Bayer Shareholders: Put Health and Nature First and Stop Funding This Company!
Colin Todhunter
Campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to Bayer Crop Science shareholders and Chairman of the Board Werner Wenning. She has also sent them a 13,000-word report. Mason is appealing to shareholders to put human health and nature ahead of profit and to stop funding Bayer. In her report, she sets out why shareholders should take this course of action.
Mason outlines how the gradual onset of the global extinction of many species is largely the result of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. For instance, she argues that Monsanto’s (now Bayer) glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and Bayer’s clothianidin are largely responsible for the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and that the use of glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides are wiping out wildlife species across the globe.
Mason also argues that the science behind (chemical-dependent) GMOs is fraudulent and that the devastating effects of pesticides on human health can no longer be ignored.
She begins by addressing some of her concerns directly to Werner Wenning and Bayer shareholders. The following is a slightly edited (for clarity) version Mason’s letter to Wenning (and shareholders) and sets the scene for what is in her report.
Dear Mr Wenning
I have taken the liberty of writing an Open Letter to Bayer Crop Science Shareholders for your next meeting. I apologise because I can’t find the email address of Paul Singer, Founder of Elliott Management Corporation but could you please pass it on. I understand that Elliott disclosed in June that it has a $1.3 billion stake in Bayer and Paul Singer was anxious for a settlement (glyphosate litigation cases in the US).
US District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco suggested a high-profile mediator, Ken Feinberg to lead settlement talks over the herbicide litigation. Has he resolved anything?
I understand that the Monsanto lobbyist organisation Genetic Literacy Project (Founding Director Jon Entine) has suggested that you might take the European Union to Court if they ban glyphosate in 2022.
Liam Condon for Bayer Crop Science said: If we feel a scientific process, an established regulatory pathway, is being completely ignored, then of course we’ve got to look at all our options.
As you must be aware, Cancer Research UK protects the agrochemical industry: the CRUK website claims “there is little evidence that pesticides cause cancer”
Michael Pragnell former Chairman of Cancer Research UK (2010-2017), founder of Syngenta and former Chairman of CropLife International, was awarded a CBE in 2017 for services to cancer research. CropLife International was founded in 2001.
As of 2015, CropLife International´s member list included the following eight companies: BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, FMC Corp, Monsanto, Sumitomo and Syngenta.
Many of these corporations make their own formulated glyphosate.
CRUK said that there was little evidence that pesticides caused cancer. CRUK, the CMO England and PHE, linked cancer to alcohol, obesity and smoking. They blamed the people for ‘lifestyle choices’.
But I have warned Lord Gardiner of Kimble, Under-Secretary of State for Defra, that when the British people wake up to the fact that pesticides are responsible for their reduced life expectancy (and the fact that they spend the last 16-20 years or so in poor health), Defra may be taken to court for re-registering Roundup when they knew it not only caused cancer but a host of other problems that have been outlined in my document.
The 2019 UK State of Nature revealed shocking declines in the natural world 04/10/2019
Jon Snow, in the Channel 4 Report ‘Extinction Britain: Wildlife survey shows shocking declines in animals’, noted that 14% of UK wildlife faces extinction. Jon Snow has finally told the truth: “We all thought it was climate change. Now we are told we are actually poisoning the land with our agriculture.”
Most UK farmers who manage ‘75% of UK land’ are drowning their crops in pesticides and lobbied to continue this
The National Farmers’ Union, the Crop Protection Association and the Agricultural Industries Confederation combined to lobby the EU not to restrict the 320+ pesticides available to them.
Global Chemicals Outlook II – From Legacies to Innovative Solutions: Implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development March 2019
Mandated by the UN Environment Assembly in 2016, this agenda seeks to alert policymakers and other stakeholders to the critical role of the sound management of chemicals and waste in sustainable development. It takes stock of global trends as well as progress made and gaps in achieving the global goal to minimize the adverse impacts from chemicals and waste by 2020.
However, there is Continued growth in the pesticide/crop protection industry
“Pesticides include herbicides, insecticides, termiticides, nematicides, rodenticides and fungicides. These products are largely used for crop protection in agriculture. Today the industry is valued at over US dollars 50 billion and there are around 600 active ingredients. Herbicides account for approximately 80 per cent of all pesticide use (Phillips McDougal 2018).”
