We Won the Labeling Fight–or Did We?
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Four major food companies – ConAgra Foods, Kellogg’s, General Mills and Mars, Inc. – announced they will label food products that contain genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. These companies join Campbell’s Soup, which declared its intent to do likewise back in January.
The news comes less than a week after GMO labeling supporters in the Senate defeated the latest attempt at a bill that opponents have dubbed the Deny Americans the Right to Know Act, or DARK Act. That legislation would have prohibited states from requiring GMO labeling. Vermont has already passed a mandatory labeling law, scheduled to go into effect July 1.
But before we rejoice, might there be more to the story? Ronnie Cummins and Katherine Paul of the Organic Consumers Association certainly think there might be. Here’s their thinking on the topic:
Have consumers won the GMO labeling battle? Have these food companies that so fiercely fought to keep labels off their products really split with the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), the multi-billion-dollar lobbying group that is still trying to overturn Vermont’s law in the courts, and preempt it in Congress?
Four out of the five companies announced plans to label after a Senate bill to preempt Vermont’s labeling law failed, but before the Senate has a chance to come back with an amended version of the bill after Congress returns on April 4 from Easter recess.
It’s worth noting that all of the companies that have revealed plans to label adamantly defend the “safety” of GMOs—without once mentioning the fact that the vast majority of GMO crops, from which GMO food ingredients are derived, are sprayed with glyphosate, classified last year by the World Health Organization as “a probable human carcinogen.” Clearly, we have a long way to go before food corporations acknowledge the devastating consequences of the GMO monoculture model on the environment, human health and global warming.
General Mills, Mars and Kellogg’s all revealed their labeling plans after the Senate failed to pass S. 2609, a bill intended to preempt Vermont. It’s possible that their announcements signal that these food giants have conceded defeat, especially as they all noted the need to comply with the Vermont July 1 deadline.
That’s the optimistic view. But the timing of these announcements, made before the Senate returns to try again to try to pass a preemption bill, could also be part of a calculated strategy to win over more Senators to a compromise bill, one that will delay or outright preempt enactment of Vermont’s Act 120.
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), sponsor of the Monsanto- and GMA-funded S. 2609 (the DARK Act) is unwavering in his rejection of any legislation that requires labels on GMO ingredients. Though he is adamant about a “federal solution,” Roberts outright, and illogically, rejects the idea of a uniform mandatory federal solution.
Roberts’ rigid position on mandatory vs. voluntary cost him the support of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Ranking Member of the Senate Agriculture Committee and a key player in the GMO labeling drama. Stabenow says she would support a mandatory federal labeling law, though whether that support would include on-package labels, or some sort of QR barcode scheme or toll-free phone numbers, both of which have been floated as alternatives to on-package labels, remains unclear.
Still, Stabenow and other Senators representing Big Ag states are under tremendous pressure (by corporations, not voters) to keep Vermont’s law from taking effect. The Big Food corporations know this. So is it possible that companies, by announcing, in quick succession that they will label voluntarily, hope to send the message that there’s no need to pass a mandatory labeling law, because they’ve already volunteered? And could those big companies, or at least some of them, pull the plug on their labeling plans if federal legislation preempts Vermont? (Again, Campbell’s and Mars have said they will proceed regardless of what happens in Congress—we know that’s not the case for General Mills; Kellogg’s and ConAgra haven’t confirmed one way or the other).
That’s one possibility. Here’s another. General Mills told Politco’s Jenny Hopkinson that while the company won’t pass on the cost of labeling to consumers, the Minnesota-based cereal giant will have to spend “millions of dollars” to comply with Vermont’s law. Could this “woe is me” message win enough sympathy votes from Senators who may still be on the fence (and who are being hounded by their corporate donors), that they’ll be persuaded to betray consumers in order to stave off what General Mills or other companies allege is a “huge” financial burden?
