There is a three month old article on a web based platform from Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, called Prince George (PG) CITIZEN, that claims Moose living in the nearby forests are dying in large numbers from starvation, and the reason is suspected to be herbicide spray.
The article does not spell out glyphosate, but it implies it, from my point of view.
There is a long chain or correspondence under that article, with some arguing in favour of the use of glyphosate and commenting that the opponents of herbicide spray are just being unreasonable, unscientific, with a knee-jerk reaction against herbicides. A lot of others are countering that, and are apparently opposed to the idea of using herbicides over prairies, grasslands and forests. The article got shared by someone on Facebook and thus it came to my notice.
I posted the following long comment in that discussion chain, where it has not appeared yet and is presumably waiting for approval of the admin. I am copying it here, as I believe it deserves to be on record that can be traced back in later years.
Here is what I wrote.
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Glyphosate was first approved by Health Canada in the 1970s for agriculture. It saw Monsanto’s test results on lab animals subjected to measured dose of glyphosate in their feed, based on which our government is presumed to have concluded that glyphosate was safe to be in animal food in small doses, and hence approved its controlled use in Canadian agriculture.
However, the Government has kept those safety test data and reports hidden from the public till date, forty plus years running. This non-disclosure of the safety data, irrespective of whatever agreement the government made with the herbicide promoter, makes approval of glyphosate in Canada to be constitutionally illegal in my view. And yet, the Government hides the data and the use of glyphosate continues.
Now, regarding spraying over the forests.
It is under jurisdiction of provincial Governments to allow or disallow any use of herbicides over crown forests. I have had several freedom of information act applications with the British Columbian Ministry of Forest Management as well as Environment in an effort to discover a few facts such as:
1) could I have a copy of whatever evidence the BC government saw that spraying glyphosate over our forests was safe for our environment and biodiversity before it allowed glyphosate to be sprayed, and
2) could I have the records of how much glyphosate has been sprayed over our BC forests, year upon year, from the first year of application till date.
I got reasonably candid responses back.
A) The BC government has seen no evidence whatsoever, if glyphosate is at all safe for our forests, on the grounds that the chemical was already approved by Ottawa. This despite the fact that Ottawa approved it only for controlled application in agriculture and that Ottawa has never disclosed the data that was supposed to prove glyphosate to be safe for any living organism.
B) The BC Government does not have the data on how much glyphosate has ben applied by the logging firms over the years, and if I paid the BC Government several thousand dollars (because answering my question requires more than 5 man-hour labour by the government official that my freedom of information act allows me), then the BC government would ask around to all the logging firms if they kept those records, and then collect them, compile them, and then prepare an answer for me. I refused to pay those extra dollars, and I got only what the BC government had – which is small amounts of glyphosate applied by backpack carrying persons on small bushes and weeds at the edge of forests here and there, which was organized by local municipalities etc and not the aerial spray directly over forests as arranged by logging corporations.
Glyphosate is a mimic of glycine. Glycine is the most common (most prevalent) of all the twenty one amino acids that make up all the proteins of the entire living world, from a bacteria to a whale and includes all proteins in humans, plants and wildlife.
Animals and plants are constantly producing more proteins to replace old ones, and even more of them when the plant or the animal is young and growing fast. Our biology does not know how to distinguish glyphosate from glycine, mainly because glyphosate was not around in nature in the long history of evolution of life on earth, and is a synthetic chemical invented two generations ago. Therefore, with glyphosate in the food, creatures pick it up in place of glycine, and mis-incorporate them into newly formed proteins. These plant and animal proteins, with glyphosate in place of glycine, do not work as intended. The proteins become rogue protein and can trigger a cascading series of diseases, many of which are synthetic ones that did not exist before.
All this has been already investigated and reported including in peer reviewed journals.
Canada has not conducted any such investigation on safety of glyphosate. Any scientist in Canada that wishes to look into how glyphosate works on in biology of the plant and animal kingdom, is usually fired or made to shut up. As a result, Canada is in essence similar to a third world country where mass poisoning of the land and the people is a politically accepted practice to allow profit to foreign corporations.
Welcome to Canada.
Here is another post from Facebook that might deserve to be stored. 1st July 2018
Canada has a long history of poisoning the land and its people. Glyphosate was introduced into Canada soon after it was approved in the US. We are talking about mid 1970s.
I was personally instrumental in raising hell through a sympathetic MP in the Canadian parliament for testing all foods for glyphosate – something no country was doing. Eventually it resulted CFIA ordering over 8000 tests covering over 3000 food samples collected in Canada but originating in 68 countries.
I obtained a copy of all those test results from Health Canada and analyses them. It proved that North America produces far and away the most poisonous foods of all, and within North America, Canada produces measurably more toxic foods than even the US. Its all in the book.
Available at Amazon stores
I have sent nearly 25,000 signatures demanding that Canada discloses the hitherto hidden safety test documents from Monsanto that it saw back in 1970s before approving glyphosate, and has since kept out of reach of the public. This alone makes approval of glyphosate illegal in my view. Even 25,000 signatures did not move Justin Trudeau.
I have now changed to going after elected politicians that collaborate with the pesticide pedlars and allow mass poisoning of the people.
Canada started growing huge quantity of red lentil (masoor daal) recently, in order to export to India. That daal is toxic like hell, and Indians are getting mass poisoned through it, apart from a runaway increase in use of glyphosate everywhere in India, under the radar, from Kanyakumari to the Himalayas.
Meanwhile in Canada, wildlife is facing immediate extinction, thanks to glyphosate spray over grasslands, prairies and forests.
Welcome to Canada.
Storing these bits and pieces of my social media posts, so one day they might be retrieved and included in my book – Lonely Road, a journal of a food security activist.