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Folate-glyphosate-liver conundrum

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The story started with the possible link between spina-bifida and glyphosate from the point of view of India.

I am visiting India right now. I have also been invited to speak at different venues about dangers of using glyphosate. There are pockets of India with high use of glyphosate, and there are reports of high occurrence of certain disease and birth defects. I have not gotten access to much reports and statistics and I get the impression that there is much room for data collection and analysis on this front.

However, I did come across the issue of spina-bifida, the broken-spine birth defect and its effects in Missions province of Argentina and also in India. In Argentina, they are using roundup ready tobacco. Women that were spraying glyphosate on those tobacco plants, were giving birth to many of the seriously deformed babies with damaged spinal column or damaged brain etc. Glyphosate was suspected to be the cause. Following that, and getting further information from scientists like Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, and also from the internet, I learned that deficiency of folate/ folic acid has links to this birth defect. Also, India apparently has the worlds highest rate (per thousand births) of spina bifida in the world, and four times higher than the world average.

There seemed to be a number of birth defects related to pregnant women being exposed to various toxins, of which glyphosate is one. The defects ranged from babies without a brain or having a deformed brain, to man-formed or broken spine. Some of these defects were identified under an umbrella term – Neural Tube Defect, or NTD. India had a high prevalence of that.

I was further advised by grassroots workers that the farming community needed to see these images of deformed babies, to fully grasp the potential harm that newborns can have, if adult women of childbearing age are engaged in handling toxic material. This is one way to make folks realise the overall dangers involved with agro-toxins.

Folate deficiency is reported to be at the root of some of these birth defects, such as spina-bifida or broken-spine disease. The story of folate itself appears to hide as much truth as it tells. The 1990s is when glyphosate started seriously entering human food through GMO. Later its presence increased through non-GMO desiccated seed crops. Along with the presence of glyphosate, birth defects such as spina-bifida started rising. scientists discovered a possible link between folate deficiency, especially during the first month of pregnancy, and spina-bifida. There is virtually no cure for this defect.

Fortification of seed crops with folic acid (a folate substitute) was made mandatory for suppliers of main cereals in the US back in the 1990s, the same time when glyphosate started entering human food in every increasing amount. Apparently, folic acid (vitamin B9) is not exactly the same thing as folate.

Stephanie Seneff told me that, when she was researching folate for her lecture, she noted that the gut microbes processed dietary folate into methyl tetrahydrofolate, but the same microbiome did not know what to do with the folic acid that was being added as fortification of wheat.

However, according to some scientists that perhaps influenced the US Government into proposing folic acid fortification, noted a reduction in spina-bifida birth defects with folic acid fortification of food. It is believed that liver gets over-taxed by demands to convert folic acid into methyl tetrahydrofolate, because our gut bacteria are unable to handle folic acid. Therefore, although some methyl tetrahydrofolate was eventually being produced by the body, which in turn reduced the rate of spina-bifida, our liver got overworked, and as a direct result of that our liver was then unable to engage in both methylation capacity and antioxidant capacity. In other words, folic acid helped solve one problem but created a few more in turn.

The lesson here is – removing glyphosate would have been the best solution, allowing our gut bacteria to do their job, than fortification of food with man made alternatives. Having said that, I am advised by Stephanie Seneff that, should one be incapable to reducing glyphosate from food, and must take supplements, methyl folate was better than folic acid.

There is another way glyphosate puts a spanner into the wheels. Its presence in folate producing plants that we eat, in itself interferes with the plant’s ability to do its work properly. This in turn reduces the plant’s production folate. As a result, glyphosate-laced plants ends up with more of the potential natural folate being bio-unavailable for us.

It is my opinion that the only thing good about glyphosate is that it makes money for some toxic corporations. It has no other positive. It should not be present on planet earth. Let them make a profit by supplying it to Jupiter.

To meet with a demand to have some of this material in local languages and not just English, I translated a few. Here is an example.

This will be another chapter in my book – Lonely Road.

