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Glyphosate Found in California Wines

Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on Glyphosate Found in California Wines

Shortly after the release of a report showing 14 beers testing positive for glyphosate in Germany, a concerned supporter of Moms Across America approached me at a convention with disturbing news, Zen Honeycutt reports in EcoWatch.

He said he had test results from Microbe Inotech Lab of St.Louis showing that 10 different wines, from large and small vineyards, contained the chemical glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer, including wine made with organic grapes.

The contamination of conventional wine was 28 times higher than the organic wine, with levels ranging from 0.659 parts per billion in organic wine to 18.74 ppb in conventional wine.

The wines tested came from Napa Valley, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties in California. The brand names of the wines were not revealed, and frankly, the brands are not the issue. The real issue is the widespread contamination of glyphosate based herbicides in consumer products.

Here are my five reasons why Roundup/glyphosate should never be sprayed on any crops, including vineyards:

1. According to farmers, glyphosate based herbicides are likely present in manure/fertilizer from animals fed genetically modified grains because GMOs are sprayed with excessive amounts of Roundup. In fact, the genetic modifications are made so the plants can withstand Roundup. Glyphosate residues have been detected in many foods, beers and wines.

2. Wine growers of conventional farms report that their family businesses used to be able to harvest from their vines for 100 years. Today, with chemical farming, vines are lasting 10-12 years. Glyphosate is a chelator, which makes the vital nutrients and minerals of any living thing it touches unavailable. Taking the risk of depleting the vitality of important crops is not a good long term decision for farmers of any kind. Instead, Regenerative agriculture enriches the soil, supports longevity of the farm and does not use toxic chemicals.

3. Glyphosate has been deemed a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization. Even the small amount of 0.1 ppt of glyphosate has been shown to stimulate the growth of breast cancer cells. According to the California Department of Health, breast cancer rates in the Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties are 10 to 20 percent higher than the national average. There are many pending lawsuits against Monsanto for the connection between non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Roundup.

4. The pig study by Pedersen and Krueger showed a repeated 30 percent increase of birth defects and stillborns with the introduction of glyphosate-sprayed grains. The infertility and sterility in America is exactly correlated to the pig study results, at 30 percent, the highest in recorded U.S. history.

5. French scientist Gilles-Éric Seralini and his team have discovered that the co-formulants of Roundup are 1,000 times more toxic than glyphosate and are hormone disruptors, which can lead to breast cancer, miscarriages, birth defects and many other health issues.

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CAN ORGANIC FARMS REALLY FEED THE WORLD? LOOK AT CUBA!

Is organic farming merely a niche model of agriculture that is not capable of feeding the global population? Or does it have a major role to play? Colin Todhunter, writing in CounterPunch, posed these questions and then set out to answer them. Here, in part, is what he wrote:

If we want to really appreciate what happens when a major widespread shift to organic farming occurs, we need look no further than Cuba.

Cuba is the one country in the world that has made the biggest changes in the shortest time in moving from industrial chemical-intensive agriculture to organic farming.

Miguel Altieri notes that, due to the difficulties Cuba experienced as a result of the fall of the USSR, it moved towards organic and agroecological techniques in the 1990s. Thousands of oxen replaced tractors that could not function due to lack of petroleum and spare parts. Farmers substituted green manures for chemical fertilizers and artisanally produced biopesticides for insecticides.

Altieri states that from 1996 to 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2 percent yearly during a period when production was stagnant across the wider region. In the mid-2000s, the Ministry of Agriculture endorsed the creation of 2,600 new small urban and suburban farms and allowed farming on some three million hectares of unused state lands.

Today Cuba has 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables. The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square meter, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals. Urban farms supply 50 to 70 percent or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.

Altieri and his colleague have calculated that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.

What Cuba has done is a major achievement, as Garry Leech argues:

“The shift to a more ecologically sustainable agricultural production has resulted in healthy organic food being the most convenient and inexpensive food available to Cubans. Because of the US blockade, processed foods are more expensive and not readily available. This reality stands in stark contrast to that in wealthy capitalist nations such as the United States and Canada where heavily-subsidized agri-businesses flood the market with cheap, unhealthy processed foods while organic alternatives are expensive and more difficult to obtain. The consequence in the United States is high levels of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.”

Cuba shows what can be done (see how it was done and the dangers it now faces) when the political will exists and what should be done if we are to move away from an unsustainable model of agriculture that creates food insecurity, environmental degradation, bad food and ill health.

Contrast this with what NAFTA did to Mexico. Driven by an industrial chemical-intensive US model of food processing, retail and agriculture, the outcome has been bad health, the undermining of food security and the devastation of small farmers and businesses.

Processed junk food ridden with toxins and a propped up agribusiness sector with subsidies has become a feature of the US chemical-intensive model of agriculture, which has led to all kinds of health and environmental problems in the US, as highlighted here.

For Olivier De Schutter, a programme that deals effectively with hunger and malnutrition has to focus on Mexico’s small farmers and peasants. They constitute a substantial percentage of the country’s poor and are the ones that can best supply both rural and urban populations with nutritious foods.

And the writing is on the wall for places like India too as the neoliberal invasion and transnational agribusiness armed with its chemicals (and GMOs) increases its hold over food and agriculture. It is turning out to be disastrous for Indian farmers, the environment and the health of the public.

