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Tag: monsanto
What Will Happen If We Lose The Bees To Pesticides? Let's Not Find Out

What Will Happen If We Lose The Bees To Pesticides? Let's Not Find Out

If we were to lose the bees, as now seems increasingly likely, humanity would collapse after four years. They pollinate about a third of our food. But if the insects were to disappear altogether, then even more than our food supply and quality of life would be affected. Entire ecosystems and inevitably civilization itself would collapse. Even now an enormous proportion of world insect species are endangered. Without them half of all birds would disappear and our world would become unrecognizable, a world we would not want to inhabit.

We have visited the Monarch butterfly sanctuary in Michoacan, Mexico, where the butterflies arrive after a 3000-mile journey from Canada through the United States in the longest insect migration on earth. To see the butterflies engaged in their aerial acrobatic flights is one of the world’s great spectacles. Everyone in North America should be concerned that the population of this unique iconic species has dropped by 80 percent in the last generation due to habitat destruction – and to genetically engineered crops which have been modified to resist Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide which destroys the Monarch species’ main food supply.

Spellbound by the numbers and huddled masses of the Monarchs we beheld in the oyamel forests over 16 years ago, we left the refuge very slowly. Local rangers made sure no-one drove more than five miles an hour so that not a single monarch would be hurt or hit by our vehicle. Yet all the while, in the United States our agricultural policies are committing mass murder of one of nature’s most exquisite species .

But it is not just the Monarch Butterfly that is threatened. Many bee species and nearly half of all insects have seen their numbers drop worldwide. As climate change exacerbates the destruction of their habitat, insects and fauna of all kinds face a very uncertain future. The United States still permits the use of 72 pesticides that are outright banned or will soon be in Europe, Brazil, and even China. More than 300 million pounds of pesticides banned in other countries are used in this country annually, in a military-type assault on agricultural lands. The banning of these pesticides will be largely up to the very industries that use them, but the people need to make their voices known. Until these chemicals are outlawed, we are committing ecocide on our own lands.

These chemical can also kill human beings, of course. The glyphosate-based weedkiller in Roundup has finally been brought to justice in the first cancer trial exposing that pesticide’s effect. After using the Monsanto insecticide, a farmer named DeWayne Johnson got non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a deadly form of cancer. Now Monsanto will have to pay $289 million in damages to Johnson. The only hitch is that he will probably not survive much longer.

Monsanto has allegedly concealed the facts about Roundup ever since its introduction on the market in 1974. Since then over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate have been distributed over the American food supply – and over the past 20 years, the average amount of glyphosate assimilated into humans has increased by 1000 percent. The Johnson lawsuit only begins to reflect the damage done to the environment and people, with 8000 additional plaintiffs awaiting trial.

Anyone who believes they can escape the ill effects of pesticides should realize that breakfast cereals also contain glyphosate – and the average American consumes 10 pounds of cereal every year. The Lucky Charms leprechaun and that jolly Quaker fellow on the oatmeal box should be replaced with a death’s head. Too little and too late, the Environmental Protection Agency is reconsidering the impact of glyphosate and Roundup on human health and the environment, including the Monarch butterfly habitats. But the World Health Organization has determined already that glyphosphate is a deadly carcinogen.

Farmers have been using glyphosphate on crops at the time of harvest, incuding peas, carrots, soy products, sweet potatoes, corn, almonds, quinoa, and others. The impact on the body’s biochemistry, especially as it pertains to inflammation and the gut is substantial. We are all being affected.

Critically endangered species are being harmed by pesticides and herbicides daily, as is our vulnerable topsoil. Retailers such as Home Depot need to be persuaded to stop supplying Roundup before our food system crashes. In this time of extreme climate change, the last thing we need is to lose the insects, those very beings we have taken granted for millennia.

In Europe, regulators have taken a far tougher position on pesticides. France has been careful to ban five neonicotinoid chemicals from agricultural use because they are known to wreak havoc on pollinating bees. Europe’s top court ruled that the chemicals posed a “serious risk to human or animal health or to the environment.”

The United Nations has issued an alert that half of pollinators, bees and butterflies included, are at immediate risk of disappearing forever. Worsening floods, drought, and serious climate disruption are occurring already. If we don’t reverse course, we will have poisoned the very foundation of this country, its soil. Without the soil there can be no civilization. In the corn belt, America has already lost half of its topsoil. By 2050, as much as 75 percent of the world will be suffering from drought.

Global famine is just around the corner if we don’t save the insects by adopting sustainable farming methods. The industrial use of pesticides is eliminating the insects we depend on and will eventually undermine the viability of our species. The insects, those tiny creatures that uphold the world, have warned us.

