Presentation to Opposition Committee Agriculture & Food

Banning Roundup in Agriculture is an Imperative.

In the US a judge has ruled that kids can sue the US government for inaction on Climate Change. Last July, a court in The Hague has ordered the Dutch government to cut its emissions by at least 25% within five years, in a landmark ruling expected to cause ripples around the world. As incontrovertible proofs that Roundup is linked to autism, cancers, and other disorders accumulate, we can expect to see large groups of the population suing government for inaction against toxic agriculture.

Banning Roundup in agriculture won't solve everything but it will at least stop contaminating our food supply with this known toxin, and show that government is taking action. It may even motivate government to change forestry practices for currently BC forestry industry sprays about 18,000 hectares of forests with Glyphosate at a highter toxicity despite the fact that a Ministry of Environment 7paper dated 2008 shows it kills amphibians. Of course it also kills most animals since it greatly reduces food supplies and pollutes the air and waterways.

What is Roundup?

Roundup's active ingredient is Glyphosate. It started out as a pipe cleaner in industry but after realizing it killed plants, industry figured it would be more profitable to sell it as a herbicide. We don't know all of its inert ingredients because their identity is protected as being proprietary. However studies show that some of these can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells1.

Roundup is the most extensively used herbicide in the world, mainly due to the fact that the four Genetically Modified crops grown in Canada, corn, canola, sugar beet and soy, are called "Roundup Ready" crops. This means that the fields can be sprayed repeatedly, as often as needed, even when the crop is growing, with this herbicide that kills everything except the genetically engineered crop. Very attractive for farmers but lethal to biodiversity.

When GM crops first started being grown we were told by industry that they would reduce the use of pesticide. On the contrary, between 1996 and 2011, pesticide use increased by 404 million pounds. The reason is simple. Weeds adapt. There are always a few that can resist the herbicide, and those are the ones that survive and proliferate, becoming Superweeds, that require more and more toxic pesticides.

In addition to spraying GM crops with Roundup, farmers use it extensively on wheat, barley, oats, pulses, as a pre-harvest desiccant to dry the crop prior to harvest.

But Glyphosate is also one more thing that is very little known. In 2010 it was patented as an antibiotic after the industry proved that it could kill bacteria at 1 ppm. There is so much of it in bread and all processed foods that contain cereals, soy and corn, canola oil and sugar, that the EPA had to raise the legal residue levels in all food and feed crops in 2013 – and Health Canada of course follows their guidelines for MRL (Maximum Residue Limits). 2For example, soy can now contain 20 parts per million (ppm) and cereals (wheat, oat, and barley) can contain 30 ppm. Animal feed can legally contain up to 100 ppm, so imagine the residues in dairy and meat products. So basically, we are allowing food to be grown with a very powerful antibiotic that remains and persists in the air, the soil, the water, and in the food that we eat, affecting our own gut bacteria.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weed-whacking-herbicide-p
Interviews and letters by Dr. Thierry Vrain

How Does Roundup Affect us?

"Over the years a large body of independent research has accumulated and now collectively provides a sound scientific rationale to confirm that glyphosate is far more toxic and poses more serious health risks to animals and humans than Monsanto and our government admit. Among the many diseases and health conditions non-industry studies identified Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and autism since Roundup has been shown to instigate aluminum accumulation in the brain. The herbicide has been responsible for reproductive problems such as infertility, miscarriages, and neural tube and birth defects. It is a causal agent for a variety of cancers: brain, breast, prostate, lung and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Other disorders include chronic kidney and liver diseases, diabetes, heart disease, hypothyroidism, and leaky gut syndrome. In addition to lung cancer, glyphosate may be responsible for today’s growing epidemics of chronic respiratory illnesses among farm workers and their families. [6] However, these findings derive from outside the Big Agriculture industry.

Private industries routinely defend themselves by positing their own research to refute independent reports. They also subsidize numerous websites that ridicule these studies by attacking them as being anti-science. The Seralini study - that found that both GM maize NK603 and Roundup caused serious kidney and liver damage and an increased and earlier development of tumours, leading to an increased rate of mortality - was retracted based on strong pressure from the biotech industry, but republished after Dr. Seralini won a court case for defamation.

Consequently, for several decades it has been a he-said-she-said stalemate. Monsanto is content with this. It can conduct business as usual, Roundup sales increase, and the debates and media wars continue without government interference. But when the Seralini team reproduced and extended the length of Monsanto’s 3-month GMO maize rat-fed study for the life of the animals, they observed profuse cancer and tumour development starting after the 4th month of the study." (Richard Gale and Gary Null).

Scientists from Argentina were able to demonstrate how Roundup caused the fetal abnormalities. They became concerned about human birth defects in areas of their country where Roundup was being sprayed from airplanes for soy production, and found that frog and chicken embryos exposed to the herbicide developed significant malformations, including neural defects and craniofacial malformations similar to the birth defects seen in humans.

The herbicide increased the activity of the Vitamin A (retinoic acid) "signaling pathway, a pathway that turns genes on and off. Roundup causes an abnormal increase in activity of this pathway, which turns off certain genes that are needed for normal embryological development. This pathway is shared by virtually all vertebrates, including amphibians, birds and mammals. It seems likely that if we continue to allow glyphosate to accumulate in the environment, we can expect vertebrates of many types to suffer increasing rates of birth defects, including humans.

It's important to realize that, contrary to Monsanto's claims, Roundup persists and accumulates. It contaminates the air, the soil, and the water including drinking water via rainwater, surface runoff and leaching into groundwater, thereby adding drinking water, bathing, and washing water as possible routine exposure pathways. The EPA MRL for glyphosate in drinking water is below 0.7 ppm. Beyond that the EPA warns you that you will get severely ill quickly. The MRL in Europe is considerably less.

The World Health Organization has concluded that glyphosate, probably causes cancer. Last year the Netherlands, Bermuda and Sri Lanka have either banned or imposed strict limits on Roundup. Most European countries don't allow Roundup Ready GM crops and last June, France banned the use of Roundup in gardens. Brazil, Germany and Argentina are considering legislative bans. And this month, California’s environmental protection agency launched plans to label Roundup as a carcinogen.

The Future of Agriculture Without Roundup

It won't be easy for industrial agriculture to shift to farming without Roundup and other toxic pesticides but it is possible and it is an imperative. "(Brussels / Trondheim: 2nd June) Input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots must be consigned to the past in order to put global food systems onto sustainable footing, according to the world’s foremost experts on food security, agro-ecosystems and nutrition.The solution is to diversify agriculture and reorient it around ecological practices, whether the starting point is highly-industrialized agriculture or subsistence farming in the world’s poorest countries, the experts argued."

It is our hope that you will take all the actions under your power to ensure that Roundup is banned in agriculture.

Huguette Allen, for Bee SAFE.