Rosemary Mason

This is a paper that describes how the pesticides industry has committed crimes against humanity and ecocide. As the tribunal's website says: "it can ignore the human and environmental damage caused by its products and maintain its devastating activities through a strategy of systemic concealment: by lobbying regulatory agencies and governments, by resorting to lying and corruption, by financing fraudulent scientific studies, by pressuring independent scientists, by manipulating the press and media...etc." Examples of these activities are provided.

This Phytochemical Committee has representatives from all EU Member States. They met on 10/11 December to decide whether to endorse EFSA's conclusions on Glyphosate. The absence of humans from the title suggests that there are no doctors present. Or if there are doctors present, they are ignorant of the fact that plants and humans absorb nutrients via identical shikimate pathways;  the human gut microbiome consists of trillions of bacteria which are poisoned by glyphosate in precisely the same way as plants are poisoned.

Anthony Samsel has discovered how glyphosate, a man-made amino acid, mimics glycine an essential amino acid and becomes incorporated into our bodies to cause many of diseases which have increased in the Western world in those eating a western diet.

This is a response to the European Food Safety Authority EFSA recommending the renewal of glyphosate. There is an introduction; a history of farming with chemicals in the UK; History of chemical regulation in Europe - in the hands of the pesticides industry; Deterioration of health in the UK, the US and Latin America; Loss of biodiversity which correlates with the measurement of chemicals in the environment.

Two papers about the future of the planet are analysed. The first from environmentalists shows that we are already in the sixth extinction and much of it is to do with agriculture. The second from the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission never mentions chemicals in agriculture.

The European Commission has allowed EFSA to delay the decision on the review of glyphosate until June 2016 (from 2012 when it was supposed to be reviewed.) In March 2015 the World Health Organisation International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate as a 2A carcinogen (probably carcinogenic in humans), but the Glyphosate Task Force said that it did not accept this classification. However, sealed documents obtained from the US EPA show that Monsanto knew that glyphosate caused cancer, but manipulated the research results. Glyphosate is an endocrine disrupting chemical. EDCs are chemicals, that for example, cause fish to change sex, make girls become sexually mature at about 13 years old, cause a range of endocrine-related cancers, obesity and diabetes.

Monsanto has four patents on glyphosate; as a herbicide, a chelator of minerals (it was previously used to extract minerals from boilers), an antibiotic and an anti-protozoal. Every meal that is consumed in which food contains glyphosate residues, beneficial bacteria will be destroyed.

GMO Crops, Pesticides, Birth Defects, Coral Bleaching and Lies.
In September 2015, WWF Living Blue Planet on the state of the world's oceans was published. In supporting Monsanto's GM Roundup Ready Soy, WWF-US seems to be unaware that glyphosate and other pesticides are responsible for disasters to the environment and human health.

The guidance in the UK for antibiotic use warns about overuse by doctors and vets. Glyphosate has been patented has an antibiotic and a recent scientific paper confirms that glyphosate, dicamba and 2,4-dichloro-phenoxyacetic acid, all herbicides that are common chemicals in use in agriculture, domestic gardens and public places can induce multiple antibiotic resistance phenotype in potential pathogens. The effect occurs upon simultaneous exposure to antibiotics and faster than the lethal effect of antibiotics.

David Cameron's Government buried the Open Letter from America, in which nearly 60 US citizens wrote to the citizens of Britain warning about the hazards  of growing genetically modified (GM) crops. Examples are given of evidence that the BBC allowed biased programmes to be made that supported industry and which did not declare the conflicts of interest of those that appeared.  Complaints to the BBC were dismissed.

I have to thank Carey Gillam for the title of this article. In my discussions with the European Chemicals Agency they had insisted that they only did the harmonised classification of glyphosate. I tried to convince them that a substance that was classified as causing severe eye damage and was toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects shouldn't be allowed on the market, but nevertheless, the European Commission renewed the licence based on ECHA's reassurance that it wasn't a carcinogen.