Incidentally, I found methyl tetrahydrofolate is available in India, in 800 microgram tablets, about $8 (₹ 500) for 180 tablets. I am thinking of trying them out, but am waiting feedback from experts. The thing is – I am neither female, nor pregnant, nor in childbearing age. So, how much folate am I usually in need of ?

Glyphosate & Paraquat on paddy fields of India

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I was reading through and tinkering with pieces of information coming my way that related to biocides in general, and herbicide epidemic in India in particular.

Soumik Banerjee, a freelance agro-sociology consultant has been an important source of information from the ground in eastern India. Promotion of sustainable organic agriculture is part of his field of work. He is also one of the rare persons in India that actually bought my book – POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA, and read it through.

Anyhow, I was playing with some still images and video clips received from him, mostly about the use of glyphosate and other substances such as paraquat in the province of Odisha, India, on the bund around paddy fields. A bund is a raised wall that surrounds small paddy plots. The land is usually made flat so water could stand evenly across the plot. The bund ensures that the water stays and does not flow off. Rice often grows on standing water. This system works in lands with high rainfall and high ground water level during the rainy season in he flood plains. In other words, it suits a monsoon fed India, particularly along the Ganga-Brahmaputra river system of Eastern India.

Before India adopted modern agro-technology, the land was tilled by domestic cattle – cows or buffalo. They ate the grass that grew on the bund, as well as in the paddy fields off season. The cows left their droppings on the fields. The left over grass, cow dung and other organic matter, rainwater and heat, all did their thing. Worms and micro organisms did mulched and composted the biomass. Nutrients got recycled. Rice was usually grown once only in a year, taking say four months during monsoon. Another crop, a kind of pulse, called Khesari daal, was grown after the rice was harvested. The left over moisture in the soil was enough for this pulse crop. It fixed nitrogen and helped balance the soil nutrient load. Then for the last four months, the land was left to grass, weeds, worms, birds, goats, rats, snakes and nature.

And that was how rice was grown, without any chemical input nor any pumped water, for eons. That was before modernism came into agriculture like an invading army of pillagers. India got agro-modern, agro-civilized and agro-mechanized.

Cattle were ancient and costly to maintain, even if they were ecologically more sustainable than chemicals and fossil fuel dependent machinery. Out went the cows, along with their dung and appetite for grass. In came fossil fuel dependent tractors that spilled industrial lubricants on the soil, left exhaust in the air, and had no use for grass. Since farmers did not usually have money to own such machines, they were rented. Poor farmers had to dole out money to rent these gas guzzlers to till their land.

That was not all. The idea of crop rotation with Khesari Daal was not good for the GDP of the agro-chemical industry. So, that brand of pulse that was hardy enough to grow without extra work and using the left over moisture of the paddy fields, had to go. So another campaign of misinformation was initiated – Khesari daal, used for generations, was suddenly touted as bad for health. So, the traditional companion of the rice field, Khesari pulse, was banished. In its place came the need for two crops of rice being grown every year out of the same field. People must eat more rice and less varied seeds like pulses.

Also, one needed high yield, this-tolerant, that-intolerant thingamajig kinds of special rice that “unscientific” farmers did not have and could not produce, but scientific institutions could. So these so called hybrid rice was now be used on the field. But these seeds did not come from farmers who would pass successful seeds around for others free of charge. Instead, these magic seeds were the result of hard work of the agro-scientists who worked for firms that were in agriculture business to create a stable market for its products and to make a profit. So the seeds had to be bought.

And since these seeds were hybrid and not stable, nor designed to be stable, they could not be saved by farmers for continuous use. They had to be bought afresh every year. Why make a product that needs to be purchased only once, if you can make the customer buy it again and again and again ?

And since the off season rice did not have the benefit of the monsoon, and since the hybrid rice did not grow out of love and fresh air, but had an unbelievable thirst for water – there were needs for drilling millions of tube wells to pull the water out of the ground. All this activity was financed by bank loans which on paper looked like hectic economic activity and a sign of progress. GDP was rising, India was going to be feeding itself with great food. All was great. Or so the slogan went.