Top 10 products used on major crops in the United States by volume, 1968 – 2016 (Phillips McDougal 2018, p. 4)
- Glyphosate (an herbicide, an antibiotic, a fungicide, an antiprotozoal, an organic phosphonate, a growth regulator, a toxicant, a virulence enhancer and is persistent in the soil. It chelates (captures) and washes out the following minerals: boron, calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, nickel and zinc. (Monsanto/Bayer),
- metolaclor, an organochlorine, selective herbicide
- pyraclostrobin, a fungicide (Sigma-Aldrich)
- mesotrione, a herbicide (Syngenta)
- thiamethoxam, a systemic neonicotinoid insecticide (Syngenta)
- acetochlor, a herbicide (Monsanto and Zeneca)
- azoxystrobin, a fungicide (Syngenta)
- atrazine, an herbicide and endocrine-disrupting chemical (Syngenta)
- abamectin, an insecticide, an acaricide
- clothianidin, a long acting systemic neonicotinoid insecticide (Bayer)
Bayer Crop Science shareholders, please read the attached document
Do you really want to put your money into two corporations that lied about the safety of their products for more than 40 years and continue to produce BIOCIDES for agriculture; chemicals that are weapons of war and kill all life?
Bayer Crop Science, the former IG Farben, a private chemical company allied with the Nazis in WW2, built a factory and a concentration camp at Auschwitz. IG Farben was probably the most well-known corporate participant in the Holocaust, and the company’s history sheds a chilling light on how genocide became tied in with economics and business.
Rosemary Mason 09/10/2019
Key points for Bayer shareholders to consider
The following lists just some of the key bullet points from Mason’s report. A wide range of peer-reviewed studies are listed in support of the claims made. Readers are strongly urged to access it in full via the acadameia.edu site.
- Monsanto and pesticide regulators claim that Roundup only affects plants, fungi and bacteria because they have the shikimate pathway which is absent in humans and animals. Their assertion displays considerable ignorance of human physiology. Alternatively, it is deliberately fraudulent. Humans and animals have trillions of bacteria in their gut: the gut microbiome.
- The gut microbiome is the collective genome of organisms inhabiting our body. Obesity is associated with low bacterial richness in the gut. Glyphosate, the controversial main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and other herbicides, disrupts the shikimate pathway within these gut bacteria, without which we cannot survive. Glyphosate is a strong chelator of essential minerals. In addition, it kills off beneficial gut bacteria and allows toxic bacteria such as Clostridium difficile to flourish. Two key problems caused by glyphosate residues in our diet are nutritional deficiencies, especially minerals and essential amino-acids, and systemic toxicity.
- The richness of the human gut microbiome correlates with metabolic markers: we are facing a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic. Britain and the US are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. They are experiencing not merely a slowdown in life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across all our populations, men and women alike. We are needlessly allowing our people to die early.
- There is a gradual onset of the global extinction of trees and crops. Moreover, the fungicidal action of Roundup is destroying the means by which trees communicate. It would be irresponsible to release genetically engineered trees into the environment.
- Glyphosate is being connected to Lake Erie’s troubling algae blooms, which has fouled drinking water and suffocated and killed marine life in recent years. Roundup and clothianidin are largely responsible for the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef because the APVMA did not read the instructions.
- Massive kills of wildlife during flooding now make sense with glyphosate and clothianidin having been found to be toxic to aquatic invertebrates, biocides and immune suppressants.
- Emerging pathogens are wiping out wildlife species across the globe partly due to immune suppression by glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides.
- The science behind GMOs is fraudulent. US Attorney Steven Druker says that governments and leading scientific institutions have systematically misrepresented the facts about GMOs.
- In the UK, each year there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers.
- Roundup/glyphosate causes birth defects at low doses.
- Neurotransmitter changes in the brain derive from exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides.
- The global legacy of aspartame, Monsanto’s neurotoxic sweetener: Erik Millstone has just analysed EFSA Panel decisions on Aspartame and finds they are biased towards industry (2019 paper).
All of Rosemary Mason’s reports and open letters to officials can be accessed here
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why a mason
and why the 13
is that not the hoax code
Just putting this link here about the lawsuits coming down the line re: banned substances being used on crops in Hawaii – peanuts in terms of fines, but at least it is now coming to light- far too late for many effected and the environmental damage
https://www.rt.com/news/474047-monsanto-hawaii-penncap-pesticide/
Since this is the latest article in the ‘Environment’ category, allow me to add this link from Japan. It details the ‘washing away’ of highly radioactive soil that was scraped off the surface from 2011 on and bagged for storage. Typhoon Nº 19 (the Japanese don’t name their Typhoons) wreaked havoc on the bags.
