Thursday, July 28, 2011
Dietary Supplements
Dietary supplements are among the safest substances on the planet, safer even than food. According to statistics , you are 1,357 times more likely to die from eating food than from consuming natural healthcare products. (You are also 18 times more likely to die from a lightning strike than from natural supplements.) Deaths from food poisoning are quite common. So are deaths from anaphylaxis (e.g., allergic reaction to peanuts). Dietary supplements, however, have an impeccable safety record. In the half century that these products have been available in Canada, they haven't killed anyone. Zero deaths have ever been documented to have been caused by these ultra-safe products, not in any country, not ever. On rare occasion, Poison Control Centres in the U.S. have erroneously reported a death attributed to a particular vitamin. In every case such anomaly was subsequently discovered to be a reporting error. Deaths caused by vitamins are in fact zero. http://www.hfnn.ca/index.php?showArticle=17411
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
The Trouble with Cherries ... and Walnuts (according to the FDA)
The Trouble with Cherries ... and Walnuts (according to the FDA)
Let go of that stem and back away from the cherry.
It's for your own good.
You see, that cherry is officially an unapproved drug, at least according to the Einsteins at the FDA.
Obviously, that makes no sense. But it lead me to ask: If cherries are unapproved drugs, what does that make potato chips?
Also compliments of the geniuses at the Food and Drug Administration: Heart healthy, of course!
Fortunately, there may be a way out of this government-inflicted insanity.
Over-the-counter cherries.
Cherries contain antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory components. The scientific evidence behind that statement is irrefutable. But when owners of cherry orchards made those claims and backed them up with links to the evidence, the FDA ruled that the claims "cause your products to be drugs."
Needless to say, none of the orchard owners had submitted their cherries for approval as drugs, so they were not allowed to continue the claims.
Crazy? Oh...we're just getting started.
Last year, Dannon settled a dispute with the FDA by paying out $21 million to several states where they had advertised their Activia yogurt and DanActive dairy drink. In those ads they said the products, "help regulate your digestive system...naturally."
That claim is based on what we know about the benefits of living cultures in probiotics.
But the FDA decided that Dannon was actually claiming that "Activia provided consumers with bowel movements at fixed, uniform or normal intervals." Clearly, that was not the case, but the agency's absurd decision ended up costing Dannon millions.
And FDA officials were just as picky and difficult when it came to walnuts.
They told walnut distributer Diamond Foods that multiple studies showing heart health benefits of walnuts were not sufficient to allow such claims on the Diamond Foods website. Again, the FDA ruled that the health claims classified walnuts as drugs.
Now...if all that seems completely bat-house crazy, brace yourself -- seriously -- because here's what the FDA allows Frito-Lay to say about their products...
"You might be surprised at how much good stuff goes into your favorite snack. Good stuff like potatoes, which naturally contain vitamin C and essential minerals. Or corn, one of the world's most popular grains, packed with thiamin, vitamin B6, and phosphorous -- all necessary for healthy bones, teeth, nerves and muscles."
Potatoes and corn -- two of the WORST foods you can eat, even before the processing begins! But wait -- there's more...
"Our all-natural sunflower, corn and soybean oils contain good polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which help lower total and LDL 'bad' cholesterol and maintain HDL 'good' cholesterol levels, which can support a healthy heart."
So you CAN'T say cherries provide antioxidants that benefit health, but you CAN clearly tell customers that corn chips help keep bones healthy and potato chips cooked in soybean oil "can support a healthy heart."
That is true lunacy! In any rational world we'd be able to storm FDA headquarters and take them all away in straitjackets.
As I said earlier, there may be a way out of this government-inflicted insanity. But to do it, we have to go through the government.
Two members of Congress recently introduced the Free Speech about Science Act that will require the FDA to let food producers and supplement makers state health claims when they're backed up by sound, science-based evidence.
You can help this important effort by contacting your representatives and senators through "Thomas," a Library of Congress website (thomas.loc.gov).
Let your Congressmen know how vital it is to change these absurd FDA regulations that withhold essential health information and cause companies and growers to spend millions defending ridiculous charges.
I mean, really...aren't there other "unapproved drugs" that are currently putting us at greater risk than walnuts and cherries???
From: "HSI - Jenny Thompson"
Let go of that stem and back away from the cherry.
It's for your own good.
You see, that cherry is officially an unapproved drug, at least according to the Einsteins at the FDA.
Obviously, that makes no sense. But it lead me to ask: If cherries are unapproved drugs, what does that make potato chips?
Also compliments of the geniuses at the Food and Drug Administration: Heart healthy, of course!
Fortunately, there may be a way out of this government-inflicted insanity.
Over-the-counter cherries.
Cherries contain antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory components. The scientific evidence behind that statement is irrefutable. But when owners of cherry orchards made those claims and backed them up with links to the evidence, the FDA ruled that the claims "cause your products to be drugs."
Needless to say, none of the orchard owners had submitted their cherries for approval as drugs, so they were not allowed to continue the claims.
Crazy? Oh...we're just getting started.
Last year, Dannon settled a dispute with the FDA by paying out $21 million to several states where they had advertised their Activia yogurt and DanActive dairy drink. In those ads they said the products, "help regulate your digestive system...naturally."
That claim is based on what we know about the benefits of living cultures in probiotics.
But the FDA decided that Dannon was actually claiming that "Activia provided consumers with bowel movements at fixed, uniform or normal intervals." Clearly, that was not the case, but the agency's absurd decision ended up costing Dannon millions.
And FDA officials were just as picky and difficult when it came to walnuts.
They told walnut distributer Diamond Foods that multiple studies showing heart health benefits of walnuts were not sufficient to allow such claims on the Diamond Foods website. Again, the FDA ruled that the health claims classified walnuts as drugs.
Now...if all that seems completely bat-house crazy, brace yourself -- seriously -- because here's what the FDA allows Frito-Lay to say about their products...
"You might be surprised at how much good stuff goes into your favorite snack. Good stuff like potatoes, which naturally contain vitamin C and essential minerals. Or corn, one of the world's most popular grains, packed with thiamin, vitamin B6, and phosphorous -- all necessary for healthy bones, teeth, nerves and muscles."
Potatoes and corn -- two of the WORST foods you can eat, even before the processing begins! But wait -- there's more...
"Our all-natural sunflower, corn and soybean oils contain good polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which help lower total and LDL 'bad' cholesterol and maintain HDL 'good' cholesterol levels, which can support a healthy heart."
So you CAN'T say cherries provide antioxidants that benefit health, but you CAN clearly tell customers that corn chips help keep bones healthy and potato chips cooked in soybean oil "can support a healthy heart."
That is true lunacy! In any rational world we'd be able to storm FDA headquarters and take them all away in straitjackets.
As I said earlier, there may be a way out of this government-inflicted insanity. But to do it, we have to go through the government.
Two members of Congress recently introduced the Free Speech about Science Act that will require the FDA to let food producers and supplement makers state health claims when they're backed up by sound, science-based evidence.
You can help this important effort by contacting your representatives and senators through "Thomas," a Library of Congress website (thomas.loc.gov).
Let your Congressmen know how vital it is to change these absurd FDA regulations that withhold essential health information and cause companies and growers to spend millions defending ridiculous charges.
I mean, really...aren't there other "unapproved drugs" that are currently putting us at greater risk than walnuts and cherries???
From: "HSI - Jenny Thompson"
We are truly spinning out of control............
We are truly spinning out of control............
Russel Mead writes, “Politics, economics, international relations, religion: Everything in our world is getting weirder, and the weirding is happening faster all the time. This change is rapidly propelling us into a century that will be radically different from everything humanity has known before. We have all been given tickets on the wildest rollercoaster ride in the history of Planet Earth. Our governing classes, our academics, our journalists, and our professionals mostly hate this and, with eyes firmly fixed in the rear view mirror, try to pretend that the world of the 20th century can never, will never break up.”
Climate catastrophes, harvest failures, droughts, dust and firestorms are raining misery on an increasingly unstable earth. What do we expect when our entire planet has shifted on its axis and unexplainable increases in gamma radiation are being detected, both affecting the weather? Everything is changing around us; even thousands of miles beneath our feet the earth is rumbling loudly with a record number of volcanoes now in various stages of eruption. Floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and other extreme weather have left a trail of destruction during the first half of 2011.
There were jaw-dropping heat indexes—measured as a combination of
temperature and humidity—across the Midwest. It felt like 131 degrees in
Knoxville, in central Iowa, and 124 in Freeport, Ill., the Weather Service said.
These “extreme weather” events will become more numerous and deadly as atmospheric conditions across the planet become more and more unstable. The sheer force of Nature is increasing (for some reason) and she is deadly, often striking without warning. In the space of hours or even minutes, in the case of tornadoes, unbridled forces of nature can obliterate everything man has created. It’s time to face the fact that the weather has changed dramatically in a very short period of time and it’s threatening to spin out of control.
