1. Glyphosate (roundup) use is two orders of magnitude higher than originally approved.
2. Due to the emergence of glyphosate-resistant weeds, the dosage has been increased substantially.
3. It is now also usually combined with other compounds to increase effectiveness, which affects how it breaks down and affects both the food and environment.
4. It is now also used for 'green burndown'. To help dessicate the crop. AKA they use it to kills crops to speed harvest, resulting in significantly elevated levels in your food.
Realize that little to gain from raising these concerns, while there are many wealthy parties with vested interests in not finding these results. There's little funding behind this. Governing bodies (e.g. in Germany) are still relying on findings from labs with clear conflicts of interest.
There are many conflicts of interest in the world - organic farming is an industry too. e.g. at least one of those 14 experts is an active member of the organic industry and has long had a beef with the GMO industry: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/glp-facts/charles-ben...
As to the science: the original highly-questionable IARC determination has since been contested by both the European Chemical Agency and the European Food Safety Authority.
It doesn't do us any good calling everything in the world a carcinogen. We have to rank-order risks in order to make reasonable choices in life, and glyphosate sits very low on that list compared to other industrial chemicals when you look at the evidence for mutagenicity or secondary carcinogenic mechanisms.
Ockham's razor reasoning is that a gigantic profit driven structure with a huge lobbying activity, and high financial stakes should probably not be trusted with making the right choice between their business and our health.
History tells it didn't work very well for us when the big guys said tobacco, asbestos, the Chernobyl cloud and PCBs were all safe and good.
Given Monsanto's pretty poor moral track record (improper accounting for incentive rebates, Agent Orange, terminator seeds, patent trolling...), it's only fair to be suspicious by default with them.
I'm not asking you to believe anything from Monsanto. There is a vast field of researchers that care deeply about what causes cancer and what can be done to prevent and treat it. Most of us aren't for sale.
There are sensitive, objective and simple tests for determining whether or not a compound causes genetic mutations in cells (Ames test). There are tests for whether or not a compound induces chromosome abnormalities in mammalian cells. There are lifetime feeding tests for determining whether or not any cancers can be induced with wildly unrealistic dosing regimes. Lastly, there are epidemiological studies that monitor whether workers using glyphosate demonstrate increased occurrences of particular cancers.
For glyphosate, there is no evidence of mutagenicity or genotoxicity, there is no evidence of teratogenic potential in mammals. There are no statistically significant epidemiological correlations with exposure. Glyphosate is poorly absorbed by human guts, poorly absorbed by human skin, and does not accumulate in tissues.
This is the scientific consensus: there is no good evidence that N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine is a carcinogen, there is a mountain of evidence that it is not.
But at the end of the day, whether I'm arguing with GMO-skeptics or climate-change-skeptics, I can't prove that this scientific consensus is worthy of your respect. You can always retreat into a more hardline epistemological skepticism, you can always cast aspersions at the entire enterprise.
You fail to account for the possibility of unknown unknowns, and again you're displaying biased cognitive dissonance.
You can't determine generational toxicity from LD50 profiles. You are simplifying everything way too much.
Glyphosate is an analog to glycine. You know, the building blocks for proteins. DuPont did a study in 2007 that shows glyphosate is integrating in protein structures. Does that not worry you?
Glyphosate is also a
chelating agent. Glyphosate impacts the shikimate pathway, and is said to be non-toxic because humans do not possess the shikimate pathway. Yet the shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, archaea, and eukarya, and all of them are harmed by Glyphosate. Do we have bacteria in our guts utilizing the shikimate pathway? Yes we do.
You are running with the base assumption that Monsanto is benevolent and honest. This is where your cognitive dissonance stems from.
I engineer proteins for a living. I know that glyphosate is a glycine analog. Re: bacterial processing -- We've fed tons of glyphosate to mammals to see if it causes cancers - it doesn't seem to. Mammals don't absorb it well. I certainly don't assume anything about Monsanto's benevolence, but you happily seem to assume that I'm made of socks.
> You fail to account for the possibility of unknown unknowns, and again you're displaying biased cognitive dissonance.
I will discuss unknown unknowns later on. Firstly, in terms of cognitive dissonance, I believe that the charge is premature. You seem to have missed the fact that he was referring to himself as one of those researchers, and he most certainly did not mention LD50 profiles. A quick check of his profile:
> I'm a synthetic biologist. I did some of the early work in optogenetics as a student. Now I work on industrializing the genetic engineering of cells.
It seems unlikely to me, given that context, that he routinely simplifies the topic too much.
Your questions about glycine, protein structures, chelating, and shikimate might be really good ones. I wouldn't know. However, your preamble provides a strong disincentive to answering them.
In terms of errors in reasoning, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance, I wonder if this is a common reinforcing structure; that is, if people generally prefix questions with a preamble hinting at the permissible responses in order to ward off the experience of cognitive dissonance. I might do it myself. That's just a passing thought. Concretely, regardless of motive, you've signalled to him quite strongly that any answer he makes will be futile, for persuasive purposes, and probably pissed him off a bit.
> You are running with the base assumption that Monsanto is benevolent and honest. This is where your cognitive dissonance stems from.
Your conclusion returns to the theme of rejecting what he has to say. His very first sentence was literally "I'm not asking you to believe anything from Monsanto." Having demonstrated that you will not pay attention to what he says, you then reaffirm that anything he says contradicting your opinions is the result of cognitive dissonance. I do not think that anyone who was paying attention to your words would, at that point, bother to reply.
With regards to "unknown unknowns," you should appreciate that you are speaking to a domain expert. By contrast, you are reasoning through a trust calculus on first principles. That's fine, but he has education and experience that represent a multi-generational attempt to address those "unknown unknowns". Detecting unknown unknowns and turning them into known unknowns is one of its primary occupations. It is manifestly erroneous to equally weight the "unknown unknowns" with "everything else" at all points and times, especially if that means privileging them over known unknowns.
You appealed to Occam's Razor in your previous comment. Here we have a dispute about material fact between a genetic scientist and a (known unknown) random person on the internet, regarding the risks of a substance as a carcinogen. I want to stress again that that's fine. However, I think it would benefit you to be self-aware enough to realize exactly which resolution of the dispute Occam's Razor suggests to your audience. If you demonstrated such awareness, you might be taken more seriously.
> Do you have an example of anything that accounts for the possibility of unknown unknowns? My guess is if you do, then all it will take to debunk it is someone with a bigger imagination.
