CIRCA 2016
For those familiar with the mounting body of peer-reviewed evidence showing that the herbicide Roundup is probably harmful to animals, crops and humans, it may be hard to understand why the product remains so wildly popular. This story tells you why.
by Larry Powell
For years, Monsanto, the US-based chemical and agrifood giant which makes Roundup, has maintained a veritable media blitz.
The ads are everywhere. Newspapers, radio, TV, online.
They sing the praises of Roundup and the seeds used to grow the crops.
The corporation has manipulated the seeds to resist Roundup, by adding a gene from another species. It’s called genetic modification (GM) or transgenics. These "genetically-modified organisms," (GMOs) allow the Roundup to kill the weeds, but spare the crops. Hence the term, "Roundup-Ready" (RR).
Roundup has, for years, been referred to as Monsanto's "flagship" product and a key to its enormous commercial success.
Monsanto and other such corporations now produce almost 200 similar formulations under different brand names. But Roundup, first registered in 1976, still dominates. The common, active ingredient in all of these is glyphosate.
While logging companies and homeowners use it on forests, lawns and gardens, it is the world's farmers who buy it most, spraying it on their food crops.
So the farmer, or primary food producer, has become Monsanto's "target audience."
Roundup will keep your farm weed-free, help you produce more crop and put more money in your pocket.
You are stewards of the land, the ads proclaim, on a mission with Monsanto as your partner, to achieve truly "sustainable agriculture" over the coming decades.
Using Monsanto's chemical and seed technology, you can help reduce precious water and fuel usage and therefore greenhouse gas emissions, by fully one-third, "by 2030 or sooner."
Even the daunting task of feeding a soaring human population may be within reach. "There'll likely be 9 billion people in the world by mid-century," another ad reminds the producer,"so you'll need to produce as much food over the next 40 years as you have in the past 10 thousand!"
To the farmer who wants to take these kinds of challenges seriously, this is heady stuff, indeed.
Meanwhile, growth prospects for the product seem to be going nowhere but upward.
Along with wheat, GM canola is arguably the most valuable crop and biggest food export in Canada. It relies totally on Roundup or another glyphosate-based herbicide, to succeed.
Meanwhile, the goal of the Canola Council of Canada, representing producers, is to boost production by 65%, to 15 million tonnes over the next three years!
How Else is Monsanto "Winning us Over?"
The corporation has skilfully crafted a winning combination of strategies to build good will at the community level and in the schools.
For example, there's the "Monsanto Fund Opportunity Scholarship" program. Since 1991, it has awarded well over $1 million to thousands of graduating grade 12 students from farm families. The money helps pay for their post-secondary education in agriculture or a related field.
The company also gives thousands of dollars to the "Made in Manitoba Breakfast Program," organized by a non-profit, charitable group. With the Monsanto logo fully on display, It travels across the province, feeding students full, hot breakfasts, helping them "explore the agriculture industry and learn where their food comes from."
The program provides Monsanto with a golden opportunity to tell the world (and impressionable young people) about its philanthropic virtues, with nary a hint of the dark side of its products.
And it would be the rare student, indeed who benefitted from the corporation's generosity, to raise a whisper of dissent in such an environment.
Academia, politicians and bureaucrats have long settled in with Monsanto, not as a maker of products which might need regulation, but as a partner, client or even bedfellow to be listened to and served.
Monsanto has the ready ear of lawmakers at the federal level. According to the Globe and Mail, the biotech industry, with Monsanto playing a leading role - held 50 meetings with federal politicians and government officials leading up to the defeat of a bill in parliament. That bill would have placed GM crops under more scrutiny when they are considered for foreign export.
For decades, the corporations's Canadian headquarters has been at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. In 2010, as protestors demonstrated outside, Manitoba's Minister of Agriculture, Stan Struthers, lunched inside with company officials. The occasion was the grand opening of a $12 million, "state-of-the-art" centre, dedicated to the breeding efforts of Monsanto Canada's rapidly growing canola business.
To this day, GM Canola is so prevalent, organic producers have complained their own fields have been contaminated and their markets destroyed, due to "pollen drift" from GM fields.
The Case Against Roundup
An examination of the research done into the safety of Roundup over the years, offers many disturbing glimpses into a product which achieves such pristine monocultures.
Many authors have reported that in the past 30 years there has been a significant decline in amphibian populations in several different parts of the world.
In 2005, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Rick Relyea, carried out research which pointed the finger directly at Roundup. He concluded that the weed-killer "Can cause extremely high rates of mortality to amphibians that could lead to population declines." Prof. Relyea, with the University's Department of Biological Sciences, noted that earlier tests in the laboratory had already shown that the herbicide may be highly lethal to North American tadpoles. So he set up tests exposing three species of frogs, both larvae and juveniles, to Roundup, outdoors, in what he called "more natural conditions." After a single day, "the Roundup had killed up to 86% of the juveniles and, in three weeks, up to 100% of the larvae."
A body of research done here in Canada seems to counter claims by Roundup's maker, Monsanto, that it is safe.
Five years ago, a graduate student at the University of Manitoba, Jennifer Magoon, found statistically significant links between the use of crop sprays and serious health problems with infants born in farming areas of the province where such sprays were commonly used.