In Chicago those looking for some kind of a break from the heat of the last week got it overnight—a rainstorm that dropped temperatures into the low 70s. But like the heat wave that preceded it, this rainstorm was anything but ordinary. According to ChicagoWeatherCenter.com, the total rainfall at O’Hare—6.91 inches as of about 6:50 a.m.—is the largest single-day rainfall since records began in 1871. – Chicago Tribune
Reports of these kinds of storms have been pouring in from all around the world. Some people are calling them cloudburst storms, which are very intense thunderstorms. In many instances these storms appear to come out of nowhere. Most of them develop late at night where the atmosphere has been heated by record daytime temperatures. They are characterized by very intense lightning strikes. Some unleash hailstones and monstrous amounts of rainfall that often lead to dramatic flash-flooding events like we witness in the video below where we actually see, to our horror, people getting swept away by a very sudden flood.
Climate change is dramatically increasing the scale of natural disasters threatening world security as predicted years ago by a 2007 Pentagon study. Though science cannot yet explain all the reasons behind the radical changes in the world’s climate, “a changing climate is a reality,” and one that effects all sectors of society, said Achim Steiner, director of the U.N. Environment Program.
While Chicago dealt with too much water, Arkansas was preparing for forest fires due to drought. Fires have been burning down millions of acres around the world. Some 40,000 wildfires have torched over 5.8 million in the United States alone and conditions threaten to worsen through the summer months.
The hot weather in the nation’s breadbasket also posed a threat to farmers’ top cash crop, corn, as it enters its key growth stage of pollination. The wet spring led to late planting of corn, and dry hot weather was adding concerns. “Right now we are seeing real stress in the corn plants,” said Mark White, adviser to the Missouri Corn Growers Association. Drought, unlike earthquakes, hurricanes and other rapid-moving weather, could become a permanent condition in some regions.
Read more at: http://blog.imva.info/world-affairs/spinning-control
Russel Mead writes, “Politics, economics, international relations, religion: Everything in our world is getting weirder, and the weirding is happening faster all the time. This change is rapidly propelling us into a century that will be radically different from everything humanity has known before. We have all been given tickets on the wildest rollercoaster ride in the history of Planet Earth. Our governing classes, our academics, our journalists, and our professionals mostly hate this and, with eyes firmly fixed in the rear view mirror, try to pretend that the world of the 20th century can never, will never break up.”
Climate catastrophes, harvest failures, droughts, dust and firestorms are raining misery on an increasingly unstable earth. What do we expect when our entire planet has shifted on its axis and unexplainable increases in gamma radiation are being detected, both affecting the weather? Everything is changing around us; even thousands of miles beneath our feet the earth is rumbling loudly with a record number of volcanoes now in various stages of eruption. Floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and other extreme weather have left a trail of destruction during the first half of 2011.
There were jaw-dropping heat indexes—measured as a combination of
temperature and humidity—across the Midwest. It felt like 131 degrees in
Knoxville, in central Iowa, and 124 in Freeport, Ill., the Weather Service said.
These “extreme weather” events will become more numerous and deadly as atmospheric conditions across the planet become more and more unstable. The sheer force of Nature is increasing (for some reason) and she is deadly, often striking without warning. In the space of hours or even minutes, in the case of tornadoes, unbridled forces of nature can obliterate everything man has created. It’s time to face the fact that the weather has changed dramatically in a very short period of time and it’s threatening to spin out of control.
In Chicago those looking for some kind of a break from the heat of the last week got it overnight—a rainstorm that dropped temperatures into the low 70s. But like the heat wave that preceded it, this rainstorm was anything but ordinary. According to ChicagoWeatherCenter.com, the total rainfall at O’Hare—6.91 inches as of about 6:50 a.m.—is the largest single-day rainfall since records began in 1871. – Chicago Tribune
Reports of these kinds of storms have been pouring in from all around the world. Some people are calling them cloudburst storms, which are very intense thunderstorms. In many instances these storms appear to come out of nowhere. Most of them develop late at night where the atmosphere has been heated by record daytime temperatures. They are characterized by very intense lightning strikes. Some unleash hailstones and monstrous amounts of rainfall that often lead to dramatic flash-flooding events like we witness in the video below where we actually see, to our horror, people getting swept away by a very sudden flood.
Climate change is dramatically increasing the scale of natural disasters threatening world security as predicted years ago by a 2007 Pentagon study. Though science cannot yet explain all the reasons behind the radical changes in the world’s climate, “a changing climate is a reality,” and one that effects all sectors of society, said Achim Steiner, director of the U.N. Environment Program.
While Chicago dealt with too much water, Arkansas was preparing for forest fires due to drought. Fires have been burning down millions of acres around the world. Some 40,000 wildfires have torched over 5.8 million in the United States alone and conditions threaten to worsen through the summer months.
The hot weather in the nation’s breadbasket also posed a threat to farmers’ top cash crop, corn, as it enters its key growth stage of pollination. The wet spring led to late planting of corn, and dry hot weather was adding concerns. “Right now we are seeing real stress in the corn plants,” said Mark White, adviser to the Missouri Corn Growers Association. Drought, unlike earthquakes, hurricanes and other rapid-moving weather, could become a permanent condition in some regions.
Read more at: http://blog.imva.info/world-affairs/spinning-control
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Mississippi runoff expands Gulf 'dead zone'
Mississippi runoff expands Gulf 'dead zone' - Posted on Jul 19th 2011 by Kate Taylor
The so-called Gulf Dead Zone is looking set to be the biggest ever this year.
It's currently about 3,300 square miles, or roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, but researchers at Texas A & M University say it's likely to become much larger.
The dead zone is caused by hypoxia, whereby oxygen levels in seawater drop to dangerously low levels. Severe hypoxia can potentially result in widespread fish kills.
During the past five years, the Gulf dead zone has averaged about 5,800 square miles and has been predicted to exceed 9,400 square miles this year.
More changes are expected because large amounts of water are still flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River. "This was the first-ever research cruise conducted to specifically target the size of hypoxia in the month of June," says oceanography professor Steve DiMarco.
"We found three distinct hypoxic areas. One was near the Barataria and Terrebonne region off the Louisiana coast, the second was south of Marsh Island (also Louisiana) and the third was off the Galveston coast. We found no hypoxia in the 10 stations we visited east of the Mississippi delta."
The largest areas of hypoxia are still around the Louisiana coast, he says, thanks to the huge amounts of fresh water still coming down from the Mississippi River. The hypoxic area extends about 50 miles off the coast.
The Mississippi is the US' largest river, draining 40 percent of the land area of the country. It also accounts for almost 90 percent of the freshwater runoff into the Gulf of Mexico.
http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/57323-mississippi-runoff-expands-gulf-dead-zone
The so-called Gulf Dead Zone is looking set to be the biggest ever this year.
It's currently about 3,300 square miles, or roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, but researchers at Texas A & M University say it's likely to become much larger.
The dead zone is caused by hypoxia, whereby oxygen levels in seawater drop to dangerously low levels. Severe hypoxia can potentially result in widespread fish kills.
During the past five years, the Gulf dead zone has averaged about 5,800 square miles and has been predicted to exceed 9,400 square miles this year.
More changes are expected because large amounts of water are still flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River. "This was the first-ever research cruise conducted to specifically target the size of hypoxia in the month of June," says oceanography professor Steve DiMarco.
"We found three distinct hypoxic areas. One was near the Barataria and Terrebonne region off the Louisiana coast, the second was south of Marsh Island (also Louisiana) and the third was off the Galveston coast. We found no hypoxia in the 10 stations we visited east of the Mississippi delta."
The largest areas of hypoxia are still around the Louisiana coast, he says, thanks to the huge amounts of fresh water still coming down from the Mississippi River. The hypoxic area extends about 50 miles off the coast.
The Mississippi is the US' largest river, draining 40 percent of the land area of the country. It also accounts for almost 90 percent of the freshwater runoff into the Gulf of Mexico.
http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/57323-mississippi-runoff-expands-gulf-dead-zone
Friday, July 15, 2011
NCEHS Calls for More Changes to Revised HUD IPM Guidance.
NCEHS Calls for More Changes to Revised HUD IPM Guidance
On April 26, 2011, HUD issued revised guidance on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for Public and Indian Housing (PIH). PIH-2011-22 which supersedes PIH 2009-15 “promotes and encourages” IPM, but IPM is still at the discretion of the housing authority. While the recent guidance does include reference to people with chemical sensitivities as recommended by Mary Lamielle, the statement that “Some residents may suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or other Environmental Illnesses” (4g), stops short of providing sufficient guidance and protections necessary for people disabled by pesticide exposures. As a point of contrast, “IPM in Multifamily Housing” training (www.stoppests.org) funded in part by HUD specifically discusses the health threat and access barrier posed by conventional pesticides. (attached Chapter 3, Slide 18)
When the revised IPM guidance was discussed at the June 29, 2011 HUD Disability Task Force meeting, Mary asked why the PIH did not specifically prohibit the use of lawn care pesticides. In follow-up correspondence she called for immediate promulgation of a policy that would prohibit lawn care and landscaping pesticides. “The PIH should specifically prohibit the use of lawn care pesticides. This should be promulgated immediately. These practices are frivolous, a waste of tax dollars, and a health threat to vulnerable populations including children and the elderly, and a health threat and an access barrier for people with chemical sensitivities. …There is substantial literature available that provides guidance on maintaining lawns and grounds without the use of toxic pesticides.”
The PIH also indicates that “residents should notify PHA [public housing authority] management before pesticides are applied.” (4.k) In correspondence with HUD Mary stated “This is a very dangerous practice in public housing and there have been many instances of the use or misuse of pesticides to the detriment of those who use them and other occupants. Additionally this practice is extremely hazardous for vulnerable populations including those with chemical sensitivities. Residents should not be permitted or encouraged to use conventional pesticides.”
