GM wheat in Argentina

February 2022

In 2004, the US, Canadian and European wheat markets breathed a sigh of relief when Monsanto yielded to pressure and withdrew its glyphosate-tolerant GM wheat from the pipeline.

Predictably, it was just a matter of time before GM wheat popped up again, this time as 'HB4' with combined drought-resistance and tolerance to glufosinate herbicide.

HB4 has now been approved by Argentina: no surprise there, because the country has long been a key route used by the agrichemical industry as a bridgehead to the rest of Latin America for the (legal and illegal) dissemination of its products.

Avoiding evidence about cancer (linked to Glyphosate of course)

October 2021

Because humans can't be subjected to experimentation, regulators assessing the safety of a chemical have to weigh whatever other, imperfect, evidence they have at their disposal. Safety assessment is particularly challenging when dealing with a possible carcinogen, such as glyphosate herbicide [1]. It's even trickier, it seems, when the chemical is, like glyphosate, a major money-spinner produced by the powerful biotech industry for use on its commodity GM crops [2].

There are two important types of evidence available to regulators: laboratory experiments using animal models, and epidemiological studies. Neither can yield definitive conclusions, and their limitations are particularly evident in investigations of suspected carcinogens.

The shortcomings of animal models stem from the biology of cancers.

Glyphosate is damaging our children

September 2021

 

Glyphosate-based herbicides have become ubiquitous in our food chain and in our environment. Their presence has been boosted, especially, by GM glyphosate-tolerant commodity crops such as soya, maize, sugar-beet, cotton, and oil-seed rape.

How much damage are these herbicides doing to our children? Even before they've been born? And even threatening their very existence?

Nasty GM surprises

March 2020

Farmers' knowledge about the cycles of nature, their land, their crops and livestock, their soil, and all the life that shares their estates seem to have been swept aside by reductionist 'solutions' sold to them by corporations with $-lined technological tunnel vision.

Simple, GM 'solutions' have a habit of leading to complex outcomes and nasty surprises.

Poisoning our great-grandchildren?

November 2018

Disturbed by the higher incidence of birth defects he observed after moving to a mid-west farming state, one US paediatrician decided to investigate.  His research homed in on two of the most heavily used herbicides in the state: atrazine and glyphosate.  Atrazine is used on corn and soya crops, and has a habit of ending up in drinking water*.  Glyphosate is used on most GM corn and GM soya and has a habit of ending up everywhere [1].

So far, studies on humans have shown that if you plot the levels of atrazine in drinking water and birth defects, they fit each other "like a hat".  At the same time, glyphosate has been found in the body of "virtually every pregnant mother" tested in the state, and has been linked to shortened pregnancy [2].

Looking at rat experiments carried out in the US (atrazine) and Argentina (glyphosate), things become scary. 

No Bt soya for US farmers

July 2018

After spending more than a decade testing the performance of its GM 'Intacta 2 Xtend' soya in preparation for US commercialisation in 2021, Monsanto has pulled the plug.

What glyphosate has achieved in Argentina

June 2018

While the agrichemical and biotech industries insist their products are SAFE when used as directed, and regulators can't seem to figure out whose interests (the people's or industry's) to prioritise, what's happening in the real world where people have to live with the chemicals and the GMOs?

Real-life infant harm from Glyphosate

May 2018

Glyphosate is the most heavily used herbicide worldwide. Where high-tech monoculture is the agricultural norm, GM glyphosate-tolerant crops account for huge and widespread use of this one herbicide.

In Argentina, for example, 65% of pesticides used are glyphosate-based. In the American mid-west, over 90% of the millions of acres of corn, soya and canola, are GM and glyphosate-tolerant.

After starting its commercial life with a 'safe as salt' ticket [1], long before modern sub-cellular and molecular safety tests had been developed, glyphosate has certainly become "one of the world's most studied chemicals" (President of The Agribusiness Council of Indiana). However, its real-life complexity is only now being recognised by scientists.