You can't enunmerate unknown unknown, but you can plan for them. Simple things like let things fail and no single point of failure have built in protections against unknown unknowns. Its hard to argue this without using Taleb's ideas, which GMO advocates don't like.
Does he know Glyphosate mimics glycine? I'm pretty sure he doesn't. That's an unknown to him.
Whenever you study a complex subject, you have to be aware that there are things you might not know about. And there are also things you might not know you do not know.
That's an unknown unknown.
You're making light of a very serious issue among scientists and science. An honest scientist keeps looking for the unknown, a dishonest scientist (to himself) stops looking, and then it becomes dogma.
This guy thinks he knows it all, but he does not, and he does not even realize that there could be things he does not know. When you do that, you can easily switch from doing science, to (accidentally or deliberately) start pushing an agenda.
Nobody said it doesn't. But the whole purpose of organic is to do it in a way that has been tested by darwin natural selection for a long time in a very complex system.
Of course that doesn't mean the organic industry is doing things properly nor does it mean that this type of culture doesn't some other negative side effects.
But globally, I'll bet on the farmer cooperative that want to avoid pesticide to be less evil than a mega corporation that produce the Agent Orange. Does that sound silly ?
I really don't get how much you are willing to reverse this attack from Monsanto to organic sellers.
Sure nobody is perfect. And yes, the whole debate is tainted by pseudo science and bad faith. But come on, it's not even on the same scale.
>You fail to account for the possibility of unknown unknowns
This sounds reasonable. /s
Do you have an example of anything that accounts for the possibility of unknown unknowns? My guess is if you do, then all it will take to "debunk" it is someone with a bigger imagination.
The way you take in consideration unknown unknowns is not by trying to think of every single possible thing.
It's actually quite the opposite.
You start from what you know and what you control. From that you can assess what you can mess up. The scale, the consequences and likelihood of it.
E.G: if you are using a very potent instable new explosive, you have much more unknown unknowns that if you are manipulating a well well know concentrated acid.
Now starting from here you know what the cost of what you don't know could be, and else can choose measures to mitigate that such as more research, bigger safety coefficient, additional staff, insurance, etc.
When we blame a company for not taking in consideration unknown unknowns, it usually means they just tried to build the very minimal legal requirement to put it on the market and make money. They may have known that it was risky, but they didn't bother.
In that case, I think they meant to say: "known unknowns"
Perhaps this is just semantics but I have always thought of "unknown unknowns" as being in that mirky realm of "every single possible thing".
Perhaps I should have been more charitable and less pedantic, which is honestly hard for me to do when I see someone passionately argue against something I thought was a scientific consensus.
Yeah I prefer the term "precaution principle", it's more straight forward because it describes the action instead of what's motivate it.
But known unknowns and unknown unknowns are not the same things though. known unknowns are a space you can account for. It's easy to put a number of it. unknown unknowns not so much, and dealing with it is more a matter of morality than science. You can't scientifically deal with something you can hardly define or quantify.
Do you have a link to any individual nation state bans being based on scientific evidence rather than public/media outrage? Because the EFSA has been against the bans.
Hence the word 'consensus'. There are plenty of scientists that don't believe in climate change. Most of them don't work on climate data. I've met vanishingly few biologists that think GMOs pose a health risk to humans.
I'm not arguing against the science, I'm arguing against the people.
E.G: I think GMO have a fantastic potential. It's a powerful technology. And like any powerful technology, it has a huge potential of destruction as well.
And I don't trust the people making money with it to take the necessary precautions to avoid a catastrophy. There are so many past and present events where money won over the benefit of the human specie.
I trust people like you, that are dedicated to analyze things and share conclusions.
But between you and the public, there is an army of people whose job is to hide/distort informations that will make them loose money, and show off informations that will make them win money. And they are better are it that the public is at critical thinking.
You talk about climat skepticism, and it's a good example of a generalized propaganda that entities with an interest in fossil fuel and live stock keep pushing. And it works. There are people that doubt climate change. There are leaders that act on it.
When there is an obvious conflict of interest in an entity of huge influence, one should ALWAYS be suspicious by default. The entity has to prove, over, and over again that it's doing the right thing.
Right now entities are usually, as they grow, turning into systems that buy PR campaign to tell you they are doing the right things instead of doing it.
In there you can read the statment from the tobacco industry:
1. That medical research of recent years indicates
many possible causes of lung cancer.
2. That there is no agreement among the authorities
regarding what the cause is.
3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is
one of the causes.
4. That statistics purporting to link smoking with the
disease could apply with equal force to any one of
many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the
validity of the statistics themselves are
questioned by numerous scientists.
Like I said, they are very good at controlling the story.
Defending them because that's the intellectually moral thing to do - while I understand that's something intelligent reasonable people wants to do - is not working in our favor.
Now you tell me that up to now, nothing is hinting that N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine is dangerous. But Monsanto still decided to have research about it ghostwritten. Such behavior is an alarm signal to me, and should trigger new investigations and tests for the next 10 years.
You don't need to convince me of the potential malfeasance of US corporate interests - I grew up in West Virginia, a state that's more or less been run by the coal industry for a century. :)
We should always remain vigilant of unappreciated risks, both health and ecological, from existing practices and chemicals. However, scientific studies are not cheap. In a world with an endless supply of serious problems, we have to prioritize research spending on science and engineering that's likely to actually improve life for the most people. Redoing the same experiments we've been doing to death for decades probably isn't the best use of limited science funding from a purely utilitarian standpoint. Industrial agriculture has quite a few more serious public health issues than glyphosate. (e.g. antibiotic abuse in animals)
Monsanto is not running out of money any time soon. We can always tax it specifically to finance more research. They want to play with dangerous techs ? Ok, well it's going to be long and expensive. And again and again and again. Any other way would be foolish.
You're shouting conspiracy because I studied neuroscience at Stanford? Dude. Just glad you didn't dig up my links to the International Order of the Prismatic Leopard.
In France we had this wonderful scandal about donated blood that was provided by aids infected patients... but declared safe. It's been used to make transfusion to other people that were already plagued with hemophilia, so that they could really enjoy the benefit of having both diseases at the same time.
I'm wondering what will be the next stuff like that.
Will we learn in 30 years that milk is actually unhealthy and that "got milk" was a blatant lie ?
Will we discover that too much computer activity reduce IQ while we all though we were getting so clever learning online ?
"Don't worry, teleportation is totally safe. We are absolutely not copying your body and destroying the original"
I get to angry even thinking about it. Imagine your day job is to convince the public spreading poison globally is not dangerous only to make a marginal profit. And to give decision makers some excuse with some bullshit "proofs" that lets them stay "ignorant". Alot of enviormental issues comes to mind where this is happening today.
