South Georgia Growing Local is inside a new venue with cooking facilities!
When: 9AM-4:30 PM, Saturday, January 21st 2017 today, right now!
Where: Pinevale Elementary School, 930 Lake Park Road, Valdosta GA.
Web: page with schedule.
-jsq
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?
Michael Warren and Natacha Pisarenko wrote for AP today, Argentines link health crisis to agrochemicals,
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.
Meanwhile, German researchers found pesticides in all samples of urine, and back in the U.S.A. and Canada, researchers found pesticide metabolites in 95% of schoolchildren tested.
90+% of cotton, soybeans, peanuts, and corn around here are doused in agrochemicals, and even Continue reading
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.
Anthony Gucciardi wrote for NaturalSociety 11 April 2012, Explosive: Monsanto ‘Knowingly Poisoned Workers’ Causing Devastating Birth Defects,
In a developing news piece just unleashed by acourthouse 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.
This would be the same Monsanto that was convicted of chemical poisoning in France.
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
Picture by John S. Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 22 June 2011.
-jsq
The promise of Roundup:
“No tilling, just seed, spray, and harvest.”Adriana Alvarez, who lives next door to an Argentinia GM soy field, says:
“They came from this side and sprayed the entire field. Here he turns, spraying all the time.”The farmer was wearing a mask. That’s more than no-till farmers around here do.
Interesting statistic that in Argentina
soy production increased
35-fold between
1996 and 2003
while Roundup use increased
56 times.
And eventually it doesn’t work at all, because it breeds resistant weeds.
In Georgia it took only ten years to produce
mutant pigweed
that not just Roundup but not even paraquat can kill.
Many farmers are realizing that
it’s cheaper, more effective, and more profitable to plow the weed under
in the fall and plant a winter cover crop.
Even mutant weeds are not resistant to cold steel.
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.”
Monsanto refused an interview, responding in writing:
As Dr. Carrasco has been known to say:“Monsanto is convinced of the safety and usefullness of its products and its contribution to efficacious agriculture.”
“Son hipócritas, cipayos de las corporaciones, pero tienen miedo. Saben que no pueden tapar el sol con la mano.”“They are hypocrites, those corporate lackeys, but they are afraid. They know they can’t cover the sun with their hand.”
The documentarians interviewed
Gilles-Eric Seralini in Caen, France.
“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:
“Transgenics are toxic for human health.”
This is the same Monsanto that
made Fox rewrite 80 times about RBGH in Florida cows.
The same Monsanto that
was convicted by the French Supreme Court of lying about leaving the soil clean.
The same Monsanto that
was fined $2.5 million by the U.S. EPA for
selling genetically modified cotton seeds without labeling them as such.
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.
The Roundup-spraying farmer said:
Roundup, mas algo! mas algo!It’s time to say:Roundup, more and more!
Ya basta!Enough already!
-jsq
PS: Credits to the German TV consumer series ‘plus minus’:
GM toxic soy in animal feed broadcast (© WDR) by Detlef Flintz and Mathias Rauck. Translation and highlighting provided by TraceConsult. Broadcast Tue, 08 Feb. 2011 | 9:50 PM.Bericht
D. Flintz
M. Rauck
Kamera
J. Fenske
C. Kültür
J. Midú
Schnitt
H. Bischoff
E. Elsner
This is the same “gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt)” used in Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready cotton and peanuts and soybeans. Since Continue readingAn 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.