Glyphosate and AMPA in the air

May 2018

GM crops are still hanging on to their 'environmentally-friendly' image.

Resistance to glyphosate-based herbicides is a feature of most GM crops. This GM trait enables soil-preserving no-till farming, and provides easy weed control with a single chemical reputed to be toxic only to weeds and to disappear readily from the environment. All this, plus glyphosate's early 'safe-as-salt' tag for humans [1] provided little incentive for scientific study of side-effects of the herbicide during the past decades of increasing use.

However, things are changing since the International Agency for Research on Cancer came to the conclusion that glyphosate is 'probably carcinogenic to humans' [2]. Questions are gradually surfacing about where glyphosate actually goes when it 'disappears' from the environment.

The emerging answers don't paint a comforting picture.

A soya model NOT to follow

April 2018

Argentina's 'modelo sojero', once promoted as a shining economic example for others to follow, seems instead to have led straight to the social disaster many predicted.

The 'modelo sojero' [1] is based on a move to high-tech monocultures of a few commodity crops (in this case mainly GM soya, a lot of wheat and GM maize) produced for export markets and for growing the country's GDP. Boosted by extreme free-trade, light-touch regulations and privatisation, the model channels the cash flowing in from far-off lands into state hand-outs to reduce poverty.

GM sugarcane

July 2017

Brazil has been a major supplier of non-GM soya to Europe. While huge tracts are planted with GM soya, the country has a very large land area and is confident it can keep GM and non-GM separate.

Last year, saw reductions in several GM-growing areas around the world: two countries (Romania and Burkino Faso) discontinued GM agriculture, India dropped GM cotton cultivation due to pest problems, one of China's biggest provinces implemented a 5-year ban on growing, processing and selling GM crops, Chinese GM cotton planting dropped 24%, while Argentina moved to crop diversification and away from GM. However, globally, the hectares planted to GM crops continue to edge upwards because the reductions have been offset by continuing increases in North and South America where 90% of GM plantings take place.

In Brazil there has been a rise in GM crop area, most of which will be soya, accompanied by reports of the deforestation of nearly 2 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon, the first in a decade.

This renewed environmental destruction may portend something more ominous than just more GM soya.

Regulators in Brazil have approved the commercial use of GM sugarcane.

Glyphosate damages soil

September 2016

Photo: Creative Commons

When crops are sprayed with glyphosate, a large proportion ends up on the soil. The GM plants themselves exude glyphosate through their roots into the soil. Also, any plant debris which ends up in the soil will come complete with accumulated glyphosate.

The discovery that GM cotton plants which generate 'Bt' insecticide suffer from impaired ability to support the vital associations with soil fungi in their roots wasn't anticipated [1]. Increasingly, these same Bt crops are also being genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate herbicide.

Just how Bt plants adversely influence the fungi in and around their roots is unexplained, but glyphosate's effects are highly predictable: fungi are plants and can be harmed by herbicides such as glyphosate due to the same toxic mechanism which kills the weeds. Indeed, a study by Argentinian scientists on grassland, typically treated with glyphosate in late summer to promote the growth of winter annuals, found reduced fungal spore viability and fungal root-colonisation.

Spotlight on spray drift

September 2016

Photo Creative Commons

While agri-businesses see GMOs as central to their future, the brand-oriented and customer-sensitive ends of the food supply chain do not. Indeed, 79% of Americans voice concerns about GM foods.

Although 51% of Americans express concerns over the number of chemicals and pesticides in their food, all current GM crops are designed to generate or accumulate pesticides, and are firmly embedded in the high-chemical-input monoculture model of agriculture.

Glyphosate harms the womb

August 2016

Photo Creative Commons

The two words which agrichemical manufacturers least want to hear are "endocrine disruptor". These conjure up the spectres of fertility damage, cancer, no safe level of exposure, and commercial disaster.

