This is the
continuing saga of Monsanto et al to optimize their business model which is
coming under increasing challenge and outright rejection by consumers. What bothers me is just how few have been
able to stand up to them. So far it has been on the edges.
What it going to
kill this is surely the biology itself.
The cost structure is already creaking and the absolute need to properly
rejuvenate soils just to sustain fertility is a natural deadline. Super weeds are also signaling failure.
At the same
time, conversion to organic protocols is becoming more clearly understood and
easier to implement. Once begun there is
no going back.
I am disturbed
by the attempt by these multinationals to write their advantage into any trade
agreement. That it infers surrendering
sovereignty to Trans national corporation seems wishful thinking but we must
remain vigilant.
WHY MONSANTO AND
TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP EQUAL GLOBAL FOOD DOMINANCE
“Control oil and you control nations,” said U.S.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. ”Control food and you control
the people.”
Global food control has nearly been achieved, by
reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are
distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been
implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment
and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.
Profits Before
Populations
According to an Acres USA interview of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor
Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically
all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today. One involves
insect resistance.
The other, more disturbing modification involves
insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals).
Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name,
glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to
resist it.
Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most
commonly used herbicides in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to
the GMOs that are the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry.
Glyphosate is a “broad-spectrum” herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not
by killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical
nutrients.
Because of the insidious way in which it works, it
has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier
dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown
glyphosate and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to
health.
Compounding the risk is the toxicity of “inert”
ingredients used to make glyphosate more potent. Researchers have found, for
example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic,
placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently
ignored.
The widespread use of GMO foods and glyphosate
herbicides helps explain the anomaly that the U.S. spends more than twice as much per capita on healthcare as the average developed
country, yet it is rated far down the scale of the world’s healthiest
populations. The World Health Organization has ranked the U.S. last out of 17 developed
nations for overall health.
Sixty to seventy percent of the foods in U.S. supermarkets
are now genetically modified. By contrast, in at least 26 other
countries—including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France,
Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and
Russia—GMOs are totally or partially banned; and significant restrictions on GMOs exist in
about sixty other countries.
A ban on GMO and glyphosate use might go far toward
improving the health of Americans. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global
trade agreement for which the Obama Administration has sought Fast Track
status, would block that sort of cause-focused approach to the healthcare
crisis.
Roundup’s
Insidious Effects
Roundup-resistant crops escape being killed by
glyphosate, but they do not avoid absorbing it into their tissues.
Herbicide-tolerant crops have substantially higher levels of herbicide residues
than other crops. In fact, many countries have had to increase their legally
allowable levels—by up to 50 times—in order to accommodate the introduction of
GM crops.
In the European Union, residues in foods are set to rise 100 to 150 times if a new
proposal by Monsanto is approved. Meanwhile, herbicide-tolerant “super-weeds” have adapted to the chemical, requiring even
more toxic doses and new toxic chemicals to kill the plant.
Human enzymes are affected by glyphosate just as
plant enzymes are: the chemical blocks the uptake of manganese and other
essential minerals. Without those minerals, we cannot properly metabolize our
food. That helps explain the rampant epidemic of obesity in the United States.
People eat and eat in an attempt to acquire the nutrients that are simply not
available in their food.
According to researchers Samsell and
Seneff in Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality:
"Glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450
(CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP
enzymes play crucial roles in biology... Negative impact on the body is
insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular
systems throughout the body. "Consequences are most of the diseases and
conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal
disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility,
cancer and Alzheimer’s disease."
More than 40 diseases have been linked to glyphosate
use, and more keep appearing. In September 2013, the National University of Rio
Cuarto, Argentina, published research finding that glyphosate enhances the growth of
fungi that produce aflatoxin B1, one of the most carcinogenic of substances.
A doctor from Chaco, Argentina, told Associated
Press, “We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of
cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before.” Fungi growths have
increased significantly in U.S. corn crops.
"Agribusiness claims that glyphosate and
glyphosate-tolerant crops will improve crop yields, increase farmers’ profits
and benefit the environment by reducing pesticide use. Exactly the opposite
is the case... [T]he evidence indicates that glyphosate herbicides and
glyphosate-tolerant crops have had wide-ranging detrimental effects, including
glyphosate resistant super weeds, virulent plant (and new livestock) pathogens,
reduced crop health and yield, harm to off-target species from insects to
amphibians and livestock, as well as reduced soil fertility."
