17

Poisoned for Profit: We Are Not the Agrochemical Industry’s Guinea Pigs

Colin Todhunter

Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Chemicals Regulation Division (HSE) in the UK claiming that the glyphosate-based weed killer Roundup has poisoned her nature reserve in South Wales and is also poisoning people across the UK (she includes herself here, as she struggles with a neurodegenerative condition).

She notes that the widespread spraying of glyphosate went against the advice of directive 2009/128/EC of the European parliament but was carried out at the behest of the agrochemicals industry.

Mason has sent a 24-page fully referenced document with her letter in support of her claims. It can be accessed in full here.

What follows is a brief summary of just a few of the take-home points. There is a lot more in Mason’s document, much of which touches on issues she has previously covered but which nonetheless remain relevant.

The thrust of her open letter to these agencies is that glyphosate is a major contributory factor in spiralling rates of disease and conditions affecting the UK population. She also makes it clear that official narratives – pushed by the pesticides industry, the media and various key agencies – have deliberately downplayed or ignored the role of agrochemicals in this.

Instead, the focus has been on the role of alcohol use and obesity, conveniently placing the blame on individual behaviour and the failure of people to opt for ‘healthy lifestyle’ choices.

Mason argues that Monsanto emails released into the public domain have revealed that Roundup was kept on the market by capturing regulatory agencies, corrupting public officials, bribing scientists and engaging in scientific fraud. In addition, she notes that documents show that the European Commission bowed to the demands of pesticide lobbies.

Former PM David Cameron, Defra, the European Food Safety Authority, the European Commission and the European Chemicals Agency all ignored the warnings that GM crops and Roundup were hazardous to human health and the environment.

In the run-up to the relicensing of glyphosate in the EU, Mason states that in its analysis the Glyphosate Task Force omitted key studies from South America (where herbicide-tolerant GM crops are grown) that associate Roundup with cancer, birth defects, infertility, DNA damage and neurotoxicity. She refers to many studies in support of her claim that glyphosate is deleterious to human health and the environment.

It is worth noting that the European Chemicals Agency has classified glyphosate as a substance causing serious eye damage and toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects.

Mason reserves a special place for Cancer Research UK (CRUK) in her letter, saying that the agency has been hi-jacked by the pesticides industry and has persuaded key figures in the medical establishment to repeat certain claims: that alcohol, cigarette smoking and obesity are the main causes of cancer. She argues that Monsanto and the US EPA have known for a long time that Roundup is carcinogenic.

CRUK recently made a bold statement about its vision to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. However, Mason asserts this is fantasy for public consumption. She argues there are a huge number of cancers in the UK and their prevalence is increasing each year in tandem with the rising use of glyphosate and other agrochemicals.

Mason provides the statistics:

In the UK, there were 13,605 new cases of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma in 2015 (and 4,920 deaths in 2016);
there were 41,804 new cases of bowel cancer in 2015 (and 16,384 deaths in 2016);
12,547 new cases of kidney cancer in 2015 (and 4,619 deaths in 2016);
5,736 new cases of liver cancer in 2015 (5,417 deaths in 2016);
15,906 new cases of melanoma in 2015 (2,285 deaths in 2016);
3,528 new cases of thyroid cancer in 2015 (382 deaths in 2016);
10,171 new cases of bladder cancer in 2015 (5,383 deaths in 2016);
8,984 new cases of uterine cancer in 2015 (2,360 deaths in 2016);
7,270 cases of ovarian cancer in 2015 (4,227 deaths in 2016);
9,900 new cases of leukaemia in 2015 (4,712 deaths in 2016);
55,122 new cases of invasive breast cancer in 2015 (11,563 deaths in 2016);
47,151 new cases of prostate cancer in 2015 (11,631 deaths in 2016);
9,211 new cases of oesophageal cancer in 2015 (8,004 deaths in 2016);
and 5,540 new cases of myeloma in 2015 (3,079 deaths in 2016);
2,288 new cases of testicular cancer in 2015 (57 deaths in 2016);
9,921 new cases of pancreatic cancer in 2015 (9,263 deaths in 2016);
11,432 new cases of brain cancer in 2015 (5,250 deaths in 2016);
46,388 new cases of lung cancer in 2015 (and 35,620 deaths in 2016).
In the US in 2014 there were 24,050 new cases of myeloma.

Arguing that UK farmers are “drowning” their crops in pesticides, Mason notes that it is therefore not surprising that Pesticide Action Network UK’s analysis of the last 12 years of residue data (published by the Expert Committee on Pesticide Residues in Food) shows there are unacceptable levels of pesticides present in the food provided through the Department of Health’s (DoH) School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme (SFVS).