Mary additionally recommended that the Reference Materials include a list of low impact or least toxic pesticides similar to the list issued by New Jersey for the state’s School IPM legislation.
The PIH recommends that PHA’s who use outside pest control contractors use companies that are trained and certified to provide IPM services through Green Shield or Green Pro. It also recommends that the PHA consider training for maintenance, staff, residents, Resident Councils as well as PHA administrative staff. We’d like to hear from you if your housing authority has used pest control contractors certified by Green Shield or Green Pro.
As a special note to those in multifamily housing or housing covered by HUD PIH guidance, IPM in Multifamily Housing training may be available to educate your community in IPM practices. It is protective of vulnerable populations including those with chemical sensitivities. The training that accompanies the slides addresses the health and access barrier posed by pesticides. “Conventional pesticides should not be used in the units occupied by people with chemical sensitivities, or in adjacent or neighboring units, or in common areas such as the halls, lobbies, laundry rooms, elevators, or stairs, or along paths of travel for disability access.” (attached Chapter 3, Slide 18)
If you live in multifamily housing and want your community to receive training, or if your community has received this training, we’d like to hear from you. Contact NCEHS at (856)429-5358 or marylamielle@ncehs.org.
Mary Lamielle, Executive Director, National Center for Environmental Health Strategies, 1100 Rural Avenue. Voorhees , New Jersey 08043 (856)429-5358; (856)816-8820; marylamielle@ncehs.org
On April 26, 2011, HUD issued revised guidance on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for Public and Indian Housing (PIH). PIH-2011-22 which supersedes PIH 2009-15 “promotes and encourages” IPM, but IPM is still at the discretion of the housing authority. While the recent guidance does include reference to people with chemical sensitivities as recommended by Mary Lamielle, the statement that “Some residents may suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or other Environmental Illnesses” (4g), stops short of providing sufficient guidance and protections necessary for people disabled by pesticide exposures. As a point of contrast, “IPM in Multifamily Housing” training (www.stoppests.org) funded in part by HUD specifically discusses the health threat and access barrier posed by conventional pesticides. (attached Chapter 3, Slide 18)
When the revised IPM guidance was discussed at the June 29, 2011 HUD Disability Task Force meeting, Mary asked why the PIH did not specifically prohibit the use of lawn care pesticides. In follow-up correspondence she called for immediate promulgation of a policy that would prohibit lawn care and landscaping pesticides. “The PIH should specifically prohibit the use of lawn care pesticides. This should be promulgated immediately. These practices are frivolous, a waste of tax dollars, and a health threat to vulnerable populations including children and the elderly, and a health threat and an access barrier for people with chemical sensitivities. …There is substantial literature available that provides guidance on maintaining lawns and grounds without the use of toxic pesticides.”
The PIH also indicates that “residents should notify PHA [public housing authority] management before pesticides are applied.” (4.k) In correspondence with HUD Mary stated “This is a very dangerous practice in public housing and there have been many instances of the use or misuse of pesticides to the detriment of those who use them and other occupants. Additionally this practice is extremely hazardous for vulnerable populations including those with chemical sensitivities. Residents should not be permitted or encouraged to use conventional pesticides.”
Mary additionally recommended that the Reference Materials include a list of low impact or least toxic pesticides similar to the list issued by New Jersey for the state’s School IPM legislation.
The PIH recommends that PHA’s who use outside pest control contractors use companies that are trained and certified to provide IPM services through Green Shield or Green Pro. It also recommends that the PHA consider training for maintenance, staff, residents, Resident Councils as well as PHA administrative staff. We’d like to hear from you if your housing authority has used pest control contractors certified by Green Shield or Green Pro.
As a special note to those in multifamily housing or housing covered by HUD PIH guidance, IPM in Multifamily Housing training may be available to educate your community in IPM practices. It is protective of vulnerable populations including those with chemical sensitivities. The training that accompanies the slides addresses the health and access barrier posed by pesticides. “Conventional pesticides should not be used in the units occupied by people with chemical sensitivities, or in adjacent or neighboring units, or in common areas such as the halls, lobbies, laundry rooms, elevators, or stairs, or along paths of travel for disability access.” (attached Chapter 3, Slide 18)
If you live in multifamily housing and want your community to receive training, or if your community has received this training, we’d like to hear from you. Contact NCEHS at (856)429-5358 or marylamielle@ncehs.org.
Mary Lamielle, Executive Director, National Center for Environmental Health Strategies, 1100 Rural Avenue. Voorhees , New Jersey 08043 (856)429-5358; (856)816-8820; marylamielle@ncehs.org
Coffee and tea might protect against superbug MRSA, study finds.
Coffee and tea might protect against superbug MRSA, study finds
Published: Friday, July 15, 2011, 10:29 AM - By Sue Thomas
If you wanted another good reason to start your day with a hot cup of coffee or tea, consider this news: A study found tea and coffee drinkers are less likely to have the superbug MRSA in their nostrils.
It might be enough to make you pour a second cup. And maybe blow your nose as well.
The report published in the Annals of Family Medicine looked at the coffee- and tea-drinking habits of 5,500 people who took part in a government study. It found they were half as likely to have methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in their nostrils. The bacteria, because it is resistant to the antibiotic methicillin, is difficult to treat.
The reassuring news is the superbug is not commonly found in nasal carriage -- it occurs in only about 1.4 percent of the population.
So why did the researchers decide to study the effect of coffee and tea on MRSA? Because both have been found to have "antimicrobial properties" against different forms of bacteria. And tea and tea-based extracts have shown promising results in treating MRSA infections.
The good news did not extend to iced tea and soft drinks: The researchers found they did not have any effect on MRSA rates.
"As many sodas are caffeinated, this finding suggests that caffeine is unlikely to be responsible for the antibacterial properties of hot tea and coffee," writes lead researcher Dr. Eric Matheson, of the University of South Carolina.
Matheson notes that the study, although it shows an association between MRSA and beverage consumption, does not prove causation.
"The effect, however, appears to be robust," the report says.
The findings suggest that drinking coffee and tea might lower the risk of developing a MRSA infection, Matheson writes. And they might lead to alternatives to antibiotics for getting rid of MRSA in the nostrils.
The study is just the latest in a series of recent reports exploring the health benefits of coffee. Researchers have linked java consumption to reduced risks for diabetes, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, liver and skin cancer, as well as lower stroke risks for women.
E-mail Sue Thoms: sthoms@grpress.com
http://www.mlive.com/health/index.ssf/2011/07/coffee_and_tea_might_protect_a.html
Published: Friday, July 15, 2011, 10:29 AM - By Sue Thomas
If you wanted another good reason to start your day with a hot cup of coffee or tea, consider this news: A study found tea and coffee drinkers are less likely to have the superbug MRSA in their nostrils.
It might be enough to make you pour a second cup. And maybe blow your nose as well.
The report published in the Annals of Family Medicine looked at the coffee- and tea-drinking habits of 5,500 people who took part in a government study. It found they were half as likely to have methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in their nostrils. The bacteria, because it is resistant to the antibiotic methicillin, is difficult to treat.
The reassuring news is the superbug is not commonly found in nasal carriage -- it occurs in only about 1.4 percent of the population.
So why did the researchers decide to study the effect of coffee and tea on MRSA? Because both have been found to have "antimicrobial properties" against different forms of bacteria. And tea and tea-based extracts have shown promising results in treating MRSA infections.
The good news did not extend to iced tea and soft drinks: The researchers found they did not have any effect on MRSA rates.
"As many sodas are caffeinated, this finding suggests that caffeine is unlikely to be responsible for the antibacterial properties of hot tea and coffee," writes lead researcher Dr. Eric Matheson, of the University of South Carolina.
Matheson notes that the study, although it shows an association between MRSA and beverage consumption, does not prove causation.
"The effect, however, appears to be robust," the report says.
The findings suggest that drinking coffee and tea might lower the risk of developing a MRSA infection, Matheson writes. And they might lead to alternatives to antibiotics for getting rid of MRSA in the nostrils.
The study is just the latest in a series of recent reports exploring the health benefits of coffee. Researchers have linked java consumption to reduced risks for diabetes, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, liver and skin cancer, as well as lower stroke risks for women.
E-mail Sue Thoms: sthoms@grpress.com
http://www.mlive.com/health/index.ssf/2011/07/coffee_and_tea_might_protect_a.html
New herbicide suspected in tree deaths.
New herbicide suspected in tree deaths
DuPont: 'We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms'
By JIM ROBBINS
The New York Times
updated 7/14/2011 8:34:03 PM ET 2011-07-15T00:34:03
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43763096/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
NEW YORK — A recently approved herbicide called Imprelis, widely used by landscapers because it was thought to be environmentally friendly, has emerged as the leading suspect in the deaths of thousands of Norway spruce, eastern white pine and other trees on lawns and golf courses across the country.
Manufactured by DuPont and approved for sale last October by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Imprelis is used for killing broadleaf weeds like dandelion and clover and is sold to lawn care professionals only. Reports of dying trees started surfacing around Memorial Day, prompting an inquiry by DuPont scientists.
“We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms,” said Kate Childress, a spokeswoman for DuPont. “Until this investigation is complete, it’s difficult to say what variables contributed to the symptoms.”