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201910140036.html
Unfortunately I am unsure what is greater – the courage to write an open letter like this, or the naïvety to except these criminal psychopaths to change their genocidal ways.
Sure you know that George Soros is a major shareholder of Monsanto and thus also a shareholder of BAYER. And while I laud the effort, here is the latest news in regards of what the psychopathic shareholders of these fascist corporations have in store for mankind. They intend to corner the market of Cannabis and have their GMO versions patented that they can reproduce what they did in India to those Cannabis users/growers that live in countries/states, where Cannabis has been legalized for either, or both medicinal and recreational use.
Fascist corporate persons cornering the Cannabis market. (Link to GlobalResearch.ca)
Too late for us – damage in the waterworks irreversible.
The Bayer monsanto story has once been interpreted such: BlackRock owned monsanto and bayer shares. They select board members who then implement the policies. Law suits against monsanto were a financial risk for BlackRock shares so they offloaded monsanto to bayer – they could order bayer to buy monsanto. Bayer was and is overcommitted to Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank cannot go under so will be rescued by the taxpayer. BlackRock has no losses.
BlackRock also owns much of the German Stock Exchange which enables them to insider knowledge, manipulation and ‘lucrative’ trading. BlackRock’s success is out of this world.
Everyone should know about this article, it is more important than extinction rebellion nonsense. I nearly didn’t read it because the headline didn’t grab me. In this case, tabloid style shocking is permissible, something like: Cancer Research UK protects the agrochemical industry.
Anyone who invests money can choose to avoid Bigpharma and biotech investments. This is apparently very rare or hardly asked for of financial consultants. This also applies to investing in purchases of products. It may not always be easy or possible to control – pension funds are legally obliged to maximise profits – in cash terms of its investment- irrespective of toxic consequence.
But while those with money want their money to appreciate irrespective of consequence, they are actively giving power to destructive intent – legally dictated or not.
Xcellent article: This is for the sjw and their climate change paradigm. This is one of the issues that should be highlighted with regards to environmental degradation not the global warming BS thrown @ we the sheeple. PUNTO UNO: We have known for over a century the effects of total industrilisation and chemical companies effecting the environment and now the msm the tools of the masters of the universe try to sell us the impending doom that is upon us. PUNTO DUE:If the impending doom so near why have the masters of the universe (anglo-zionist empire) offered or suggested a change in paradigm ????? PUNTO TRE:The only change that has been offered to us is more coporatocracy /fascism. POST SCRIPTUM: I for one am not a climate change denialist but a climate change critique of the black and white simplistic formula that has been used as a propgandistic tool by… Read more »
Bang on, falcemartello
Mrs.Mason was doing well until the last paragraph. A bit over the top don’t you think?
Mason’s final para: “Bayer Crop Science, the former IG Farben, a private chemical company allied with the Nazis in WW2, built a factory and a concentration camp at Auschwitz. IG Farben was probably the most well-known corporate participant in the Holocaust, and the company’s history sheds a chilling light on how genocide became tied in with economics and business.”
Sounds sober fact to me. The U$ UK air force bombed Berlin, Dresden and other centres of civilian population. We busted dams and other civilian infrastructure. Yet we never bombed the IG Farben work camps at Auschwitz. Why not?
“There was a gentleman’s agreement between the RAF and the Luftwaffe. They did not bomb ICI and we did not bomb IG Farben”. David Irving, The Virus House.
Honour among Capitalist thieves.