Residues of 123 different pesticides were found, some of which are linked to serious health problems such as cancer and disruption of the hormone system. Moreover, residues contained on SFVS produce were higher than those in produce tested under the national residue testing scheme (mainstream produce found on supermarket shelves). However, Mason says that when PAN-UK sent its findings to the DOH, the agency was told that pesticides are not the concern of the DoH.

Perhaps they should be, given what Baskut Tuncak, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes, stated in 2017:

Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weed killers, insecticides and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals and their potential impact on people’s fundamental rights, I beg to differ.”

He added:

Paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a ‘silent pandemic’ of disease and disability. Exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes, and cancer. Because a child’s developing body is more sensitive to exposure than adults and takes in more of everything – relative to their size, children eat, breathe, and drink much more than adults – they are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals. Increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.”

Tuncak says that most victims cannot prove the cause of their disability or disease and this limits our ability to hold those responsible to account. But this is changing. The public is becoming increasingly aware of the industry’s criminal strategy for keeping Roundup on the market, thanks to the various high-profile litigations in the US. 

Maybe it’s time for the (taxpayer-funded) agencies Rosemary Mason has continually written to over the years to finally act in the public interest. Or would that be too much to expect?

In finishing, we should take note of the current orchestrated campaign (cheer-led by those outside of India with industry links) to get herbicide-tolerant seeds planted in India. Aside from Bt cotton, GM crops are not allowed in the country. This cynical campaign is aimed at increasing GM seed, glyphosate and other toxic agrochemical sales.

Given increasingly saturated markets elsewhere, the global GM seed and herbicide industry regards India as a massive potential money spinner.

However, Punjab took the lead in 2018 and banned glyphosate. Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have since followed. But there is still no nationwide ban. With this in mind, author and academic Ashwani Mahajan has started a petition campaign (here) to stop the use of glyphosate in India.

He says that pesticide companies are taking advantage of farmers’ ignorance about the deadly risks associated with glyphosate. Mahajan notes that industry is sending its agents to approach farmers directly and trap them with attractive promotional offers. 

This is part of a wider strategy to get farmers to break with effective traditional practices and lure them onto agrochemical (and GMO) treadmills as described in the 2017 paper The Ox Fall Down: Path Breaking and Technology Treadmills in Indian Cotton Agriculture (Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs).

Farmers are being subjected to slick PR and lured because they are told this herbicide is a cost-effective method to kill weeds quickly. What they are not told is that its effectiveness is limited, that it’s a health and environmental hazard and that it’s a risk to their lives. But it’s not just farmers’ lives that are at risk.

We just need to look at the statistics provided earlier in this article to realise the risk to the wider public health.

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.

Categories: agriculture, featured, GMO, latest
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

17 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
binra
binra
Aug 5, 2019 1:06 PM

I sense that ‘Roundup’ refers to its human target. And not just bodies but consciousness itself.

The Corporate sector is part of a network of ‘possession and control’ by which to dispossess and dis-integrate. That there is plunder in breaking down the integrity of cultural AND biological boundaries is the primary switch from wholeness of being to private or dark agenda – that rises from and seeks out a sense of self-LACK as the basis for GETTING as a private or hidden self set over and against Other – and in forgetting of wholeness.

The idea of corruption works through the whole to become a broad spectrum dominance of structure set over and against love’s recognition, embodiment and exchange.

To the mind set in seeking possession and control – there is never ‘enough’. Scarcity is built in and embodies as the means of persisting a destructive dispossession AS IF a personal aggrandisement – set in narrative masking justifications of the image, symbol or concepts of life or protection – but working BACKWARDS.

The evil is of a sense of LACK in wholeness – give worth-ship and false ‘with-ness’ or allegiance and support. The progeny are effects or fruits of a false foundation or indeed lack of true foundation.
Uncovering a true foundation is opening discernment as to what we give ‘worth-ship’ and ‘with-ness’ TO – particularly in our own thought and word and therefore response or behaviour.

A lie MUST fear truth and search for sustainability in lies passed off as true – but a true recognition can only release the ‘mind of the lie’ from acceptance and allegiance in our heart.

A mis-taken identity generates dissonance that can be woven into a script of survival in fight or flight, but all such ‘power or protection’ reinforces the very identity from which it proceeds and purports to reinforce or protect.

Part of being painted into an impossible situation is a willingness to question the painter or ‘script-maker’. When conditioning is internalised as our structural consciousness, it becomes invisible. We are being brought to notice or see that which was kept hidden in order for a ‘surface reality’ to operate AS IF an escape from a more deeply denied and feared truth – that nonetheless rises in our experience and world as terror symbols ‘writ large’.

