Monthly Archives: July 2018

Glyphosate-India part II

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Are young tea or alcohol drinkers likely to face early cancer or liver damage from Glyphosate?

If we are getting poisoned by glyphosate, which of our food and drinks are likely to affect us faster ?

If we are getting poisoned by glyphosate, which of our food and drinks are likely to affect us faster ? I CFIA tested thousands and thousands of foods for glyphosate, where I had a role to play. But Canada did not test tea or coffee or alcohol, since these were not considered food and my drive was to test food.

Separate small scale testing has been done on beverages. There is a test of wines done by Zen Honeycutt in the US, where she found glyphosate in most wines including wineyards that were organic or biodynamic ones. Then there is the test of various foods and a few tea brands, whose details are mentioned here. These too were just a handful of tests. These seemed to indicate that tea contains far more glyphosate than all other foods tested by the US team. There is separate comments on how glyphosate is to be expected in beer and whiskey etc, alcohol that are produced from wheat and rye, barley etc. I know that these desiccated grains have far more glyphosate than Roundup Ready soy and corn. So I would have expected glyphosate concentration to be high in these drinks, especially in products that used grains harvested after 2005 in North America, since pre harvest desiccation of grains started from that time.

But, I have not seen a comparative data on glyphosate concentration on all these drinks, i.e. tea, wine, beer and whiskey. Without seeing such comparative chart, and from what I have already seen, I suspect more non-alcoholic people, especially people from Asia, are getting poisoned from tea, where glyphosate is suspected to have entered from the 1980s. On top of this background, highly toxic lentils and pulses are now being imported from Canada, Australia etc without any testing if those levels of glyphosate are allowed in India, and more importantly, if India has ever checked on safety of glyphosate in seed crops by subjecting test animals to a dose of glyphosate proportional to their body weight. These two factors, tea and lentils, might be the first reasons for the epidemic of auto-immune diseases facing India right now, and which I suspect is going to swamp the nation in a decades time. ON top of these, we have a runaway use of glyphosate everywhere. It is omnipresent and ubiquitous in India.

My computer crashed last week, and is now with local Apple Service centre. I am using a backup unit, a 13 inch MacBook Air with much smaller hard drive and screen. I am not building up the programs and data from cloud and Time Machine backups.

Being in India for the last few months, my perspective on the subject has changed considerably. I have become less concerned about reaching out to the anti-GMO activist groups, or the media, and have gotten more interested on grassroots level activity going on under the radar. There are a to of things going on here, both good and bad.

Glyphosate is everywhere, with and without Monsanto. Public is unaware of it, its omni presence, or potential damage. Anti-GMO groups have their heads in the sand and blowing hot air from the wrong end. The people and wildlife are likely already facing a rising tsunami of health degradation. Some experts have predicted that conventional farming is going to collapse in India within the next two decades.

I personally feel the healthcare system and along with it much of the fabric of society is likely to also collapse from a tsunami of auto-immune disease.

One side of the discussion was initiated by me, trying to learn about salts of glyphosate and their water solubility and activity at the biological level when it gets into our stomach with the food. The other part was discussion relating to glyphosate’s ability to trigger cancer.

Obviously there are many kinds of cancer. We humans seem to have developed an elevated fear of cancer. If glyphosate kills you by liver or kidney failure or turning your brain into a cabbage, that is acceptable, as long as we do not die of cancer. This mentality has lifted the topic of if glyphosate can or cannot to trigger cancer to a high level of public visibility.

There are several studies and opinions on glyphosate’s carcinogenicity. I shall not go into much except a few comments:

  • WHO declared it to be probably carcinogenic
  • Another international group countered it
  • Sri Lanka banned it because it was killing some farm workers
  • Sri Lanka has since been internationally pressurised and forced to selectively allow glyphosate use in some areas such as rubber plantation and tea gardens.
  • There is a suspicion that tea garden workers in Sri Lanka are getting throat cancer due glyphosate.
  • Next door in India there is a news blanket on the Sri Lanka- Glyphosate story.
  • Independent study of tea in USA showed glyphosate concentration in all tea brands tested, and the level of concentration to be higher than all other food and beverages tested.
  • Another study found people drinking tea to have more glyphosate in their urine.

Sri Lanka as well as India tea gardens and rubber plantations are good cases to check what is going on with glyphosate. Glyphosate is regularly used in these areas for both countries. In India there seem to be no study or testing of health effects of glyphosate among agricultural workers. There is also almost no test 

Meanwhile, Excel Cropcare, a Mumbai based Indian firm that produces three kinds of glyphosate and is a major producer of glyphosate, has been taken over by Japanese multinational Sumitomo Chemicals.