And with the absence of crop rotation, and disappearance of Khesari pulse, the soil of course would not support two successive crops of rice without nutrient supplement. Smart scientists figured out that plants got carbon, hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. The next three nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, gets depleted by the crop. If most of the leftover stuff is lot allowed to recycle into the soil then the soil needs to be replenished. Thus, the term NPK as combination fertilizer that was to be industrially produced, became a catch word of modern agriculture. This also boosted on paper economic activity, since industry had to cater to this new kind of chemical fertilizer that was not used before.

Somewhere along with it came the need for poisons to kill of pests that usually attacked these hybrid crops that were not naturally hardy to withstand pest attack like the original folk rice varieties did. So, the land had to be inundated with herbicide, pesticide, fungicide, insecticide, etc. All these poisons, grouped together as biocides, are poisons that kill. And if one herbicide did not do the job, why not use two?

Nobody actually did any work on testing if these killer chemicals had any adverse effect on the biomass, on the ecology, and on people.

In came chemical agents. They informed the farmers that the grass on the paddy field as well as on the bund were nasty stuff. Since the cows were not around any more to eat them, they needed to be destroyed, because they host all sorts of dangerous pests. And then they sold glyphosate, along with some more of the toxins that were available. These were not called poison. They were called medicine. They were called vitamin for the soil.

If glyphosate alone was not doing all the job, then another item was added to it – such as paraquat.

Soumik sent me a number of pictures, such as this one from Odisha, where the partition wall between two adjacent fields of paddy, called bund, was twice sprayed by glyphosate and paraquat, to kill all vegetation. That concoction flows into the paddy fields because of the rain, and the water collects and stands in the paddy fields. What this is doing to the soil biology – is not investigated nor told to the farmers. This is how “soil medicine” gets into our food web.

Meanwhile, I was conversing with some US scientists and asking about a questionnaire for the women who gave birth to deformed babies. This was to build up statistics on possible exposure of pregnant women to toxins that might have resulted in the stated birth defects.

Stephanie Seneff of MIT believed there is cause to believe synergistic damage done to kidneys of farm workers exposed to the glyphosate-paraquat concoction.

Apparently, the human protein called MATE1 is responsible for detoxification of items such as the nasty poison paraquat, most of which might normally be captured by MATE1 that works with our kidneys and allowed to be expelled from the body through urine.

But, we already know that all proteins are constructed from the basic building blocks of 20 amino acids, and the most used of those twenty are glycine. We also know that glyphosate is a biological mimic of glycine and our body does not know how to distinguish one from the other. Therefore when new proteins are being constructed, which is all the time for adults, and at a furious pace for growing children, glyphosate gets to be disincorporated into proteins, if it (glyphosate) is present in our food.

As Dr. Seneff pointed out to me through an email, MATE1 has “tons” of glycine in key positions of that protein, making it very susceptible to being subverted by glyphosate substituting itself in place of some of some glycine in key positions of that protein, thereby rendering MATE1 useless in detoxification work. This, apart from allowing a person being seriously harmed by paraquat itself, also has the ability to permanently damage the kidney – leading to kidney failure that may be linked to the Sri Lanka farm workers as well as the Mesoamerican nephropathy.

This disease, Mesoamerican nephropathy, was earlier called kidney disease of unknown cause (CKDu), first noticed among young, agricultural workers primarily in Central American nations such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

Then there was this other picture, also received from Soumik Bannerjee. It shows a cauliflower patch with brown grass around it, killed by glyphosate. This, when shown to a few scientists, generated instant and spirited response. Comments from Anthony Samsel and Don Huber was included with the picture. There were so many things wrong with this picture. The glyphosate would drift onto the vegetable patch and be picked up by the roots of the Cauliflower. Testing of the vegetable should show presence of glyphosate in it which would poison everything and everyone that eats it. In other words, the cauliflower is sick.