I've been astonished that so many people think it's okay. I think it's related to the tribal mindset, how cheering for your team has been more important in evolution than critical thinking.
> Will we learn in 30 years that milk is actually unhealthy
I do not know if you are joking, but we know for some time now that regular consumption of dairy as an adult human increases risk for many health complications. (similarly evidence builds up against meat and eggs for some time now)
I know you are serious and I have actually heard this for years and was of the understanding that recommendations was now changing towards "milk and dairy more healty than previously though".
Full disclosure: grew up on a dairy farm. Like milk. Might be biased.
This whole recommendations thing is a battle ground for corporate interests. It is better to do your own research (find doctors that argue in favour and against) and weight the evidence yourself.
> Full disclosure: grew up on a dairy farm. Like milk. Might be biased.
Dunno if yr biased. Only after to gather enough info and are ready to pass a judgment by yourself, then bias might show. Currently I expect your are merely uninformed. Some of the bigger "abandon milk" doctors grew up on dairy farms themselves.
And enjoyment is different story from health-impact. Some claim to enjoy smoking :)
Maybe it depends on how the milk was processed or not rather than the milk itself? I also have health issues with milk, yet find yoghurt and milk based products just fine.
There are studies that found a link between gut bacteria and mental illnesses. Some of the bacteria in our guts also thrives in milk based products like yoghurt.
The point is not that someone knew something was/is dangerous - in retrospect you always find them (see financial crisis too). The point is what/who actually impacted the real large-scale actions.
F-1 Hybrid is the term. Cross a tasty tomato with a high-yield one, and you get a tasty high-yield tomato - but you can't use the seeds. This has been around for years.
You can't trust charities either. They have a vested interest in maintaining their world view in spite of contrary evidence. For instance, the banning of DDT in Africa despite the fact that using it to control malaria saves lives.
This is a zombie lie that never ever stops. You can't trust whatever psycho-website you got that misinformation from.
DDT was NEVER banned for public health purposes in Africa or anywhere in the Developing World.
It was restricted for use in agriculture to ensure --in part-- that it continued to be useful for public health. As far back as the late 1950s it was known that mosquitos easily developed resistance to DDT and other insecticides.
I think their argument is more along the lines of "Mother Teresa campaigned against the birth control that would have eased the poverty she based her career on."
I actually have very little faith in charities. I did missions for find, the earth institute, the gates foundation, MVP and WHO. Money is wasted/stolen, politics everywhere, ego, incompetence... It's business as usual, except the people I worked with a the bottom of the pyramid were awesome.
There is nothing special about charities. You describe most human organizations. Whose nature also depends on their environment - I posit that in a less cut-throat world humans and their organizations would be less cut-throat too. I also don't believe that the way it is is "inevitable" and/or "human nature" (http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/survival-of-the-friendlies...).
Think about this: At least in the western world we have achieved wealth and productivity where the word "unimaginable" from a point of view of even 500 years ago would be a gross understatement. And yet, to many people daily life still feels full of threats, while many work what they themselves recognize are meaningless jobs (see the popular Dilbert cartoons). It doesn't make sense, it is artificial. It doesn't need to be this way. We force people - and organizations - to live in a "stress and survival mode" that is completely unnecessary.
As Nicholas Taleb put it - stuff that is natural is time-tested. Food we've grown + consumed has a multi-millennium history of being safe to consume. The burden of proof is on the synthetic. And health issues can materialize with a time gap of a decade or so - essentially you can ruin a couple of generations with a mistake you didn't catch in time.
It doesn't help when those who have to prove their validity have to resort to regulatory capture so often.
Particularly, they have been time-tested in a complex system.
Our tests are not only limited in time, but also in complexity. Scientists take a sample of subjects in a defined environment. The benefit of that is that they can draw definitive conclusions because of the manageable variables. The problem with it is that you fail to see the big picture, the many interactions with the numerous components of a real life activity, and on the long run.
When talking about living things and food, or in that case, living things that are food, the context is incredibly important to define what is safe or not.
> Food we've grown + consumed has a multi-millennium history of being safe
The food we consume now has little resemblance past a visual one (and even not that in some cases), to food of the past.
Time-tested? Only in the past 60 years or so have we actually been able to begin to understand the effects of any food, natural or GMO. That our ancestors didn't keel over immediately after consuming these "same" foods does not mean they are anymore "safe to consume" than GMO foods.
Looks like we first cultivated "garden strawberries" in 1714[1]. Before that we just had "wild strawberries", which are small and not very sweet. I don't know now they've changed nutritionally (probably more sugar), and I doubt they've changed chemically.
Unfortunately "time" doesn't test for cancerogenicity, as laypeople are terrible at inferring causality that may span months or years. Case in point [1]: several "herbal remedies" used in China for hundreds of years are linked to kidney failure and kidney cancer.
We don't know if something is dangerous until we deliberately and scientifically test it. Given that "non-natural" stuff (e.g. GMO) is thoroughly tested, I would expect that it's way safer than "natural" one that was never really tested.
This is a fallacy. All sorts of things are time-tested, in some cases over a millennium, and turn out to be carcinogenic: lutefisk, for instance, or the scalding hot tea Iranians drink.
I'm talking conditional probabilities here. Conditioned on the natural, our track record isn't bad. Conditioned on synthetic substances, just in the last century we have thalidomide, high-fructose corn syrup and this wonderful collection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Withdrawn_drugs
>Food we've grown + consumed has a multi-millennium history of being safe to consume.
Its not so simple. When you consider the significantly lower yields of organic farming[0], combined with a growing world population 71% of which lives on less than $10 a day[1] that will not be able to afford these increased food costs you are left with a question. Do you prefer to add perhaps a few years to the end of your life or do you prefer to allow a great many others to live?
Personally even if GMO and others took a decade from me (I have seen no evidence this is the case. Humans are living longer lives than ever before.) if it allows more children to eat I support it.
It does, but not really to smoking. Tobacco is far safer chewed or insufflated than smoked, and cigarettes have a bunch of additional terrible chemicals in them.
Is it really (time-)tested? How do we know what is safe to consume, especially long-term? We don't really have proper data to support most claims. We did not track and log the causes of death throughout the vast majority of our history.
> It doesn't do us any good calling everything in the world a carcinogen
I think it would help tremendously if we started expressing everything in terms of Disability-adjusted life years[1] lost. So instead of "Drinking hot tea causes cancer!", the headline would read "Drinking hot tea causes you to lose an average 20 minutes of disability-adjusted life expectancy". A lot less scary, and a lot easier to compare with other things.
