Monsanto Still Trying to Cover Up Deadly Health Risks of Roundup

[GoLeft TV]

Study after study is showing up these days that tell us that Monsanto’s Roundup is causing cancer and other extremely severe neurological defects. Monsanto adamantly denies all of these charges, but they cannot deny the reality of science. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this with attorney Howard Nations.

[Major Nikon]

1. Study after study...

EFSA concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans and the evidence does not support classification with regard to its carcinogenic potential according to Regulation (EC) No 1272/2008.

http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/4302

The Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has already completed the draft re-assessment report on health risk assessment. For this purpose, more than 150 new toxicological studies were evaluated for the first time and are described in detail in the draft report by BfR. In addition, all available toxicological studies (nearly 300) were re-assessed from the point of view of compliance with actual quality standards in study conduction and confirmation of interpreted results. Furthermore, about 900 publications from scientific journals have been considered in the draft report and more than 200 publications were reviewed in detail. In conclusion of this re-evaluation process of the active substance glyphosate by BfR the available data do not show carcinogenic or mutagenic properties of glyphosate nor that glyphosate is toxic to fertility, reproduction or embryonal/fetal development in laboratory animals.

http://www.bfr.bund.de/en/the_bfr_has_finalised_its_draft_report_for_the_re_evaluation_of_glyphosate-188632.html

[zalinda]

2. Just like we've heard nuclear energy is totally safe.

You eat the stuff if you want, I don't want to. Other countries don't want to. Why are we pushing it on them?

It reminds me of Walmart. They pushed their way into towns that didn't want them, destroyed the small businesses and then left when the profits weren't high enough. They destroyed the town, but it didn't matter to them, they got what they wanted.

You do realize that small villages are being destroyed because of Monsanto seeds? Farmers are committing suicide because of the cost and bad production of crops.

It is not a good product in any way that you look at it, sometimes science is wrong. I still remember the Thalidomide babies and how Thalidomide was a safe product, because science said it was. Could glyphosate be the trigger for obesity, they started using it around the same time obesity started to be a big problem. With glyphosate being in most everyone's body, how do we know it's not causing damage?

Z

[Major Nikon]

4. Just like we've heard a lot of conspiracy theory gibberish that never amounted to anything

All you are doing is repeating nonsense that has nothing to do with science. Science was right, Thalidomide was never approved for use in the US.

Personally I don't care if you eat all natural road apples, nor am I really concerned that you don't trust anything. The OP's comment about "study after study" is just wrong and the exact opposite is true.

[progressoid]

5. You know the suicide thing is a myth right?

https://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/files/2014/01/GMOsuicidemyth.pdf

[Major Nikon]

7. I don't think very many people who repeat this myth care that it's a myth

[zalinda]

8. It is not a myth but probably not noticed because it happens to the poor

Larger farmers do well with Monsanto.

"But 65 percent of India's cotton crop comes from farmers who rely on rain, not irrigation pumps. For them, the situation is the opposite—reliance on pesticides and the higher cost of the seeds increase the risk of bankruptcy and thus suicide, the study finds. The smaller and more Bt-reliant the farm in these rain-fed cotton areas, the authors found, the higher the suicide rate. (An analysis that largely jibes with Shiva's, apart from her heated rhetoric.)

Even so, the paper does not present Bt cotton as the trigger for India's farmer-suicide crisis. Rather, it provides crucial background for understanding how India's shift to industrial farming techniques starting in the 1960s left the majority of the nation's cotton farmers increasingly reliant on loans to purchase pricey fertilizers, pesticides, and hybrid seeds, and eventually GM seeds, making them vulnerable to bankruptcy when the vagaries of rain and global cotton markets turned against them.

The authors note that cotton has been cultivated in India for 5,000 years, and until the emergence of the slavery-dependent cotton empire in the southern United States in the early 1800s, "India was the center of world cotton innovation." In the 1970s, Indian cotton farmers turned to hybrid seeds that delivered higher yields as long as they were doused with sufficient fertilizer. Until then, the pink bollworm—the pest now targeted by Bt seeds—"was not a major pest in Indian cotton," they write. But higher-yielding plants draw more insect pests, and so the new hybrid seeds also triggered an increasing reliance on insecticides. Bollworms evolved to resist the chemical onslaught and many of their natural predators (other insects) saw their populations decline, giving the bollworms a niche. Hence when Monsanto's bollworm-targeting Bt seeds hit the market in the early 2000s, they were essentially an industrial-ag solution to a problem that had been caused by industrial agriculture.

As an alternative to Bt seeds, the paper shows, small-scale farmers can successfully plant varieties of cotton that ripen quickly, before bollworm populations emerge. As for the irrigated cotton farms that are now successfully using the Bt trait, the authors note that India's large farms, like many of California's, are tapping underground water that's "unregulated and unpriced," at rates much higher than natural recharge. They're courting a problem that may make the feared bollworm look tame by comparison: "the impending collapse of ground water levels for irrigated cotton.""


http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/09/no-gmos-didnt-create-indias-farmer-suicide-problem


Z

[Major Nikon]

9. Your link betrays your subject line

Which kinda proves the point.

[zalinda]

10. Did you read the clip that was posted?

It is the poor who are being screwed and killing themselves. Those who have the money think Monsanto is great.

But, then it's all the same to the corporations and Hillary supporters, let the poor die. But those supporters don't realize that those poor will have to be replaced by someone up the financial ladder, because that's how the system works.

Z

[Major Nikon]

11. I've seen it before

Even Tom Philpott admits the myth is a myth, so I'm not sure you read it. His basic point is, yes the whole BT cotton and the cause of suicide thing is a myth, but biotech is still evil, blah, blah, blah.

Tom Philpott is a hack and the so-called peer reviewed paper is a piece of shit published in the same shit pay-to-play journal that republished Seralini's shit rat study. When you get a lot of studies saying one thing, and then an agenda driven "journal" and "journalist" tell you something completely different, then you should probably smell a rat.

What the hack Tom Philpott and the shit study he references doesn't tell you is the overall cost of Bt cotton in India is less than the alternative, and small farmers as well as big farmers have seen yield increases as well as cost reductions. He also doesn't much go into the actual underlying causes of the India farmers' suicides. So the thing that's the most egregious about hacks like Tom Philpott is they are pushing a false narrative that fits their agenda, while diverting attention away from the actual thing that actually is causing Indian farmers to kill themselves.

[progressoid]

3. Blah blah blah

We will never let facts get in the way of our righteous indignation!

[libodem]

6. Yep

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

12. K&R. Thanks for posting.