Not just that, but it was declared that the new management would open up 30% of its shares for public to pick up. Its shares have skyrocketed.

Back in 2011 its share was valued at Rs 150. This year it has reached Rx 4,200 representing a 2800% rise in share value in 7 years. Share market advisory web sites are describing this share to be a hidden gem.

Considering glyphosate and a whole list of nasty biocides are part of the “Cropcare” products, I marvel at the idea of having the Indian public fund their own mass poisoning.

But the story does not end there. I am given to understand that India is one of the suppliers of glyphosate, legally and illegally, to Sri Lanka.

When Sri Lanka banned glyphosate after noting death from kidney failures of sugarcane workers, the ban was included in all areas and covered tea and rubber plantations.

Japan, a major importer of Lankan tea, has reportedly warned that a shift away from glyphosate to other alternatives is considered unsafe and as a result Japan is to ban import of Sri Lankan tea. There were various other financial pressures on the nation that resulted in Sri Lanka recently opening select sectors of its agriculture to use of Glyphosate.

Going back to tea drinking, could Asians, heavy drinkers of tea, be getting poisoned through tea? Could they have liver and other problems from drinking tea that is increasingly having glyphosate as tested in the US, but nobody is testing it in India?

Back to India, there are reports that the current crop of traditional farmers are leaving the profession. Their children want to study and get urban. Farming in India is going to be left to professionals, i.e. technology and chemical pushing firms.

I can begin to see the prediction from the ground that farming in India is going to face a collapse sometime within the next two decades. And that will be achieved largely by the money invested by a rising tide of upwardly mobile Indians.

I shall need some time to wrap my head around all the new things on the horizon. I shall likely not be alive to see the end of this transition, being 68 years old now. But the world is surely facing an extremely stark future, unless the opposite trend of going back to the soil wins over in the end.

Meanwhile, there is a good series of exchanges ongoing daily between Anthony Samsel, Judy Hoy, Stephanie Seneff, André Comeau, Thierry Vrain, Don Huber and myself. I am the only non-scientist in the group, but have benefitted enormously from learning of the intricacy of the issues involving glyphosate from them.

There are talks on how and if glyphosate by itself or with others can cause this or that disease. The item under discussion in the last two days involve near demise of wildlife in North America, from likely exposure to glyphosate and other biocides that come over in tiny quantities along with the weather fronts from agriculture belts over to forests.

According to wildlife scientist Judy Hoy, it is today extremely hard to find a single male white tail deer that does not suffer from damaged reproductive system involving visible abnormality in their scrotum and penis/sheath.

Judy Hoy says: “Specific new male reproductive malformations and consequent infertility were first observed on wild and domestic grazing animals on males born in 1995. The incidence rate on our study animal, white-tailed deer went up through 2001 and then remained at a prevalence for abnormal scrotum alone at between 65 an 70%. In 2014, the prevalence of malformed male genitalia (all of several different  documented birth defects of the scrotum and testes placement) went up to 80% and remained at approximately 80% since. When short penis sheath (micro-penis on human newborns0 is added, there are almost no completely normal male fawns now being born. It is extremely rare to observe a male deer, white-tailed deer or mule deer, with normally placed, normal length scrotum and testes and normal length penis sheath. Males of all other common grazing species that live in Montana and other western states have been documented with congenital male reproductive malformations.”

My question for India is – does this country have an equivalent of Judy Hoy, that has methodically tested wildlife for decades and has the data of possible similar effects on local wildlife? If the answer is a likely “no” (Judy is unique even in North America), then is it not high time that Indian educational institutes address this issue? Ask Judy to train field workers on how to measure and record wildlife, both alive and dead.

Part of the correspondence going around. This one was from me, the only non-scientist in the group.

Anthony Samsel said:Grapes for eating and for wine are contaminated with Glyphosate by absorption through the roots of the vines.  Grape juice and wines are contaminated this way because they use Glyphosate for weed control i9n the path rows and around the plants for weed and insect control.  No weeds less places for insects to hide.  This is also the case in orchards, nut groves and olive production too.
Grapes juice and wine products will have additional glyphosate added during production of grape juice and with wine after fermentation. Both end products are additionally contaminated from the glyphosate of the gelatins used in the fining process for product clarity.

