Monsanto’s Roundup
Roundup is a broad-spectrum herbicide, a weed and grass killer, upon which Monsanto built its empire. Monsanto developed Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, and held the patent until 2000.
As we have come to expect with Monsanto’s products and practices, Roundup is not without controversy, not only for its detrimental effects on the environment, but also due to corporate deception and lies. In 1996, Monsanto was sued by the Attorney
General of the State of New York Consumer Frauds and Protection Bureau, Environmental Protection Bureau for consumer fraud “in broadcast and print media, including television, radio, magazines, brochures, and at point-of-purchase displays.” Among the cited examples of Monsanto’s lies are the following:
“Remember that environmentally friendly Roundup herbicide is biodegradable. It won’t build up in the soil so you can use Roundup with confidence along customers’ driveways, sidewalks and fences …”
“Glyphosate is less toxic to rats than table salt following acute oral ingestion.”
“You can feel good about using herbicides by Monsanto. They carry a toxicity category rating of ‘practically non-toxic’ as it pertains to mammals, birds and fish.”
Monsanto, while refusing to admit that it violated any laws or that it agreed with the findings of the Attorney General, did agree to the Assurance of Discontinuance and to refrain from any publicity that expresses or implies Roundup to be safe, non-toxic, harmless, free from risk, biodegradable, non-leaching, good for the environment, or/and is safer or less toxic than other herbicides. Monsanto also agreed to pay a $50,000.00 fine. 1
This slap on the wrist did not cause
Monsanto to stop making false claims overseas. In 2007, France fined Monsanto for false advertising, for claiming Roundup to be biodegradable and that it leaves the soil clean after use. 2
Roundup is certainly toxic to humans and animals. It can be absorbed by plants that grow in soil sprayed by the herbicide. Studies have shown endocrine disruption and effects on human placental cells. Roundup leaches into groundwater and has a half life of up to 3 months in water.3
Europeans and GMOs
For the most part, Americans have blithely accepted GM crops, assuming the USDA and the FDA would never allow dangerous foods to be grown and sold for human or animal consumption. Europeans are not so trusting. We asked Brad Mitchell, Director of Public Affairs for Monsanto, why he believes Europeans to be so resistant to GM crops.
“I don’t have any magic answers,” he said. “I have my own beliefs, and it’s not necessarily Monsanto’s. I think a lot of it has to do with mad cow disease, BSE, and the fact that at the time that we moved in with a lot of technology and tried to introduce it into Europe that we weren’t necessarily sensitive to that fact that a lot of citizens at that point had lost faith in the regulatory system, had
sort of lost faith in the ability of the government to protect them. All of the sudden you have this new scary thing. I think some activists moved in who opposed GMOs and sort of filled that vacuum. And I think it was just a ripe environment. I think it was the wrong time and the wrong approach. Again, that’s my personal belief and not Monsanto’s.”
GMO Compass’s website is dedicated to providing information about GMOs to the European people. This pro GMO organization gives clear information about many of the issues surrounding GMOs and how they are tested and approved in Europe.
The European Food Safety Authority or EFSA, established in 2002, serves as the “central authority for the evaluation of food and feed safety in the EU.” The GMO Panel is an expert committee of independent scientists from a range of disciplines who are charged with the task of authorizing or rejecting a GMO food based on scientific evidence.
The first safety issue with GM foods centers around the effects of introducing a new gene into a plant’s DNA, which generally results in the formation of a new protein. If this protein is new to humans, it could have effects on our health. The first concern is an allergic response.
“The safety of a particular protein regarding
toxicity is assessed using animal feeding tests. For food additives or herbicide residues, these kinds of tests are routine. When results from animal trials are applied to humans, considerable extra safety measures must be taken.
“Safety evaluations must include tests to find out if the new protein could trigger allergies. Several criteria are known that suggest allergenic potential. If one or more of these criteria are met, the GM plant expressing this protein is unlikely to receive clearance in the EU.”
The second safety issue is whether unforeseen changes have resulted in the plant’s metabolism as a result of the gene transfer.
Two tests measure these changes. The first is a chemical analysis that measures nutritional value, vitamin content, and toxin levels. This test would indicate that the food is substantially equivalent if these measurements do not differ from those of the same plant’s conventional counterpart. If the results differ, further testing is indicated.
The second test is a feeding test. “In these tests, the whole food is fed to animals such as rats or chickens over an extended period of time. It is anticipated that any dangerous ‘side effects’ of the GM food would be made noticeable by changes affecting, for instance, the animal’s immune system or its internal organs.
This sounds good until reading on.
