January 27th
The volume of pesticide use and exposure is occurring
on a scale that is without precedent and world-historical in nature.
Agrichemicals are now pervasive as they cycle through bodies and
environments. The herbicide glyphosate has been a major factor in
driving this increase in use.
These statements appear in a 2021 paper ‘Growing Agrichemical Ubiquity: New Questions for Environments and Health’ (Community of Excellence in Global Health Equity).
The authors state that when the WHO’s International Agency for
Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate to be a “probable
carcinogen” in 2015, the fragile consensus about its safety was upended.
They note that in 2020 the US Environmental Protection Agency
affirmed that glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) pose no risk to human
health, apparently disregarding new evidence about the link between
glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as well as its non-cancer impacts
on the liver, kidney and gastrointestinal system.
The multi-authored paper notes:
In just under 20 years, much of the Earth has been coated
with glyphosate, in many places layering on already chemical-laden
human bodies, other organisms and environments.”
However, the authors add that glyphosate is not the only pesticide to achieve broad-scale pervasiveness:
The insecticide imidacloprid, for example, coats the
majority of US maize seed, making it the most widely used insecticide in
US history. Between just 2003 and 2009, sales of imidacloprid products
rose 245% (Simon-Delso et al. 2015). The scale of such use, and its
overlapping effects on bodies and environments, have yet to be fully
reckoned with, especially outside of countries with relatively strong
regulatory and monitoring capacities.”
According to Phillips McDougall’s Annual Agriservice Reports,
herbicides made up 43% of the global pesticide market in 2019 by value.
Much of the increase in glyphosate use is due to the introduction of
glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize, and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil
and Argentina.
The global pesticide industry is valued at over $50 billion (Phillips McDougal 2018).
Eating poison
In December 2021, a piece appeared in the prominent Danish newspaper Weekendavisen. Written by Niels Bjerre, agricultural affairs manager at Bayer CropScience in Copenhagen, ‘Thank goodness for pesticides’ set out to convince readers that sustainable modern agriculture cannot be done without using pesticides.
Denmark-based environmental campaigner Rosemary Mason has responded with the document ‘Open Letter to Bayer: Monsanto concealed the toxicity of Roundup to human health and the environment’ which mentions but goes beyond the now well-documented duplicity of Monsanto (which Bayer bought in 2018) – see the ‘Monsanto Papers’ – to highlight the ongoing damage being done by pesticides like glyphosate.
Mason lists many pertinent studies. For instance, a French team
has found heavy metals in chemical formulants of GBHs in people’s
diets. As with other pesticides, 10–20% of GBHs consist of chemical
formulants. Families of petroleum-based oxidized molecules and other
contaminants have been identified as well as the heavy metals arsenic,
chromium, cobalt, lead and nickel, which are known to be toxic and
endocrine disruptors.
In 1988, Ridley and Mirly (commissioned by Monsanto) found
bioaccumulation of glyphosate in rat tissues. Residues were present in
bone, marrow, blood and glands including the thyroid, testes and
ovaries, as well as major organs, including the heart, liver, lungs,
kidneys, spleen and stomach. Glyphosate was also associated with
ophthalmic degenerative lens changes.
A Stout and Rueker (1990) study (also commissioned by Monsanto)
provided concerning evidence with regard to cataracts following
glyphosate exposure in rats. It is interesting to note that the rate of cataract surgery in England “increased very substantially” between 1989 and 2004: from 173 (1989) to 637 (2004) episodes per 100,000 population.
A 2016 study by the WHO also confirmed that the incidence of
cataracts had greatly increased: ‘A global assessment of the burden of
disease from environmental risks’ says that cataracts are the leading
cause of blindness worldwide. Globally, cataracts are responsible for
51% of blindness. In the US, between 2000 and 2010 the number of cases
of cataract rose by 20% from 20.5 million to 24.4 million. It is
projected that by 2050, the number of people with cataracts will have
doubled to 50 million.