The nature of our consciousness – as we have developed, is split. But denials are never really escaped by acting out upon the body or upon the bodies of others and world. Self-hatred is both victim AND victimiser running blind. Projecting hate or unworthiness of life is ‘storing up denial in hell’ rather than ‘treasures of shared being in Heaven’.

Belief and allegiance to hell is almost ‘de facto’ or taken as a given, in a consciousness set against it – and therefore a mind-capture OF IT. Alignment in truth is yielding the seeming ‘will’ of a mind-set over and against the hated and feared, to a core willingness that was otherwise covered over.

To gain a ‘world’ of self-illusion in exchange for Soul – of multi-dimensional presence – here and now, is a decision and not a hard wired fact. However our invested identity in self-illusion is a deep entanglement from which release can only be shared. No one is healed alone because healing reveals a wholeness of communication and connection.

Our emergent understanding of Cosmos and of biology (outside the filtering of mainstream narrative) is also revealing a different ORDER or Modelling of Reality than object densities, forces and effects. Resonant frequency domains operate at all scales as the qualities of that which is beyond measure.

I recall the words of a man who said it is not what is put into the mouth that corrupts a man, but what proceeds out of it. In our modern articulation we can say that as we set the measure in accepted and shared definitions, so do we receive exactly as we gave – BUT to an unconsciously acquired and developed personality – almost all of this is UNconscious as a world of subjection to wholly ‘external’ densities, forces and effects’.
Self interest is absolutely governed by what we are currently and actively accepting as true of us in the moment of experiencing.
There are positive or integrative synergies or indeed synchronicities of being, that are integral or innate to health and wholeness, such that releasing the blocking signal allows Life to Flow and Know Itself through you. The ‘jamming or blocking signal’ may SEEM to be via proxies of toxic intent – but IF that was a way of putting an evil OUTSIDE as if to mitigate or escape its pain – then there becomes a collective willingness to hate the evils in OTHER instead of facing or feeling our own hateful conflict. This is not altogether WRONG, so much as an attempted self-protection under extreme duress that then protects the problem from any solution that comes home to roost.
Without willingness to heal, such conflict is our undoing, and yet through any moment of willingness to heal is such conflict undone. Invested illusions may not be released at root or at once, but over time spent in delaying and deferring the Inevitable – which is truth and NOT death – except to self-illusion that senses it has no support and thus runs as rejected and excluded by selecting to reject – as an exclusion zone.

Going within this and every moment of our relational existence is watching or noticing our thought and emotional response while IN ACT and not dissociating from life. But to re-open such a channel of communication of being may need to withdraw or separate from triggering and distracting diversion from what you now recognise you truly WANT.

The idea of a death wish or destructive intent in our psyche is of an insistence that LIFE BE THUS! or else fail and fall to unworthiness. Putting FORM above LOVE is worth-shipping forms, images or idols of love and life and becoming possessed by them. The Call to Love is our true Need when a call to insanity is recognised as just that and nothing more. But we do not of our self know what it is having taught ourself wrongly and so the willingness to heal is the release of a presumption to know or determine Truth to a fresh willingness.

As for the pathways and potentialities of the body (our own and our world) to heal – I sense we are not just ignorant but wilfully so under an incapacity to suspend belief in the power of evil as our nemesis or undoing. But where we choose to give and therefore receive power, is a matter of intention and desire that grows and becomes a focus of a reintegrative and truly conscious purpose or awakening responsibility for thought in place of a dissociated and dissociating mental defence.

Mucho
Mucho
Aug 4, 2019 9:02 AM

Meanwhile, in hell……….corporations and the UK govenrment have conspired to have British citizens arrested for the crime of curing people of cancer to be extradited to France, under a European Arrest Warrant, supposedly set up for counter terrorism purposes. Very important story
Update On The Persecution Of David Noakes & Lyn Thyer …

mark
mark
Aug 3, 2019 10:18 PM

When we do our big trade deal with Trump, we can look forward to Kraft rubber cheese, lovely chlorine flavour chicken, and Hershey plastic chocolate, all served up with a delicious glyphosate garnish.

Yum yum!!

SeriousRe-Think
SeriousRe-Think
Aug 3, 2019 5:17 PM

Glyphosates are not killing enough people, so US Defense Secretary Mark Esper, during his visit to Australia, endorses the idea of deploying medium-range missiles to the Indo-Pacific region.

What is in this guy’s Exceptional DNA?

