Why Is Damning New Evidence About Monsanto's Most Widely Used Herbicide Being Silenced?

Why Is Damning New Evidence About Monsanto's Most Widely Used
Herbicide Being Silenced?
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_62905.shtml

By Jill Richardson
AlterNet
Saturday, Apr 30, 2011

Dr. Don Huber did not seek fame when he quietly penned a confidential
letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in January of this
year, warning Vilsack of preliminary evidence of a microscopic
organism that appears in high concentrations in genetically modified
Roundup Ready corn and soybeans and "appears to significantly impact
the health of plants, animals and probably human beings." Huber, a
retired Purdue University professor of plant pathology and U.S. Army
colonel, requested the USDA's help in researching the matter and
suggested Vilsack wait until the research was concluded before
deregulating Roundup Ready alfalfa. But about a month after it was
sent, the letter was leaked, soon becoming an internet phenomenon.

Huber was unavailable to respond to media inquiries in the weeks
following the leak, and thus unable to defend himself when several
colleagues from Purdue publicly claiming to refute his accusations
about Monsanto's widely used herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) and
Roundup Ready crops. When his letter was finally acknowledged by the
mainstream media, it was with titles like "Scientists Question Claims
in Biotech Letter," noting that the letter's popularity on the
internet "has raised concern among scientists that the public will
believe his unsupported claim is true."

Now, Huber has finally spoken out, both in a second letter, sent to "a
wide number of individuals worldwide" to explain and back up his
claims from his first letter, and in interviews. While his first
letter described research that was not yet complete or published, his
second letter cited much more evidence about glyphosate and
genetically engineered crops based on studies that have already been
published in peer-reviewed journals.

The basis of both letters and much of the research is the herbicide
glyphosate. First commercialized in 1974, glyphosate is the most
widely used herbicide in the world and has been for some time.
Glyphosate has long been considered a relatively benign product,
because it was thought to break down quickly in the environment and
harm little other than the weeds it was supposed to kill.

According to the National Pesticide Information Center, glyphosate
prevents plants from making a certain enzyme. Without the enzyme, they
are unable to make three essential amino acids, and thus, unable to
survive. Once applied, glyphosate either binds to soil particles (and
is thus immobilized so it can no longer harm plants) or microorganisms
break it down into ammonium and carbon dioxide. Very little glyphosate
runs off into waterways. For these reasons, glyphosate has been
thought of as more or less harmless: you spray the weeds, they die,
the glyphosate goes away, and nothing else in the environment is
harmed.

But Huber says this is not true. First of all, he points out, evidence
began to emerge in the 1980s that "what glyphosate does is,
essentially, give a plant AIDS." Just like AIDS, which cripples a
human's immune system, glyphosate makes plants unable to mount a
defense against pathogens in the soil. Without its defense mechanisms
functioning, the plants succumb to pathogens in the soil and die.
Furthermore, glyphosate has an impact on microorganisms in the soil,
helping some and hurting others. This is potentially problematic for
farmers, as the last thing one would want is a buildup of pathogens in
the soil where they grow crops.

The fate of glyphosate in the environment is also not as benign as
once thought. It's true that glyphosate either binds to soil or is
broken down quickly by microbes. Glyphosate binds to any positively
charged ion in the soil, with the consequence of making many nutrients
(such as iron and manganese) less available to plants. Also,
glyphosate stays in the soil bound to particles for a long time and
can be released later by normal agricultural practices like phosphorus
fertilization. "It's not uncommon to find one to three pounds of
glyphosate per acre in agricultural soils in the Midwest," says Huber,
noting that this represents one to three times the typical amount of
glyphosate applied to a field in a year.

Huber says these facts about glyphosate are very well known
scientifically but rarely cited. When asked why, he replied that it
would be harder for a company to get glyphosate approved for
widespread use if it were known that the product could increase the
severity of diseases on normal crop plants as well as the weeds it was
intended to kill. Here in the U.S., many academic journals are not
even interested in publishing studies that suggest this about
glyphosate; a large number of the studies Huber cites were published
in the European Journal of Agronomy.

If Huber's claims are true, then it follows that there must be
problems with disease in crops where glyphosate is used. Huber's
second letter verifies this, saying, "we are experiencing a large
number of problems in production agriculture in the U.S. that appear
to be intensified and sometimes directly related to genetically
engineered (GMO) crops, and/or the products they were engineered to
tolerate -- especially those related to glyphosate (the active
chemical in Roundup® herbicide and generic versions of this
herbicide)."

He continues, saying, "We have witnessed a deterioration in the plant
health of corn, soybean, wheat and other crops recently with
unexplained epidemics of sudden death syndrome of soybean (SDS), Goss'
wilt of corn, and take-all of small grain crops the last two years. At
the same time, there has been an increasing frequency of previously
unexplained animal (cattle, pig, horse, poultry) infertility and
[miscarriages]. These situations are threatening the economic
viability of both crop and animal producers."

Some of the crops Huber named, corn and soy, are genetically
engineered to survive being sprayed with glyphosate. Others, like
wheat and barley, are not. In those cases, a farmer would apply
glyphosate to kill weeds about a week before planting his or her crop,
but would not spray the crop itself. In the case of corn, as Huber
points out, most corn varieties in the U.S. are bred using
conventional breeding techniques to resist the disease Goss' wilt.
However, recent preliminary research showed that when GE corn is
sprayed with glyphosate, the corn becomes susceptible to Goss' wilt.
Huber says in his letter that "This disease was commonly observed in
many Midwestern U.S. fields planted to [Roundup Ready] corn in 2009
and 2010, while adjacent non-GMO corn had very light to no
infections." In 2010, Goss' wilt was a "major contributor" to an
estimated one billion bushels of corn lost in the U.S. "in spite of
generally good harvest conditions," says Huber.

The subject of Huber's initial letter is a newly identified organism
that appears to be the cause of infertility and miscarriages in
animals. Scientists have a process to verify whether an organism is
the cause of a disease: they isolate the organism, culture it, and
reintroduce it to the animal to verify that it reproduces the symptoms
of the disease, and then re-isolate the organism from the animal's
tissue. This has already been completed for the organism in question.
The organism appears in high concentrations in Roundup Ready crops.
However, more research is needed to understand what this organism is
and what its relationship is to glyphosate and/or Roundup Ready crops.

In order to secure the additional research needed, Huber wrote to
Secretary Vilsack. Huber says he wrote his initial letter to Secretary
Vilsack with the expectation that it would be forwarded to the
appropriate agency within the USDA for follow-up, which it was. When
the USDA contacted Huber for more information, he provided it, but he
does not know how they have followed up on that information. The
letter was "a private letter appealing for [the USDA's] personnel and
funding," says Huber. Given recent problems with plant disease and
livestock infertility and miscarriages, he says that "many producers
can't wait an additional three to 10 years for someone to find the
funds and neutral environment" to complete the research on this
organism.

If the link between the newly discovered organism and livestock
infertility and miscarriages proves true, it will be a major story.
But there is already a major story here: the lack of independent
research on GMOs, the reluctance of U.S. journals to publish studies
critical of glyphosate and GMOs, and the near total silence from the
media on Huber's leaked letter.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a
member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She
is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and
What We Can Do to Fix It..

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.