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The author will deny it but we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.
Don't expect any of this to be revealed in this country. We are as dependent on Roundup as we are on 1080.
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.
27
April, 2019
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.
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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F.
William Engdahl is
strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree
in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling
author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online
magazine “New
Eastern Outlook” where
this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor
to Global Research.
