June 24, 2013
Phil Angell, director of corporate communications, Monsanto, was quoted in The New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1998, as saying, “Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.”
The above might be acceptable if not for the fact that Monsanto works to control government regulations— and succeeds. Through the force of campaign contributions and by transferring Monsanto employees to key positions in FDA, USDA, and even the courts, Monsanto can and does control regulatory outcome.
One example: Margaret Miller, while working as a Monsanto researcher, contributed to a scientific report for the FDA on Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Shortly before the report was submitted, she left Monsanto to work at the FDA where her first job was to review the same report.
Worse, a provision called The Monsanto Protection Act was slipped into The Appropriations Act of 2013. The act strips the federal courts of their power to stop Monsanto from planting unproven and potentially dangerous crops. The law expires in 2013 if it can be kept out of the next bill.
Recently, the Obama administration has given the green light to Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa, sugar beets, and Bt soybean and is looking at GMO apples, sweet corn and salmon. Except for salmon and apples, plants are explicitly designed to control weeds through application of Roundup Ready herbicides. Making a more nutritious and productive plant is not the purpose of genetically engineering a plant--the purpose is to sell the GMO together with an herbicide. For Monsanto, genetically engineered seed and herbicide are a double sale every time.
Monsanto is determined to replace the seed that has always belonged to the farmers of the world—the seed farmers save from their own crops. As farmers use Roundup, they find that the weeds are becoming insensitive to it and they are forced to use stronger and more frequent applications, which damage the fertility of the soil.
The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate. Today, 100 million pounds of it is sprayed on American farms and gardens each year; it has contaminated meat, milk, butter, and eggs. The FDA permitted residue levels in crops are rising sharply. Monsanto has widely asserted that glyphosate is minimally toxic to humans. But glyphosate suppresses a crucial family of enzymes that protect health.
Recent research has identified glyphosate’s role in neural disorders like autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and depression. It can produce inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, liver failure in children and induce DNA damage. The dramatic increase is these diseases and more, some barely known before, coincides with the introduction of glyphosate. Researchers believe that glyphosate is the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment. And it is everywhere.
Glyphosate also severely curtails the ability of plants to take up calcium, iron, and manganese from the soil, resulting in deficiencies of the same nutrients in humans. (www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy)
Monsanto has made it clear it is not its job to ensure its products are safe. Isn’t it our government’s job to do so?
Much of the text above is from a handout prepared by Moisha Blechman for the March Against Monsanto event. For the full article, contact her at mblechman@earthlink.net.