What's on my Food? A Pesticide Resource

Pesticide residues are on your food, even after washing. What are the dangers of these pesticides? How much of this stuff is really on the food we eat?

The Pesticide Action Network has developed a valuable resource that can tell you what pesticides, and how much of them, are on the foods you buy in the grocery store and from conventional farms. What’s On My Food? is a searchable database designed to make the public problem of pesticide exposure visible and more understandable.  The database allows you to search by pesticide or by product, and lists how often a particular pesticide is found, in what ways it is toxic, and what other produce has been exposed to it.  You can search the database online or download the free iPhone app and take it with you when you go shopping.  With every dollar you spend, you make a choice about whether or not to support the poisoning of yourself and the planet.  Arm yourself with this tool in order to make more informed decisions about what is going into your body and take a stand against harmful agrochemicals.

Pesticide exposure is a huge problem in the United States.  Chemicals sprayed on produce remain after washing and turn up in the human body and in the environment thousands of miles from where they were originally applied to crops.  They disrupt our bodies and the bodies of other lifeforms.  In the United States, pesticide regulation lags behind the rest of the industrialized world. The Pesticide Action Network explains:

Since the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) regulates most chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, the combined and cumulative effects of a mixture of pesticides are nearly impossible for them to address – and so they usually don’t.  Pesticides and industrial chemicals in the U.S. are innocent until proven guilty. It often takes decades to prove a chemical guilty. Meanwhile, we are exposed to dozens of pesticides in the food we eat, water we drink and air we breathe.

As always, a great way to limit your pesticide exposure is to buy organic and local.  Organic foods are prohibited from being sprayed with synthetic pesticides.  Talk to your local farmer.  Even if they aren't USDA Certified Organic, they might not be spraying their crops with harmful chemicals.  Building a relationship with a nearby farmer is the best way to ensure that you limit your pesticide exposure while supporting your local economy. 

Not sure how to take that first step toward buying local and organic?  Check out our website for a listing of Connecticut farmers markets where our member farms sell their produce, or download a PDF of our Farm and Food Guide to see a listing of all our member farms by county.  Visiting a farm or farmers market transforms the chore of grocery shopping into a fun and healthy experience for your whole family.  What better way to help us secure a brighter future for ourselves and the planet!

Our New Guide to Organic Land Care is in!

This is a view of the lower level of our office building with our new shipment of 2012-2013 Guides to Organic Land Care.  Hopefully it won't get too cold for a while because it looks like we won't be using that stove for a few months.

As you know, last month we received a shipment for the first of our two printed Guides, the 2012-2013 Farm and Food Guide, which provides information by county of our member farms, farmers markets, csa programs, supporting businesses, community farms, and community gardens.  Yesterday, our second Guide developed by the NOFA Organic Land Care Program was completed and brought back to the office!  The 2012-2013 Guide to Organic Land Care provides course information, local pesticide info, and AOLCP listings by state and county, as well as a large number of feature articles and book excerpts about pest control, compost, rain gardens, and much more. The Guide is a great resource to help you find Accredited Organic Land Care Professionals in your area who can help you maintain your property without the use of harmful chemicals.  If you are an Accredited Professional, this is a great way to advertise yourself as part of a large and influential community of sustainable landscapers while also providing helpful tips to homeowners and groundskeepers on how to organically maintain their land.

You can order a copy of the Guide to Organic Land Care for just $2 to cover the cost of shipping, and if you visit us at one of our outreach events, you can pick up a copy for free!  To order larger quantities of the Guide for distribution, contact the CT NOFA office at 203-888-5146 or e-mail ctnofa@ctnofa.org.  A PDF of the Guide will also be available online shortly.  

Have a lovely Thursday,
Melissa

10 Things You Should Know About GMOs

A new article by Care2 provides a concise and well-written outline of topics you can use in the event of a Genetically Modified Organism debate, courtesy of Jeffrey Smith, the Keynote speaker at our upcoming Winter Conference.  Advocates for GMO use have a lot to say about why GMOs are great for humanity, but numerous studies argue otherwise.  Here are some of the highlights:

1. GMOs are unhealthy.
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urges doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients. They cite animal studies showing organ damage, gastrointestinal and immune system disorders, accelerated aging, and infertility. Human studies show how genetically modified (GM) food can leave material behind inside us, possibly causing long-term problems. Genes inserted into GM soy, for example, can transfer into the DNA of bacteria living inside us, and that the toxic insecticide produced by GM corn was found in the blood of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.