In the meantime, supporters of the unhealthy, unsustainable, industrialized petro-chemical model of agriculture wish to continue to rip up indigenous agriculture and recast it accordingly. And they attempt to justify this by stating there is no alternative and that organic-based approaches, including a genuine democratic-participatory movement like agroecology, cannot deliver.

From NAFTA and trade agreements like the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (India), TTIP, and TPP to the ongoing infiltration of Africa by Bill Gates and ‘corporate America,’ they require business as usual: to offer governments strings-attached loans and ensure that export cash-crop monocropping takes hold, to make farmers reliant on external inputs, to get them onto a highly profitable but unsustainable GMO/chemical treadmill and to incorporate them into an system of globalization centered on rigged trade, debt traps and the manipulated international ‘free’ market.

And all for what? To capture the entire supply chain from seed to plate, to serve the commercial interests of transnational agritech/agribusiness and food retail corporations and to use agriculture as a political tool to create dependency. All of this at the expense of self-sufficiency, sustainable indigenous agriculture, and the livelihoods of those involved in traditional food production, processing and retail. And all of this too at the expense of regional food security, the environment and a nutritious, healthy, and diverse diet.

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FDA SUED TO FORCE IT TO RESPOND TO NRDC PETITION

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Center for Food Safety, on behalf of four other public health and environmental organizations, have sued the Food and Drug Administration to force it to act on a petition to ban perchlorate in food packaging. The groups filed the petition in December, 2014, but the FDA ignored it and missed a June, 2015, deadline to respond to the petition. Hence the lawsuit.

Co-petitioners include Breast Cancer Fund, Center for Environmental Health, Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the Environmental Working Group. Perchlorate impairs hormone production critical to brain development and poses a health threat, particularly to fetuses, infants, and children. FDA has approved it for certain specific uses, including as an anti-static agent in plastic packaging for dry foods such as beans, rice and flour.
“This is a toxic chemical, and it’s all over our food supply,” said Erik Olson, director of the Health Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There’s enough evidence of harm for the FDA to ban it, and there is no excuse for the agency’s inaction.”

“Perchlorate is primarily used in rocket fuel. There is no reason FDA should allow a chemical like this in or on food products,” said Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of Center for Food Safety. “It is irresponsible, illegal, and indefensible for FDA to continue withholding a response to our petition when human health is at stake.”

“From increased risk of breast cancer, to interfering with the development of babies’ brains, hormone-disrupting chemicals are harming public health,” said Nancy Buermeyer, Senior Policy Strategist at the Breast Cancer Fund. “We wouldn’t think of practicing medicine the way we did in the 1950s; nor should the FDA consider science through a decades-old lens. The FDA should act immediately to ban perchlorate to protect our children and future generations.”

“There’s no reason for the food industry to use a rocket fuel ingredient that can contaminate our food,” said Caroline Cox, Research Director for the Center for Environmental Health. “FDA needs to act immediately to end this food safety threat to our children and families.”

“Banning perchlorate should be a no-brainer when you consider its threat to human health, particularly to fetal development,” said Ken Cook, co-founder and president of the Environmental Working Group. “We hope this lawsuit spurs FDA to give a new look at the science, instead of relying on its original, flawed reasoning, and to move swiftly to protect consumers from exposure to this toxic chemical.”

“There’s just no practical way for consumers to protect their families from perchlorate, because it’s not labeled and is allowed in packaging and production of so many foods,” said Laura MacCleery, Director of Regulatory Affairs for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “But protecting consumers is clearly FDA’s job, and the agency should ban perchlorate right away.”

The petition for a writ of mandamus, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is here: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/20160331-mandamus-petition.pdf

Last month, NRDC also sued the Environmental Protection Agency to force it to limit
perchlorate in drinking water.

FDA is currently under court orders to comply with other deadlines mandated by the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and Food Safety Modernization Act, as a result of two lawsuits filed by CFS in 2014 and 2012, respectively.

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MONSANTO ANTS CAN REPLACE HONEYBEES, SPOKESPERSON SAYS

According to a recent Greenpeace study, 70 out of the top 100 human food crops are pollinated by bees. US National Agriculture Statistics show a honey bee decline from about 3.2 million hives in 1947 to 2.4 million hives in 2008. Also, beekepers in Western countries have been reporting slow declines of stocks due to impaired protein production, changes in agricultural practice, or unpredictable weather. On 2007, abnormally high die-offs (30–70 percent of hives) of European honey bee colonies occurred in North America, which was later called “colony collapse disorder.”

This lead the team of Researchers at Monsanto to develop alternative strategies to bridge the gap of an eventual honey bee extinction. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted the researchers at Monsanto a $3 million dollar research fund to be able to develop a modified way to save the world’s food supply.

The team of researchers, led by biochemist John Leere, developed a genetically modified ant that has a striking similar feature with the common honeybee but 50 times stronger immunity to certain types of pesticides.

“Through genetic manipulations, we could eventually create a species that would have both the common honey bee’s pollinating characteristics, as well as possess the pesticide immunization properties of certain ant species, a perfect match that would take thousands of years to develop on its own in nature,” Leere explains.

Just think: our food crops crawling with Monsanto’s pesticide-resistant ants, and honey just a substance written about in the history books. That’s Monsanto—always thinking several steps ahead.

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