DuPont continues to sell the product, which is registered for use in all states except California and New York. The company said that there were many places where the product had been used without causing tree damage.
The E.P.A. has begun gathering information on the deaths from state officials and DuPont as well as through its own investigators. “E.P.A. is taking this very seriously,” the agency said in a statement.
In a June 17 letter to its landscape customers, Michael McDermott, a DuPont products official, seemed to put the onus for the tree deaths on workers applying Imprelis. He wrote that customers with affected trees might not have mixed the herbicide properly or might have combined it with other herbicides. DuPont officials have also suggested that the trees might come back, and have asked landscapers to leave them in the ground.
Mr. McDermott instructed customers in the letter not to apply the herbicide near Norway spruce or white pine, or places where the product might drift toward such trees or run off toward their roots.
'It's been devastating'
For some landscapers, the die-off has been catastrophic.
“It’s been devastating,” said Matt Coats, service manager for Underwood Nursery in Adrian, Mich. “We’ve made 1,000 applications and had 350 complaints of dead trees, and it’s climbing. I’ve done nothing for the last three weeks but deal with angry customers.”
“We’re seeing some trees doing O.K. with just the tips getting brown, and others are completely dead and it looks like someone took a flamethrower to them,” Mr. Coats said.
So far, the herbicide seems to affect trees with shallow root systems, including willow, poplars and conifers, he said.
Underwood Nursery is replacing the trees, which its liability insurance covers, but faces a $500 deductible for each incident. “It’s already cost us $150,000,” Mr. Coats said. Some landscapers are finding that their insurance does not cover the tree deaths at all.
The chemical name of the product is aminocyclopyrachlor, one of a new class of herbicides that has been viewed as safer than earlier weed killers.
DuPont, landscapers and others had high hopes for the product. It has low toxicity to mammals, works at low concentrations and can kill weeds that other herbicides have trouble vanquishing like ground ivy, henbit and wild violets. It works on the weeds’ roots as well as their leaves. No firm estimate exists on the extent of the tree die-off. But Bert Cregg, an associate professor of horticulture and forestry and an extension specialist with Michigan State University who has fielded many calls from landscapers and inspected affected trees, said the problem exists across the country. Many extension services have issued warnings, Dr. Cregg said.
“This is going to be a large-scale problem, affecting hundreds of thousands of trees if not more,” he said. Imprelis is used on athletic fields and cemeteries as well as on private lawns and golf courses, he noted.
Losing some of the biggest
While landscapers are replacing some of the trees, they cannot replace large mature ones, meaning that some homeowners have lost some of their biggest and oldest trees.
“I’m very concerned,” said Amy Frankmann, executive director of the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association, who has heard from many members and who says the disaster could threaten the livelihood of landscapers whose insurance will not cover the cost. “Absolutely. One member is looking at having to replace a thousand trees.”
Mark Utendorf, owner of Emerald Lawn Care in Arlington, Heights, Ill., has seen dozens of customers’ trees turn brown. “It’s unfortunate because the product works exceedingly well on turf,” he said. “It kills creeping Charlie, and that’s something that’s very hard to kill,” Mr. Utendorf said, referring to a type of ivy that has been known to take over lawns.
He noted that the product had been viewed as part of a more environmentally safe lawn industry and a game changer. “I hope people will give DuPont a chance to make this product work,” Mr. Utendorf said. He added that he was still using it, though very carefully and not where there were conifers.
Imprelis went through some 400 trials, including tests on conifers, and performed without problems, according to experts at DuPont and at the E.P.A. The agency reviewed the herbicide for 23 months, which is standard procedure.
Even if the product is eventually proved to be a tree killer, it is considered unlikely that the E.P.A. would ban it, experts said. The agency would probably work with DuPont to change the herbicide’s labeling or to mandate larger buffer zones, they added.
Compost gets tainted
The United States Composting Council, meanwhile, warned in May that grass clippings from lawns treated with Imprelis should not be composted because the chemical survives the process and can kill flowers and vegetables that are treated with the compost. That warning is included on the Imprelis product label.
Dr. Cregg, the extension service specialist at Michigan State University, said it was possible that many of the affected trees could recover if they are left in place for a year to a few years, even if damage appears severe, because he has seen such a turnaround after similar damage to trees. “A lot of it comes down to the homeowner’s tolerance,” he said. “How long can they stand to look at this thing in the yard?”
Janet and Robert DaPrato of Columbus, Ohio, are facing that question as they gaze upon a 10-foot-high Norway spruce that started withering a month after a worker applied Imprelis in their yard. Then the needles fell off.
“The tree looks pretty well dead,” Mr. DaPrato said.
This article, "New Herbicide Suspected in Tree Deaths," first appeared in The New York Times.
DuPont: 'We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms'
By JIM ROBBINS
The New York Times
updated 7/14/2011 8:34:03 PM ET 2011-07-15T00:34:03
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43763096/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
NEW YORK — A recently approved herbicide called Imprelis, widely used by landscapers because it was thought to be environmentally friendly, has emerged as the leading suspect in the deaths of thousands of Norway spruce, eastern white pine and other trees on lawns and golf courses across the country.
Manufactured by DuPont and approved for sale last October by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Imprelis is used for killing broadleaf weeds like dandelion and clover and is sold to lawn care professionals only. Reports of dying trees started surfacing around Memorial Day, prompting an inquiry by DuPont scientists.
“We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms,” said Kate Childress, a spokeswoman for DuPont. “Until this investigation is complete, it’s difficult to say what variables contributed to the symptoms.”
DuPont continues to sell the product, which is registered for use in all states except California and New York. The company said that there were many places where the product had been used without causing tree damage.
The E.P.A. has begun gathering information on the deaths from state officials and DuPont as well as through its own investigators. “E.P.A. is taking this very seriously,” the agency said in a statement.
In a June 17 letter to its landscape customers, Michael McDermott, a DuPont products official, seemed to put the onus for the tree deaths on workers applying Imprelis. He wrote that customers with affected trees might not have mixed the herbicide properly or might have combined it with other herbicides. DuPont officials have also suggested that the trees might come back, and have asked landscapers to leave them in the ground.
Mr. McDermott instructed customers in the letter not to apply the herbicide near Norway spruce or white pine, or places where the product might drift toward such trees or run off toward their roots.
'It's been devastating'
For some landscapers, the die-off has been catastrophic.
“It’s been devastating,” said Matt Coats, service manager for Underwood Nursery in Adrian, Mich. “We’ve made 1,000 applications and had 350 complaints of dead trees, and it’s climbing. I’ve done nothing for the last three weeks but deal with angry customers.”
“We’re seeing some trees doing O.K. with just the tips getting brown, and others are completely dead and it looks like someone took a flamethrower to them,” Mr. Coats said.
So far, the herbicide seems to affect trees with shallow root systems, including willow, poplars and conifers, he said.
Underwood Nursery is replacing the trees, which its liability insurance covers, but faces a $500 deductible for each incident. “It’s already cost us $150,000,” Mr. Coats said. Some landscapers are finding that their insurance does not cover the tree deaths at all.
The chemical name of the product is aminocyclopyrachlor, one of a new class of herbicides that has been viewed as safer than earlier weed killers.
DuPont, landscapers and others had high hopes for the product. It has low toxicity to mammals, works at low concentrations and can kill weeds that other herbicides have trouble vanquishing like ground ivy, henbit and wild violets. It works on the weeds’ roots as well as their leaves. No firm estimate exists on the extent of the tree die-off. But Bert Cregg, an associate professor of horticulture and forestry and an extension specialist with Michigan State University who has fielded many calls from landscapers and inspected affected trees, said the problem exists across the country. Many extension services have issued warnings, Dr. Cregg said.
“This is going to be a large-scale problem, affecting hundreds of thousands of trees if not more,” he said. Imprelis is used on athletic fields and cemeteries as well as on private lawns and golf courses, he noted.
Losing some of the biggest
While landscapers are replacing some of the trees, they cannot replace large mature ones, meaning that some homeowners have lost some of their biggest and oldest trees.
“I’m very concerned,” said Amy Frankmann, executive director of the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association, who has heard from many members and who says the disaster could threaten the livelihood of landscapers whose insurance will not cover the cost. “Absolutely. One member is looking at having to replace a thousand trees.”
Mark Utendorf, owner of Emerald Lawn Care in Arlington, Heights, Ill., has seen dozens of customers’ trees turn brown. “It’s unfortunate because the product works exceedingly well on turf,” he said. “It kills creeping Charlie, and that’s something that’s very hard to kill,” Mr. Utendorf said, referring to a type of ivy that has been known to take over lawns.
He noted that the product had been viewed as part of a more environmentally safe lawn industry and a game changer. “I hope people will give DuPont a chance to make this product work,” Mr. Utendorf said. He added that he was still using it, though very carefully and not where there were conifers.
Imprelis went through some 400 trials, including tests on conifers, and performed without problems, according to experts at DuPont and at the E.P.A. The agency reviewed the herbicide for 23 months, which is standard procedure.
Even if the product is eventually proved to be a tree killer, it is considered unlikely that the E.P.A. would ban it, experts said. The agency would probably work with DuPont to change the herbicide’s labeling or to mandate larger buffer zones, they added.