Steve Hayes
Steve Hayes
Aug 3, 2019 1:55 PM

“In the run-up to the relicensing of glyphosate in the EU, Mason states that in its analysis the Glyphosate Task Force omitted key studies from South America (where herbicide-tolerant GM crops are grown) that associate Roundup with cancer, birth defects, infertility, DNA damage and neurotoxicity. She refers to many studies in support of her claim that glyphosate is deleterious to human health and the environment.” The European Union was well aware of the harmful effects of glyphosate, but this anti-democratic, unaccountable organisation went ahead and continues to push it in the interests of multinational corporations, specifically Bayer.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Aug 5, 2019 7:45 PM
Reply to  Steve Hayes

“The European Union was well aware of the harmful effects of glyphosate, but this anti-democratic, unaccountable organisation went ahead and continues to push it in the interests of multinational corporations…”

All the more reason to push for Bremain
Just love the cool feeling of those agrochems
Obliterating my hitherto brain

SeriousRe-Think
SeriousRe-Think
Aug 3, 2019 10:45 AM

Little did we know that spreading democracy meant spreading cancer.

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.

Interestingly enough, in one study, scientists were saying, it’s difficult to pinpoint what is causing cancer. Well, it would be a bit difficult task when everything is contaminated, wouldn’t it?!

Question This
Question This
Aug 3, 2019 10:31 AM

Excellent article, lets not downplay the catastrophic effect agrichem has on biodiversity, the greatest threat to human life!

Following on from the article on transgenderism earlier this week, I would be interested to know if any studies have been done on the effects of pesticides on human hormone production, could this cultural dependency on synthetic chemicals be one of the causes in the increase in deviant sexual behavior & “gender” dysphoria?

That said peer review of scientific papers isn’t what it used to be as with everything this system of accreditation has been hijacked by neo-liberals with an agenda, most medical papers aren’t worth the price of toilet roll anymore.

We can of course expect no acceptable response from her work by establishment of poisoners for profit, welcome to the renascence in Victorian principles!

Mucho
Mucho
Aug 3, 2019 10:08 AM

Mafia controlled world

Tim Jenkins
Tim Jenkins
Aug 3, 2019 12:16 PM
Reply to  Mucho

Never a truer word spoken, today …

Betrayed plane.
Betrayed plane.
Aug 3, 2019 9:13 AM

I have been involved in fighting Monsanto since years. That there is even a question mark over these lethal chemicals some of which were used for making bombs in WW2 is quite simply a joke. The Corporations after the war wanted to find a way to keep their profits so instead of bombing the people it is now death by a thousand cuts. They have absolutely no regard nor conscience and this used to shock me but no more.
Without a revolution in the U.K., without a reckoning for the warmongering deeply destructive politicians, bought officials of the city of London, a reckoning for the entire MSM who have also been bought and are in league with England’s Secret Services, this country is finished. The abuse heaped on ordinary people is out of control. And The saddest thing of all is that the dumbing down has worked, shit poisoned food and cheap booze has done its job, many just have no idea.

Shelly
Shelly
Aug 3, 2019 8:31 AM

I tried to buy some wood chip yesterday. Everything I could find had been treated with fungicide, which is madness as we know fungi are needed in the soil for plants to obtain nutrients. The fungicide was marketed as “playground safe” even though (a) it is quite simple to teach children not to touch unidentified fungi and (b) there is no evidence childhood fungicide exposure is safe.

Question This
Question This
Aug 3, 2019 10:34 AM
Reply to  Shelly

Without Fungi there would be nothing but bacteria & dust on the land surface of this planet.

SeriousRe-Think
SeriousRe-Think
Aug 3, 2019 12:54 AM

There are moments where a Dramatic Re-Think becomes a must. Here is one of these moment which prompts you to rethink of health care provision.

In a clinic, you are asking about some questionable ingredients. Your general physician, a medical doctor, with a straight face instructs you:

“if it’s dangerous to people’s health, the government wouldn’t allow it to be used. The government would ban it”

How can an experienced doctor be so naive to spout such nonsense?

And, who the hell can patients trust after hearing that nonsense?

Question This
Question This
Aug 3, 2019 10:39 AM

The medical profession now are no more than camp guards, sales men for big pharma 75% of medical patients get better despite medical intervention.

Professional medicine has place in society just not to as drug sales men/women.g.

Cesca
Cesca
Aug 3, 2019 12:34 AM

Thing is we are, many principled, intelligent ppl tried to warn us but few listened. Now it’s a nitemare to sort out.

wardropper
wardropper
Aug 3, 2019 3:19 PM
Reply to  Cesca

I think the poisoners still don’t care.
It’s not until several of their children perish under this onslaught that anything is likely to be done.