PS I must admit I did suspect Dr.Mason might possibly have gone “over the top” in describing IG Farben as “allied to” the Nazi Party. So I checked, and Lo!: “The majority of the board members joined the Nazi Party; by means of economic and political blackmail, IGF took over important chemical factories in the areas annexed to the Reich or occupied by the Germans. After Bosch’s death on the 26 April 1940 , Krauch took his place as chairman of the board, adding this position to the different posts he held in the Four-Year Plan administration. More than anyone else, Krauch personified the link between private industry and the growing government involvement in economic life during the Nazi period. In connection with the economic preparations for the forthcoming war against the Soviet Union, the IGF board, with government support, decided to establish an additional Buna works and installations for… Read more »
Thanks Vexarb: you know my feelings about what is truly OTT in terms of chemicals & gassing & military deployment of same (celebrating over 100 years of gassing like the British 77th Brigade): which even shows a blatant disregard for the health of their OWN Military Forces of brainwashed poor young people, in terms of testing & handling. Amongst others, Italian NATO troops were tested by ETH Zürich, after handling Depleted Uranium Munitions / DUM munitions that infect even those that deliver, let alone those that receive the subsequent far worse legacy of devastation. 2001 news, but, all the same … http://archiv.friedenskooperative.de/themen/gifte-16.htm ‘Funny’ you should mention Dow Chemicals, that ‘inherited’ Union Carbide (for a ‘song’ & legal dance) without the legal liability for the Bhopal catastrophe: the usual tricks of changing names, subsequent to disaster, particularly prevalent in the chemicals business, for many many decades, indeed over a century !… Read more »
Indeed. Extinction rebellion is controlled dissent. IF they really were interested in changing the sick status quo of the world, they would organize and support a ‘GAZA REBELLION’. Without the end to the HOLOCAUST on the Palestinian people, the world will continue to descend into the deepest filth the Universe can provide.
Indeed: Censorship and controlling dissent implicitly corrupts minds,
denying human growth in any collective searching for integral solutions.
Corruption is the destruction of any Culture of integrity. Therefore:-
“The Destruction of Culture is a Terrorist Act”. (UNESCO Law -Bokova).
I, you and Joe Meadors cannot think of a better place to start, in terms of cleaning up the deepest filth of Apartheid, than Gaza: in terms of demonstrating, how things have come full circle, from the USS Liberty to
the state of climate, today … we best start getting real, somewhere, soon.
Breaking News:- “Climate Change agrees to hold off true destruction for 5 Years, while idiot humans Bicker about TRUMP & ASSANGE ” 🙂
Warmest greetings,
Tim
Excellent Vex: damned Nazis. It is worse than even that though. Haber-Bosch invented the artificial nitrogen fixation cycle. Employed by the Hun to make explosives from ammonia in WW1: when they had no access to bird shit (guano) or saltpetre. Habre was also the father of chemical warfare. After that: it became the major innovation of the Green Revolution …pouring artificial NPK fertiliser on the land to replace the nutrients we had strip mined out. One nitrogen molecule – fixed by microbes – used to cycle through biomes on geological timescales. Now we pour 450 million tonnes of the shit on the land every year. Natural cycles have a creation and destruction aspect that balance each other – nitrification and denitrification. Industrialised nitrification without denitrification equals …? We don’t know. It is the biggest geochemical engineering experiment ever carried out: that many ecologists think might be more detrimental than our… Read more »
BigB, thanks very much for your interpretation of HaberBosch which is new to me — even though my DIC project was to calculate its thermodynamics. Up till now I had taken the standard Catholic interpretation of Industrial Nitrogen Fixation as a neutral tool we can freely choose either for evil (explosives) or good (fertilizer). But now you point out that even its use to make fertilizer might be subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences. I can only agree. There seems to be no escape from the Duality of Nature: from “God the Father, who made the Tiger and the Lamb. Dieu Pere, a lequel le bon et le mal sont eqal.” Except via Faith, Hope and Charity? Notes: 1. Haber invented Zyklon B and took part in chlorine gas warfare. He did that as a Christian convert in WW1. When the Nazis threw him out he decided he was… Read more »
Thank you. When I point out to the fascist filth that has metastasized to rule the Western hemisphere, people are generally in deep denial as to how far the Nazi ideology has spread and prospered. It is actually disgusting that the masses still extend the benefit of a doubt to utterly fascist corporations and institutions.
One could say that Hitler won the war he lost all battles in.
NTO1, I think Hitler was just a pawn on the Devil’s chessboard. Expended to win a game for the Anglo Zio Capitalists who financed his party, called him “Our Bulwark against Communism”, gave him the respect of their MSM, built up his war machine and encouraged his Drang nach Oeste to destroy Communist Russia. All done by playing on those evil instincts in us hairless apes that the Church calls Original Sin.
‘For we wrestle not only against flesh and blood but against diabolic principles and evil powers in the Cosmos’ — St.Paul, Ephesians 6:12.
In retrospective it all makes sense. When the snakes are all laid out, one can see what the causes for both WW’s were and who pushed the cart to get them going. Even more apparent was the dropping of the first two nukes.