Then there is the issue of aerosol particles of glyphosate drifting and falling on the cauliflower. Its antibiotic activity kicks and inhibits the natural disease suppressors for E. coli and other animal/human pathogens. This phenomenon, when our vegetable begin to make us sick, is an unwanted development that is rising in epidemic proportions across India and elsewhere. As Don aptly said – the entire ecology is turned upside down, all because a handful of dishonest business people manage to hoodwink the entire world, and because folks in India refuse to test, investigate and find out for themselves the truth, and would rather depend on the same entities that sell the poison, to educate us on food nutrition.

India is not known to keep detailed statistics of health conditions of its citizens, particularly the rural low income class. However, India is supposed to be developing. It is among the fastest rising large emerging nations.

It is time, that India sheds its colonial trappings of the past and begins to take interest in its own affairs. It is time for India to investigate effect of its modern agriculture on the flora, fauna, nature, food, ecology and health of its inhabitants.

It does not take rocket science to allow funding to hospitals and research facilities to start collecting data on one hand, and also testing the effect of these chemicals, single and in synergy, on lab animals, and release the findings for the public.

Glyphosate has not been approved for use in agriculture in India. And yet, it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere in the farm sector. It is not even being called a poison. It is termed as “medicine”. There is a massive campaign of misinformation being conducted by corrupt people with vested interest in pushing these chemicals illegally in agriculture.

The Government and its regulatory authority is apparently not able to keep track of the runaway use of these substances. A few provinces, as it happens appear to be waking up to this menace and contemplating withdrawing license to store or sell glyphosate in areas where there are no tea gardens. The issue is also related to illegal planting of smuggled seeds of GM herbicide tolerant cotton.

There seem to be small signs that some sections of the population is waking up to the danger posed by agro-toxins in general and glyphosate in particular, especially after I came to India and was invited to speak about it in a few towns, an exercise that was supported by a few well meaning NGO and groups.

The task at hand to both record the facts, analyze the statistics, investigate the effects and correct the situation is humongous. But, like all endeavours, it starts with a first few tentative steps.

This article is to be part of my running journal – “Lonely Road”. It is also likely to be shared and circulated as a pdf file. Lastly, it should be also in my blog tonu.org.

And when I speak with farming communities across various rural regions in Bengal – I am likely to mention this. In fact, I did create a slide just for this.

I have not had much time proof reading these pages. All that would be done later. So, reader is requested to pardon any strange grammar or spelling that might pop up as odd in these pages.

Western Producer bypassing uncomfortable subjects?

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I made the below post on this article. I thought the site might lack the guts to publish it. So I am copying my post here. However, Two days down the line, I cannot see my post there at all. So I guess someone lost the guts to keep it there.

Uncomfortable truths?

Perhaps my mention of Canada hiding the safety documents on glyphosate is a touchy issue. This glaring and legal pot hole is avoided by the Government and supported by the mainstream media by simply keeping the topic from the people. I personally do not trust  Platforms such this Western Producer. Could it be that they avoid the issue on purpose, to keep it under the wraps, or could it be that they are intellectually incapable of grasping the concept of proof of safety?

Then there is this observation from me about selective focus of Canadian media where only western, so called “white” nations are newsworthy, and brown or blacks are not. Could such comments be getting under the skin of the platform? Cancer patient in California winning against Monsanto in court is big news, but dead farmers in Sri Lanka are not. Italy cancelling Canadian wheat is mentionable news, but that India is waking up to poisonous Canadian lentils is not yet news, and will not be news till it actually begins to bite them in the back?

Whatever the case, here is what I posted there. I might make a video of it, or refer to this blog in future.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I am a Indian-born Canadian citizen and food security activist, and author of the book “POISON FOODS OF North America” based on analysis of CFIA test results on glyphosate. I have had quite a few hitherto unsuccessful meetings with federal and provincial (BC) politicians and ministers to push back at glyphosate in agriculture or anywhere else on the planet, unless Canada discloses hitherto hidden test records on safety of glyphosate, which the Govt received from Monsanto back in the 1970s and has been hiding till date. In my view of the constitutional law, no product may be released to the people without releasing its safety document. And yet, the government hides it, and replaces it with a plethora of “independent scientific repots” from around the world, selectively picked, that declare glyphosate to be safe.