Compost gets tainted
The United States Composting Council, meanwhile, warned in May that grass clippings from lawns treated with Imprelis should not be composted because the chemical survives the process and can kill flowers and vegetables that are treated with the compost. That warning is included on the Imprelis product label.
Dr. Cregg, the extension service specialist at Michigan State University, said it was possible that many of the affected trees could recover if they are left in place for a year to a few years, even if damage appears severe, because he has seen such a turnaround after similar damage to trees. “A lot of it comes down to the homeowner’s tolerance,” he said. “How long can they stand to look at this thing in the yard?”
Janet and Robert DaPrato of Columbus, Ohio, are facing that question as they gaze upon a 10-foot-high Norway spruce that started withering a month after a worker applied Imprelis in their yard. Then the needles fell off.
“The tree looks pretty well dead,” Mr. DaPrato said.
This article, "New Herbicide Suspected in Tree Deaths," first appeared in The New York Times.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Herbicide Resistance, and Weeds, Are Spreading in the United States: Newly Published Research
Herbicide Resistance, and Weeds, Are Spreading in the United States: Newly Published Research
Press Release -- July 12, 2011 Herbicide resistance is growing. At least 21 weed species have now developed resistance to glyphosate, a systemic herbicide that has been effectively used to kill weeds and can be found in many commercial products. Some weeds are now developing resistance to alternative herbicides being used. New occurrences of resistance are being noted in varying weed species and locations, creating challenges for weed scientists.
Several articles in the current issue of the journal Weed Science focus on the issue of herbicide resistance. The articles highlight first reports of resistance. “The herbicide resistance issue is becoming serious,” the journal’s editor, William K. Vencill, said. “It is spreading out beyond where weed scientists have seen it before.”
Palmer amaranth is a common weed that competes with cotton, soybean, corn, grain sorghum, and peanut crops in the southern United States. A density of 10 of these weeds per row of cotton has been shown to reduce yields more than 50 percent. By 2010, 52 counties in the state of Georgia had infestations of glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth.
Field and greenhouse tests conducted for the current study now confirm that this weed is resistant not only to glyphosate, but also to phrithiobac, an acetolactate synthase-inhibiting herbicide. This marks one of the first reports of multiple resistance to both glyphosate and pyrithiobac in Palmer amaranth. As multiple herbicide resistance becomes more common, a grower’s ability to be economically sustainable is threatened.
Another study in this issue conducted dose-response, ammonia accumulation, and enzyme activity tests on glyphosate-resistant Italian ryegrass populations taken from hazelnut orchards in Oregon. This research now confirms resistance of Italian ryegrass to another control alternative, glufosinate ammonium, a nonselective broad-spectrum herbicide.
In West Memphis, Ark., another study reports the first documented glyphosate-resistant johnsongrass biotype in the United States. A soybean field in continuous production over 6 years showed reduced control of johnsongrass with the recommended application rate of glyphosate. A greenhouse study was conducted with this johnsongrass to confirm this finding and determine any differences in absorption or translocation of the herbicide within these plants.
As herbicide resistance spreads, growers will need new weed management strategies. These could include herbicides with alternative sites of action within the plant or nonchemical methods such as tilling and mulching. Growers should prevent resistant weeds in a production field from reaching reproductive maturity to prevent spread of the trait through seed or pollen.
Full text of “Multiple Resistance in Palmer Amaranth to Glyphosate and Pyrithiobac Confirmed in Georgia,” and other articles in Weed Science, Vol. 59, No. 3, May-June 2011, are available at: http://allenpress.com/publications/journals/wees
Press Release -- July 12, 2011 Herbicide resistance is growing. At least 21 weed species have now developed resistance to glyphosate, a systemic herbicide that has been effectively used to kill weeds and can be found in many commercial products. Some weeds are now developing resistance to alternative herbicides being used. New occurrences of resistance are being noted in varying weed species and locations, creating challenges for weed scientists.
Several articles in the current issue of the journal Weed Science focus on the issue of herbicide resistance. The articles highlight first reports of resistance. “The herbicide resistance issue is becoming serious,” the journal’s editor, William K. Vencill, said. “It is spreading out beyond where weed scientists have seen it before.”
Palmer amaranth is a common weed that competes with cotton, soybean, corn, grain sorghum, and peanut crops in the southern United States. A density of 10 of these weeds per row of cotton has been shown to reduce yields more than 50 percent. By 2010, 52 counties in the state of Georgia had infestations of glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth.
Field and greenhouse tests conducted for the current study now confirm that this weed is resistant not only to glyphosate, but also to phrithiobac, an acetolactate synthase-inhibiting herbicide. This marks one of the first reports of multiple resistance to both glyphosate and pyrithiobac in Palmer amaranth. As multiple herbicide resistance becomes more common, a grower’s ability to be economically sustainable is threatened.
Another study in this issue conducted dose-response, ammonia accumulation, and enzyme activity tests on glyphosate-resistant Italian ryegrass populations taken from hazelnut orchards in Oregon. This research now confirms resistance of Italian ryegrass to another control alternative, glufosinate ammonium, a nonselective broad-spectrum herbicide.
In West Memphis, Ark., another study reports the first documented glyphosate-resistant johnsongrass biotype in the United States. A soybean field in continuous production over 6 years showed reduced control of johnsongrass with the recommended application rate of glyphosate. A greenhouse study was conducted with this johnsongrass to confirm this finding and determine any differences in absorption or translocation of the herbicide within these plants.
As herbicide resistance spreads, growers will need new weed management strategies. These could include herbicides with alternative sites of action within the plant or nonchemical methods such as tilling and mulching. Growers should prevent resistant weeds in a production field from reaching reproductive maturity to prevent spread of the trait through seed or pollen.
Full text of “Multiple Resistance in Palmer Amaranth to Glyphosate and Pyrithiobac Confirmed in Georgia,” and other articles in Weed Science, Vol. 59, No. 3, May-June 2011, are available at: http://allenpress.com/publications/journals/wees
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Betty Ford's requests..........
Betty Ford's requests
http://news.yahoo.com/current-former-first-ladies-gather-funeral-073957732.html
Roberts said Ford asked her to give a eulogy five years ago and specified it should be about the power of friendship to mend political differences even in these hyper-partisan times.
Roberts, a commentator on National Public Radio and member of a noted political family, said Ford asked her to talk about a time in Washington when Democrats and Republicans could be friends and partisan politics did not paralyze government.
It was that way, Roberts said, when her father, Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs, was House majority leader and Republican Gerald R. Ford was House minority leader. She said they could argue about issues but get together as friends afterward. The two families became close as did the Ford and Carter families, despite Jimmy Carter defeating Ford in the 1976 presidential election.
Carter spoke at Ford's funeral in 2007. The two families were so close that before his death, Ford asked the Carters to join his wife aboard Air Force One, which flew his body to its final resting place in Grand Rapids.
"Mrs. Ford was very clear about what she wanted me to say," Roberts said. "She wanted me to talk about Washington the way it used to be. She knew there were people back then who were wildly partisan, but not as many as today.
http://news.yahoo.com/current-former-first-ladies-gather-funeral-073957732.html
Roberts said Ford asked her to give a eulogy five years ago and specified it should be about the power of friendship to mend political differences even in these hyper-partisan times.
Roberts, a commentator on National Public Radio and member of a noted political family, said Ford asked her to talk about a time in Washington when Democrats and Republicans could be friends and partisan politics did not paralyze government.
It was that way, Roberts said, when her father, Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs, was House majority leader and Republican Gerald R. Ford was House minority leader. She said they could argue about issues but get together as friends afterward. The two families became close as did the Ford and Carter families, despite Jimmy Carter defeating Ford in the 1976 presidential election.
Carter spoke at Ford's funeral in 2007. The two families were so close that before his death, Ford asked the Carters to join his wife aboard Air Force One, which flew his body to its final resting place in Grand Rapids.
"Mrs. Ford was very clear about what she wanted me to say," Roberts said. "She wanted me to talk about Washington the way it used to be. She knew there were people back then who were wildly partisan, but not as many as today.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Rising Temperatures Melting Away Global Food Security.
Rising Temperatures Melting Away Global Food Security
www.earth-policy.org/book_bytes/2011/wotech4_ss3
Earth Policy Release - Book Byte - July 6, 2011
Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.
Rising temperatures are already melting the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Recent studies indicate that a combination of melting ice sheets and glaciers, plus the thermal expansion of the ocean as it warms, could raise sea level by up to 6 feet during this century. Yet even a 3-foot rise in sea level would sharply reduce the rice harvest in Asia, a region home to over half the world's people that grows 90 percent of the world's rice. It would inundate half the riceland in Bangladesh and submerge part of the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam. Viet Nam, second only to Thailand as a rice exporter, could lose its exportable rice surplus. This would leave the 20 or so countries that import rice from Viet Nam looking elsewhere. Numerous other rice-growing river deltas in Asia would be submerged in varying degrees.
While the ice sheets are melting, so too are mountain glaciers. The snow and ice masses in the world's mountain ranges and the water they store are taken for granted simply because they have been there since before agriculture began. Now we risk losing the "reservoirs in the sky" on which so many farmers and cities depend.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service reported in 2010 the nineteenth consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers. Glaciers are melting in all of the world's major mountain ranges, including the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Tibetan Plateau.