It’s also possible that this is just a public relations ploy by corporations that are banking on the fact that a federal law will pass before they have to label, and that that law will include restrictions that prohibit them from printing “produced with genetic engineering,” or similar wording, on their packages. That scenario would allow them to say, gee, we tried to give consumers what they want, but Congress wouldn’t allow it.
Whatever the new-and-improved version of the Senate bill morphs into, assuming the Senate passes a bill, it will have to go back to the U.S. House. There, members of a Republican-controlled Joint Standing Conference Committee will try to “reconcile” the Senate bill with the House version, H.R. 1599, which passed the House in July by a vote of 275 – 150. Guaranteed, the House won’t sign off on anything with the words “mandatory” or “on-package.” In fact, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway (R-Texas), according to Politico, “declared just this week that he won’t support on-package labeling, which he has said stigmatizes the technology.” Whatever ends up coming out of the committee will have to go back to the House and Senate for a full vote.
That leaves consumers no choice but to continue to hammer our Senators with this message: No compromise. Let Vermont’s law take effect. And if you really can’t tolerate supporting states’ rights to pass labeling laws, then pass a federal labeling law that meets, or preferably exceeds, the standards set by Vermont’s law.
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GLYPHOSATE FOUND IN WINE AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE
Concerned with the widespread contamination of glyphosate/Roundup and other
glyphosate based herbicides from GMO chemical farming, Moms Across America has
initiated the testing of glyphosate in water, urine, breast milk, Pediasure feeding tube
liquid given to pediatric patients with cancer, baby formula, and beverages. Since then,
several groups have since reported finding glyphosate in cereal, bread, honey, cow’s
milk, soy sauce, pet food, beer and more.
In this recent project, an individual and Moms Across America supporter sent ten wines, including organic and biodynamic, to be tested for glyphosate based herbicides
On March 16th, 2016, Moms Across America received results from testing done by Microbe Inotech Lab of St. Louis, Missouri, that showed all 10 wines sampled by the lab tested positive for the chemical glyphosate, the declared “active” ingredient in Roundup weedkiller.
The highest level of glyphosate detected was in a 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon from a conventional, chemically farmed vineyard. It was 28.4 times higher than the other wines at an average 18.74 parts per billion. The lowest level was from a biodynamic and organic vineyard, 2013 Syrah, which has never been sprayed according to the owner, with a level of 0.659 ppb. An organic wine from 2012 made from mixed red wine grapes, had 0.913 ppb of glyphosate.
It is important to note that the detection of glyphosate is an indicator of the
presence of many other coformulants in glyphosatebased herbicides which
have recently been shown by French scientist Seralini’s team to be endocrine
hormone disruptors and to be 1000x more toxic than glyphosate alone. Therefore, the type or amount of the coformulant chemicals in the wines are untested
and the consequences on our health are unknown.
Monsanto’s Roundup recently earned the ominous title of the most heavily-used agricultural chemical of all time, according to Dr. Joseph Mercola. In fact, an analysis showed that farmers sprayed enough glyphosate in 2014 to apply 0.8 pounds of the chemical to every acre of cultivated cropland in the U.S., and nearly 0.5 a pound of glyphosate to all cropland worldwide.
As you might suspect, when you use this much of a chemical, it doesn’t simply stay on the fields. The lab testing reported by Moms Across America reveals that glyphosate is now showing up virtually everywhere.
The analysis referred to by Dr. Mercola revealed glyphosate in levels of 76 micrograms per liter (μg/l) to 166 μg/l in women’s breast milk. As reported by The Detox Project, this is 760 to 1,600 times higher than the EU-permitted level in drinking water (although it’s lower than the U.S. maximum contaminant level for glyphosate, which is 700 μg/l).
This dose of glyphosate in breastfed babies’ every meal is only the beginning. An in vitro study designed to simulate human exposures also found that glyphosate crosses the placental barrier. In the study, 15 percent of the administered glyphosate reached the fetal compartment (as doctors sometimes call the pregnant uterus).
