by Alexis Baden-Mayer and Ronnie Cummins
This is not a game, and just because your TV & Politicians and Churches are not warning you about it doesn't mean that YOU shouldn't do what you can to protect yourself and loved ones the best you can . .
Energy-intensive industrial farming practices that rely on toxic
chemicals and genetically engineered crops are not just undermining
public health--they're destroying the planet. Here's how:
#1
Generating Massive Greenhouse Gas Pollution (CO2, Methane, Nitrous
Oxide) and Global Warming; While Promoting False Solutions Such as
Industrial Biofuels, So-Called Drought-Resistant Crops, and Genetically
Engineered TreesEvaluations of corn grown for ethanol
show that whatever reduction in emissions you get from burning corn
instead of oil in the gas tank is more than offset by the fact that
producing biofuel from corn requires as much fuel as it could replace.
Corn
production, like the production of all of the crops (corn, cotton,
canola, soy, and now, sugar beets and alfalfa) that Monsanto has so
successfully industrialized through its business model of selling
patented GMO seeds to increase the use of its pesticides, is very fossil
fuel intensive.
But that's just the beginning of Monsanto's
contribution to agriculture's green house gas emissions. With
ever-increasing acreage, where are all those GMO crops going? They're
being fed to animals, and when you look at emissions from factory farms,
you'll wish we burned them in the gas tank instead!
Added to the
greenhouse gas emissions from crop production and factory farms is the
pollution related to heavily processed food and the fact that food in
the U.S. travels anywhere from 1500 to 3000 miles to reach your plate
and must be either cooled or frozen in transit or storage. That's fossil
fuel intensive, too.
Before we total the life cycle contribution
of Monsanto's crops to greenhouse gas emissions, we have to take
several steps back and acknowledge that clearing land to grow GMO crops
for animal feed is the biggest driver of forest and wetland destruction,
which generates 20% of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases.
All
told, the production and processing of Monsanto's GMO crops, from
deforestation to fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers, polluting
factory farms, and fuel-intensive food processing and distribution, is
estimated to produce up to 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
#2 Polluting the Environment and the Soil-Food
Web with Pesticides, Chemical Fertilizers, and Persistent Toxins,
Including DioxinIndustrial agriculture's heavy reliance on
pesticides and fertilizers is responsible for the release of many
dangerous toxins into our environment, but since Monsanto first
commercialized genetically engineered crops in the 1990s, we've been
exposed to one more than any other. It's common name is glyphosate, but
Monsanto markets it as RoundUp and has created "RoundUp Ready" crops to
promote it. RoundUp Ready crops are genetically engineered to withstand
endless amounts of RoundUp. The success of Monsanto's business model has
made RoundUp the most-used pesticide in the history of the world.
The
trouble is, RoundUp is very toxic. It's known to cause cancer, birth
defects and infertility. In fact, some scientists are now saying it's
more dangerous than DDT.
It only took about 15 years for the
RoundUp Ready technology to begin to fail, with RoundUp-tolerant
super-weeds springing up across the country and farmers having to resort
to more and more toxic pesticides for weed control. The biotech
industry says it has a solution: replace RoundUp Ready crops with a new
type of GMO, "2,4-D Ready" crops.
As dangerous as RoundUp is
turning out to be, the only thing worse would be 2,4-D replacing
RoundUp's as the most popular pesticide in the world. The use of 2,4-D
releases dioxin. Dioxin is what has made Agent Orange, which contained
2,4-D, a source of horrific birth defects in Vietnam to this day.
Genetically engineered 2,4-D-tolerant crops would be a disaster of
untold proportions.
#3 Turning Farmland into Desert, Draining Aquifers and WetlandsIn
the U.S., the soil's capability to sequester carbon has been severely
deteriorated due to the enormous increase in the use of nitrogen
fertilizers, mostly to raise Monsanto's genetically engineered crops for
animal feed. The soil should be a sink for excess carbon but has lost
about 50% of its organic matter, making it is less than half as
effective as it used to be. Many of our most productive agricultural
lands have been degraded or desertified because of industrial
production.
Recent studies on the University of Illinois Morrow
plots (the oldest continuously farmed experimental plots in the U.S.)
have shown that since 1955, when synthetic nitrogen was first used,
40-190% too much nitrogen was applied, yet yields dropped and organic
matter declined dramatically. These problems on the Morrow plots are
writ large on millions of acres of agricultural soils that have been
degraded by synthetic fertilizer all over this country.
Synthetic
nitrogen fertilizer kills soil life, including earthworms and
microorganisms. In addition to reduced yields, degraded and deadened
soils produce less nutritious food.
Contrary to Monsanto's
marketing claims
that their business is about "squeezing more out of a drop of water,"
their genetically engineered crops are notoriously thirsty. It takes
twice as much
water to produce a pound of a RoundupReady crop soybean plant treated
with RoundUp herbicide, as it does with a soybean plant that's not
treated with RoundUp.