The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Yet the first thing you think about is accusing organic farming of conflicts of interest?
You are a perfect example of extreme cognitive dissonance. What's even more scary is you're working in the field of biotechnology. It only reinforces my view that many of you are living in your own dogmatic information bubble.
What do you want them to say? They provided, just one further comment downthread, a pretty persuasive case that a letter of concern about the carcinogenicity of glyphosate is athwart the scientific consensus. You're asking them to ignore the science, because Monsanto is a big scary company.
This particular debate is not about GMO though, is it?
> It doesn't do us any good calling everything in the world a carcinogen.
We're not calling everything a carcinogen. Some people are suspecting Glyphosate of being one.
> We have to rank-order risks in order to make reasonable choices in life, and glyphosate sits very low on that list compared to other industrial chemicals when you look at the evidence for mutagenicity or secondary carcinogenic mechanisms.
Indirectly it is; Monsanto promotes Roundup as a weed killer and simultaneously promotes Roundup Ready crops that are genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup, thus letting farmers safely apply Roundup without endangering the crops themselves.
This story is as much about the info-war that kept glyphosate from being 'poisonous in the public mind' as it is about the fact that there are worse carcinogens in the world ..
Sure, depleted Uranium is a much worse pollutant for us to be worried about. But, that's no reason for us to continue paying millions into an industry that lied to us so that we would keep spreading it on our food sources now, is it?
I'm in full agreement unfortunately as there is substantial asymmetry in funding between the parties with vested interests it's unsurprising it starts to get complex.
Ultimately, I think it's appropriate for things to be tested in the context they are used. It's just really weird to me that some governments are examining the evidence but not requesting 2nd (let alone 3rd) party testing.
It seems very irrational. Chemicals have different breakdown characteristics when mixed. Dosages are different from before. Consumer exposure is different.
Even if the impact is minimal, you should test and prove that it's minimal.
That they have avoided it makes me think they have something to hide.
Gotta love how Snopes dismisses anecdotal claims of allergies, then goes on to use anecdotal stories from farmers on a discussion forum to support their assertion that RoundUp isn't used as a crop dessicant.
The article says it isn't used as a crop desiccant in wheat. If you want another anecdotal data point, as a grain grower myself, I have to echo the sentiment there. I'm sure someone has tried it, but I see no reason for wheat to need desiccation generally.
I was merely noting Snopes' intellectual dishonesty in dismissing anecdotal data solely on the basis that it is anecdotal (and obviously, inconvenient to their conclusion), but then using anecdotal data to support their conclusion when it is convenient.
It's difficult to judge long term toxicity in humans. You don't immediately keel over and die when you smoke a cigarette, and the correlation between lung cancer and cigarettes needs a fully understandable cause. That's how the industry slipped by for years.
Likewise, most European countries do not fluoridate their water and the correlation doesn't seem to show any significant difference in dental health. The anti-fluoride people state these numbers, and then go and use the same bad logical to attribute fluoride to a host of ailments that are loosely correlated without any causation links.
Can fluoride in water lead to osteoporosis in older adults? Well we don't know, and these types of studies are very difficult to conduct because there are tons of variables. Many people drink from a combination of fluoridated and non-fluoridated water supplies and beverages throughout their lives. People move in and out of municipalities with different water treatment techniques. People have different intakes for calcium, iron, fibre, carbs throughout their entire lives. People have different genetics. When it comes to long term toxicity, it's really difficult to narrow down factors because you can't control for everything (ethically) and humans can live a long time.
It would make sense for at least some percentage of the population to have adverse reaction to Glyphosate. We all have slight genetic differences and reactions. Can it lead to specific cancers in humans consistently? Do we understand the mechanism by which it does this chemically? Can we replicate this in other animals where we control for other factors.
Just like the tobacco industry, I wouldn't put it past Monsanto to both bury and make up studies to suit their interests.
> Likewise, most European countries do not fluoridate their water and the correlation doesn't seem to show any significant difference in dental health.
Just to expand on this point a book: In Germany you buy fluoridated salt (you can also buy non fluoridated salt, you have the choice, no idea why you would do that though). Children and people with dental problems also can get fluoridated toothpaste.
I think this fluoridation thing is a non-issue in Germany, never heard anyone talk about it at least . Also I think the salt solution is a lot more elegant than the tap water one in the US.
To play devils advocate.. we will never prove if smoking truly cause cancer, unless we go back in time and look at the same person in the same circumstances only that he/she never smoked.
And in all seriousness, my grandmother smoked all her life, from age of 16 all the way till she died at 103 due to Alzheimer. Her lungs were as gold as it gets!
She lived to be 103 and has Alzheimer's. Does it matter? Plus, at that age and frailty, lots of things could have killed her that a younger person would survive.
I'm not trying to be insensitive to your grand mothers death but you're claiming she smoked forever and had great lungs, sans evidence except that she died late. That's evidence but it's anecdotal as hell.
One important reasons for robotics is to reduce/eliminate the use of pesticides. After all we use weed killed because it's cheaper than weeding by hand.
Regardless of whether Glyphosate is toxic to humans or not, it kills the rhizome (fungi and other ecology around the roots), drying the soil and making it less productive. Robots will not only avoid this problem but support the planting of complementary crops.
While I'm not against robots per se, I do wonder why "working the fields" cannot be made a good job for humans?
Without this job I foresee several potential problems: large unemployment, people leaving the countryside, many low paying jobs that feel meaningless to the workers.
> I do wonder why "working the fields" cannot be made a good job for humans
It would make food expensive again. As of 2010, 1.6% of American and 14% of the world's workers worked in agriculture [1]. As recently as 1870, that figure for the United States was almost 50% [2]. Most of us prefer today's standard of living.
> "working the fields" cannot be made a good job for humans
Manual farm labour is extremely hard work, "stoop" labour causes back conditions, and man+machine agricultural labour has a history of accidents.
People already have left the countryside in the West; farming is a few % of the population, plus seasonal immigrant/guest workers.
I'm quite happy to be on this side of the agricultural revolution and increase the automation in farming. If we want meaningful jobs, we have to address the question of "meaning" directly, in the context of the society we wish to have.
Dunno but to me "working the fields" is more meaningful then being the marketing dude for some shitty consumer brands that cause more harm then good to the general population (yet because of the amazing marketing apparatus sell like hot cakes).
Now if only the wage gap between the two jobs was not that big, I think many more people would realize this and be willing to do the hard labour of working the fields.