Angelika Hilbeck, Ph.D., senior scientist at the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich, told The Detox Project: “If confirmed in a full investigation, it seems that glyphosate has become a ubiquitous chemical in terms of presence and persistence. This data also offers a first indication of potential accumulation in the human body, giving newborns a substantial dose of synthetic chemicals as a ‘gift’ for their start into life, with unknown consequences. This is reckless and irresponsible conduct in a democratic society, which still has a living memory of previous reckless chemical contaminations, such as DDT.”
The analysis revealed glyphosate in additional samples as well, including the blood of non-pregnant Canadian women. Their average level was 73.6 μg/l, which is similar to the concentration found to have endocrine-disrupting effects in vitro.
Further, glyphosate was also detected in urine samples, and U.S. women had maximum glyphosate levels that were more than eight times higher than levels found in urine of Europeans.
Where is the glyphosate exposure coming from? It’s likely coming from food (although it could be in water as well). We don’t know exactly how much glyphosate may be in your food because the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does not test for it.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just announced in February that it would begin testing foods for glyphosate, however, which will help to quantify just how much glyphosate Americans are consuming.
For now, the analysis suggests that eating non-organic, genetically engineered foods (the prime candidates for Roundup spraying) is associated with higher glyphosate levels in your body. The Detox Project explained: “Glyphosate levels have been found to be significantly higher in urine of humans who ate non-organic food, compared with those who ate mostly organic food. Chronically ill people showed significantly higher glyphosate residues in their urine than healthy people. In a separate detailed analysis, glyphosate was found in the urine of cows, humans, and rabbits. Cows kept in a GMO-free area had significantly lower glyphosate concentrations in urine than cows in conventional livestock systems.”
Glyphosate and its degradation product, aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), were detected in more than 75 percent of air and rain samples collected during the 2007 growing season in the Mississippi Delta agricultural region.
This could be even higher now, as since 1996 the use of glyphosate has risen nearly 15-fold. The testing commissioned by Moms Across America also found glyphosate in 13 of 21 U.S. drinking water samples tested.7
They contained glyphosate levels between 0.085 ug/l and 0.33 ug/l, which is only slightly below the EU maximum allowed level for glyphosate in drinking water of 0.1 ug/l.
Further, a 2012 analysis used a magnetic particle immunoassay to test for the presence of glyphosate in roughly 140 samples of groundwater from Catalonia, Spain. The analysis found that glyphosate was present above the limit of quantification in 41 percent of the samples.
This suggests the chemical does not break down rapidly in the environment, as its manufacturer claims, and instead it might be accumulating (both in the environment and in people).
In northern, colder regions, farmers of wheat and barley must wait for their crops to dry out prior to harvest.
Rather than wait an additional two weeks or so for this to happen naturally, farmers realized they could spray the plants with glyphosate, killing the crop and accelerating their drying (a process known as desiccating).
Desiccating wheat with glyphosate is particularly common in years with wet weather and has been increasing in North Dakota and Upper Midwestern states in the U.S., as well as in areas of Canada and Scotland (where the process first began). One Canadian farmer told EcoWatch: “I think every non-organic farmer in Saskatchewan uses glyphosate on most of their wheat acres every year … I think farmers need to realize that all of the chemicals we use are ‘bad’ to some extent … Monsanto has done such an effective job marketing glyphosate as ‘safe’ and ‘biodegradable’ that farmers here still believe this even though such claims are false.”
What this means is that even non-GMO foods are likely to be contaminated with glyphosate, and possibly even more so because they’re being sprayed just weeks prior to being made into your cereal, bread, cookies and the like.
Along with wheat and barley, other crops that are commonly desiccated with glyphosate include oats; legumes like lentils, peas, and non-GMO soybeans; corn; flax; rye; buckwheat; triticale; canola; millet; sugar beets; potatoes, and sunflowers.
