Renewable Farming

The worst mistake a corporation can make: Infuriate mothers, or the Chinese

The headline on this article is a paraphrase of crop consultant Bob Streit’s comment to farmers — tactfully avoiding the fact that he’s referring to the major biotech firms pushing GMOs and their related residues into the global marketplace.

Well, both of these constituencies are intensifying their crusades against toxic herbicides, primarily glyphosate, and against genetically modified food.

The national organization, “Moms Across America” is literally marching for safe, healthy food. A groundswell of public opinion, fueled by social media, is intensifying “no GMO” efforts across China. 

This is where change will occur in America. Not from the federal agencies paid to protect health and lives, but from informed individuals.

Meanwhile the media gatekeepers, in and out of agriculture, can no longer maintain the facade that glyphosate is as safe as table salt…  genetically modified foods never hurt anyone… and on into the night.  

The latest worry for Monsanto attorneys in St.Louis is that five very articulate and scientifically capable women have joined forces with a class action lawsuit challenging a specific Monsanto advertising claim that “Glyphosate targets an enzyme in plants, but not in people or pets.”  Major media have mostly ignored the lawsuit, filed earlier this year.  Details are on the Infowars website.

This is a legally vulnerable spot, like the claim in the European Union that glyphosate quickly breaks down in soil. (Monsanto lost that lawsuit, brought in France.)

There’s an equally vulnerable advertising statement on a document published in February 2010 by Monsanto International and Monsanto Europe SA.  The publication is titled, “The agronomic benefits of glyphosate in Europe.”  For your reading enjoyment, you can download it at this link.

Here’s what it says on page 4, in a list of summary benefits, item “L” —

“Highly safe to operators, public and environment: glyphosate is only active in plants, acting by blocking the production of aromatic amino acids, a process that does not occur in animals.”

Massive clinical evidence is available that glyphosate, one of the most effective bactericides known, kills beneficial microbes in the human digestive system. It kills them by chelating essential elements and thus blocking their ability to produce essential amino acids, the precursors to proteins. With beneficials decimated in the gut, pathogens and parasites dominate, and inflammation intensifies.

Ironically, it was not a government or biotech company study that spurred this finding, but a cooperative effort between an Iowa farmer, Howard Vlieger, and a research team led by Australian scientist Judy Carmen. You can see that research report as a PDF at this link.   Dr. Don Huber, speaking Sept. 2 at a field day in Iowa, cited this study, which found that hogs fed a diet of GMO corn and soybean meal developed inflamed stomachs and gastrointestinal tracts. Part of this response could be an immune reaction; part from the documented presence of glyphosate residue in the corn and protein supplement. 

A market hog can endure this for five months and still reach finished weight. A human being eating less concentrated “rations,” but still laced with corn/soybean products, has high odds of developing gut inflammation and and follow-on problems which lead to celiac, Crohn’s disease and the other chronic diseases which are going epidemic in America.

Those accelerating disease rates were documented by the Center for Disease Control, and brought to the public by Dr. Nancy Wilson — one of the five influential women who’ve just signed on as supporters of the class action suit against Monsanto.  You can see more details about this suit at this link.