The authors of ‘Assessment of Glyphosate Induced Epigenetic
Transgenerational Inheritance of Pathologies and Sperm Epimutations:
Generational Toxicology’ (Scientific Reports, 2019) noted that
ancestral environmental exposures to a variety of factors and toxicants
promoted the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult-onset
disease.
They proposed that glyphosate can induce the transgenerational
inheritance of disease and germline (for example, sperm) epimutations.
Observations suggest the generational toxicology of glyphosate needs to
be considered in the disease etiology of future generations.
In a 2017 study, Carlos Javier Baier and colleagues documented
behavioural impairments following repeated intranasal glyphosate-based
herbicide administration in mice. Intranasal GBH caused behavioural
disorders, decreased locomotor activity, induced an anxiogenic behaviour
and produced memory deficit.
The paper contains references to many studies from around the world
that confirm GBHs are damaging to the development of the foetal brain
and that repeated exposure is toxic to the adult human brain and may
result in alterations in locomotor activity, feelings of anxiety and
memory impairment.
Highlights of a 2018 study
on neurotransmitter changes in rat brain regions following glyphosate
exposure include neurotoxicity in rats. And in a 2014 study which
examined mechanisms underlying the neurotoxicity induced by
glyphosate-based herbicide in the immature rat hippocampus, it was found
that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup induces various neurotoxic
processes.
In the paper ‘Glyphosate damages blood-testis barrier via
NOX1-triggered oxidative stress in rats: Long-term exposure as a
potential risk for male reproductive health’ (Environment
International, 2022) it was noted that glyphosate causes blood-testis
barrier (BTB) damage and low-quality sperm and that glyphosate-induced
BTB injury contributes to sperm quality decrease.
The study Multiomics reveal non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in rats following chronic exposure to an ultra-low dose of Roundup herbicide (2017),
revealed non-fatty acid liver disease (NFALD) in rats following chronic
exposure to an ultra-low dose of Roundup herbicide. NFALD currently
affects 25% of the US population and similar numbers of Europeans.
The 2020 paper ‘Glyphosate exposure exacerbates the dopaminergic
neurotoxicity in the mouse brain after repeated of MPTP’ suggests that
glyphosate may be an environmental risk factor for Parkinson’s.
In the 2019 Ramazzini Institute’s 13-week pilot study that looked
into the effects of GBHs on development and the endocrine system, it was
demonstrated that GBHs exposure, from prenatal period to adulthood,
induced endocrine effects and altered reproductive developmental
parameters in male and female rats.
Aside from glyphosate, Mason also notes that in 1991 Bayer
CropScience introduced a new type of insecticide into the US:
imidacloprid, the first member of a group now known as neonicotinoids.
Imidacloprid was licensed for use in Europe in 1994. In July of that
year, beekeepers in France noticed something unexpected. Just after the
sunflowers had bloomed, a substantial number of their hives would
collapse, as the worker bees flew off and never returned, leaving the
queen and immature workers to die. The French beekeepers soon believed
they knew the reason: a brand new insecticide called Gaucho with
imidacloprid as active ingredient was being applied to sunflowers for
the first time.
In the 2022 paper ‘Neonicotinoid insecticides found in children treated for leukaemias and lymphomas’
(Environmental Health), the authors stated that multiple neonicotinoids
were found in children’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), plasma and urine.
As the most widely used class of insecticides worldwide, they are
ubiquitously found in the environment, wildlife and foods. The data
revealed multiple neonicotinoids and/or their metabolites in children’s
CSF, plasma and urine.
Bottom line
If the ‘Monsanto Papers’ told us anything, it is that a corporation’s
top priority is the bottom line (at all costs, by all means necessary)
and not public health. A CEO’s obligation is to maximise profit, capture
markets and – ideally – regulatory and policy-making bodies as well.