All those reports are third party opinions and nothing more. Proof of safety involves exposing a group of test animals in laboratory conditions with measured dose of glyphosate, and comparing their health parameters, through the life of those animals, with health parameters of identical animals living identical lifestyle and eating identical food but without glyphosate. This comparative study is what comprises of proof if glyphosate is, or is not, safe. Pubic have a right to this data and be able to independently scrutinize it to check if the test and analysis was done honestly and there was no cheating. As the California court report indicates, Monsanto cheated and purposefully down played evidence of harm to test animals that were subjected to glyphosate. Worse yet, Monsanto has a habit of testing rats for only 3 months and not the life of the rats (usually 2 years), so that the test is concluded before some of the slow developing diseases, such as growth of cancerous cells, can be clearly identified and measured.

I have been battling the Canadian Government through Access to Information act appal so it releases all documents originally received from Monsanto back in the 1970 based on which health Canada first approved glyphosate for agriculture, or alternately I am given in writing that I do not have the right to those documents. The Government has indirectly agreed I have the right to the documents and yet it drags its feet for ever, hoping I shall die of old age so they can close the file.

Meanwhile, the analysis of Canadian seed crops that are desiccated with glyphosate show high continuation in virtually all cereals and products made from them. this includes wheat, rye, barley, oats, etc. That is not all, even seed crops that are not so common in Canadian diet but is grown in large quantities for export, such as pulses, are also desiccated. Millions of tons of red lentils are exported to India. India has not approved use of glyphosate in any food crop and only allows controlled amount in tea gardens. My book ‘POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA’ shows the high contamination of glyphosate in lentils imported by India. I have warned Indians about it. I have been invited in multiple towns in India, such as Delhi (Capital) as well as Kolkata and Bangalore, to speak to people about this mass poisoning of India with a herbicide that is illegal in India and whose safety documents are hidden by the Canadian Government. This news has been picked up in more than a dozen mainstream papers in India, both in English and local languages.

Two provincial governments have passed orders to clamp down on all illegal sale, distribution or use go glyphosate in the last two weeks. One opposition MP has brought my warning to the floor of the Indian parliament during zero hour question and answer and changed the minister of Food for not taking care of protecting Indians from poisons that are banned in Indian agriculture but coming in bushel full from imported crops. The Ministry has promised to look into it and protect Indians from this menace.

I have met at least two provincial ministers in India who are far more receptive than Canadian ministers have been, I am sorry to say. The environment minister of the state of West Bengal invited me to write. a letter to him with attached documents covering a few issues, so he can bring it up in cabinet discussions – about how to push back at glyphosate on two fronts, one is from pulses imported from Canada and Australia and the second from illegal use of glyphosate pushed through corrupt agents trying to misguide farmers.

I know Canadian press, media and even social/agricultural platforms have an involuntary bias of primarily noticing what happens in western countries, such as Italy, California, France, Germany etc, and not what happens in countries with people that have dark skin, such as Sri Lanka or India for example. Otherwise, the issues taking place across India since I arrived to warn them of glyphosate laced lentils from Canada, or what happened in last four years in Sri Lanka, where huge number of farm workers died from kidney failure after starting to use glyphosate to spray sugarcane crops etc, would have made front page news.

I am trying my best to make India

  • demand that Canada discloses the forty five year old hidden safety documents of Glyphosate and lets Indians to independently verify honesty and validity of those papers,
  • Immediately cancel all imports of Canadian grains unless each parcel can be demonstrated to be free of all biocides that are not approved for use by India,
  • Initiate broad based testing of all food for glyphosate and pay special attention to all imported grains from countries that are known to desiccate any crop with glyphosate
  • Initiate independent lab test on safety of glyphosate to a few species of mammals, conducted through the entire life cycle of the animals, and
  • disclose all data to the public.