Those problems included low birth weights, spina biffida, respiratory distress, jaundice, Down syndrome, cleft palate, retinal degeneration and cataracts. Her findings, two years in the making and reviewed and approved by her peers and superiors, do not mention Roundup. But she singled out herbicides as the class of crop chemical she was most concerned with.
In 1997, the Ontario Farm Family Health Study surveyed almost 19 hundred male farmers in Ontario who'd been exposed to several chemicals, including glyphosate in their faming activities. It concluded that their partners were "more than twice as likely" to miscarry or give birth, prematurely.
In 2,001 another phase of the same study, surveyed almost 4 thousand pregnant farm women in the same province. All had been involved in farming activities, milking cows, cultivating or seeding the fields and sometimes helping their partners mix and apply the herbicides. 395 of those women experienced miscarriages. All had been exposed to a variety of pesticides, including glyphosate.
In the words of the study, "Among older women (over 34) exposed to glyphosate, the risk of miscarriage was three times that for women of the same age who were not exposed to this active ingredient."
The French Connection
In 2009, laboratory findings by a leading French researcher, Gilles-Eric Séralini, proved consistent with that Canadian research. In his lab at the University of Caen, the molecular biologist demonstrated that, within 24 hours, the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, was totally lethal to three different kinds of human cells (umbilical, embryonic and placental), at just a fraction of the concentrations used in agriculture and equal to those found in human and animal feed!
Séralini was "surprised" to also discover that other ingredients in Roundup, besides glyphosate, were not the harmless substances the public had been led to believe. On the contrary, Roundup, as a mixture, was, in every test, always twice as deadly as glyphosate alone! One of those other ingredients (polyoxyethylene tallow amines, POEA), stated the researcher, has been clinically shown to cause "high mortality in fish and amphibians." Regulators had been legally classifying "POEA" as simply "inert."
He also concluded, Roundup's residues "May thus enter the food chain, and glyphosate is found as a contaminant in rivers."
Can Roundup (glyphosate) Actually Damage Crops?
Extensive, multi-year research by an Agriculture Canada team led by Miriam Fernandez, published some two years ago, showed that use of glyphosate was actually a significant factor in the incidence of Fusarium head blight (FHB) and Common root rot (CRR) in wheat and barley crops planted up to 18 months after such application. Both FHB and CRR are considered serious diseases in these important cereal crops in places like eastern Saskatchewan, where the trials were conducted. (The study appeared in the European Journal of Agronomy in 2009.) While tillage practices were also found to have some effect, the team concluded, "Previous glyphosate use was consistently associated with higher FHB levels" … and "significantly increased" risk of the plant diseases.
Can Fusarium Also Harm Animals and Humans?
According to the Mold and Bacterial Consulating Laboratories, fusarium toxins have been shown to cause a variety of toxic effects such as vomiting and feed refusal in livestock. They're also suspected of being poisonous to humans.
The Federal Response
Health Canada (the federal Department which regulates pesticides through its Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency) told me, it was aware of the evidence documented here, but, that, "It did not raise immediate risk concerns that would have triggered regulatory action."
Then, in December, the PMRA approved Roundup for yet another use, on mustard seed crops. It states," The evaluation of this glyphosate application indicated that the end-use product has merit and value and the human health and environmental risks associated with the new uses are acceptable."
Superweeds
Over the years, some weeds sprayed with Roundup (glyphosate) have developed resistance. In other words, they refuse to die. They're called "superweeds." Finding other ways to get rid of them can be a huge and expensive problem for farmers. "Kochia weed" was found apparently thriving in three fields sprayed with glyphosate in southern Alberta just last summer. Another superweed, Canada fleabane, was found in well over 100 sites in Ontario in the past couple of years. Monsanto has responded to the superweed crisis, not as a setback, but an opportunity. It now sells even more potent chemicals to "burn down" the superweeds.
Last November, the Federal Court of Canada (FCC) asked the Minister of Health, Leona Aglukaag, to consider ordering a "special review" of the safety of glyphosate. (It is Health Canada, through the Pesticide Management Review Agency (PMRA), which regulates products such as Roundup.) Now, several months later, the Minister has declined to give me or even the court a definitive answer to the court's request. (According to the FCC, the Minister is neither required to abide by the court's request, or even inform it of what her decision is.) That ruling came down several months ago. Despite repeated requests from this author, the Minister has now fallen silent on the issue.
The PMRA is conducting a review of glyphosate. But it is a longer-range, more routine examination than a "special review" would have been. That is unlikely to be completed for at least another year.
Reaction to the Court Ruling
It was Josette Wier, an environmental activist from BC, who started the legal ball rolling by asking the Minister for the special review, then being refused. (It was that refusal which sparked the court case.)
But Ms. Wier refuses to accept the outcome as a defeat.
"The ruling is only a small victory, but a victory, nevertheless."
"I truly feel that I am doing the job of government and that government has become the enemy. Scientific facts mean nothing, as they are so embedded with industry. And Monsanto, Dow Chemicals etc... are so powerful. So only what is left is this awful job going through the court and wasting enormous amounts of time and money. I guess if changes are to happen, one should not expect any result soon, even in one's lifetime. But what counts is to keep the flow going."
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