“Toxicological assessments on test animals are not explicitly required for the approval of a new food in the EU or the US. Independent experts have decided that in some cases, chemical analyses of the food’s makeup are enough to indicate that the new GMO is substantially equivalent to its traditional counterpart. Feeding tests are only requested in cases of doubt.
“Nonetheless, the results of animal tests are routinely presented to the European safety assessment authorities. In recent years, biotech companies have tested their transgenic products (maize, soy, tomato) before introducing them to the market on several different animals over the course of up to 90 days. Negative effects have not yet been observed.”
90 days? 90 DAYS!!!
Oh, wait! There’s more!
“GMO critics claim that feeding studies with authorized GMOs have revealed negative health effects. Such claims have not been based on peer-reviewed, scientifically accepted evaluations. If reliable, scientific studies were to indicate any type of health risk, the respective GMO would not receive authorisation. 4
So, once again, we have a situation where the tests that are approved are conducted by the companies themselves. And all the other tests that say there are problems with GMOs are not scientifically accepted evaluations. And the longest period required for the scientifically approved tests is 90 days. 4
Where are the long term studies? Where are the human studies? Where are the generational studies?
Monsanto’s Brad Mitchell said, “If you look at EFSA, The European Food Safety Authority, they basically said what FDA has and South American authorities. So the opposition to GM foods and AG [agriculture] technology in general in Europe seems to be more based on philosophy and personal feelings versus science. I wouldn’t say that they are any less valid, but we don’t have a conflict in regulatory bodies between the U.S. and Europe. It’s a conflict in social acceptance.”
If Brad Mitchell is right in his first assumption, that Europeans don’t trust regulatory agencies partially due to Mad Cow Disease, perhaps they’ve heard the story told by Monsanto whistleblower, Kirk Azevedo.
Kirk was approached by Monsanto and offered a job back in 1996. Kirk had been
raised on a farm, and had worked with a competitor testing pesticides and herbicides. Kirk was fascinated by Monsanto’s GMO crops and looked forward to being a part of Monsanto as the company forged ahead to make the world a better place.
As a young scientist, Kirk was also interested in Mad Cow Disease and its cause, improperly folded proteins called prions. He had learned about how these strange proteins cause healthy proteins to become misfolded, which over time cause holes in the brains of the cows. Prions survive cooking. In cows, the disease may incubate undetected for 2 to 8 years; in humans, it is thought to incubate up to 30 years.
At Monsanto, Kirk worked with two varieties of GM cotton; one of which was Roundup Ready® cotton. A Monsanto scientist told Kirk the plant contained several unknown proteins. While the scientist was unconcerned about these new proteins, Kirk became very concerned.
He had learned normal testing protocols in his previous job working with herbicides and pesticides. Plants from test fields were always destroyed. They were never allowed to enter the food chain. This was a basic safety precaution. But at Monsanto, creating new DNA with rogue proteins that could be toxic or allergenic or could even lead to
another prion-type disease, they were skirting normal safety protocols and feeding their test plants to cows—cows that were part of our food chain.
Kirk explained his concern to the PhD in charge of the test plot. The supervisor refused to destroy the plants. He even told Kirk Monsanto was doing it that way everywhere. So Kirk shared his concerns with co-workers to no avail before going outside the company to the California Agricultural commissioners. He spoke to more commissioners and to people at the University of California, but got nowhere; blank stares told him the technology was beyond their comprehension. They did not understand the threat. Kirk, of course, was ostracized. Any action that did not lead to commercialization of the product was an unwanted intrusion. He left the company and entered chiropractic school.
He continued to research prion disease and its possible relationship to GM crops. He remained concerned that cows and the people who ate them were used as test subjects, and we still don’t know the result of that experiment.
Safety Concerns
The safety concerns over GM or GMO crops will never be addressed unless or until we stop the revolving door governance between big business in general and Monsanto in particular.
Too often, executives who work for Monsanto or have close ties to Monsanto are later placed in positions of power within the government regulatory agencies, and often go right back to working at Monsanto. Brad Mitchell downplays this using his own experience as a measure. “Well, you know I came from working for the state ethics commission in my previous job. And you know when I came back, I work for Monsanto. If I went back to the state department, I would not be able to make decisions for a year related to Monsanto…Is a year enough? I don’t know. And there are other provisions. Are they enough? Those
rules are constantly being reviewed, but as a regulator I never made a single decision where there weren’t at least four other people who had some say over that or some responsibility over me.”