3. GMOs increase herbicide use.
Most GM crops are engineered to be “herbicide tolerant”―they defy deadly weed killer. Monsanto, for example, sells Roundup Ready crops, designed to survive applications of their Roundup herbicide.
Between 1996 and 2008, US farmers sprayed an extra 383 million pounds of herbicide on GMOs. Overuse of Roundup results in “superweeds,” resistant to the herbicide. This is causing farmers to use even more toxic herbicides every year. Not only does this create environmental harm, GM foods contain higher residues of toxic herbicides. Roundup, for example, is linked with sterility, hormone disruption, birth defects, and cancer.

5. Government oversight is dangerously lax.
Most of the health and environmental risks of GMOs are ignored by governments’ superficial regulations and safety assessments. The reason for this tragedy is largely political. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example, doesn’t require a single safety study, does not mandate labeling of GMOs, and allows companies to put their GM foods onto the market without even notifying the agency. Their justification was the claim that they had no information showing that GM foods were substantially different. But this was a lie. Secret agency memos made public by a lawsuit show that the overwhelming consensus even among the FDA’s own scientists was that GMOs can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. They urged long-term safety studies. But the White House had instructed the FDA to promote biotechnology, and the agency official in charge of policy was Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney, later their vice president. He’s now the US Food Safety Czar.

8. GMOs harm the environment.
GM crops and their associated herbicides can harm birds, insects, amphibians, marine ecosystems, and soil organisms. They reduce bio-diversity, pollute water resources, and are unsustainable. For example, GM crops are eliminating habitat for monarch butterflies, whose populations are down 50% in the US. Roundup herbicide has been shown to cause birth defects in amphibians, embryonic deaths and endocrine disruptions, and organ damage in animals even at very low doses. GM canola has been found growing wild in North Dakota and California, threatening to pass on its herbicide tolerant genes on to weeds.

9. GMOs do not increase yields, and work against feeding a hungry world.
Whereas sustainable non-GMO agricultural methods used in developing countries have conclusively resulted in yield increases of 79% and higher, GMOs do not, on average, increase yields at all. This was evident in the Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2009 report Failure to Yield―the definitive study to date on GM crops and yield.

And that's only half of the list!  To read the full list, go here.  If you want to hear Jeffrey Smith speak in person about the dangers of GMOs, register for our Winter Conference being held on March 3, 2012 in Manchester, CT.  To learn more and to register, click here.

Have a great afternoon!
-Melissa

GM Crops Have not Delivered on Promised Benefits

A new report by 20 Indian, south-east Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups, representing millions of people, shows that Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of "superweeds".  According to a video posted by the UK Guardian, in an article about the Global Citizen's Report on the State of GMOs, the only entity that GMOs actually benefit is the biotech industry.  GM crops were originally marketed as a solution to world hunger, climate change, and soil erosion, but have only proven thus far to exacerbate those problems.  Not only have GM crops failed to provide benefits like drought resistance and salt tolerance like originally proposed, but they have also contributed to the increased used of synthetic chemicals to control pests and weeds.  Ironically, biotech companies had originally justified that these same crops would ultimately decrease global dependence on pesticides.

The Guardian sites two examples of GM crops' failures globally: "In China, where insect-resistant Bt cotton is widely planted, populations of pests that previously posed only minor problems have increased 12-fold since 1997. A 2008 study in the International Journal of Biotechnology found that any benefits of planting Bt cotton have been eroded by the increasing use of pesticides needed to combat them.  Additionally, soya growers in Argentina and Brazil have been found to use twice as much herbicide on their GM as they do on conventional crops, and a survey by Navdanya International, in India, showed that pesticide use increased 13-fold since Bt cotton was introduced."