I have been told near 8 million acres of farmland is allocated in Saskatchewan just to grow lentils for export to India, while nobody is measuring effects of it on wildlife and people’s health. I will not bother giving links on these because your admin might remove them.

For the sake of Canadian people and what is left of Canada’s forests and biodiversity, I am doing my best to convince Indian federal politicians and provincial governments to federally cancels or provincially disallow sale of any and all grain imports from Canada unless each parcel can be proven to be poison free.

Pardon any typo, since I wrote this on the fly and do not have the time to proof read it.

Cheers and have a great day everybody.

This is an emerging and evolving story – about ravages of glyphosate. Canadian media and agriculture is not just biased towards whatever happens in western so Called white skinned nations, but also are particularly ill-educated about nature and biodiversity, or how biocides work on living biology. IN short, the global positions seem to be shifting or turning on its head. Canada behaves more and more like a colonial era third world country with a slave mentality to whatever is doled down by USA or whoever holds its leash, and brown skinned nations begin to display better democratic character despite working against lots of odds.

Derecognition of good scientists

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Dark ages of Glyphosate resistance

While on the subject of the planet being poisoned by glyphosate, other toxins, micro plastics, Chemtrail and a myriad of other things, all in the name of development, there is something else that gets missing in the noise.

There is a need for us to step back a bit, and look at it from afar, and reflect with a wider viewpoint an look for root causes that go deeper than scratching at the surface.

And that is how I end up writing chapters like this one for my book in the making – Lonely Road, footprints of a food security activist.

West took a leading role in many issues of global significance. This involved development of a functional democratic system represented by one-man-one-vote in a modern sense. This also meant developing a culture that separated the church from the state, and encourage secularism and rule of law, where everybody was equal in the eyes of the law, where universal education was a birthright, along with basic healthcare and social security.

It was the west that lead the world in scientific research in many fields and proved to be catalytic in development of a wide swatch of modern scientific research.

It created the League of Nations and later the United Nations, so that a single powerful nation cannot wage war on another on personal opinion, but where there was need for international mediation and effort to use peaceful means to conflict resolution first, a system where might did not equate right. 

There is perhaps no need for me to elaborate on this. West produced people like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Adam Smith. The west had the most advanced nations on earth, with the highest standard of living. People from the rest of the world aspired to migrate to the west in order to have a better life.

All this is fact and undisputed.

However, like the great eastern philosopher Confucius of the past had stated – change is the only unchanging fact of life. Everything must and will change.

So, too, is the case with what the famed “west” represented. So, to go back to issues – while the west still dominates in scientific research, it is more often than not conducted by people working for western institutions but themselves originating from outside. Theory of Charles Darwin is most challenged today in the western school system, rather than in any other place. United Nation has been castrated and rendered into a hapless eunuch by none other than the United States. United States makes unilateral decision to wage war on whoever it likes, whenever it likes and wherever it likes. Standard of living in the rest of the world is catching up fast with the west. China arguably already has more millionaires than the US does. On GDP based on purchasing power parity, there are more non-western nations in the top ten than western nations. Everything people feared about communism, is coming true under capitalism.

Democracy has been hijacked in almost all the western nations, replaced with a form of fascist crony capitalism where out of state shadow commercial actors decide how the state will function, while the public only decide who the symbolic but otherwise useless face of the Government will be such as a prime minister or president. Biotech science has never been more biased, tilted, controlled and abused, without neutrality, objectivity and honesty in the west, than ever before. It can hardly be called science. West does not have free press any more. In fact, the whole world is fast losing all free press. Human rights is an illusion, everywhere, but especially noticeable in the west.  Corporations have more rights than citizens with votes. Medical system is geared to keep unhealthy people sick, and to make healthy people unhealthy.

The legal system does not provide justice. Instead it provides revenue through catering to whoever can pay more. Education system is degenerating to the dark ages. School children in the west comparatively get the stupidest scores on an international scale. The western education system is busy dumbing down everybody.