The ongoing epidemic of auto-immune disease in India, I feel, may have strong link with mass glyphosate poisoning from imported dal as well as a runaway use of it everywhere, and total lack of control by the government, nor any kind of test on what it does to the planetary biology.

Comments like these from wildlife scienst Judy Hoy of Montana have gone into my blogs which are used as placeholders of rapidly flowing bits of information.

Later on they are to go into the book I amp writing, tentatively titled “Lonely Roads”. I have also been toying with the notion of an alternating title (or a subtitle) such as “Field notes of a food security activist”.

According to Judy Hoy, who has been studying, as well as performing autopsy on dead animals for several decades now, big game herbivore wildlife in North America is likely in its last generation before going extinct, all due to exposure to toxins, prime suspect of them being glyphosate due to its insidious ability to harm foetuses in womb, and because of the sheer volume of it being used every where.

IN North America, it gets into forests not just by spraying by logging corporations, but also from nearby agricultural fields along with movement of the weather front, and even as the fumes are picked up in rain and comes down later on nature.

Some years ago, Judy used to say that over 70% of the wild deer of Montana and nearby states have birth defects that will prevent them from producing a viable offspring for the next generation. Today she claims the figure is approaching 100%. The damage is not just in the reproductive system, though that one is easy to see visually on a dead animal. On a living one, the best indication might be to see the dispatch on upper and lower jaws.

Once a daed animal is cut open for autopsy, it is easy to see damage to internal organs from heart to vasculature to liver and many other parts. It is not a pretty picture.

Nobody I know of has been checking on wildlife quite the the way and to the extent that Judy has from North America. Therefore, we may not know if wildlife in other parts of the world, say in India, are also heading the same way.

This leaves an interesting question. How about domestic animals ? What is happening with them ? I need to engage Judy and others on that too.

Anthony Samsel suggested that I might want to test my urine to check if it is free of glyphosate or not, considering I am making effort to eat only organically grown rice and pulses for a while now. Its a good idea.

I shall still take time to wrap my head around all issues of Glyphosate in India, and have not touched the issues of politicians, although I have things to say, both good and bad about the system. Perhaps in another issue – part III, of India and Glyphosate series of articles.

Also there is still the issue of glyphosate’s ability to cause various kinds of cancer – liver cancer including Lymphoma and malignant Hemangioendotheliomas.

Those have to go into a future article – part III ?

Glyphosate & India – Part I

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A lot of updates are due, that perhaps deserve to be recorded, all to do with glyphosate.

Debal Deb at his Odisha farm

Most of it started thanks to Debal Deb inviting me to spend a week with him in iin his rice conservation farm in Odisha. I accepted the invitation and saw quite a few things, and not just his efforts in conserving some thousand five hundred kinds of folk rice. I saw the variety of crops that were grown to sustain soil health. I saw the wonderful home garden with papaya and other trees bearing unbelievable numbers of ripe fruits and the flock of wild birds that frequented the area. I saw how the nearby villagers were influenced. I also saw the near zero carbon footprint housing erected with sun baked bricks. And, I got to yap with Debal.

This followed up with me yapping and arguing with Debal and Martin Brown in the evenings, where I perhaps ended up describing some of the dangers involved in glyphosate getting itself mis-incorporated into humans and other proteins by mimicking glycine, one of the canonical amino acids and part of the 20 basic building blocks of life.

It was Debal that first convinced me to speak about glyphosate, covering what I had learned from Scientists like Anthony Samsel on one end, and what I ended up doing in Canada on the other. And that first talk has turned into a keystone event in India. It started a chain reaction that is even now triggering more events here and there, in urban as well as rural enclaves.

The group at my first talk arranged by Debal Deb at Kalipur on the 24th of February, 2018.

Although Bengal media is refusing to cover the glyphosate story till now, it has one way or another broken into mainstream media in India. First salvo was fired by reputed Delhi journalist Bharat Dogra on two papers covering Hindi and English. The first came out in Deshbandhu, followed by an English article on The Statesman.

My talk at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, arranged by Angshuman & Bhoomi Ka

But before that happened, Angshuman Das of Bhoomi Ka, Kolkata heard me talk at Debal’s study circle and invited me to speak again at their venue in Kolkata. And then he followed up with a trip to Delhi for me to make a presentation at the Gandhi Peace Foundation in the month of may, organised by Bhumi Ka Delhi. That opened a lot more doors, including a number of articles in mainstream media.

Hindi article by Bharat Dogra on Deshbandhu

The Statesman article, titled “Health hazards of imported pulses” is here.

