With GM crops come herbicides, which breed resistant weeds.
This has happened in about a decade for the worse mutants.
We can reverse the problem by reversing the spraying,
using plowing, cultivation, and crop rotation instead.
Likely effects of dousing
90+% of all corn, soybeans, peanuts, and cotton grown in Georgia
(and elsewhere)
in Roundup and other toxic chemicals,
often drifting onto other people’s land, schools, shops,
and churches.
It’s not that hard to grow the same crops without those poisons
and without the toxic seeds that require them;
not that hard and more profitable.
Yes, I know Jeffrey M. Smith is not a biological scientist
or medical doctor.
But many of the sources he cites are.
The IRT release also indicated that glyphosate, a weed killer sold
under the brand name ‘Roundup’ was also found to have a negative
effect on intestinal bacteria. GMO crops contain high levels of the
toxin at harvest.
“Even with minimal exposure, glyphosate can significantly
reduce the population of beneficial gut bacteria and promote the
overgrowth of harmful strains,” the report found.
Pesticide poisoning has rapidly increased in Argentina as Monsanto-seed
pesticided crops ramped up.
Meanwhile in Georgia, 90+% of common crops already are doused in pesticides.
What effects are all those poisons having on our own children and adults?
Argentine farmworker Fabian Tomasi wasn’t trained to use protective
gear as he pumped pesticides into crop dusters. Now at 47, he’s a
living skeleton.
Schoolteacher Andrea Druetta lives in a town where it’s illegal to
spray agrochemicals within 550 yards of homes, and yet soy is
planted just 33 yards from her back door. Recently, her boys were
showered in chemicals while swimming in their backyard pool.
Sofia Gatica’s search for answers after losing her newborn to kidney
failure led to Argentina’s first criminal convictions for illegal
spraying last year. But 80 percent of her neighbors’ children
surveyed carry pesticides in their blood.
For many years big agro has treated the world’s health as an economic externality, a problem for somebody else that did not affect its own bottom line. That is starting to change, most recently in Argentina.
In a developing news piece just unleashed by a courthouse news wire, Monsanto is being brought to court by dozens of Argentinean tobacco farmers who say that the biotech giant knowingly poisoned them with herbicides and pesticides and subsequently caused ”devastating birth defects” in their children. The farmers are now suing not only Monsanto on behalf of their children, but many big tobacco giants as well. The birth defects that the farmers say occurred as a result are many, and include cerebral palsy, down syndrome, psychomotor retardation, missing fingers, and blindness.
But this is once again far away in a small country of which we know nothing, right? Wrong:
The farmers come from small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell their tobacco to many United States distributors. The family farmers say that major tobacco companies like the Philip Morris company asked them to use Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides, assuring them that the products were safe. Through asserting that the toxic chemicals were safe, the farmers state in their claim that the tobacco companies ”wrongfully caused the parental and infant plaintiffs to be exposed to those chemicals and substances which they both knew, or should have known, would cause the infant offspring of the parental plaintiffs to be born with devastating birth defects.”
Still, it must be some obscure poison only sold in the third world, right?
Wrong:
The majority of the farmers in the area used Monsanto’s Roundup, an herbicide with the active ingredient glyphosate that has shown to be killing human kidney cells. What’s more, the farmers say that the tobacco companies pushed Monsanto’s Roundup on the farmers despite a lack of protective equipment. In other words, these farmers — many in dire economic conditions — were being directly exposed to Roundup in large concentrations without any protective gear (or even experience or skills in handling the substance). Still, the farmers say the tobacco giants required the struggling farmers to ‘purchase excessive quantities of Roundup and other pesticides’.
That would be the same Roundup that farmers use around here all the time, without protective equipment. The Roundup we already knew was
Continue reading →
First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any
problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company’s
scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of
dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they
desperately wanted — soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been
incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists
for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company’s
“Manhattan Project.”
Considering how hard it had been to create those crops, “the
thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become
tolerant” to Roundup, says Rick Cole, who is now responsible for
Monsanto’s efforts to deal with the problem of resistant weeds.
So they thought small scale would be the same as saturating
90+% of every corn, soybean, peanut, and cotton field in the U.S.
and numerous other countries with virulent poisons.
Because they wanted the money.
The documentary points out many products in German stores that
include GM soy.
In Argentina, it’s even worse, with increasing numbers of birth defects.
They interview
Prof. Andrés Carrasco about his research on amphibians:
“The hemispheres do not separate, like you can see here.
If you look closely you can see one brain.
Glyphosate can cause this kind of mechanisms, for it is an enzymatic toxin.”
“To human cells glyphosate is already toxic in a very low dose.
A farmer uses a much higher dose on the field.
Roundup is even more toxic than glysophate,
for that is only one of the ingredients in Roundup.”
Roundup says none of this applies to humans and Roundup is safe.
Seralini
says:
Who should you believe?
A corporation repeatedly convicted of deception,
or scientists who say that GM crops
cause liver and kidney damage in animals,
according to research using Monsanto’s own data.
An insecticide used in genetically modified (GM) crops grown extensively
in the United States and other parts of the world has leached into the
water of the surrounding environment.
The insecticide is the product of a bacterial gene inserted into GM
maize and other cereal crops to protect them against insects such as
the European corn borer beetle. Scientists have detected the insecticide
in a significant number of streams draining the great corn belt of the
American mid-West.
The researchers detected the bacterial protein in the plant detritus that
was washed off the corn fields into streams up to 500 metres away. They
are not yet able to determine how significant this is in terms of the
risk to either human health or the wider environment.
Mutant pigweed, Amaranthus palmeri, caused by repeated application of Roundup to cotton.
Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, Coffee County, Georgia, 2 October 2010.
More in the
flickr set.
In both cases, we here in the southeast are just peasants
or backwards natives from the perspectives of the
the new colonialists as they try to transform our countryside.
So what if such transformation results in
dust storms
or
leaks, explosions, or
higher domestic natural gas prices?
The new colonialists would profit!