These restrictive measures were certainly not in place in the FDA for Margaret Miller. Miller, while working for Monsanto, put together a report for the FDA which was used to determine whether or not Monsanto’s bovine growth hormones were safe. When she went to work for the FDA, her first task was to determine whether or not to approve the Monsanto report, the very one she herself had submitted. The instances of revolving door appointments and employments are too numerous to list. Simply google revolving door and Monsanto to view them all. 5
The reality is we have no idea what the long term effects of eating GM foods will be for humans. But what do we know?
- Rat studies have shown liver changes, stomach lesions, and third generation reproductive failure.
- Farmers who fed their pigs Bt corn report severe reproductive failures and bizarre events such as pigs giving “birth” to bags of water with no fetuses.
- The only human feeding study proved the modified genes jumped into human gut bacteria and combined DNA.5
If Monsanto is so proud of their GMO foods, why do they resist labels that inform the consumer of what they are eating? On his blog, Brad Mitchell says, “Opposition to GM labeling is not based on anyone wanting to hide this information. Its <sic>just that given our system only requires labeling for information that people need to know about, a significant concern with mandatory GM labeling is that people will assume there is something risky with GMs. To date, every GM crop approved in the US has been determined by the government to be equivalent to its non-GM equivalent. I know some people disagree with this, but this is the determination in the US and most other governments.”
He told us, “Monsanto did not sue a dairy farmer because he labeled his milk, Monsanto sued because of ‘how’ he labeled his milk. What we were trying to prevent was misleading labeling of milk as being rBST free. And many of the milk companies out there who were labeling it where doing so in a way that was in violation of FDA guidelines and made it basically sound like our product wasn’t safe, and the scientific consensus, at
least in this country, was that it is.”
And Brad reminds us that we can be sure we are eating GMO free foods by choosing organic foods. And yet, can we be sure our organic foods have not become contaminated?
Aside from not knowing the specific health risks of Bt foods, we are standing on the brink of a greater disaster—contamination of the world’s food supply. GMOs are not contained. The seeds are blown into neighboring tracts of land and carried great distances by birds.
“I can kind of understand why someone who wants pure food wouldn’t want GM, genetic material in his corn,” says Brad Mitchell. “Realistically, he’s not going to be able to tell the difference. It’s not going to taste any different. It’s not going to be substantially different at all and you’re going to need some very sophisticated machinery/equipment to even tell if there has been any movement of genetic material. And in fact there has been genetic material of hybrids and everything moving around between corn for as long as there have been different varieties of corn. So I guess I would ask what the real significance is versus what the philosophical concern is… To date, in my mind, and most of the regulators in the world, the risks have not been demonstrated. Now if we demonstrate real risks, you know, I’ll switch, and say we shouldn’t be doing this. But I haven’t seen them.”
We see reports that regulators are not seeing the risk because they are looking the other way, because they are bribed, because their jobs are threatened, and because no long term studies are required. Again, the greatest threat is the fact that we’ve opened Pandora’s Box. How will we have a choice, how will we “pull the plug” on this great experiment if we confirm the worst, that genetic engineering of plant and animal DNA in our food chain is disastrous to our health and to our food supply?
What we know for certain is that we are dealing with a company that has a history of corruption—lies, bribes, cover-ups. Monsanto brought us Agent Orange, dioxin, PCBs and DDT. They covered up massive contamination of superfund sites in the U.S. and in other countries. Now they bring us GMOs and ask us to trust them—saying they would never hurt us. This, the same company who covered up the contamination in Anniston, dumping toxic waste into unlined landfills and dumping millions of pounds of dangerous chemicals into creeks and rivers before standing by and witnessing health repercussions of the residents including thousands of children whose problems included cancer, birth defects, and cerebral palsy. This company stood by for decades doing nothing. They lied on the stand. Their true culpability was revealed through documents they had tried to conceal.
“Will we look back on it and say we made some mistakes with GMs? Possibly. Some people would say probably,” says Brad Mitchell. “Are we going to look back and say, ‘Oh, my God, this was a huge mistake?’ No, I don’t think so.”
Our point exactly, Mr. Mitchell. “I don’t think so” isn’t good enough. Our health, our lives, and the future of our food depend on our actions today.
Recommended Reading:
Sources:
- Mindfully.org, Assurance of Discontinuance
- Terra Daily, Monsanto fined in France for ‘false’ herbicide ads
- Organic Consumers Association, Multiple Studies Show That Monsanto’s Roundup is Toxic
- GMO Compass, Evaluating Safety: A Major Undertaking
- Global Research, Monsanto Whistleblower Says Genetically Engineered Crops May Cause Disease, by Jeffrey M. Smith
- Healthy Choices BC website
- Monsanto Website—Blog entry by Brad Mitchell, GMO Labels: Surveys, Petitions, and Political Theater, March 2, 2009