Then came the cover page news on the bimonthly eco-magazine “Down to Earth” by Vibha Varshney, who had attended my presentation at Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi in the month of May. But she followed it up with further research on her part, especially do with the issue that imported lentils from Canada might be very toxic. She tried to get comments from relevant Government departments, where the people refused to comment. I guess the Government got to know, one way or another, that the cat has been belled.

Then there were more talks in Kolkata, influenced by Samar Bagchi, such as one at the Ashutosh Mukherji science foundation. The partial group picture below shows some of the attendants.

Then came my twin talk at Bhoomi College and Ragi Cana at Bangaluru as invited by Vishala Padmanabhan and assisted by Bhoomi College & Ananya Mehta.

The Bangaluru visit was, in more ways than one, a watershed event for me.

This was also the first time when I had a class of youngsters in the front rows of the audience.

I learned, directly and indirectly, of many of the issues involving conserving biodiversity, interactions with the government on legislations that involve or affect organic farmers, on petty ego and undercurrents of human emotions getting in the way of finding a common ground and reaching resolutions.

I found in Vishala a fresh face of emerging Indian eco-consciousness, that I found both impressive and very endearing. I found in her friend Ananya an equally committed worker bee. Then there was Seetha, the founder of Bhoomi College that invited me to stay in her compound for two days and arranged for eating unique organic vegetarian diets at their excellent facility.

This followed up by two wonderful articles on two issues of Deccan Chronicle by journalist S.N.V. Sudhir.

One was for the Telengana issue while the other was for Andhra Pradesh.

I was asked by Sabuj Mancha (সবুজ মঞ্চ) and Disha (দিশা) to deliver a talk on glyphosate on the 25th of July at 5 PM at 186A Kalikapur Road, Kolkata.

July 25 – Kalikapur Kolkata

This is the same place where I had earlier delivered my first talk in India on glyphosate, as requested by Debal Deb back in February 2018.

I put up the pdf file of that presentation on the web. It is not password protected. Some of the slides had action items where multiple images get on top of each other. Single pdf image of those slides can get confusing. However, the news articles are listed in this blog post, for all to see.

Around this time, I was also getting a lot of additional information relating to glyphosate, from my scientist friends back in the US and Canada. One such helpful person was wildlife scientist  Judy Hoy of Montana. She actually sent me the photograph that showed visibly noticeable birth defect in the jaws of an endangered species in India – the wild cattle called “gaur”. The picture was of a calf sitting on the ground next to a metal pan, and is presumed to be under care of humans, possibly an orphan, that had likely suffered a birth defect while still a foetus in its mothers womb, through glyphosate exposure.

This blog might appear to the reader as indication that the level of awareness on the dangers of glyphosate has been raised just a little bit since Debal first identified the need for speaking on this issue and its relevance.

Interestingly, the big honcho’s of India’s anti-GMO groups and their alliances are, not unlike in the west, mostly pre-occupied with themselves and their bubble of anti-GMO echo chamber, and give all the impression of themselves being genetically engineered to ignore all dangers of glyphosate, which is saturating the landscape, while keeping their vision fixed and fixated on GMO only, like deer caught in the headlights, or a rabbit caught in the gaze of a hypnotic snake. I am told that some of the megalomaniacs that form the core group of these associations have asked “what is the relevance (of glyphosate) for India?”.

Its like someone spending twenty years studying seven volumes of Ramayana and then asking if Sita might be Lord Rama’s father-in-law.

This however, is not typical an Indian evolution. It took me some years back in North America, to fully. understand this phenomenon. The first group of people that were self-occupied and fixated with GMO and refused to acknowledge the need to resist glyphosate, were the very anti-GMO and clean food activists I used to hang out with. They were the fist line of defence of the biotech industry. They were the flip side of the same coin. The whole shebang, from agro-chemical corporations, their shareholders, politicians as well as all these anti-GMO groups and talking heads, were all on the same side of the issue, all ensuring conservation and propagation of toxic food industry, but each carefully creating their own image and avatar and pretending to represent this or that group.

I have since been told that this is the very definition of “controlled opposition”.

However, my extended trip to India has also opened my eyes on encouraging issues and signs that I was not aware of before and would never have known if Debal did not ask me to speak up on glyphosate at Kalikapur, and if that did not somehow spread the news under the radar and out of sight, far into the rural heartland where the real India resides.

It has opened new doors and I have been fortunate to glimpse at remarkable groups of people that are, individually and in small groups, already come to the concluding that chemical free farming of heirloom crops, and staying as far away from glyphosate as possible, is not only the way to go, but was the main alternative to an ecocide that was already busy writing the epitaph for the living planet.