Politics Trumps
Science
In light of these adverse findings, why have
Washington and the European Commission continued to endorse glyphosate as safe?
Critics point to lax regulations, heavy influence from corporate lobbyists, and
a political agenda that has more to do with power and control than protecting
the health of the people.
In the ground-breaking 2007 book Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden
Agenda of Genetic Manipulation,
William Engdahl states that global food control and depopulation became U.S.
strategic policy under Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. Along with oil
geopolitics, they were to be the new “solution” to the threats to U.S. global
power and continued U.S. access to cheap raw materials from the developing
world.
In line with that agenda, the government has shown
extreme partisanship in favor of the biotech agribusiness industry, opting for
a system in which the industry “voluntarily” polices itself. Bio-engineered
foods are treated as “natural food additives,” not needing any special testing.
Jeffrey M. Smith, executive director of the Institute for Responsible
Technology, confirms that
U.S. Food and Drug Administration policy allows biotech companies to determine
if their own foods are safe. Submission of data is completely voluntary. He
concludes:
"In the critical arena of food safety research,
the biotech industry is without accountability, standards, or peer-review. They’ve got bad science down to a
science."
Whether or not depopulation is an intentional part
of the agenda, widespread use of GMO and glyphosate is having that result. The endocrine-disrupting properties of glyphosate
have been linked to infertility, miscarriage, birth defects and arrested sexual
development.
In Russian experiments, animals fed GM soy were
sterile by the third generation. Vast amounts of farmland soil are also
being systematically ruined by the killing of beneficial microorganisms that
allow plant roots to uptake soil nutrients.
In Gary Null’s eye-opening documentary Seeds of
Death: Unveiling the Lies of GMOs, Dr. Bruce Lipton warns, “We are leading the
world into the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet... Human behavior
is undermining the web of life.”
The TPP and
International Corporate Control
As the devastating conclusions of these and other
researchers awaken people globally to the dangers of Roundup and GMO foods,
transnational corporations are working feverishly with the Obama administration
to fast-track the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, a trade agreement that would strip governments of the power to
regulate transnational corporate activities.
Negotiations have been kept secret from Congress but
not from corporate advisers, 600 of whom have been consulted and know the
details. According to Barbara Chicherio in Nation of Change:
"The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the
potential to become the biggest regional Free Trade Agreement in history... The
chief agricultural negotiator for the U.S. is the former Monsanto lobbyist,
Islam Siddique. If ratified the TPP would impose punishing regulations that
give multinational corporations unprecedented right to demand taxpayer
compensation for policies that corporations deem a barrier to their profits.
"They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the
involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating,
where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of
herbicides and pesticides."
Food safety is only one of many rights and
protections liable to fall to this super-weapon of international corporate
control. In an April 2013 interview on The Real News Network, Kevin Zeese
called the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and “a global corporate coup.” He warned:
"No matter what issue you care about—whether
its wages, jobs, protecting the environment... this issue is going to adversely
affect it.... If a country takes a step to try to regulate the financial
industry or set up a public bank to represent the public interest, it can be
sued."
Return to
Nature: Not Too Late
There is a safer, saner, more earth-friendly way to
feed nations. While Monsanto and U.S. regulators are forcing GM crops on
American families, Russian families are showing what can be done with
permaculture methods on simple garden plots.
In 2011, 40% of Russia’s food was grown on dachas
(cottage gardens or allotments). Dacha gardens produced over 80% of the
country’s fruit and berries, over 66% of the vegetables, almost 80% of the
potatoes and nearly 50% of the nation’s milk, much of it consumed raw.
According to Vladimir Megre, author of the best-selling Ringing Cedars Series:
"Essentially, what Russian gardeners do is
demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world – and you do not need any GMOs,
industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s
got enough food to eat. Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing
season per year – so in the U.S., for example, gardeners’ output could be
substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the U.S.
is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens – and it produces nothing but
a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry."
In the U.S., only about 0.6 percent of the total
agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. This area needs to be vastly
expanded if we are to avoid “the sixth mass extinction.” But first, we need to
urge our representatives to stop Fast Track, vote no on the TPP, and pursue a
global phase-out of glyphosate-based herbicides and GMO foods. Our health, our
finances and our environment are at stake.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public
Banking Institute and the author of twelve books, including the best-selling
Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores
successful public banking models historically and globally. Her blog articles
are at EllenBrown.com.
