What You Need To Know: The Fight Against GMOs and Glyphosate Continues. Arm Yourself With Information
The new DARK Act just passed by the Senate is a blow against the wished of 90 percent of Americans who want to know what’s in their food.
But the fight is far from over. And we don’t win if we don’t fight, and we can’t fight if we aren’t informed. Here’s a round-up of the latest with Monsanto and glyphosate that you can use as talking points when some clever co-worker or your annoying uncle wants to debate about the relative safety of GMOs and glyphosate.
First the lowdown on the DARK Act II. Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Pat Roberts (R-KS) colluded with supposed allies turned traitors in the organic foods industry, including Horizon Organic, Naked Juice, Kashi and Silk–all of whom, by the way also donated money to the fight the GMO labeling bill Prop 37 in California–as well as the Organic Trade Association to pass this odious bill.
Far from what consumers want–a simple label on the outside of the product’s packaging telling them whether there are GMO ingredients in the food–this bill allows manufacturers to skate around that by instead making the information available only through a QR code or by calling an 800 number. Nonetheless is passes the Senate handily, once again proving that our elected representatives are neither elected nor do they represent anyone but deep-pocket industry.
But moving on. You’ve probably heard by now about the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer doing some labeling of its own, when it released a study that listed glyphosate–the active ingredient in Roundup–as a probable carcinogen.
Monsanto and other industry mouthpieces–and not incidentally their suspiciously similar sounding sock puppets on social media–immediately and constantly have been at work to debunk these findings ever since, accusing the IARC of “cherry-picking” data.
What they don’t tell you in the breathless mainstream media reports on this spat is that the data the IARC left out was the closed, non-peer-reviewed industry studies that originally assured us that everything is just fine with glyphosate. And it’s not simply because the studies were conducted by industry-financed scientists–its because the IARC, like any reputable scientific body, simply doesn’t use non-peer-reviewed, non-replicated studies. It’s just bad science.
In fact, there is a new study from France that shows that glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic to human reproductive cells. The risk of infertility shoots way up when exposed to the chemical, and low sperm count and prostate or testicular cancer can result.
Another line of argument the pro-Monsanto shills like to take is the “Don’t you want to feed the world, you monster” tack. Pre-supposing that Monsanto’s claims of increased crop yields were true (they’re not), and that Monsanto planned to give away its crop seed for free in perpetuity to the impoverished people around the world where food insecurity actually exists (ha), then we would still be talking about feeding these people with crops designed to be heavily treated with glyphosate-based chemicals.
That’s no way to feed a starving planet.
Stay informed. Don’t back down. And when someone presents you with bogus arguments in favor of GMOs ask them how they like testicular cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, because that’s what they’re arguing in favor of.
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