Having Udupi & dosa with Vishala and Ananya at Bangaluru on a Sunday morning.

In many ways, Vishala and Ananya of Bangaluru represent part of this grassroots movement that bypasses the mainstream everything, and represent a new face of India that I find hopeful.

Anupam Paul at his Agriculture Training Centre in Fulia, Dist of Nadia

There is also the story of Anshuman Das, Anupam Paul, Tathagata Das, Rabin Bannerjee, Devpriya Mukherjee, Sujit Mitra, Shamik Bannerjee, Abhra Chakraborti and many others that are all coming to parallel and similar conclusions about the future of food, environment and humanity, and are taking steps, within their individual means, to address this issue from multiple angles. I have been enriched by contact with them, and wish to highlight their own trials and efforts to push back at this massive global endeavour to destroy what needs to be preserved, by human development, or what Debal might like to call – Developmentality.

Then there are entrepreneurs like Pravin Singhania and Abhishek Singhania (not related). they represent another angle – both having reached similar conclusion independently, to be directly involved in organic farming, one in order to feed clean food for his family, while continuing in his main profession which is not related to agriculture, while the other made a lifestyle change to make organic agriculture his profession. There are many others like them, that are buying or leasing farmlands and beginning to get involved in producing food. Its the beginning of a new level of realisation – that moving away from the soil, and expecting good food to automatically appear in stores, and leaving the issue in the hands of the Government, agro-corporations, or even the NGO talking heads, may have been an unmitigated disaster, for the world, and for India.

Then there are topics under discussion involving North American scientists Anthony Samsel, Stephanie Seneff, Don Huber, Judy Hoy, André Comeau, Theirry Vrain and myself (myself being the only non-scientist in the group), through mostly email. They cover a plethora of issues that are worth mentioning, all to do with glyphosate.
Here is a piece of information I have not harped upon too much while in India, but I should. The problem is too much to talk about and too little time. Anyhow, the thing is, India and most of Asia have heavy tea drinkers. India is also a major tea producer and exporter, much like Sri Lanka next door.

In Sri Lanka, there is also some indication that tea garden workers that use glyphosate to clear weeds around tea plants have apparently been suffering from throat cancer at a rate substantially higher than the national average, and glyphosate is suspected to be the root cause. The nation had implemented an island wide ban on import or use of glyphosate. But lately they have been pressurised to relax the ban and allow selective use, including in tea gardens. One of the pressure points, I heard, came from Japan, a major importer of Sri Lanka tea. Apparently Japan did not like the fact that Sri Lanka was trying to find alternatives to glyphosate for tea gardens. According to the Japanese, these alternatives are not proven safe, but, according to the Japanese, Glyphosate is deemed safe. As a result Japan threatened to cut off all import of Lankan tea , which would result in heavy loss to earning and jobs for Sri Lanka.

It is perhaps equally interesting that one fo the major producers of glyphosate in India has been recently bought over reportedly by a Japanese firm. And India is one supply source of glyphosate for Sri Lanka. I wonder if conflict of interest and share holder earnings for Japanese investors is clouding the whole issue of public safety in tea.

Meanwhile, an American firm has tested a lot of tea brands and found much glyphosate in most brands. Another group found prevalence of glyphosate in urine of tea drinkers.

What is happening in India – does anybody know ? I am aware that glyphosate has been used in tea gardens in the North East of India from the 1980s. These are issues that need to be highlighted, and I should do it, somehow within the time frame. I would like Indians to start checking the following:

  • How much glyphosate is in various brands of tea in India.
  • If there is noticeable health hazards among tea garden workers that use glyphosate
  • If there is noticeable health hazards among tea drinkers in India from glyphosate contamination
  • Testing effect of glyphosate in beverage on laboratory test animals

And last but not least, I have had my share of interaction with elected politicians in provincial ministry here in West Bengal, and perhaps more are in line.I have been trying to convince them to not allow glyphosate to be used indiscriminately, and blindly, without any proof of its safety. I have been asking them to demand that the safety documents on glyphosate be released by Delhi, failing which to ban the molecule. I have been asking them to consider initiating independent safety test on glyphosate and same time engage in broad based testing of local foods for presence of glyphosate. All these are critical issues. They too deserve a mention.

Those will go into part II of this write up.

Glyphosate in Canadian Forest and the death of our forests and wildlife

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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.

——-

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.