#4 Poisoning Drinking Water, Acidifying the OceansSynthetic
nitrogen fertilizer is also responsible for the nitrate poisoning of
two-thirds of the U.S. drinking water supply. Synthetic nitrogen
fertilizer is the major cause of the 405 oceanic dead zones around the
world (including the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay, and the coasts
of California and Oregon). Monsanto's genetically engineered corn uses
more fertilizer than any other crop.
#5 Chopping Down the Rainforests for Monoculture GMO Crops, Biofuels and Cattle GrazingClearing
land to grow GMO crops for animal feed is the biggest driver of forest
and wetland destruction, which generate 20% of all climate-destabilizing
greenhouse gases. In Argentina and Brazil, Monsanto's genetically
engineered soy is the main cause of deforestation.
Argentina has
one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world with an average
of 0.8% of the forest cut down each year, against a global rate of
0.23%. During the period 2002-2006, 1,108,669 hectares of forest were
lost. That is 277,000 hectares per year, equivalent to 760 hectares per
day or 32 hectares per hour. The speed with which Córdoba's forests are
disappearing is unmatched worldwide, it even surpasses that of tropical
forests in poor countries. This is a ecological tragedy for the
primitive forests which shelter a biodiversity found nowhere else on the
planet.
In Brazil, the soy output increased 7.2 percent in 2011, causing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon to jump sixfold.
#6 Increasing the Cost of Food, While Reducing Nutrition and BiodiversityThe
business press
unabashedly links Monsanto's profits to record-high global food prices
and increases in the costs of farm inputs, especially Monsanto's
patented genetically engineered seeds. Monsanto's profits go up as
hunger increases and families lose their farms to insurmountable debt.
Nowhere has the connection between Monsanto's fortunes and farmers' misfortunes been so clear as in India where
200,000 farmers
have committed suicide since 1997. For many Indian farmers growing
Monsanto's genetically engineered Bt cotton, suicide is their only means
of escaping the debt they've accrued to obtain the seeds and
pesticides.
Monsanto has made food and farming more expensive,
while reducing the nutrition and variety of food available to the
average consumer. The world's farmers are increasingly growing more of
fewer number of crops (especially Monsanto's genetically engineered
corn, cotton, soy, canola, sugar beets and alfalfa). The result is that
we're eating a lot more of these few genetically engineered crops,
mostly in the form of animal products, oils & fats, and sugars. The
most notorious genetically engineered ingredients are high-fructose corn
syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and processed meats.
The
concentration of power in the hands of a few chemical companies like
Monsanto and the industrial producers who can most easily afford their
products, has resulted in a global food system dominated by two
extremes: on one hand, a plenitude of industrially produced junk foods,
on the other, regular food shortages and drastic price hikes. This
leaves a billion people saddled with obesity and diet-related disease,
even as more than a billion don't know where their next meal is coming
from.
#7 Spawning Pesticide-Resistant "Super" Bugs and Weeds, and Antibiotic-Resistant BacteriaGenetically
engineered crops designed to produce insecticides or tolerate
herbicides have proven a failure. Herbicide-resistant "superweeds" have
increased farmers' weed-control costs to
$50/acre,
as they battle weeds that can stand up to the most toxic chemicals ever
invented, including RoundUp (glyphosate), 2,4-D, dicamba, atrazine, ALS
inhibitors, PPO inhibitors, HPPD inhibitors and synthetic auxins.
Monsanto's Bt corn and cotton are being mowed down by
resistant insects from Iowa to India.
On
farms raising animals for food, the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics
has created a serious threat to the longevity and effectiveness of
certain classes of antibiotics used to treat a host of human illnesses.
Doctors concede that antimicrobial drug resistance due to use in animal
feed has already cost thousands of lives. In 2006, the EU banned the use
of antibiotics in water and feed, proving that raising livestock
without drugs is possible.
- TAKE ACTION
- No Agent Orange Corn!
- Ban Monsanto's RoundUp! Experts Say It's Worse than DDT! Tell the EPA to Ban Glyphosate
- Can You Imagine a World without Antibiotics? Tell the FDA to Protect Human Health and Regulate Antibiotics in Animal Feed
#8 Generating New and More Virulent Plant, Animal and Human DiseasesThe following is a summary of a must-watch interview (
Part 1,
Part 2) that Dr. Joseph Mercola conducted with Dr. Don Huber.
The
way Monsanto's RoundUp herbicide (glyphosate) kills weeds and plants is
by compromising their defense mechanisms, making them very susceptible
to soil borne organisms. It's not a direct killer, but it has a
debilitating effect on the weed's immune system, much like the human
disease AIDS.