No one is keeping track of how many crops are being desiccated with glyphosate; those in the industry have described it as a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy.”
Others have described spraying crops with glyphosate just days before harvest “barbaric.” Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the recent study showing glyphosate use is increasing, told EcoWatch: “I don’t understand why Monsanto and the food industry don’t voluntarily end this practice. They know it contributes to high dietary exposure (of glyphosate).”
Uh, Dr. Benbrook, I think you know the reason. Monsanto is in the business of selling glyphosate, not protecting people and the environment from glyphosate.
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HORMONE DISRUPTORS LINKED TO FIBROID DEVELOPMENT
Hormone-disrupting chemicals are everywhere — in plastics, pesticides, and makeup — and two of them, phthalates and DDE, have been particularly strongly linked with common female reproductive conditions, such as fibroids, according to CNN.
In a new study, researchers estimate that the problems caused by these two chemicals alone could cost the European Union at least 1.41 billion euros a year, the U.S. equivalent of about $1.58 billion.
or the current study, the researchers turned their attention toward fibroids and endometriosis, two common conditions that affect an estimated 70 percent of women and are leading causes of female infertility
The researchers looked at studies of many different endocrine-disrupting chemicals and determined that the strongest evidence, albeit still from only a handful of studies, implicated a role for DDE, or diphenyldichloroethene, and phthalates in fibroids and endometriosis, respectively.
“There are substantial human and toxicological studies (in mice and other lab animals) that suggest that exposure to these endocrine-disrupting chemicals, many of which are increasing in use, are contributing to female reproductive conditions,” said Dr. Leonardo Trasande, associate professor of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine.
Trasande carried out the earlier study on the economic impact of these chemicals and is the lead author of the new study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
DDE is a breakdown product of the insecticide DDT that, although banned in the United States in 1972 and in Europe starting in the 1970s, still lingers in the environment and enters our body through food. The main exposure to phthalates is through eating food and drink stored in plastic containers.
Trasande and his colleagues determined that 56,700 cases of fibroids among women in Europe were probably due to DDE exposure, and 145,000 cases of endometriosis were probably caused by phthalates. The researchers arrived at these estimates through studies that looked at typical DDE exposures in women of reproductive age in Europe and the association between DDE levels in the blood and fibroid diagnoses.
In a similar way, they relied on a study that linked higher phthalate levels in women who had been diagnosed with endometriosis compared to healthy women.
The researchers noted that the costs generated by these chemicals would be even greater if they had factored in infertility associated with fibroids and endometriosis, and the other health problems those conditions can lead to. For example, endometriosis can increase the risk of cancer and autoimmune disorders.
“In so far as Europe is actively considering criteria for endocrine-disrupting chemicals and they are about to pursue action to limit exposure to chemicals in that category, this work is likely to be extremely important in shaping European policy,” Trasande said.
The European Union and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have already banned the use of certain endocrine disruptors, such as BPA, in baby bottles, though research suggests alternatives to BPA also might not be safe.
Although the United States is not as far along in considering restrictions on these chemicals, it could get a jumpstart from European legislation.
“Potentially some of the progress in European activity could actually bring the key stakeholders, such as environmental public health groups and industry, to the table in considering U.S. legislation,” Trasande said.
The health burden — and healthcare costs — of endocrine-disrupting chemicals could far exceed what the current study captured by looking at only two chemical groups. As Trasande and his colleagues point out in the study, several other chemicals, such as PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, have been linked with female reproductive health problems.
Some of these chemicals, including PCBs and dioxins, have already been restricted through a treaty called the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which went into effect in 2004, said Linda S. Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program.
The current study is important because it focused on chemicals that have not been restricted, and in the case of DDE — which persists in the environment — are not able to be restricted, Birnbaum said. However, she said she was surprised the researchers did not include an analysis of chemicals such as BPA, which has also been linked to endometriosis risk.
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