In South America, some 22 percent of Peru's glacial endowment, which feeds the many rivers that supply water to farmers and cities in the arid coastal regions, has disappeared. Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson reported in 2007 that the Quelccaya Glacier in southern Peru, which had been retreating by 20 feet per year in the 1960s, was retreating by 200 feet annually. Bolivia is also fast losing the glaciers whose ice melt supplies its farmers and cities with water. Between 1975 and 2006, the area of its glaciers shrank by nearly half. Bolivia's famed Chacaltaya Glacier, once the site of the world's highest ski resort, disappeared in 2009.
For the 53 million people living in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the loss of their mountain glaciers and dry-season river flow threatens food security and political stability. Not only do farmers in the region produce much of their wheat and potatoes with the river water from these disappearing glaciers, but well over half the region's electricity supply comes from hydroelectric sources. Currently, few countries are being affected by melting mountain glaciers as much as these Andean societies.
As Peru's glaciers shrink, the water flow from the mountains to the country's arid coastal region, where 60 percent of the people live, will decline during the dry season. This region includes Lima, which, with nearly 9 million inhabitants, is the world's second largest desert city, after Cairo. Given the coming decline in its water supply, a U.N. study refers to Lima as "a crisis waiting to happen."
In many of the world's agricultural regions, snow is the leading source of irrigation and drinking water. In the southwestern United States, for instance, the Colorado River—the region's primary source of irrigation water—depends on snowfields in the Rockies for much of its flow. California, in addition to depending heavily on the Colorado, relies on snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range to supply irrigation water to the Central Valley, the country's fruit and vegetable basket.
A preliminary analysis of rising temperature effects on three major river systems in the western United States—the Columbia, the Sacramento, and the Colorado—indicates that the winter snow pack in the mountains feeding them will be reduced dramatically and that winter rainfall and flooding will increase. With a business-as-usual energy policy, global climate models project a 70-percent reduction in the snow pack for the western United States by mid-century. A detailed study of the Yakima River Valley, a vast fruit-growing region in Washington State, shows progressively heavier harvest losses as the snow pack shrinks, reducing irrigation water flows.
Agriculture in the Central Asian countries of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan depends heavily on snowmelt from the Hindu Kush, Pamir, and Tien Shan Mountain ranges for irrigation water. And nearby Iran gets much of its water from the snowmelt in the 5,700-meter-high Alborz Mountains between Tehran and the Caspian Sea.
Ice melting in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau poses an even graver threat to food security at a global scale. It is the ice melt from these mountain glaciers that helps sustain the major rivers of Asia during the dry season, when irrigation needs are greatest. In the Indus, Ganges, Yellow, and Yangtze River basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on the rivers, the loss of any dry-season flow is bad news for farmers. China is the world's leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (The United States is number three.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. Therefore, the melting of these glaciers coupled with the depletion of aquifers present the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced.
In India, the giant Gangotri Glacier, which helps keep the Ganges River flowing during the dry season, is retreating. The Ganges River is by far the largest source of surface water irrigation in India and a source of water for the 407 million people living in the Gangetic basin.
Yao Tandong, a leading Chinese glaciologist, reports that glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau in western China are now melting at an accelerating rate. Many smaller glaciers have already disappeared. Yao believes that two thirds of these glaciers could be gone by 2060. If this melting of glaciers continues, Yao says it "will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe." The Yangtze, by far the country's largest river, helps to produce half or more of its 130-million-ton rice harvest.
Like the depletion of aquifers, the melting of glaciers can artificially inflate food production for a short period. At some point, however, as the glaciers shrink and the smaller ones disappear entirely, so does the water available for irrigation.
The melting of the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau would appear to be China's problem. It is. But it is also everyone else's problem. In a world where grain prices have recently climbed to record highs, any disruption of the wheat or rice harvests due to water shortages in India or China will raise their grain imports, driving up food prices for all.
In India, where just over 40 percent of all children under five years of age are underweight and undernourished, hunger will intensify and child mortality will likely climb. For China, a country already struggling to contain food price inflation, there may well be spreading social unrest if food supplies tighten. For U.S. consumers, this melting poses a nightmare scenario. If China enters the world market for massive quantities of grain, as it has already done for soybeans over the last decade, it will necessarily come to the United States—far and away the leading grain exporter.
Ironically, the two countries that are planning to build most of the new coal-fired power plants, China and India, are precisely the ones whose food security is most massively threatened by the carbon emitted from burning coal. It is now in their interest to try and save their mountain glaciers by quickly shifting energy investment from coal-fired power plants into energy efficiency, wind farms, and solar thermal and geothermal power plants.
# # #
Adapted from World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown. Full book available at
www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.
www.earth-policy.org/book_bytes/2011/wotech4_ss3
Earth Policy Release - Book Byte - July 6, 2011
Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.
Rising temperatures are already melting the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Recent studies indicate that a combination of melting ice sheets and glaciers, plus the thermal expansion of the ocean as it warms, could raise sea level by up to 6 feet during this century. Yet even a 3-foot rise in sea level would sharply reduce the rice harvest in Asia, a region home to over half the world's people that grows 90 percent of the world's rice. It would inundate half the riceland in Bangladesh and submerge part of the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam. Viet Nam, second only to Thailand as a rice exporter, could lose its exportable rice surplus. This would leave the 20 or so countries that import rice from Viet Nam looking elsewhere. Numerous other rice-growing river deltas in Asia would be submerged in varying degrees.
While the ice sheets are melting, so too are mountain glaciers. The snow and ice masses in the world's mountain ranges and the water they store are taken for granted simply because they have been there since before agriculture began. Now we risk losing the "reservoirs in the sky" on which so many farmers and cities depend.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service reported in 2010 the nineteenth consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers. Glaciers are melting in all of the world's major mountain ranges, including the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Tibetan Plateau.
In South America, some 22 percent of Peru's glacial endowment, which feeds the many rivers that supply water to farmers and cities in the arid coastal regions, has disappeared. Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson reported in 2007 that the Quelccaya Glacier in southern Peru, which had been retreating by 20 feet per year in the 1960s, was retreating by 200 feet annually. Bolivia is also fast losing the glaciers whose ice melt supplies its farmers and cities with water. Between 1975 and 2006, the area of its glaciers shrank by nearly half. Bolivia's famed Chacaltaya Glacier, once the site of the world's highest ski resort, disappeared in 2009.
For the 53 million people living in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the loss of their mountain glaciers and dry-season river flow threatens food security and political stability. Not only do farmers in the region produce much of their wheat and potatoes with the river water from these disappearing glaciers, but well over half the region's electricity supply comes from hydroelectric sources. Currently, few countries are being affected by melting mountain glaciers as much as these Andean societies.
As Peru's glaciers shrink, the water flow from the mountains to the country's arid coastal region, where 60 percent of the people live, will decline during the dry season. This region includes Lima, which, with nearly 9 million inhabitants, is the world's second largest desert city, after Cairo. Given the coming decline in its water supply, a U.N. study refers to Lima as "a crisis waiting to happen."
In many of the world's agricultural regions, snow is the leading source of irrigation and drinking water. In the southwestern United States, for instance, the Colorado River—the region's primary source of irrigation water—depends on snowfields in the Rockies for much of its flow. California, in addition to depending heavily on the Colorado, relies on snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range to supply irrigation water to the Central Valley, the country's fruit and vegetable basket.
A preliminary analysis of rising temperature effects on three major river systems in the western United States—the Columbia, the Sacramento, and the Colorado—indicates that the winter snow pack in the mountains feeding them will be reduced dramatically and that winter rainfall and flooding will increase. With a business-as-usual energy policy, global climate models project a 70-percent reduction in the snow pack for the western United States by mid-century. A detailed study of the Yakima River Valley, a vast fruit-growing region in Washington State, shows progressively heavier harvest losses as the snow pack shrinks, reducing irrigation water flows.
Agriculture in the Central Asian countries of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan depends heavily on snowmelt from the Hindu Kush, Pamir, and Tien Shan Mountain ranges for irrigation water. And nearby Iran gets much of its water from the snowmelt in the 5,700-meter-high Alborz Mountains between Tehran and the Caspian Sea.
Ice melting in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau poses an even graver threat to food security at a global scale. It is the ice melt from these mountain glaciers that helps sustain the major rivers of Asia during the dry season, when irrigation needs are greatest. In the Indus, Ganges, Yellow, and Yangtze River basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on the rivers, the loss of any dry-season flow is bad news for farmers. China is the world's leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (The United States is number three.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. Therefore, the melting of these glaciers coupled with the depletion of aquifers present the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced.
In India, the giant Gangotri Glacier, which helps keep the Ganges River flowing during the dry season, is retreating. The Ganges River is by far the largest source of surface water irrigation in India and a source of water for the 407 million people living in the Gangetic basin.
Yao Tandong, a leading Chinese glaciologist, reports that glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau in western China are now melting at an accelerating rate. Many smaller glaciers have already disappeared. Yao believes that two thirds of these glaciers could be gone by 2060. If this melting of glaciers continues, Yao says it "will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe." The Yangtze, by far the country's largest river, helps to produce half or more of its 130-million-ton rice harvest.
Like the depletion of aquifers, the melting of glaciers can artificially inflate food production for a short period. At some point, however, as the glaciers shrink and the smaller ones disappear entirely, so does the water available for irrigation.