Monsanto's RoundUp Ready gene, which enables crops
to withstand glyphosate, doesn't solve the problem of a debilitated
immune system, all it does is make it possible for the plant to survive
and to accumulate more glyphosate. RoundUp Ready crops aren't killed
immediately by the soil diseases RoundUp makes them susceptible to,
because they've been engineered with genes from a resistant bacteria,
but they are still more likely to succumb to disease than plants that
aren't exposed to RoundUp.
Among these disease-causing pathogens
are fusaria, which causes sudden death syndrome in soybeans and is a
major disease-causing organism for most of our crops. In crops sprayed
with RoundUp, we find an increase of up to 500 percent in root
colonization by this fungus.
While glyphosate promotes the growth
of more virulent pathogens, it also kills off beneficial bacteria that
might keep such pathogens in check in the soil and in the guts of
animals and humans that ingest the crop.
Scientists have
discovered a brand new organism in genetically engineered animal feed,
an organism that has since been linked to infertility and miscarriage in
cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry. We can anticipate that, with
such a broad spectrum of animal species, which is extremely unusual,
that humans will face the same problem, and there has been an increasing
frequency of miscarriage and a dramatic increase in infertility in
humans in just the last eight to 10 years.
The organism was
initially identified by veterinarians around 1998, about two years after
the introduction of Roundup Ready soybeans, which is one of the staple
feeds. The vets were puzzled by sudden high reproductive failure in
animals. While sporadic at first, the phenomenon has continued to
increase in severity. Dairies are reporting rates of spontaneous as high
as 70 percent.
The cause-effect relationship between high
reproductive failure and this new microbial entity has been established,
but the research has not yet been published. The reason for the delay
is because they really do not know what the organism is. It's not a
fungus. It's not bacteria. It's not a mycoplasma or a virus. It's about
the same size of a small virus; you have to magnify it 40,000 times.
When
the veterinarians wanted to find the source for this new organism, they
went to the feed. The first place where they found high concentrations
was in the soybean meal. Since it has been found it in corn and in
silage, only where there is a genetically engineered crop that has had
glyphosate applied to it. The organism is also found in manure when the
animals have been given feeds with high glyphosate residues. When that
manure is applied to pastures and cattle graze on it, we also see high
infertility rates there.
The organism is found in the placenta,
in the fetus, and in the sperm. In the dairy industry, it sometimes
takes twice as much semen to get a conception and as many as four to
eight inseminations rather than the typical 1.2 to 1.5. One bull breeder
had to pull 40 percent of his bulls out of service, because of
fertility.
If we continue to douse our crops with ever increasing
amounts of glyphosate, we will inevitably see the same effect on human
health as we're seeing in plants and animals.
Glyphosate gets
inside the plant; it cannot be washed off. Once you eat it, it ends up
in your gut, where 80 percent of your immune system resides. Glyphosate
can wreak havoc with your health by upsetting the healthy ratio of good
and bad stomach bacteria.
Because organically-farmed fields are
not doused with glyphosate, organic fields still contain beneficial soil
bacteria that actually
hinder
pathogens in and on the food from multiplying out of control. This may
be yet another reason why organic foods are less prone to be
contaminated with disease-causing pathogens than conventionally-grown
foods.
Pathogens such as E. coli have a high tolerance for
glyphosate compared to their natural biological controls. What this
means is that it may not be the presence or absence of pathogens per se
that determines the safety of our food supply, but rather the presence
or absence of the natural control organisms, which are effectively
destroyed by glyphosate. Salmonella, Clostridium, and a lot of these
disease organisms are ubiquitous. They're everywhere. Our health is
dependent on keeping them in check. If we're eliminating that check,
we're going to see an increase in Alzheimer's, thyroid problems, autism,
Parkinson's -- any disease that has a tie with either the endocrine
system or nutrient availability.
Genetically engineered crops are
supposed to be nutritionally equivalent to conventional foods, but
they're not. On the contrary, they're nutritionally inferior due to
glyphosate's herbicidal mechanism, which blocks absorption of
micronutrients. Genetically engineered crops contain about 50 percent
less manganese and up to 70 percent less zinc. They also contain less
copper, iron and magnesium, just to name a few. This affects the overall
health of the plant, and its reproductive ability, and when you eat
this nutritionally inferior food, you're not getting the micronutrients
your body needs for proper function either. Animal products are
similarly affected when they're from animals raised on genetically feed.
Studies
of pet rats are exposing behavioral differences in animals given
genetically engineered feed, as opposed to normal food. The non-GMO-fed
rats are docile. They can be pulled out of their cages and patted just
like a cat. But try and reach in to the cage where the rats are being
fed the genetically engineered feed. The rats are irritated. They don't
get along together. They always go off into their own little world. They
do backflips. They crawl up and run around the cage. They can't get any
peace, can't settle down. That is very typical of what you'd see with
autism.