It's not legal for sale in New York, mostly because of false advertising the company previously did touting it's biodegradability, even going so far as to say that it's "practically non-toxic".
Unfortunately all that may come of that lawsuit is a small label change...
It pains me to see so many people here supporting the company, especially from a group usually so ready to expose the faults of big corporations. You know, being a "hacker" and caring about the environment and the health of our planet and it's inhabitants are not mutually exclusive.
It's a recent trend in many niche (but maybe somehow influential ?) social networks like HN or some subreddits. Controversial big players are having more and more supportive comments, despite previously being famous for dubious proven activities.
It wasn't like that at the beginning. I tend to put my tinfoil hat on when I think about what could have caused it.
I chalk it up to the fact that Silicon Valley companies have now reached the scale where they have reached the same level of public scrutiny and manufactured disdain by the media. I worked at a tech company in the valley that has gotten a lot of negative attention. Some criticism was deserved but a lot of stuff was blown completely out of proportion to the point where people believed outright falsehoods and these people would fuel the fire of negative criticism of the company I worked for. Being on the inside, I could see how much was well deserved criticism and how much were lies.
With that in mind, I think Monsanto deserves criticism, but I also maintain as healthy a skepticism of the of the critics claim of danger as monsantos claim of safety.
Because of this I've often found myself trying to explore the contrarian side if I feel one side has become excessively hyperbolic.
With all that said, I'm sure I'm not alone in having this experience and that others explore this contrarian angle for the same reason.
I would also add that in this thread, I find seeing strong arguments on both sides refreshing. It provides a broad range of aspects to consider for and against its usage and challenges me to do my own research to determine the veracity of the claims on both sides.
This is exactly it, for me. Having grown up in farm country, I know that Monsanto is just one of many similar players in the game, yet only Monsanto gets the criticism. Apple bore the brunt of media narratives on Chinese working conditions, but a small amount of poking shows a whole host of tech companies with identical or worse practices.
It's a symbol of an entire industry, and the disconnect between the media narrative and the reality is large.
People are uncomfortable with how little they know about their food sources, just as they are uncomfortable about how technology is changing their lives. This sells a good story. There's some truth to parts of the narrative, but at the end of the day if there's a bunch of articles on that narrative, the most accurate one is not likely to be the most read, the most read will be the one with the largest reach by its headline hook and the one that prompts people to share it the most.
Being a "hacker" also means looking at nitty gritty details and looking past shitty coverage by non-experts written for non-experts.
Monsanto has its fair share of ethical concerns but the ones that people always accuse it of are generally absolute BS. It's as if someone said "oh obviously never use insertion sort because it's n^2" - no, there's a reason timsort cuts over to insertion sort at n=5.
“We would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak,” Mr. Heydens wrote, citing a previous instance in which he said the company had done this.
I was going to post this exact same quote. It is in my clipboard.
Controversial note: When politicians talk about defunding the EPA, people get upset. When the EPA pulls stunts like this, it makes you question their purpose. Seriously, why have regulators that "tip off" the very companies that they are supposed to be regulating?
As a youngster I used to work PT while I was at Uni back in the 80's, taking care of a semi-rural parkland spread over 200 square miles. Every Spring, our workload would increase, slashing, clearing of weeds and blackberries. So Round-up was used. I told the boss no and refused to use it. The pesticide would be measured then added to the spray packs and the blokes would hand spray what ever needed to be knocked down. When they would slightly bend over, the air-relief valve would spit the spray out over their bare necks. After work was done they'd complain of dizziness.
Whenever I read about Monsanto now, I also think about Michael White and his fight to sell seed, [0] after a neighbour accidentally contaminating it with ^round-up ready^ seed. [1],[2]
"He actually admitted to knowingly planting, producing, saving, cleaning and selling Roundup Ready soybeans illegally. All of this information is available in court documents."
No part of that is accidental.
All Monsanto's behavior amounts to is glaring flaws in our patent system. Every single time I see claims of "big corporate bully" it's always the little guy who's in the wrong, at least according to the law.
Maybe because most of their track record is just really bad PR and most people just fall for the big evil corporation line without ever fact checking claims?
You mean we should fact check the unsealed emails?
Let me quote one of the more explicit parts of the article:
> Court records show that Monsanto was tipped off to the determination by a deputy division director at the E.P.A., Jess Rowland, months beforehand. That led the company to prepare a public relations assault on the finding well in advance of its publication. Monsanto executives, in their internal email traffic, also said Mr. Rowland had promised to beat back an effort by the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct its own review.
> Dan Jenkins, a Monsanto executive, said in an email in 2015 that Mr. Rowland, referring to the other agency’s potential review, had told him, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.” The review never took place. In another email, Mr. Jenkins noted to a colleague that Mr. Rowland was planning to retire and said he “could be useful as we move forward with ongoing glyphosate defense.”
For me, this qualifies as 'big evil corporation' behavior.
[edited: formatting]
That doesn't make them automatically guilty of every evil thing people tend to pin on them.
By all means, let's hold them accountable for the evil they've provably done, but the oft-repeated "they sued a guy who had seeds wind up on his field" is throughly debunked.
(in case you're wondering about the name: in a nutshell, "science-based medicine" is the position that "evidence-based medicine" is an insufficient rejection of quackery because it leads to a lot of effort being misspent on finding "evidence" to support scientifically implausible and already-debunked treatments and theories)
> (in case you're wondering about the name: in a nutshell, "science-based medicine" is the position that "evidence-based medicine" is an insufficient rejection of quackery because it leads to a lot of effort being misspent on finding "evidence" to support scientifically implausible and already-debunked treatments and theories)
Sorry if this is a common objection, but my first reaction to this is, there's lots of people that reject the word "science" (today's anti-intellectualism), but they're okay with the word "evidence". So even if "science-based" is better, on the surface a lot of people will instantly have a negative reaction to the name.
Related topic: In the eternal and tiresome dispute between religious Creationists and modern science, a favorite talking point is that "it's only a theory!" As a result, some science-minded people are proposing that scientists adopt a different word to substitute for the "tainted" word "theory," whose colloquial meaning differs from that in a professional scientific context.
Me, I think this is a terrible idea. I fiercely resist having my (or anyone's) use of vocabulary directed to accommodate ignorant people. I can see only losing battles in that direction.
The skull and cross bones on the label was bad enough but seeing what even the smallest of drops did to plants was an eye opener. A droplet small enough to blow 30 feet in the air was enough to make a yellow spot on any plant it landed on.
