scorched soil

Crashing Monsanto’s Pesticide Party in Beijing

They have been running amok for years, unchallenged. The Codex Alimentarius Committee on Pesticide Residues (CCPR) is their playground and they know it.

May 28, 2017 | Source: Green Med Info | by Scott Tips, JD

They have been running amok for years, unchallenged. The Codex Alimentarius Committee on Pesticide Residues (CCPR) is their playground and they know it. Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, Bayer and other agrochemical companies — cozily snuggled together at Codex as the disarmingly named, front group CropLife — sent no fewer than 39 representatives to the 49th session of the CCPR meeting held in Beijing, China from April 24-29, 2017, to coerce, charm and bedazzle government regulators. And many of those regulators, especially the Australian and New Zealand ones, have long been seduced into believing that pesticides can be safely applied in near endless amounts and varieties. Or, they simply do not care about the ill-health effects of it all.

The Problem

That is why over one billion pounds of pesticides are used in the United States each and every year, while approximately 5.6 billion pounds are used worldwide (1). In many developing countries, programs to control pesticide exposures are limited or non-existent. The agrochemical companies tell us these compounds are safe and are ensuring adequate food production to feed the World, but the facts tell us another story.

On January 24, 2017, the United Nations (UN) published a report in which it stated that although pesticide use has correlated with a rise in food production, it has had catastrophic impacts upon human health and the environment. The report went on to say that “[e]qually, increased food production has not succeeded in eliminating hunger worldwide. Reliance on hazardous pesticides is a short-term solution that undermines the rights to adequate food and health for present and future generations.” In fact, the UN blames pesticides for poisoning 200,000 people each year (2). I think that figure is wildly conservative (3).

Worse, as Sayer Ji, founder of GreenMedInfo and NHF Vice-Chairman has said, glyphosate is poisoning our soil, destroying our gut biome, and laying the foundation for destroying our ability to produce healthy foods for future generations (6). Industry and regulators claim that glyphosate is safe for humans and animals because the means by which it kills weeds (the shikimate pathway) is not present in humans and animals. However, the shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, which dominate human and animal gut biomes. The glyphosate preferentially destroys beneficial gut bacteria, thereby allowing disease and inflammation to take hold (7).