Agriculture growing season is coming rapidly upon us in Indiana. Soon, we will see tractors and planters and sprayers across fields. What is not immediately visible are the genetically modified seed (GMO), the poisons on the seed, and later the poison sprayed on the land and crops…. poison and genetic modification that follow into our food supply. Bayer/Monsanto and Syngenta have already been successfully sued for millions for disease caused by their pesticides. Monsanto for glyphosate (Roundup) and Syngenta for paraquat… both killer toxic chemicals.
We hear complaint from President Trump that other countries will not take our agriculture products. Why? They don’t want our genetically engineered corn and soybeans and other GM crops…. And they don’t want the poisons that contaminate them.
We have a new Secretary of Health and Human Services in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He knows how sick our country is from our food supply. Hopefully he, with HHS and USDA, will change how we grow crops. The strangle hold of the big agriculture corporate giants must end. The constant escalation of the toxicity of agriculture poisons with the genetically engineered plants must end. It can be done.
Below is an excerpt from a book about a small community in northern Italy that went totally organic and saved their culture, people, and the health of their lands. We need to learn. What she writes about India largely applies to the United States of America.
[Exerpts from the Foreword from the book, “A Precautionary Tale”. Forward written by Dr. Vandana Shiva, a highly recognized and respected scientist in India]
For more than a century, a poison cartel has experimented with and developed chemicals to kill people, first in Hitler’s concentration camps and the war. These chemicals were later sold as inputs for industrial agriculture.
The poison cartel I refer to her is the handful of global corporations that push chemicals and genetically modified organism (GMOs) in farming — Bayer/Monsanto, Dow/Dupont, Syngenta/ChemChina. Killing is their expertise.
In India, a country of small farmers, the assault of the poison cartel has driven millions off the land and pushed 300,000 farmers to suicide due to debt for costly seeds and chemicals. The genetically modified (GM) seeds have failed to control pests and weeds. Instead they are creating super pests and super weeds, trapping farmers deeper in debt.
And it is not just farmers who are dying. Our soil organisms and pollinators are dying. Our soils are dying. Our societies are dying. Our children are dying — because of diseases caused by food loaded with toxics.
Pesticide pollution knows no boundaries, and the pesticide sprays contaminate entire ecosystems, our food, our water. These corporations take away our right to be free from harm.
They do not poison just people, our farms, and our food; they poison regulatory systems and science. Corruption of science, of regulation, of centralized government is their expertise.
The agrochemical industry and its new avatar, the biotechnology industry, do not merely distort and manipulate knowledge, science, and public policy. They also manipulate the law and the justice system.
That is why the movement for freedom from poisons in our food and agriculture is the most important freedom movement in our times. It is a movement for the rights of the Earth, the rights of all species, of all peoples to be free from harm, to be healthy. It is a movement to protect the diversity of species, of cultures, of economics, of knowledge, of decision making from the local to the global.
It is the movement for justice, for the right to life and livelihood. It the right to know about the potential harm from poisons and poison producing plants — GMOs. It is freedom from manipulated alternative facts and post-truths, which hide truth and try to bury it, as we are witnessing in the case of glyphosate and GMOs.