Pesticide also increases the risk of getting Diabetics. Here is a meta study
"After reviewing 21 previous studies, researchers found exposure to any type of pesticide was associated with a 61 percent increased risk for any type of diabetes. The increased risk for type 2 diabetes -- the most common type -- was 64 percent, the investigators found."
http://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20150916/pesticide-exposu...
The article you linked isn't very descriptive. Can you find the actual publication?
The article also seems a little contradictory. It opens with the line, "After reviewing 21 previous studies, researchers found exposure to any type of pesticide was associated with a 61 percent increased risk for any type of diabetes", then later states, "The following chemicals were linked to an increased risk of diabetes, according to the researchers: chlordane, oxychlordane, trans-nonachlor, DDT, DDE, dieldrin, heptachlor and HCB." There are lots of pesticides not in that list, including glyphosate. In addition, HCB and DDT are already banned in most places, and the others are considered toxic. The original research might shed some light on this.
I wouldnt drink a glass somebody with a clear agenda gave me. Who knows what else they would have laced it with. Man throws up after ingesting glyphosate is a great title too if they put anything in it to make me vomit.
Or it might just not be wise to drink so much so quickly: man refuse to drink 20 gallons of water, could it be cancerous?
That's an acutely toxic simple anion (CN-), in random things like e.g. apple or peach seeds (#evolution) and commonly byproduct of breaking down more complex atoms.
Versus C3H8NO5P (with additives to multiply the effectiveness), which sounds less inherently safe...
Except two of those numbers are off by three orders of magnitude. Caffeine's LD50 is 150-200 milligram/kg, Glyphosate is at 2-5.6g/kg (in rats). These numbers are completely meaningless, though, because LD50 is not the correct measure of toxicity unless you plan on drinking the stuff. The concerns are about the effects of pesticides on the body, not literally dying from the poisonous effects of pesticide. Salt is at around 3g/kg.
Lithium ion batteries are pretty much 'safe to eat'^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H non-toxic (Edit: NOT safe to eat, as discussed below) (compared with lead-acid or nickel-cadmium batteries)... but I still wouldn't actually eat one.
Button batteries are a real risk for kids. They have died eating them. For any parent out there it's scary, button batteries are pretty common and look like a sweet or something.
That's a terrible story. :( And a timely reminder that 'non-toxic' doesn't mean 'edible'.
It seems like a heartless nitpick but the reason button cells are dangerous is because they're batteries, not because of their constituent chemicals. The electric current they generate electrolyzes water producing highly corrosive hydroxide. A running blender isn't poisonous either, but you wouldn't eat one.
So if I remember the discussion on this article when it was going around, the roundup they had wasn't pure glyphosate. They sometimes mix it with other stuff, especially the off the shelf stuff for lawns. You can drink pure glyphosate and survive (I wouldn't recommend it, though.) It's been tested on animals many times. It's not like some mystery substance that's never been tested.
The funny thing is we have less herbicides because of Roundup. The option is we starve the world, because we will not be able to product enough wheat etc. or we use stronger herbicides.
There is actually another option -- especially with respect to herbicides: manual labour. Herbicides don't increase yield. They decrease cost.
Wheat is currently $4.35 a bushel. A bushel of wheat is about 60 lbs. So, we're paying just over 7 cents a pound for wheat.
Fix the distribution side, not the production side. There's a lot more fat there. And in the mean time, research ways of reducing labour on physical methods of weed control.
Have you ever been on a wheat farm? I actually have been and even got to help around the farm for fun.
My friend had 4.5 squares. That is a square equals 1 square mile. How would we increase labor for weed control?
I also lived in Imperial Valley, California. The back breaking work that the migrant workers did was amazing difficult. It would take double or triple the workers to pick through and weed a farm then pick fruits and vegetables. I don't think Kansas nor Manitoba have the population to do that seasonal work.
There are mechanical ways to fight weeds. You'd have to use the tractor and appropriate tools on the field a lot more, and you may end up to have to stop growing just one crop all years but instead cycle between different crops.
That's how it used to be done way back in the day, but what about the growing pressure to get away from disturbing the soil entirely? I even recall a Minute Earth[1] video, of all places, pressuring us to move towards no-till practices, which relies on herbicides. It seems we're getting some mixed messages.
A drone does a fly past mapping the field, then cockroach-sized robots crawl the field locating and cutting weed roots with mechanical jaws. A spike-footed walker then vacuums up the loose weeds and feeds turn to a digester that makes the fuel to run the robots ... simples!
I grew up in Winnipeg. :-) Weeding and the like is considerably less "back breaking" than most of the manual labour we have now (like house painting, window washing, road construction, etc). I've harvested rice by hand (cutting with a hand sickle). It's fun.
In North America, we build these huge farms because it's the only way to eke out a profit. You need serious capital to get started and you have a single person looking after land from one horizon to the other. This happens because the price of wheat is $4 and change a bushel.
And although milk production is often below cost, because of regulatory pressures distribution costs are kept low. Compared to wheat, milk is dramatically more difficult to process and distribute, and yet the markup is many times less. If you look at the difference, you can see where all the money is going.
I suggest that you can increase the cost of production of wheat 8-10 times without significantly affecting the final price. This would allow you to have 5 times as many farmers. It would allow them to use smaller, less expensive equipment. It would allow them to reduce their reliance on loans and insurance, further reducing their costs.
And, yes, we have more than enough labour as long as we pay people a reasonable wage. In my father's generation, university students all used to work on the farms for their summer jobs. Now? Pizza Pizza. The whole reason we have "summer vacation" is so that students could work on the farms.
I live in rural Japan now. I literally live smack dab in the middle of rice fields. Because of the protectionist policies for the last 60 years (installed by the Americans, BTW), farming here is dramatically different. A farm here can be about the size of a residential lot in North America. And... guess what? None of my neighbours use herbicide on their fields. 2 applications of pesticide a year (once in the spring for slugs/snails, once a few weeks before harvesting for grasshoppers -- some of the farmers have been growing an early variety lately and so are able to get the rice off the field before the grasshoppers emerge, so they skip the second application. Some skip the first application by over-planting and then thinning -- by hand!).
And for those interested, they do have amazing planters and harvesters. A couple of guys use traditional tractors, but they make an absolute mess of the fields. Most people use these tiny go-cart like devices. You can plant a field in less than an hour and it barely disturbs the soil at all. It's amazing. They have another device that cuts and bundles the rice stalks, but everybody hangs and dries their rice by hand. Then they load it up into pickup trucks and thresh it at a central location.