Glyphosate-based herbicides, such as 'Roundup' formula, are used for urban and rural seed-clearance, for pre-harvest withering of seed and tubour crops, and are heavily applied to, and accumulated by, most GM crops. Residues of glyphosate-based herbicides are now ubiquitous in our air, water, soil, livestock and bodies [2]. This is not a presence you want to find associated with long-term harm, yet evidence has been mounting for some time that Roundup and its cousins are endocrine disruptors [1].

Due to widespread growing of Roundup Ready soya in Argentina and concerns about the health of the people near Roundup-sprayed areas [3], Argentinian scientists have been particularly busy checking the herbicide out.

GM and tadpoles don't mix

May 2016

'Bt' toxins are a favourite tool of genetic engineers for creating crops which generate their own pesticide to kill whatever is their most troublesome insect pest.

In Nature, such toxins are formed by a variety of strains of Bacillus thuringienses bacteria (hence 'Bt') found in soil and on plants. Organic farmers may use Bacillus thrunigienses fermentations as natural, short-lived insecticide sprays on their crops. Outside of organic agriculture however, Bt-toxin containing formula are used to control specific problematic insects, such as disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Zika and super-zika

April 2016

One of the big health issues to emerge in 2016 is the Brazilian epidemic of babies tragically born with 'microcephaly' (undeveloped brain) and other deformities.  Between October 2015 and January 2016, some 4,000 cases of malformation were reported, with 49 deaths.  Health officials were quick to blame Zika virus which had been first identified in Brazil in April/May 2015.

Glyphosate - a developmental neurotoxin?

March 2016

Glyphosate protest: CC photo credit Corporate Europe Observatory on Flickr

Even before Nancy Swanson's investigations revealed a close parallel between glyphosate weedkiller usage and deaths from Parkinson's disease in the US [1], the herbicide had been found to trigger the cellular processes leading to natural death in rat nerve cells [2].  Swanson also noted the eerily close trajectories of rising glyphosate use with spiraling nervous-system problems such as autism, senile dementia and Alzheimer's disease.  After that, a study on bees concluded glyphosate impairs memory and associated learning [3].

Another ominous facet of glyphosate nuerotoxicity has been revealed by Argentinian scientists. Their study examined the effect of the herbicide on the development of rat embryonic nerve cells.

Oops, no worms!

September 2015

Photo Creative Commons

Earlier this year, we reported an Argentinean experiment in which a commonly-tested earthworm species was annihilated by a single spray of glyphosate herbicide [1]. Now an Austrian team have added data on two other earthworm species which fully support the self-same disaster-scenario.

Earthworms are vital to sustainable soil fertility. Up to 1000 individuals in each square meter of land act as ecosystem engineers: they shred plant litter and process it in their gut making nutrients available to plants; their burrowing aerates the soil and enhances water- and root-penetration.

Chemicals which harm the worms in soil are bad news.

Although it's heavily used on GM crops because most have been transformed to tolerate it, the very idea that glyphosate herbicide (active ingredient of 'Roundup') could be detrimental to earthworms has barely been entertained. After all, this chemical interferes with a biochemical pathway found only in plants, and the plant litter generated by the dying weeds will provide extra food for the worms. Glyphosate is obviously safe for animals, and obviously has benefits for nature.

Or does it?

Science says otherwise.

Roundup annihilates earthworms

January 2015

Roundup canisters. CC photo by London Permaculture on Flickr

More than twenty years after the commercialisation of GM crops designed to be blanket-sprayed with 'Roundup' herbicide, a paper has been published showing that a single spraying put earthworms at risk of local extinction.

Supertoxic remedies for superweeds

September 2014



Common pigweed. CC photo from Wiki Commons

American farmers have a problem: their crops are drowning in a sea of weeds and their machines are choking to death.

 

In desperation, Texas cotton growers recently petitioned the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) to allow 'emergency' use of propazine, a weed-killer widely banned because it causes birth defects, is an endocrine disruptor, a possible carcinogen, ends up in waterways and takes years to breakdown. Fortunately for the public and the environment, the petition was denied. But how did we come to such a pass?