It’s Time To Put Food Policy Back On The Table

It’s Time To Put Food Policy Back On The Table

During the farm crisis of the 1980s, an Iowa farmer asked if I knew the difference between a family farmer and a pigeon. When I said no, he delighted in explaining: “A pigeon can still make a deposit on a new John Deere.”

That’s funny — except, it really wasn’t. Worse, the bitter reality of the tractor joke is still true: The farm crisis has not gone away, though hundreds of thousands of farm families have. The economic devastation in farm country continues unabated as agribusiness profiteers, Wall Street speculators, urban sprawlers, and corrupted political elites squeeze the life out of farmers and rural America.

Remember last year’s presidential debates? Trump and Clinton talked about the needs of hard-hit working-class families, veterans and coal miners among others. But, hellloooo, where were farmers? Indeed, where was the multitude of producers who toil on the lands and waters of this country to bring food to our tables? All went unmentioned, even though economic and emotional depression is spreading through their communities, thanks to bankruptcy-level prices paid by corporate middlemen. In the past three years, farm income has declined steadily, plummeting 12 percent in just the last year. But these crucial-but-endangered food producers were totally disappeared by the political cognoscenti.

Actually, the farmer has long been forgotten in America’s presidential discussion. In a New York Times op-ed, Professor A. Hope Jahren reported on the discovery she made when reading through transcripts of past debates: “Farm policy hasn’t come up even once in a presidential debate for the past 16 years.”

That’s Bush-Kerry, Obama-McCain, Obama-Romney, and Trump-Clinton! Not one of them mentioned the people who produce our food. Jahren notes that the monetary value of farm production alone is nearly eight times greater than coal mining, a declining industry whose voters Clinton and Trump avidly courted.

This disregard for farmers and food policy is not only irresponsible, but also politically inexplicable when you consider that food is far more than economics to people. Purchasing food has become a political act that takes into account cultural, ethical, environmental, and community values. This was confirmed last March in a national survey published by Consumer Reports showing that huge percentages of shoppers consider production issues important:

  • Supporting local farmers: 91 percent
  • Reducing exposure to pesticides in food: 89 percent
  • Protecting the environment from chemicals: 88 percent
  • Providing better living conditions for farm animals: 84 percent

Unfortunately, no matter what We the People want, most of the political class willingly surrenders farmers, and food itself, to industrial agribusiness. That would be that … except for one thing: You! Far from surrendering to the “inevitability” of a corporatized food future, the great majority of Americans continue to push forward with the alternative future of a local, sustainable, humane — and tasty — food system that benefits all.

The ongoing battle for our food future pits the agri-industrial model of huge-scale, corporate-run operations against the agri-cultural model of sustainable, community-based family farming. The big money is with the global goliaths of corporate ag, but the grip the giants once had on the marketplace has been slipping as consumers and farmers (especially younger producers) are making clear that they prefer non-industrial food. One measure of this is the contrasting fortunes of biotech vs. organic production.

The promised “miracle” of genetically altered crops, introduced in 1994 by Monsanto, turns out to have been ephemeral. The prices of corporate-altered seeds have skyrocketed, yields from those seeds have not met expectations, planting GMO crops has forced farmers to buy more pesticides, and consumers overwhelmingly oppose GMO Frankenfoods. Thus, fewer farmers are using the biotech industry’s product: US farmers cut their plantings of GMO crops by 5.4 million acres in 2015, and sales of GMO seeds fell by $400 million.

Not only does consumer demand for organically produced food keep going up, but such major producers as General Mills and Kellogg are switching to greater use of organic ingredients. As of last June, the number of America’s certified organic farms was 14,979 (up by more than 6 percent from a year earlier), and sales of organic products zoomed up by 11 percent to $43.3 billion in 2015, about four times more than the growth in conventional food sales. This rise would have gone even higher, but the demand for organic is now outstripping the supply! Consumers clearly want to buy more, thus creating good opportunities for new organic farmers — and a bright future for agri-culture.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko

Quick & Healthy: Fitter, Happier, More Delicious

Quick & Healthy: Fitter, Happier, More Delicious

“Quick & Healthy” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness you may have missed this week:

  • Power naps are not only a great away to restore your energy — they may provide an additional memory boost. In a recent German study, participants who took a 90-minute snooze were more successful at retaining recently learned information than participants who stayed up and watched a movie.
  • Researchers trying to make chocolate healthier and more delicious are showing results. By using a technique known as “pulp preconditioning,” in which cocoa pods are placed in storage for a week before processing, as well as adjusting the temperatures and timing of roasting the beans, they are finding new ways to let the finished chocolate retain more of the flavorful and nutritious antioxidants.
  • Everything old is new again. The phenomenon of “minimalist” running is yet another back-to-basics fad, in which joggers try to approximate the way our ancestors ran — namely, barefoot. Doctors are cautioning that older runners who want to take up the barefoot running craze would be advised to transition slowly to avoid injury.
  • Glysophate, the world’s most widely used weed killer and a bastion of Big Agra, is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” according to a new report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Monsanto has been distributing glysophate under the trade name Roundup since the 1970s, and predictably has disputed the report.