Doctors working with autistic children are noting many
correlations between the rats fed genetically modified feed and autistic
children. When you look at the stomachs of the GMO-fed animals, they
have all of the severe allergy responses, the inflammation and the
reddening. The intestinal lining is deteriorating. The smell of the
intestinal contents is very rank. The biology has been drastically
changed. Doctors say that's exactly what they're seeing with autistic
children.
Another effect of the new mystery organism associated
with genetically engineered crops is premature aging. Research done in
Iowa three years ago showed that prime beef from a two-year old cow had
to be downgraded to that from a 10-year old cow.
Glyphosate can
also disrupt a number of other biological systems, including liver
function, blood function, and hormonal function. Glyphosate is a potent
endocrine disruptor that can affect the endocrine system, thyroid
function, and pituitary function.
- TAKE ACTION
- Ban Monsanto's RoundUp! Experts Say It's Worse than DDT! Tell the EPA to Ban Glyphosate
#9
Utilizing Wasteful Fossil Fuel-Intensive Practices and Encouraging the
Expansion of Natural Gas Fracking and Tar Sands Extraction (Which
Destroy Forests, Aquifers, and Farmland)The
industrialized food system is responsible for more than half of
greenhouse gas emissions, making Big Ag one of Big Oil's biggest
customers. We could deprive the oil and gas industry of a significant
amount of income by making the shift from polluting,
fossil-fuel-intensive factory farms to carbon-sequestering organic and
local agriculture.
Until we do make the shift, we need to
acknowledge that the old adage "you are what you eat" applies to energy
and the climate, as well as the body. It isn't just Hummers that are
pushing the expansion of natural gas fracking and tar sands extraction,
it's also Big Macs.
The worst thing about agriculture's wasteful
ways that the more fossil fuels we use to produce our food, the more
farmland will be destroyed in the search for new sources of that fuel.
Natural gas fracking
pumps many millions of gallons of hydrocarbons and volatile organic
compounds, including known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, into
the ground during the drilling process, and into the air from
evaporation tanks. Pollution of water, air and food from the gas
drilling industry is exempt from federal pollution laws, including the
Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clear Air Act,
thanks to Dick Cheney's 2005 Energy Policy Act and its 'Halliburton
Exemption.'
In upstate New York, the three million acres of
superior grasslands which are currently unused are threatened by natural
gas fracking. This is enough pasture land to raise local, grass-fed
cattle to replace all the factory farmed beef sold in New York City.
The
Keystone XL pipeline
would carry toxic tar sands oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada to the
Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline would cross the massive
Ogallala aquifer,
which supplies drinking water in 8 US states, and irrigation for
millions of acres of farmland. We've already seen the damage the thick
tar sands oil laden with volatile compounds can do from spills in the
Yellowstone River and the
Kalamazoo River. The first Keystone pipeline, developed with state-of-the-art technology, has already spilled
12 times in its first year in operation.
#10
Stealing Money From the 99% to Give Huge Subsidies to the 1%
Wealthiest, Most Chemical and Energy-Intensive Farms and Food ProducersThe following is a summary of Donald Carr's
must-read article, "Why the 2012 Farm Bill is a Climate Bill."
In the 2012 Farm Bill, Congress is poised
to cut 7 million acres from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The CRP is administered through the
U.S. Department of Agriculture and pays farmers to keep highly erodible land out of production.
Putting
land into conservation programs leads to cleaner water, healthier soil,
and robust wildlife habitat, and also plays a major role in fighting
climate change.
According to the USDA [PDF], one acre of protected land sequesters 1.66 metric tons of carbon
every year, carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere. The 7 million acres about to be cut from the CRP have been putting
11.6 million metric tons of carbon into the soil every year.The
Environmental Protection Agency says
that this amount of carbon is equivalent to the annual emissions of 2
million passenger vehicles. All that stored carbon will be sent back
into the atmosphere if those 7 million acres are plowed under to plant
more genetically engineered corn for ethanol and livestock feed.
Meanwhile
lavish government payments
to highly profitable mega-farms continue, and farm state lawmakers and
agribiz lobbyists are working toward newer programs that could
increase taxpayers' burden, along with agriculture's greenhouse gas emissions.
Save the Planet From Monsanto! It's
not enough to stop eating genetically engineered food. If we want a
liveable planet we've got to boycott all factory farmed food and make
the Great Transition from energy and chemical-intensive agriculture to a
re-localized and organic system of food and farming. The World
According to Monsanto is a recipe for disaster. Monsanto and Big Ag
contaminate every link in the food chain, threatening the very
foundation of life: living nutrient-rich soil, clean water, resilient
crops, healthy animals, stable climates, and diverse food sources. The
good news is that agro-ecological and organic methods can reverse this
threat and sustain food production for future generations, but we don't
have much time to turn things around.
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