Biotech companies were able to successfully market their GM crops to farmers through a combination of heavy government lobbying, buying up local seed companies, and removing conventional seed from the market.  As a result, the three largest GM companies own 70% of the global seed market.  Through patenting and intellectual property laws, these companies can legally own and sell their seed for a premium price.  As Vandana Shiva, director of the Indian organisation Navdanya International, which co-ordinated the report, so eloquently put it, "Choice is being undermined as food systems are increasingly controlled by giant corporations and as chemical and genetic pollution spread. GM companies have put a noose round the neck of farmers. They are destroying alternatives in the pursuit of profit."

To read the full Guardian article, and to watch a video on the subject, check here.  To visit Navdanya International, check here.

The Spread of Roundup Resistant Superweeds

Monsanto's Roundup Ready Soybean Seeds

An article in the Canadian CBC News Friday discussed a growing problem in the United States and Canada - the increasing prevalence of Roundup resistant weed strains, or superweeds.  The plants develop in response to the widespread use of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide.  Through natural selection, a strain develops that's resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, and as other less resistant strains of the weed are killed off by the herbicide, the superweed takes over.  These weeds can double or triple the costs of weed control and lead to more tillage, more erosion, more water pollution from run-off, increased costs, yield losses and higher food prices.  Some proponents of industrial agriculture point to using other chemicals as the best solution for the problem, arguing that the best way to stay ahead of the resistance curve is to develop new genetically modified crops that are resistant to chemicals other than glyphosate.  Thus, farmers could then spray their fields with a new chemical, killing the superweeds.  The problem with this view, however, is that we then become increasingly dependent on chemicals to produce our crops, and the superweeds become ever stronger as the quality of our food and soil becomes ever weaker.

Chris Willenborg, a weed scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, cautioned, "The solution is not always more and different pesticides."  He suggested using additional methods such as crop rotation and high seeding rates to keep weed populations low and minimize the chance that they become resistant to Roundup.  Natural and organic farming methods are also a way to solve the problem of superweeds without the use of potentially dangerous chemicals and the inevitable weakening of farmland that those chemicals cause.  Switching over from Roundup Ready seed to seed that hasn't been genetically modified, when combined with green methods of crop production, is a way to stay ahead of the so-called resistance curve in a technologically advanced way without having to utilize the chemicals so often associated with "technologically advanced" or "modern" farming.

Check out CBC's article here.

Herbicide Recall

About three weeks ago, Beyond Pesticides Daily News Blog included a story about the potential link between a DuPont herbicide named Imprelis, and the death of thousands of Norway spruce and white pine trees this summer.  Trees in or near areas treated with Imprelis are turning brown and dying along the East Coast and in the Midwest. 

The EPA conditionally approved Imprelis for sale last October.  To conditionally register a product means that the registration is granted even though all the data requirements to prove the safety of the product have not been satisfied, but the EPA assumes that no significant adverse impacts to the environment are possible as a result of the pesticide or herbicide application. 

Complaints that the herbicide caused tree deaths made DuPont first advise landscapers to refrain from using Imprelis near Norway spruce and white pine. The company has now voluntarily stopped the sale (after being strongly urged to do so by the EPA) of the herbicide because of its threat to trees and has organized a product return and refund product for mid-August.  The EPA wrote letters to the DuPont Chief Executive Ellen Kullman urging the company to release thousands of confidential documents that include details on Imprelis’ safety and the threat it might pose to plant life. 

This herbicide was advertised as the most scientifically advanced turf herbicide in over 40 years, and was used to control dandelions, clover, plantains, wild violet and ground ivy.  The chemical aminocyclopyrachlor is considered safe for humans, but is highly soluble in water and highly mobile in the soil.  The chemical spreads into the environment and is persistent.  The herbicide continues to effect non-target trees and despite being kept away from these trees when applied, has still been absorbed by the roots causing damage or death in the tree.  

 Imprelis was widely used in order to eliminate fairly benign plants (clover is actually good for your yard, it fertilizes the soil to make grass healthier and more durable), and forces us to ask ourselves if it’s worth the risk.  This loss of trees is comparable to the damages of emerald ash borer and other diseases and pests which have destroyed American trees, however this was completely caused by people, and only with the goal of improving the appearance of lawns and landscaping.  

Sources:

http://www.imprelis-facts.com/

http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2011/08/04/189115.htm

http://www.beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/?p=5625