Roundup's Toxicity Goes Beyond Glyphosate

If you've been to this blog before, you've probably heard of Roundup - Monsanto's herbicide widely used to spray lawns, yards, and crops, especially those crops that have been genetically modified to resist Roundup's active ingredient, Glyphosate.  You've probably also heard of the health dangers of Glyphosate as shown in numerous laboratory tests.  What you may not know, however, is that one of the supposedly inert ingredients in Roundup, called polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, has been shown to not only be more dangerous on its own than Glyphosate, but also increase the damage Glyphosate can do to cells on its own by combining with it to more effectively penetrate clothing, safety equipment, and cell walls in the body.  

This article in Scientific American describes how a French team of scientists came to this conclusion after testing POEA and Roundup on human cells.  An excerpt reads:

POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself – a finding the researchers call “astonishing.” 

“This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Roundup formulations are not inert,” wrote the study authors from France’s University of Caen. “Moreover, the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death [at the] residual levels” found on Roundup-treated crops, such as soybeans, alfalfa and corn, or lawns and gardens. 

The research team suspects that Roundup might cause pregnancy problems by interfering with hormone production, possibly leading to abnormal fetal development, low birth weights or miscarriages.

The article then goes on to explain why an ingredient that causes more harm than the active ingredient can be  labeled as inert:

The term “inert ingredient” is often misleading, according to Caroline Cox, research director of the Center for Environmental Health, an Oakland-based environmental organization. Federal law classifies all pesticide ingredients that don’t harm pests as “inert,” she said. Inert compounds, therefore, aren’t necessarily biologically or toxicologically harmless – they simply don’t kill insects or weeds.

If you want to avoid POEA and Glyphosate, buying more organic food, and more generally, avoiding Genetically Modified Organisms - a primary use of Roundup -  are great options.  Support mandatory labeling for GE foods, and add your voice to those advocating for the passage of Prop 37 in California.  Here in Connecticut, purchase groceries from a farmers market and get to know the farmer you're buying from.  If you know the farmers who grow your food, and ask them questions, you will know your food as well.

Have a great weekend!
-Melissa

Another Reason to Avoid GMOs: Bt Toxin Superpests

This is hardly breaking news, but worth remembering when deciding if you want to eat food processed with Bt corn or soy.  At the end of last year, both Grist and GM Freeze wrote articles about insects developing resistance to genetically modified Bt crops.  The following is an excerpt from GM Freeze:

Corn Rootworm

Scientists have confirmed five incidents of insects evolving resistance to Bt toxins in the field to date: Bt cotton in India (2010) and US (2008), moth pests in maize in Puerto Rico (2007) and South Africa (2007) and a beetle pest in maize in the US (2011).

Reasons for resistance developing are:

• Failure to provide adequate non-GM refuges in GM crops to ensure non-resistant adult insects can survive to breed with resistant ones so that the resistance gene does not become dominant. Refuges are required by US laws that are widely flouted.
• Levels of Bt toxin in the crops too low to deliver lethal doses to pests. Sub-lethal doses mean resistance can develop as pests survive, mate and pass on the resistance gene. If the number of resistant individuals is high they can multiply quite rapidly and become dominant.

This failure of Bt crops goes hand in hand with a separate superweed problem affecting Monsanto's Roundup Ready line of herbicide resistant crops. The moral of this story: genetic tinkering has a host of unintended consequences, some of which you can plan for (as in the case of non-GM refuges, which demonstrates another issue of whether or not companies will comply with knowledge-based regulations) and some of which you can't.  Since the yields of these crops are the same or worse than the organic alternative, why not just skip the GMOs altogether?

If you would like to know what's in your food, join our GMO Activist Project and add your voice to the public outcry to label genetically modified foods.  Check out our GMO resource page and take action at Just Label It.  If you want to learn more about the dangers of GMOs, register for our Winter Conference with keynote Jeffrey Smith, the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms.

Have a great rest of your week!
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.

Glyphosate Persistence in the Environment

Photo: http://library.thinkquest.org/03oct/00946/accounts/human.htm

Glyphosate, or Round Up has been found in rain and rivers throughout the Mississippi River watershed.  Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world, with an increase from 11,000 tons used in 1992 to 88,000 tons in 2007.  However there have been few tests to determine glyphosate contamination, persistence and potential health effects because it is expensive to test for the presence of glyphosate. 

Glyphosate was frequently detected in surface waters, rain and air where it is heavily used in the basin.  It persists in streams throughout the growing season in agricultural hotspots like Iowa and Mississippi, but is not observed in other times of the year.  However the degraded product in glyphosate, aminomethylphosphonic acid or AMPA was frequently detected in streams and even in rain.  These studies were completed as part of the USGS National Water-Quality Assessment Program to study water quality conditions and whether they are getting better or worse over time. 

The EPA has set a deadline of 2015 to determine if glyphosate has been continued to be sold or in some way limited. Round up has been sold consistently to the agricultural sector since it was first marketed in 1974 . . . that will have been over 40 years of unlimited use before regulations or restrictions are considered.  These findings along with with new studies about superweeds raise doubt about industry claims that glyphosate is harmless in our environment.

Sources: 

USGS: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2909

Reuters Report: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/31/us-glyphosate-pollution-idUSTRE77U61720110831