Is my hope that we can fix the distribution system, inject cash back into farms, reduce farm size and increase the number of people working on farms realistic? I seriously doubt it. But I still think that it's important to understand that this is a problem of our own making. This is about money, not about science.
In dry parts of the world herbicide use can significantly increase yield. Where I live in Australia a lot of broad-acre farming is "no-till". A field is seeded directly into stubble of the previous crop without mechanical tilling or weeding. Avoiding turning the soil retains moisture and stops top-soil blowing away. We recently had a fire come through near where I live and farmers were remarking they "hadn't seen their soil in years", and were concerned about losing the soil and moisture advantage they had gained over the years. Herbicide use is certainly not just a labor saver, it does open up different ways of farming.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I think the use of herbicide in no-till farming is to kill the cover crop before you plant. There are several other ways to do it. The way they do it in SE asia is that they grow a cover crop that mats together. You can think of it a bit like a lawn, where the roots and runners of the grass forms a sward. With a knife, you can pull up the mat by hand. This achieves the same result without the herbicide.
There is also some research for devices that will work. One way is to disc the cover crop. This is reasonably effective, apparently. Another thing I've seen is a device that kind of rakes the cover crop without disturbing it -- a bit like the manual method.
Finally, you don't necessarily have to kill the cover crop, depending on what it is (and depending on your crop). You can disc where you intend to plant, or you can even just drill to plan the seeds. The is apparently very effective in dry soil rice production in the southern US, but I haven't really been following it.
Finally, one of the techniques that's popular here in Japan is to grow a clover cover crop in the winter, but then cover it with the stalks of last year's rice. Then when you harvest the rice, you move the decomposing stalks back where you intend to plan and resow clover again. This has the advantage of reducing fertilisation use.
Assume the option of substituting manual labor for Roundup was feasible it's quite probable many more people would die of skin cancer from being in the sun or snakebites or hoe accidents or car wrecks on the way out to the field than currently die from Roundup.
I love the environment and nature but sometimes we cause bigger problems trying to solve smaller problems. And pay extra to do so.
I've personally looked into some of these things, and have read quite a few warnings about both salt and vinegar. Improperly used, they can ruin the soil and render it barren. I'm not sure of the truth of this, but it was enough to make me just use manual labor at home (in other words, my garden was half weeds since I rarely did it). The larger the scale of application, however, the worse they seem to perform. [1] Salt, interestingly enough, still requires some protection so you aren't inahling it nor getting it in your eyes. [2]
Just because things are natural or traditional doesn't make them necessarily better than the chemicals we are dealing with now, even with their present downsides.
My dad died because of roundup. He was a physics prof, smart guy, fought hard for wetland issues. Was on the board of Wisconsin Wetlands.
He didn't drink, didn't smoke, he was very active, very fit, and yet he got cancer. I can feel the down votes coming, but he was a guy that just should not have gotten cancer.
Roundup gave him cancer. I could tell you stories about him dieing that would be not so fun.
Fuck cancer and fuck roundup hard.
Edit: he and my mom fought invasive species and they used roundup. So maybe that's on them. That's why he got cancer.
I'm very sorry for your loss. But as a cancer researcher, I can fairly confidently say that glyphosate had nothing to do with your father's death. There just isn't any evidence showing that it has direct mutagenic activity or even other indirect biological influences on the probability of developing cancer. I've also lost several fit, active nonsmoking friends and family to cancer. Our cells copy themselves imperfectly, and sometimes our inborn regulatory mechanisms go awry. There's not always a "cause", beyond the fact that our bodies aren't built to a perfect spec. There's a massive amount of work going on these days to develop entirely new classes of treatments, so I hope the clinical situation in a few decades will be brighter by far. Again, sorry for your loss.
It was my understanding that while the IARC classification of glyphosate as a carcinogen has been disputed, exposure has been shown to increase the risk of melanoma, especially in occupational contexts:
That's a terrible paper. This is a small epidemiological study where they're looking both at 1. exposure to sun and 2. occupational exposure to -any- herbicides/pesticides/fungacides/insecticides (not just glyphosate) and trying to pull out odds ratios of melanoma risk. Outdoor work definitely increases melanoma risk, but I wouldn't try to pull out much more than that from this paper!
He didn't really clarify anything though, just gave his opinion on evidence that he said didn't exist just a comment before.
You could have given any of the other studies that warn against roundup and people will always find something wrong with the study. When people make up their minds about this stuff they stop looking at it objectively.
I can understand this is a very strong belief that you hold, but it's the same kind of story that was used to link vaccines and autism. In the middle ages, similar appearingly non-random connections were used to convict people of witchcraft.
Lots of people get cancer. In many cases, without having any obvious risk factors. Non-smokers still get lung cancer, for example. Human beings have an amazing ability to notice correlations, to make connections. It's an adaptation that has been hugely advantageous to us as a species, but sometimes it causes us to see correlation where the underlying evidence is not very good.
That's not to say that Roundup didn't give your dad cancer. Maybe it did, but science requires more evidence than anecdotes.
But how do you know it was because of Roundup? Just because they used Roundup does not necessarily mean that that's what caused the cancer, even if Roundup's ingredients are carcinogenic. So how are you so certain it was the Roundup?
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of enough evidence in the universe to be come to that conclusion.
Statistically speaking the odds are very high that it was something else because so many things cause cancer.
It's safe to assume that roundup causes less than 50% of cancer deaths (it's probably much lower), which means that most likely it wasn't roundup. Even if it was shown to be worse than tobacco, it's still a long way from being the likely culprit. Tobacco is the single worst thing, so we are very aware of it. It 'only' causes 30% of deaths, but that has mobilized governments around the world to curb its use.
So all the nay sayers are right, I can't prove it was roundup. But the cancer he got was the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma not some unrelated cancer from sun exposure.
His side of the family is cancer free going back generations. And they lived well into their 90's. One of my great uncle's made it to 103 or 104 (I think, I know it was over a hundred because I remember the fuss, I was very young). My dad was diagnosed at 75 and died the same year.
I can't prove anything, I'm a programmer not a cancer researcher. He was the guy who was convinced it was roundup, he was 100% mentally after the diagnosis and did tons of research trying to figure out what could have caused the cancer. He was baffled by getting cancer, nobody in his family got cancer and he had no bad habits that could have lead to this. So maybe he talked himself into it, I dunno. What I do know is he had nothing else in his history that he found, all he found was roundup.