The melting of the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau would appear to be China's problem. It is. But it is also everyone else's problem. In a world where grain prices have recently climbed to record highs, any disruption of the wheat or rice harvests due to water shortages in India or China will raise their grain imports, driving up food prices for all.
In India, where just over 40 percent of all children under five years of age are underweight and undernourished, hunger will intensify and child mortality will likely climb. For China, a country already struggling to contain food price inflation, there may well be spreading social unrest if food supplies tighten. For U.S. consumers, this melting poses a nightmare scenario. If China enters the world market for massive quantities of grain, as it has already done for soybeans over the last decade, it will necessarily come to the United States—far and away the leading grain exporter.
Ironically, the two countries that are planning to build most of the new coal-fired power plants, China and India, are precisely the ones whose food security is most massively threatened by the carbon emitted from burning coal. It is now in their interest to try and save their mountain glaciers by quickly shifting energy investment from coal-fired power plants into energy efficiency, wind farms, and solar thermal and geothermal power plants.
# # #
Adapted from World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown. Full book available at
www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Monsanto in the News......
June 29, 2011
Monsanto under SEC probe for incentives
By Hal Weitzman in Chicago
Monsanto, the world’s biggest seedmaker by revenue, is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over its use of cash to persuade distributors to use its herbicides.
The US company provides cash incentives to distributors to buy Roundup glyphosate, the world’s leading herbicide, and Roundup Ready seeds. Its most recent programme, introduced last year, offered up to $20 per acre.
Monsanto’s herbicide division was once a cash cow, but it has collapsed in the face of low-cost competition from China.
The company has been fighting to stabilise Roundup revenues, and cash incentives have played a big role in re-establishing the brand among farmers.
Monsanto said the watchdog had launched an investigation into its glyphosate incentive programmes for its 2009 and 2010 fiscal years. It said it had received a subpoena for documents from SEC staff and was co-operating with the investigation.
“We take this seriously,” said Hugh Grant, chief executive. He refused to be drawn on the details of the SEC’s concerns. “Out of respect for the SEC and their processes, there’s really not a great deal I can say at the moment. It’s early days. We’re just starting document production and we’re co-operating to our full ability.”
Monsanto is the subject of a separate long-running probe by the US Department of Justice into potential anticompetitive practices in the seed industry.
Monsanto revealed the SEC investigation as it raised its full-year earnings outlook and reported quarterly results well ahead of Wall Street’s expectations.
The seedmaker said net income for the three months to the end of May was $680m, or $1.26 per share, up from $384m, or 70 cents per share, in the same period last year, and above analysts’ average forecasts of $1.11 per share.
Monsanto expects full-year 2011 earnings, excluding extraordinary items, of $2.84-$2.88 per share, up from its previous forecast of $2.72-$2.82. It was raising expectations for free cash flow for 2011 from $900m- $1.1bn to $1.1bn-$1.3bn.
Roundup and other crop chemicals brought in a $76m profit in the quarter, from a loss of $175m in the period a year ago.
Mr Grant said the results indicated that the company was back on track after a disastrous year in which it was forced to scrap profit targets and abandon its premium pricing model as its higher-cost corn seeds failed to deliver hoped-for yields and as sales of Roundup plunged.
“The results of this achievement aren’t measured solely in [market] share points,” he said. “It also comes in the form of momentum, and I believe we now have that back again.”
Monsanto shares were up 4.4 per cent at $69.83 in mid-afternoon in New York.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f731e18c-a252-11e0-bb06-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1QnRUaKkD
===============================
30th June, 2011
theecologist.org
Greenpeace takes on Monsanto over 'pesticides arms race'
by Tom Levitt
Main ingredient of Monsanto's Roundup weed killer is being linked to cancer, birth defects and Parkinson's disease and should be banned, according to campaigners behind new report
The use of the popular weedkiller, 'Roundup', in public parks and on agricultural crops is a danger to public health, according to a new analysis of scientific evidence.
One of the main ingredients of Roundup, as well as several other herbicides, is a chemical known as glyphosate. A review of academic research, conducted by Greenpeace and the anti-GM campaign group GM Freeze, suggests exposure to it can cause cancer, hormonal imbalance, birth defects and neurological illnesses including Parkinson's.
The glyphosate within weedkiller can also be damaging to wildlife and rivers, when it spreads through the soil and into watercourses with run-off.
As the Ecologist reported recently, the pesticide industry and regulators have been accused of repeatedly misleading the public with claims that glyphosate is safe.
In reality, academic studies including one commissioned by one of the main manufacturers Monsanto, showed as long ago as the 1980s that glyphosate caused birth defects in laboratory animals.
Despite more recent evidence of the health risks, including reports of escalating levels of birth defects and cancers in areas of South America where glyphosate is heavily sprayed on crops, the EU Commission followed the US and other countries in approving the use of the chemical as a weedkiller.
The approval has allowed Monsanto to claim that 'regulatory authorities and independent experts around the world agree that glyphosate does not cause adverse reproductive effects…or birth defects.'
Resistance is spreading
The new Greenpeace campaign, backed by the report, is targeting Monsanto in particular because of the spread of its GM crops, genetically engineered to be tolerant to glyphospate. This allows farmers to spray the chemical over the top of the crop, killing almost all weeds without affecting the crop.
The campaign-launch comes as US officials began investigating claims Monsanto provided cash incentives to farmers to use its glyphospate products between 2009 and 2010.
As well as the potential human health and environmental impact of the use of glyphosate, it is also presenting a growing weed-resistance threat.
Far from reducing the cost of weed control for farmers, the heavy use of glyphosate herbicides by farmers is seeing a rise in the number of weeds becoming resistant to the chemical.
According to Greenpeace, resistance to glyphosate has now been confirmed in more than 20 weed species, with over 100 resistant strains identified, covering nearly 6 million hectares, primarily in Argentina, Brazil and the US. It fears Monsanto and other chemical companies want to use even more toxic chemicals to combat the resistance, creating a 'pesticide arms race'.
'Whether we like it or not, we all receive exposure to herbicides: sometimes from aerial spraying, sometimes through chemical residues in our food and sometimes because of chemical run off from agricultural land that pollutes nearby fields, seas or rivers,' Greenpeace sustainable farming campaigner Lasse Bruun, said.
'There are no winners in the war against superweeds - but human health, the environment, farmers and you, the consumer, all the losers.'
Useful links
Herbicide tolerance and GM crops: why the world should be Ready to Round up glyphosate
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/961236/greenpeace_takes_on_monsanto_over_pesticides_arms_race.html
===============================
June 30, 2011
Time to End the Chemical War Against Superweeds
Blogpost by Lasse Bruun
Have you ever thought about how your favourite picnic spot in the local city park is managed? Or what happens when herbicides are sprayed on the crops that make up your breakfast cereal? The truth is that in both city parks and the intensive agriculture used to produce breakfast cereals, weed killers are used on a massive scale, under the unproven assumption that they are safe. Roundup, one of the most common commercially available herbicides, is marketed by US agrochemical company Monsanto as “safe” for the environment, and for humans – but “deadly for weeds”. Our new report, Herbicide Tolerance and GM Crops written jointly with fellow non-governmental organisation GM Freeze, however, paints a very different picture.
One of the main ingredients of Roundup, as well as several other herbicides, is a chemical known as glyphosate. Numerous studies covered in the report associate exposure to glyphosate with cancer, birth defects and neurological illnesses (including Parkinson’s). Alarmingly, lab testing suggests that glyphosate can cause damage to cells, including human embryo cells. Other studies mentioned in the report indicate that glyphosate may be a gender-bender chemical that interferes with our hormonal balance. Do you still feel like having your picnic and breakfast cereal?
The environmental impacts of glyphosate are not much better with evidence suggesting that the chemical has a damaging impact on our rivers and on the animals that live in them. It also disrupts nutrients in soil, exposing plants (that are not weeds) to disease and could end up contaminating drinking water.
Whether we like it or not, we all receive exposure to herbicides: sometimes from aerial spraying, sometimes through chemical residues in our food and sometimes because of chemical run off from agricultural land that pollutes nearby fields, seas or rivers. Nobody is happy with this situation, as an extensive survey on attitudes to the environment published by the European Commission last week shows that, across the board, Europeans feel they need more information on chemicals and farming.
Of particular worry is the association between glyphosate and the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) herbicide-tolerant crops, known as Roundup-Ready. These crops, so far are mostly grown in the Americas, are genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate, so that they can survive massive spraying of Roundup to eliminate weeds. However, these weeds are now becoming increasingly resistant to glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup.
Resistance to glyphosate has now been confirmed in over 20 weed species, with over 100 resistant strains identified, covering nearly 6 million hectares, primarily in Argentina, Brazil and the U.S, where GM Roundup Ready crops are grown. Controlling these glyphosate-resistant weeds has become a major problem for farmers, prompting manufacturers of glyphosate and GM crops like Monsanto to recommend further increases in the deployment and concentration of herbicides - including the use of chemicals that are even more toxic than glyphosate. This escalation in the pesticide ‘arms race’ is creating a vicious circle that is producing a new breed of superweeds.
There are no winners in the war against superweeds - but human health, the environment, farmers and you, the consumer, all the losers. Given the problems identified so far, Greenpeace is demanding a review of the use of glyphosate in the EU and that no glyphosate-tolerant GM crops should be authorised in Europe or elsewhere. With a major reform of European farming policy just underway, governments need to recognise that the industrial agriculture system where GM crops and chemicals thrive is profoundly unsustainable.