Corporations must also secure viable year-on-year growth which often
means expanding into hitherto untapped markets. Indeed, in the
previously mentioned paper ‘Growing Agrichemical Ubiquity’, the authors
note that while countries like the US are still reporting higher
pesticide use, most of this growth is taking place in the Global South:
For example, pesticide use in California grew 10% from
2005 to 2015, while use by Bolivian farmers, though starting from a low
base, increased 300% in the same period. Pesticide use is growing
steeply in countries as diverse as China, Mali, South Africa, Nepal,
Laos, Ghana, Argentina, Brazil and Bangladesh. Most countries with high
levels of growth have weak regulatory enforcement, environmental
monitoring and health surveillance infrastructure.”
And much of this growth is driven by increased demand for herbicides:
India saw a 250% increase since 2005 (Das Gupta et al.
2017) while herbicide use jumped by 2500% in China (Huang, Wang, and
Xiao 2017) and 2000% in Ethiopia (Tamru et al. 2017). The introduction
of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize, and cotton seeds in the US,
Brazil, and Argentina is clearly driving much of the demand, but
herbicide use is also expanding dramatically in countries that have not
approved nor adopted such crops and where smallholder farming is still
dominant.”
In response to the increasing use of GBHs in India, the influential
Swadeshi Jagaran Manch recently demanded a complete ban on the use of
glyphosate in the country. A petition with more than 201,000 signatories
favouring a complete ban on glyphosate was submitted to the minister
for agriculture.
The minister was also informed that the herbicide is blatantly being
used for illegally grown genetically engineered herbicide tolerant (HT)
cotton. He was told that “miscreant seed companies” are trying to
illegally spread HT Bt cotton on hundreds of thousands of acres of land
to promote the use of glyphosate.
In a 2017 paper,
academics Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs describe how cotton farmers in
India have been encouraged to change their ploughing practices, leading
to more weeds. The outcome in terms of yields (or farmer profit) is
arguably no better but the change (conveniently) coincided with the
appearance of an increasing supply of these illegal HT cotton seeds.
Farmers are being pushed onto herbicide-intensive treadmills.
Industry figures like Niels Bjerre claim pesticide use is necessary
in ‘modern agriculture’. But this is not the case: there is now sufficient evidence
to suggest otherwise. It is simply not necessary to have our bodies
contaminated with toxic agrochemicals, regardless of how much the
industry tries to reassure us that they are present in ‘safe’ levels.
There is also the industry-promoted narrative that if you question
the need for synthetic pesticides in ‘modern agriculture’, you are
somehow ignorant or even ‘anti-science’. This is simply not true. What
does ‘modern agriculture’ even mean? It means a system adapted to meet
the demands of global agrocapital and its international markets and
supply chains.
As writer and academic Benjamin R Cohen recently stated:
“Meeting the needs of modern agriculture – growing
produce that can be shipped long distances and hold up in the store and
at home for more than a few days – can result in tomatoes that taste
like cardboard or strawberries that aren’t as sweet as they used to be.
Those are not the needs of modern agriculture. They are the needs of
global markets.”
What is really being questioned is a policy paradigm that privileges a
certain model of social and economic development and a certain type of
agriculture: urbanisation, giant supermarkets, global markets, long
supply chains, external proprietary inputs (seeds, synthetic pesticides
and fertilisers, machinery, etc), chemical-dependent monocropping,
highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency at the expense
of rural communities, small independent enterprises and smallholder
farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse
agroecological cropping, nutrient dense diets and food sovereignty.
The effects of this paradigm has had devastating ecological,
environmental, social, economic and agronomic consequences on highly
productive traditional agrarian systems (see Bhaskar Save’s 2006 open letter to Indian officials).
Furthermore, despite claims to the contrary, it is not as though the
chemical-intensive Green Revolution actually led to increased food
production per capita in the first place (see Glenn Stone’s paper ‘New Histories of the Green Revolution’).
Nevertheless, predatory agri-food conglomerates have been driving
this policy paradigm. In doing so, they have actively consolidated their
position throughout the entire global food system while promoting the
false narrative that they and their inputs are necessary for feeding the
world.
Source: https://off-guardian.org/2022/01/27/bathed-in-pesticides-the-narrative-of-deception/
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