribusiness lobby fights ferociously to ignore or discredit
evidence of human and other damage. A second US court jury case just
ruled that Monsanto, now a part of the German Bayer AG, must pay $ 81
million in damages to plaintiff Edwin Hardeman who contracted
non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. The ruling and a line-up of another
11,000 pending cases in US courts going after the effects of glyphosate,
have hit Bayer AG hard with the company announcing several thousand
layoffs as its stock price plunges.
In a trial in San Francisco the jury was unanimous
in their verdict that Monsanto Roundup weed-killer, based on
glyphosate, had been responsible for Hardeman’s cancer. His attorneys
stated,
“It is clear from Monsanto’s actions that it does not care whether Roundup causes cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concerns about Roundup.”
It is the second defeat for the lawyers of
Monsanto after another jury ruled in 2018 that Glyphosate-based Roundup
was responsible for the cancer illness of a California school
grounds-keeper who contracted the same form of cancer after daily
spraying school grounds with Roundup over years, unprotected. There a
jury found Monsanto guilty of “malice and oppression” in that company
executives, based on internal email discovery, knew that their
glyphosate products could cause cancer and suppressed this information
from the public.
A new independent study shows that those with
highest exposure to glyphosate have a 41% increased risk of developing
non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) cancer. A meta-analysis of six studies
containing nearly 65,000 participants looked at links between
glyphosate-based herbicides and immune-suppression, endocrine disruption
and genetic alterations. The authors found “the same key finding:
exposure to GBHs (glyphosate-based herbicides) are associated with an
increased risk of NHL (Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma).” Further, they stated
that glyphosate “alters the gut microbiome,” and that that could “impact
the immune system, promote chronic inflammation, and contribute to the
susceptibility of invading pathogens.” Glyphosate also ”may act as an
endocrine disrupting chemical because it has been found recently to
alter sex hormone production” in both male and female rats.
In a long-term animal study by French scientists
under Gilles Eric Seralini, Michael Antoniou and associates, it was
demonstrated that even ultra-low levels of glyphosate herbicides cause
non-alcoholic liver disease. The levels the rats were exposed to, per kg
of body weight, were far lower than what is allowed in our food supply.
According to the Mayo Clinic, today, after four decades or more
pervasive use of glyphosate pesticides, 100 million, or 1 out of 3
Americans now have liver disease. These diagnoses are in some as young
as 8 years old.
But glyphosate is not only having alarming effects
on human health. Soil scientists are beginning to realize the residues
of glyphosate application are also having a possibly dramatic effect on
soil health and nutrition, effects that can take years to restore.
Killing Soils too
While most attention is understandably drawn to
the human effects of exposure to glyphosate, the most widely used
agriculture chemical in the world today, independent scientists are
beginning to look at another alarming effect of the agrochemical– its
effect on essential soil nutrients. In a study of the health of soils in
the EU, the online journal Politico.eu found that the effects of
spraying of glyphosate on the major crops in European agriculture is
having disastrous consequences on soil health in addition to killing
weeds.
Scientists at Austria’s University of Natural
Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna showed that casting activity of
earthworms had nearly disappeared from the surface of farmland within
three weeks of glyphosate application. Casting is the process of the
worm pushing fertile soils to the surface as they burrow, essential for
healthy soil and plant nutrition. A study at Holland’s Wageningen
University of topsoil samples from more than 300 soil sites across the
EU found that 83% of the soils contained 1 or more pesticide residues.
Not surprisingly,
“Glyphosate and its metabolite AMPA, DDTs (DDT and its metabolites) and broad-spectrum fungicides… were the compounds most frequently found in soil samples and at the highest concentrations.”
The use of various pesticides, above all
glyphosate-based ones like Roundup, has exploded over the past four
decades across the EU much as across the USA. The agribusiness industry
claims that this has been the key to the dramatic rise in farm crop
productivity. However if we look more closely at the data, while average
yields of major grains such as rice, wheat and maize have more than
doubled since 1960, the use of pesticides like glyphosate-based ones has
risen by 15-20-fold. Oddly enough, while the EU requires monitoring of
many things, monitoring of pesticide residues in soil is not required at the EU level. Until recently the effects of heavy use of pesticides such as Roundup have been ignored in scientific research.
Evidence of soil experts is beginning to reveal
clear links between use of pesticides such as glyphosate and dramatic
drops in soil fertility and the collapse of microbe systems essential to
healthy soil. Worms are one of the most essential.
It’s well-established that earthworms play a vital
role in healthy soil nutrients. Soils lacking such are soils that
deprive us of the essentials we need for healthy diets, a pandemic
problem of soil depletion emerging globally over the past four decades,
notably the same time frame that use of pesticides has exploded
worldwide. Earthworms are beneficial as they enhance soil nutrient
cycling and enhance other beneficial soil micro-organisms, and the
concentration of large quantities of nutrients easily assimilable by plants.
The EU puts no limits on how much glyphosate can
be put on crops even though it is established that glyphosate can kill
specific fungi and bacteria that plants need to suck up nutrients in
addition to its effects on earthworms. That is a major blind spot.
Where now?
What is becoming clearer is the colossal and
obviously deliberate official blind eye given to potential dangers of
glyphosate-based pesticides by regulatory bodies not only in the EU and
the USA, but also in China, which today produces more glyphosate than
even Monsanto. Since the Monsanto Roundup patent expired,
Chinese companies, including Syngenta, Zhejiang Xinan Chemical
Industrial Group Company, SinoHarvest, and Anhui Huaxing Chemical
Industry Company, have emerged as the world’s major producers of the
chemical as well as largest consumers, a not good omen for the future of the legendary Chinese cuisine.
Glyphosate is the base chemical component for some
750 different brands of pesticides worldwide, in addition to
Monsanto-Bayer’s Roundup. Glyphosate residues have been found in
tap water, orange juice, children’s urine, breast milk, chips, snacks,
beer, wine, cereals, eggs, oatmeal, wheat products, and most
conventional foods tested. It’s everywhere, in brief.3
Despite the overwhelming evidence, however, EU
Commission bureaucrats and the USA EPA continue to ignore prudence in
not banning the toxic chemical pending thorough independent
investigation over longer time. If I were cynical, I would almost think
this continued official support for glyphosate-based herbicides is about
more than mere bureaucratic stupidity or ignorance, even more than
simply corruption, though that for sure plays a role. The nutritional
quality of our food chain is being systematically destroyed and it is
about more than corporate agribusiness profit.
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