From Organic Connections Magazine

Date:   2/9/2012 5:51:23 PM ( 12 y ago)

GMO's AND PESTICIDES

WHAT CONCERNS SCIENTISTS


This is an amazing quote:

The vast majority of commodity crops—including corn, soybeans, canola, cotton and now alfalfa—have been bred to resist one best-selling herbicide called glyphosate. Glyphosate is what is known as a broad-spectrum herbicide, meaning it is designed to kill a wide variety of weeds. Glyphosate is the primary active ingredient in the extensively used Roundup herbicide, and up until the year 2000 Roundup’s manufacturer—Monsanto—had proprietary rights to the compound. Since that time, Monsanto has continued to use it, but now generic glyphosate has appeared from a number of other manufacturers, and even from China.

Because of the quantity of GMO crops designed to resist glyphosate, an unnerving amount of this chemical is being employed. “The EPA recently came out with an estimate of glyphosate use,” Bill Freese, Science Policy Analyst with the Center for Food Safety, told Organic Connections. “It is for the year 2007, so it’s actually probably even higher now; but they’re estimating that in agriculture in the US, 180 to 185 million pounds of glyphosate are used yearly. It’s a huge quantity, and it’s coming close to half of all herbicides in use. If you include other applications like home and garden, commercial and industrial government use, it’s up right around 200 million pounds. It’s probably the most widely used pesticide in history.”

As one might imagine, such a sheer volume of poison being applied to millions of acres of farmland might begin to manifest negative effects—and credible scientists are telling us this is the case.

Effects on Plant, Soil, Animal and Human Biology

Glyphosate does not function as a normal pesticide might, directly killing the plant with which it comes in contact. Its action is actually far subtler: it acts as a chelating agent, whereby it binds itself to molecules, such as minerals, and holds them tightly, making them unavailable to the plant or weed.

In fact, glyphosate was originally patented as a chelating agent and quite accidentally became an herbicide. “Glyphosate belongs to the chemical family of phosphonates, which is a family of chelating agents,” Dr. Arden Andersen, soil scientist, agricultural consultant and physician, explained to Organic Connections. “Glyphosate was originally patented by Stauffer Chemicals in the early 1960s as a descaling agent [used to remove mineral residues inside dishwashers, vents and the like]. It was only by serendipity that it got spilled, or something, and it killed the weeds it contacted. It was subsequently purchased by Monsanto, and the rest is history. The key needed understanding to have is that glyphosate is a broad-spectrum chelating agent and was originally designed and patented as such. Its effect and use as an herbicide have been afterthoughts.”

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...This indeed calls for our awareness, our attention, our action... food/seed is not to become the commodity of Monsanto or corporate control... Food/Seed is Creations gift to all life and is to remain as Nature intended. This an important read...

Resisting The Corporate Theft Of Seeds

By Vandana Shiva

19 September, 2011
The Nation

We are in a food emergency. Speculation and diversion of food to biofuel has contributed to an uncontrolled price rise, adding more to the billion already denied their right to food. Industrial agriculture is pushing species to extinction through the use of toxic chemicals that kill our bees and butterflies, our earthworms and soil organisms that create soil fertility. Plant and animal varieties are disappearing as monocultures displace biodiversity. Industrial, globalized agriculture is responsible for 40 percent of greenhouse gases, which then destabilize agriculture by causing climate chaos, creating new threats to food security.

But the biggest threat we face is the control of seed and food moving out of the hands of farmers and communities and into a few corporate hands. Monopoly control of cottonseed and the introduction of genetically engineered Bt cotton has already given rise to an epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India. A quarter-million farmers have taken their lives because of debt induced by the high costs of nonrenewable seed, which spins billions of dollars of royalty for firms like Monsanto.

I started Navdanya in 1987 to address the challenge of GM seeds, seed patents and seed monopolies.

http://theapogeeforum.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html





 

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