When we fast forward to Obama, we will get the always underlying premise that it is important “to move on”. The idea behind that is to never give people sufficient time and resources to figure out what had just happened. Part and parcel of ‘rule and conquer the minds of the masses’.
When we speak now of the truth that lies 80 years behind us, we will garner rolling eyes by people who will tell us that it is “definitely time to move on”. Which is as wrong as it was the day after. From Adenauer to Obama.
Rite on point. It seems many in the west get lost in the actual context of this article . Further more ONE never mentions the German Ford factories that were never bombed in WW2. Other small details of the Nazi medallions that were issued in the mid 30’s with the Nazi symbol on one side and the Zionist star on the other and the well documented visits of Nazi delegates to Palestine in the 30’s were one could easily see the collusion between the Nazi’s and the anglo-zionist to create their colonial state. . Simple things that elude the western so called progressive left sjw.
Seems to me your all a bit quick on the draw, none of you fully understood the implications of the last paragraph.
The implications of the last part of this paper is and statistically proven. Lower birth rates increases in endocrine disorders that have rising like a hockey stick if one were to see alternative medical and vet studies in humans and animals. Most studies that get published if one were to dwell into the rabbit hole are funded and backed by crony graft hyper corporate capitalism which has been doing this for at least the Gilded age. Hence ur point per favore s’il vous plait if I may ask please???
Perfect example
Fish farming IE salmon Dupont has invented a new way to get rid of petro chemical derivatives hence waste products into feeding and raising fish on fish farms for commercial use.
But the smoked salmon tastes soooo good! I also find it very estranging that someone would call the forces behind this NOT fascist. For those who can see through the deceit – like in the movie ‘THEY’ – Hitler is everywhere. You put on the Nazi glasses and there are Swastikas everywhere.
How healthy is farmed salmon fed toxic waste?
It might sound disturbing, but I am glad that I am not younger and sad not to be closer to the exit. Now, I still have memories of how beautiful this Blue Planet was.
It should be common knowledge that IG Farben did have a factory in or near the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and employed prisoners from that prison complex. Just as it should be common knowledge that a father/ grandfather of two US presidents was on the board of directors of a company that had interests in a subsidiary that also ran a factory close to the same prison complex. Nothing over the top about these two facts.
A bit like Gene Energy today?
Genie…
We’re living in an age when the idea of Michael Jackson living in wedded bliss (sort of) with Lisa Marie Presley, or Mick Jagger’s ex marries one of the Genie Energy board directors, no longer raises eyebrows or smashes lower jawbones into the ground: our elites are now so OTT incestuous that this has become the norm.
True enough.
I can’t wait to see who Ruperts’ next conquest will be?
Sorry, but a very uncomfortable truth surely damn well
to be a bit over the top.
Don’t worry, we’ll soon be getting Kraft rubber cheese, Hershey plastic chocolate, and chlorine chicken, all washed down with lashings of Glyphosate.
Yum, yum!
The harm from antibiotics in meat is real. And by the way, Glyphosates are antibiotics too, and they are responsible for wiping out good bacteria in the gut which is responsible for many serious chronic diseases.
Ask your General Physician about it, and see how he/she start fidgeting and trying to change the subject.
As a child I used to hear that American troops had Hershey bars shipped over because they reminded them of home and they loved them so. Years later I discovered that they taste horrible, an allegory of American culture.
I tried one for the first and last time when I was in America. Never again.
Congratulations to Colin for his first “India” free article on GMOs.
Whilst we have the shoehorn out, congratulations to the mighty Ant. for his first “Pakistan’ free comment on ASIA (Ant.Shoehorns Israels agenda) 🙂
Now, now children, can we please keep Off Guardian as one of the few sites where paid trolls do not destroy adult discussion with prepared scripts?
I know neither of you are trolls, but best to nip early symptoms in the bud, eh?
oooh Rhys: yer’ right, I know: but I’d not finished the first coffee and was just waking up (evidenced by a missing apostrophe, lol) & to the fact that there were no rolling barrages of bombs going of here on the Turkish border, this morning and was feeling kinda’ relieved & more jolly, after a depressive week of booming from NATZO, to warn Erdogan … yesterday was really heavy and it gets you down & humour helps 😉 bump start the day …
apologies to Ant. though I’d have said it to him F2F with a smile 😉
Everybody happy now ? 🙂
You’d have to ban Antonym from the comments forums to keep them troll-free so that adult discussions can proceed. 😄