Photo: Lee McCoy via Flickr

Harvest Of Shame: America’s Poisoned Children Need A Hashtag

Harvest Of Shame: America’s Poisoned Children Need A Hashtag

More than 50 years ago, CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow revealed to America the awful conditions suffered by migrant farm laborers in Harvest of Shame, an angry documentary that would become a classic. While conditions have improved for some of the families whose work provides our cornucopia of affordable food, there remains a special group of workers that our political system refuses to protect: the children who pick tobacco.

On May 14, Human Rights Watch issued “Tobacco’s Hidden Children” — a stunning report on child labor in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Interviewing kids in the fields who ranged in age from 7 to 17, the organization’s researchers compiled their dismal stories of back-breaking work, inadequate water and toilet facilities, and worst of all, the chronic illness brought on by poisoning from nicotine and pesticides.

What is most troubling is that almost all of the hardship and suffering inflicted on these children is legal, so long as they are above the age of 12.

Crouched under tall, wet tobacco plants in the scorching heat, the teenaged workers soon find out that summertime means constant nausea and vomiting, intense headaches, skin rashes, and irritated eyes. It is hard to breathe, to eat, or even to sleep, despite their exhaustion. Heat stroke is an everyday risk. Medical researchers believe that the long-term dangers include bladder cancer and heart disease, as well as damage to developing adolescent nervous systems from the neurotoxins in the pesticides so heavily used by tobacco growers.

As Gabriel Thompson discovered last year when he went undercover into North Carolina’s tobacco fields for The Nation magazine and The Investigative Fund, most children start working in the fields to help parents who are earning the minimum wage and barely putting food on the table (yet another reason why the minimum must be raised).  They start this work at age 12 without any real preparation and not understanding the hazards they will face.

As former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis once observed, the kids working tobacco are badly exploited and possibly crippled for life. That is why most countries — including places like Russia and Kazakhstan — prohibit children under 18 from working in tobacco fields. But not the United States, although the State Department spent nearly $3 million recently to curtail child tobacco labor in Malawi.

Why does the U.S. government still permit this outdated outrage? In the spring of 2010, Human Rights Watch released an earlier report on child labor in American agriculture, which included interviews with adolescent tobacco workers. Solis publicly praised the report and made a promise: “We simply cannot — and this administration will not — stand by while youngsters working on farms are robbed of their childhood.” The following year, her department issued a series of new proposed regulations to protect children from the worst farm jobs, such as working in grain silos, handling pesticides, or driving tractors without seatbelts or roll bars, which results in the most deaths. And the new rules banned hiring children to work in tobacco.

Naturally the agribusiness lobby objected, mobilizing all its forces from the American Farm Bureau and Monsanto to the beef, pork, and poultry producers to stop the child-protection rules from taking effect. They mounted a mendacious campaign claiming that family farms — specifically exempted from most of the rules — would be ruined. And those lies were eagerly parroted by conservative media outlets and figures like Sarah Palin — a dim loudmouth who urges compassion for her own offspring but couldn’t care less about farmworker kids. Republicans in Congress responded by threatening to cut the Labor Department’s budget.

Such selfish and self-serving behavior was to be expected from the Tea Party right , fronting for corporate interests as usual — although there was once a time when Republican politicians cared about children.

Far more disappointing was the response of the White House, which promptly surrendered to the lobbying pressure and overruled the Labor Department. In the spring of 2012, the department issued a press release that undid all the promises made by Solis — and promised instead that the regulations would not be pursued “for the duration of the Obama administration.”

Endorsing the big lies of the agribusiness lobby, the department — which admitted that the orders had come from the White House — said that the rules had been withdrawn to prove the administration’s “commitment to family farms and respecting the rural way of life.” And if that means poisoning children, presumably the White House respects such rural customs just as sincerely.

Is it too late to rectify this grotesque injustice? Perhaps Michelle Obama, an admirable advocate for endangered children in Nigeria, should look at the kids toiling on America’s farms, whose faces appear in the Human Rights Watch report and in the video that first aired in a superb report by Fusion TV’s Rayner Ramirez. The First Lady just might imagine her own daughters in their place. At the very least those young victims will need a hashtag, too, before they finally get what they deserve from her husband.

Photo: Marcus Bleasdale/Vii for Human Rights Watch