Failure to act will threaten food production, jeopardise human lives and put the environment severely at risk. It is time to round up glyphosate for good and embrace ecological farming allowing us to once again enjoy our picnic and breakfast cereal.
Download the report: Herbicide tolerance and GM crops
Lasse Bruun is Greenpeace International's Senior Campaigner for Sustainable Agriculture
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/time-to-end-the-chemical-war-against-superwee/blog/35504
Monsanto under SEC probe for incentives
By Hal Weitzman in Chicago
Monsanto, the world’s biggest seedmaker by revenue, is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over its use of cash to persuade distributors to use its herbicides.
The US company provides cash incentives to distributors to buy Roundup glyphosate, the world’s leading herbicide, and Roundup Ready seeds. Its most recent programme, introduced last year, offered up to $20 per acre.
Monsanto’s herbicide division was once a cash cow, but it has collapsed in the face of low-cost competition from China.
The company has been fighting to stabilise Roundup revenues, and cash incentives have played a big role in re-establishing the brand among farmers.
Monsanto said the watchdog had launched an investigation into its glyphosate incentive programmes for its 2009 and 2010 fiscal years. It said it had received a subpoena for documents from SEC staff and was co-operating with the investigation.
“We take this seriously,” said Hugh Grant, chief executive. He refused to be drawn on the details of the SEC’s concerns. “Out of respect for the SEC and their processes, there’s really not a great deal I can say at the moment. It’s early days. We’re just starting document production and we’re co-operating to our full ability.”
Monsanto is the subject of a separate long-running probe by the US Department of Justice into potential anticompetitive practices in the seed industry.
Monsanto revealed the SEC investigation as it raised its full-year earnings outlook and reported quarterly results well ahead of Wall Street’s expectations.
The seedmaker said net income for the three months to the end of May was $680m, or $1.26 per share, up from $384m, or 70 cents per share, in the same period last year, and above analysts’ average forecasts of $1.11 per share.
Monsanto expects full-year 2011 earnings, excluding extraordinary items, of $2.84-$2.88 per share, up from its previous forecast of $2.72-$2.82. It was raising expectations for free cash flow for 2011 from $900m- $1.1bn to $1.1bn-$1.3bn.
Roundup and other crop chemicals brought in a $76m profit in the quarter, from a loss of $175m in the period a year ago.
Mr Grant said the results indicated that the company was back on track after a disastrous year in which it was forced to scrap profit targets and abandon its premium pricing model as its higher-cost corn seeds failed to deliver hoped-for yields and as sales of Roundup plunged.
“The results of this achievement aren’t measured solely in [market] share points,” he said. “It also comes in the form of momentum, and I believe we now have that back again.”
Monsanto shares were up 4.4 per cent at $69.83 in mid-afternoon in New York.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f731e18c-a252-11e0-bb06-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1QnRUaKkD
===============================
30th June, 2011
theecologist.org
Greenpeace takes on Monsanto over 'pesticides arms race'
by Tom Levitt
Main ingredient of Monsanto's Roundup weed killer is being linked to cancer, birth defects and Parkinson's disease and should be banned, according to campaigners behind new report
The use of the popular weedkiller, 'Roundup', in public parks and on agricultural crops is a danger to public health, according to a new analysis of scientific evidence.
One of the main ingredients of Roundup, as well as several other herbicides, is a chemical known as glyphosate. A review of academic research, conducted by Greenpeace and the anti-GM campaign group GM Freeze, suggests exposure to it can cause cancer, hormonal imbalance, birth defects and neurological illnesses including Parkinson's.
The glyphosate within weedkiller can also be damaging to wildlife and rivers, when it spreads through the soil and into watercourses with run-off.
As the Ecologist reported recently, the pesticide industry and regulators have been accused of repeatedly misleading the public with claims that glyphosate is safe.
In reality, academic studies including one commissioned by one of the main manufacturers Monsanto, showed as long ago as the 1980s that glyphosate caused birth defects in laboratory animals.
Despite more recent evidence of the health risks, including reports of escalating levels of birth defects and cancers in areas of South America where glyphosate is heavily sprayed on crops, the EU Commission followed the US and other countries in approving the use of the chemical as a weedkiller.
The approval has allowed Monsanto to claim that 'regulatory authorities and independent experts around the world agree that glyphosate does not cause adverse reproductive effects…or birth defects.'
Resistance is spreading
The new Greenpeace campaign, backed by the report, is targeting Monsanto in particular because of the spread of its GM crops, genetically engineered to be tolerant to glyphospate. This allows farmers to spray the chemical over the top of the crop, killing almost all weeds without affecting the crop.
The campaign-launch comes as US officials began investigating claims Monsanto provided cash incentives to farmers to use its glyphospate products between 2009 and 2010.
As well as the potential human health and environmental impact of the use of glyphosate, it is also presenting a growing weed-resistance threat.
Far from reducing the cost of weed control for farmers, the heavy use of glyphosate herbicides by farmers is seeing a rise in the number of weeds becoming resistant to the chemical.
According to Greenpeace, resistance to glyphosate has now been confirmed in more than 20 weed species, with over 100 resistant strains identified, covering nearly 6 million hectares, primarily in Argentina, Brazil and the US. It fears Monsanto and other chemical companies want to use even more toxic chemicals to combat the resistance, creating a 'pesticide arms race'.
'Whether we like it or not, we all receive exposure to herbicides: sometimes from aerial spraying, sometimes through chemical residues in our food and sometimes because of chemical run off from agricultural land that pollutes nearby fields, seas or rivers,' Greenpeace sustainable farming campaigner Lasse Bruun, said.
'There are no winners in the war against superweeds - but human health, the environment, farmers and you, the consumer, all the losers.'
Useful links
Herbicide tolerance and GM crops: why the world should be Ready to Round up glyphosate
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/961236/greenpeace_takes_on_monsanto_over_pesticides_arms_race.html
===============================
June 30, 2011
Time to End the Chemical War Against Superweeds
Blogpost by Lasse Bruun
Have you ever thought about how your favourite picnic spot in the local city park is managed? Or what happens when herbicides are sprayed on the crops that make up your breakfast cereal? The truth is that in both city parks and the intensive agriculture used to produce breakfast cereals, weed killers are used on a massive scale, under the unproven assumption that they are safe. Roundup, one of the most common commercially available herbicides, is marketed by US agrochemical company Monsanto as “safe” for the environment, and for humans – but “deadly for weeds”. Our new report, Herbicide Tolerance and GM Crops written jointly with fellow non-governmental organisation GM Freeze, however, paints a very different picture.
One of the main ingredients of Roundup, as well as several other herbicides, is a chemical known as glyphosate. Numerous studies covered in the report associate exposure to glyphosate with cancer, birth defects and neurological illnesses (including Parkinson’s). Alarmingly, lab testing suggests that glyphosate can cause damage to cells, including human embryo cells. Other studies mentioned in the report indicate that glyphosate may be a gender-bender chemical that interferes with our hormonal balance. Do you still feel like having your picnic and breakfast cereal?
The environmental impacts of glyphosate are not much better with evidence suggesting that the chemical has a damaging impact on our rivers and on the animals that live in them. It also disrupts nutrients in soil, exposing plants (that are not weeds) to disease and could end up contaminating drinking water.
Whether we like it or not, we all receive exposure to herbicides: sometimes from aerial spraying, sometimes through chemical residues in our food and sometimes because of chemical run off from agricultural land that pollutes nearby fields, seas or rivers. Nobody is happy with this situation, as an extensive survey on attitudes to the environment published by the European Commission last week shows that, across the board, Europeans feel they need more information on chemicals and farming.
Of particular worry is the association between glyphosate and the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) herbicide-tolerant crops, known as Roundup-Ready. These crops, so far are mostly grown in the Americas, are genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate, so that they can survive massive spraying of Roundup to eliminate weeds. However, these weeds are now becoming increasingly resistant to glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup.
Resistance to glyphosate has now been confirmed in over 20 weed species, with over 100 resistant strains identified, covering nearly 6 million hectares, primarily in Argentina, Brazil and the U.S, where GM Roundup Ready crops are grown. Controlling these glyphosate-resistant weeds has become a major problem for farmers, prompting manufacturers of glyphosate and GM crops like Monsanto to recommend further increases in the deployment and concentration of herbicides - including the use of chemicals that are even more toxic than glyphosate. This escalation in the pesticide ‘arms race’ is creating a vicious circle that is producing a new breed of superweeds.
There are no winners in the war against superweeds - but human health, the environment, farmers and you, the consumer, all the losers. Given the problems identified so far, Greenpeace is demanding a review of the use of glyphosate in the EU and that no glyphosate-tolerant GM crops should be authorised in Europe or elsewhere. With a major reform of European farming policy just underway, governments need to recognise that the industrial agriculture system where GM crops and chemicals thrive is profoundly unsustainable.
Failure to act will threaten food production, jeopardise human lives and put the environment severely at risk. It is time to round up glyphosate for good and embrace ecological farming allowing us to once again enjoy our picnic and breakfast cereal.
Download the report: Herbicide tolerance and GM crops
Lasse Bruun is Greenpeace International's Senior Campaigner for Sustainable Agriculture
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/time-to-end-the-chemical-war-against-superwee/blog/35504
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