If someone can show that there is zero connection between roundup and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma then I have no idea what caused the cancer. But if you google non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and roundup you'll see the lawyers lining up to sue. Are all those lawsuits imaginary? Usually the lawyers don't get involved in those sorts of numbers unless they think they are going to win.
I'm so sorry your dad died, I'm with you on the roundup, very nasty stuff and a nasty company lobbying/suppressing any claims that say otherwise. I worked with it for many years myself until I left the industry.
I was diagnosed with a brain tumor recently, I wasn't surprised to say the least. Won't get much of a two sided argument on HN about this unfortunately. It's interesting to see the usual anti-big-corporation crowd on HN and Reddit stick up for Monsanto. I guess when a message gets pushed hard enough the crowd follows.
I'm not sure it's crowd following in this case though.
For us (who are supposed to be objective) it shouldn't be a case of who we like or don't like or big evil corporations (which Monsanto well indeed may be, not arguing that point) but rather the objective evidence. And as far as I'm aware glyphosate objectively isn't very harmful to mammals.
It's a substituted amino acid. As opposed to something like paraquat which breaks cell membranes and generally is toxic to pretty much all biological forms.
In the US, the alternative to this would be to consume organic produce. However, most people don't realize that organic produce still uses plenty of, if not more pesticides than traditional production methods; they just use organic pesticides.
I wonder which is worse: highly mechanized, high efficiency, and low volume synthetic pesticides in traditional production methods - or low efficiency, high volume natural pesticides in organic production methods.
Organic makes a totally unscientific distinction between synthetic and naturally-occurring substances. It's also a huge, and hugely profitable industry that lobbies effectively to prevent research funding into the safety of the substances it allows, and essentially exploits food privilege and scientific illiteracy.
Organic-permitted pesticides tend to be massively over-applied, and can be unbelievably toxic to a degree that would never be allowed for modern synthetic pesticides. Rotenone for example is horrenously toxic to aquatic life, but permitted in organic agriculture with litte regard for the ecological outcomes. Simple copper and sulphur compounds that are broadly toxic are permitted as fungicides in organic agriculture, but can also persist for a long time in the environment and cause serious ecological damage.
Where's your source that indicates organic pesticides are "low efficiency, high volume" Would love to read more about this as it may effect my purchasing decisions.
The 'ghostwriting' refers to a position paper that Monsanto had a choice to either outsource to a number of outside experts at significant cost, or to write themselves, acknowledging the contributions of academics who wrote source material and/or would edit and review the document. And they only intended to do this for sections of the paper that were considered uncontroversial in the scientific community, with direct authorship in sections dealing with matters of contention.
It generally seems to be the case that most all stories of this nature are overreaching considerably by taking juicy sounding quotes out of context. It's remarkably analogous to the Climategate 'scandal' on close examination.
Having held my mothers hand as she received chemo for her Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma I can tell you this... if there is a even a tiny chance using Roundup increases the risk of the disease it isn't worth it.
This is a difficult position to maintain when we promote many activities that kill many people every day (e.g., driving). Sometimes the profound benefits of certain activities are worth the the "tiny chance" of downside risk. Whether this is one of those is up for debate, but it doesn't seem you're attributing any value to using glyphosate, which there doubtless is some.
There are lots of other things that have much higher chance of causing cancer. Almost everything is carcinogenic, so if you start living by that argument, Roundup is not high on the list at all.
For instance, drinking beer or wine. Alcohol is known to be carcinogenic for certain whereas with Roundup we're still talking about that tiny chance. There's always a tiny chance that a molecule from car exhaust or microparticle from a rail increases the risk of cancer, so will you say that the risk of being in a proximity of a car or a bus or a train isn't worth it?
It is important to be able to put things into context and assess the orders of magnitude. Things like beer are for certain a much bigger cancer risk than Roundup, not to mention tobacco. Still, there is much more talk about banning Roundup than beer.
I just doused my yard with Roundup to get rid of the vast amounts of weeds and vegetation. I have to say, it did a fantastic job. What does this mean about the soil though, is it totally fucked now?
Glyphosate breaks down pretty quickly. One of the debates about it is how quickly this actually happens, namely in the context of over-application, but in any case it's pretty quick. The low environmental persistence is one of the major selling points.
After a couple months, chances are even a very sensitive assay wouldn't be able to detect it in your lawn. As a one-off use, I don't think there's even a marginally compelling argument that it's dangerous.
More advancements in computational biology and genetics will allow us to more precisely determine the effects of glyphosate on public health. Until we have better tools, there isn't enough evidence to make a judgment against Monsanto. However, the moment we are able to make the connection between poor agricultural practices and damages to health, a multi-billion dollar industry will be created for lawyers, and they will hold these companies acccountable.
Roundup usage has been so ubiquitous for decades now so this is very worrying. I am much more concerned with Monsanto's GM food patents/diminishing biodiversity/pollution threat than this. I have no issue with GM science btw. NONE. (re:'GMO safety /mutant food nonsense') I wonder if this is a sly segway from Monsanto. Given a choice between Monsanto Roundup everywhere and Monsanto GM everywhere I'll take the former.
Also, try growing a vegetable or two for yourself and don't use synthetic fertilizer or weed killers when doing so. Nothing can beat something you grew yourself! Growing herbs on a window sill is an easy way to start.
Roundup has to be treated as if it were radioactive. I carefully sprayed only one dandelion in my lawn with roundup. Over a few weeks, the roundup spread and destroyed about a 5 foot radius of lawn.
Wilful misunderstanding of the research in the field? Or is it a gut reaction that spurs them into alternatives, based on a pretty meaningless label, which have no real proven health benefit? Perhaps it's the easy narrative of painting an entirely normal company as evil because they're messing with forces best left alone.
boric acid is an interesting one. it has a significant level of toxicity for kidneys. they use a lot of boric acid in that common residential attic insulation made from shredded post-consumer paper.
1. Glyphosate (roundup) use is two orders of magnitude higher than originally approved.
2. Due to the emergence of glyphosate-resistant weeds, the dosage has been increased substantially.
3. It is now also usually combined with other compounds to increase effectiveness, which affects how it breaks down and affects both the food and environment.
4. It is now also used for 'green burndown'. To help dessicate the crop. AKA they use it to kills crops to speed harvest, resulting in significantly elevated levels in your food.
Start with the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
Go on to a letter of concern published in the journal of Environmental Health signed by 14 experts in the field. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26883814
Realize that little to gain from raising these concerns, while there are many wealthy parties with vested interests in not finding these results. There's little funding behind this. Governing bodies (e.g. in Germany) are still relying on findings from labs with clear conflicts of interest.