And in the midst of it all, we have an ocean of toxicity into our food system, in residential lots, public parks, meadows, marshes, forests, rivers lakes and oceans – all in the name of progress.

I could go on and on ..

But, when it comes to the specific ravages of Glyphosate, let it be said that this planet destroying technology not only originated in the west, but gets most of its driving force from the west.

Citizens of the west have lost the art of resisting evil. They have long capitulated.

I do not see leadership emerging out of the west on this area at all – no matter how long and how hard I peer into the topic.

This is not to say that leadership is emerging out of the east or south or some other direction. But the rest of the world does not appear to have totally capitulated like the west has. There is a raging battle in big and small nations outside fo the west. This is my view and I am increasingly comfortable with this view.

The west has capitulated. No leadership may be expected out of the west to lead us out through this toxic wilderness. The west is going to take the planet and flush it down the toilet.

Along with this abject capitulation, comes a large swatch of disgruntled people from the west that are increasingly aware of the destruction of their belief and value system but unable find a way out. Like mindless groupies they flock around an increasing number of instant “guru” that are mushrooming out of this toxic landscape like maggots on a carcass.

And in the middle of this depressing scenario, there is a concerted effort to assassinate character of a handful of honest scientists that are still trying to shine a light. These good guys are now the target not only of the corporate controlled system but also of the army of mindless zombies that came out of the disgruntled and disenfranchised citizenry looking for something to do.

Victimisation of the good guys is an established policy

I need to say it clearly here. There is a concerted effort to downgrade and trivialise scientists that speak an unpleasant truth. This effort to trivialise select scientists, and deny them access to reputed journals and mainstream coverage, is a well established tactic used by the biotech and big Pharma industry and the political and media system that are often in cahoots with them.

It is the west that, in modern times, hounded and destroyed people like Árpád Pusztai, Andrés Carrasco, Andrew Wakefield, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. And the so called civil society of the west, went along and did nothing to stop it.

This so called civil society also includes lots of media savvy gurus that appear to be among the “good guys”. To me, they are a new breed of phoney, hypocritical people masquerading as good guys in order to milk a system.

This new breed of instant guru class will be taking donations from folks in order to fight the Monsanto dragon. But, behind the scene they appear to be in cahoots with the industry doctrine of denying recognition of scientists that did pioneering work to expose, for example, glyphosate. They will not be averse to take whatever information they can gather from these scientists, and then pass them off as their own information, or keep the source muddied. Either way, the victimisation of the handful of scientists still left to do work in exposing glyphosate will be kept under the carpet and out of sight by these media savvy false gurus and talking heads.

They victimise the last of the remaining honest, hard working, fearless scientists that are still somehow able to scrounge around for funds and are able to do some research on the bad effects of glyphosate, and often come out with ground braking information to this end.

Non-recognition of Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff

Scientists that are victims of such selective tarnishing by the “phoney” good guys are, for example, Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff.

Dr. Stephanie Seneff

I have a very strong distaste for such false gurus, and need to make my view public.

Unlike these phoney characters making a career out of milking this toxic problem of glyphosate and GMO, I do not collect donations from people. I do not run an NGO and do not wait for public support me. I do not need anybody’s help. I do have a book, but it is a reference book and I do not ask folks to even buy it. Most folks are incapable of handling a 400 page book of reference data on glyphosate. In short, I do not need anybody. Consequently, I do not need to sacrifice my freedom of thought, expression and speech on this issue. And damned if I am going to sacrifice it just to be popular.

I dislike proverbial good guys like Jeffrey Smith, Michel Antoniou, Vandana Shiva, Robin Mesnage, Carey Gillam and the rest because of what I consider their dishonesty in projecting only half truths and either selectively denying recognition of people like Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff or working overtime to convince me why I should not take Samsel/Seneff seriously. I am done considering such blabbermouths as anything other than thugs pretending to be something else.

Many of them make a career out of milking the system rather than trying to solve it. They appear to be in cahoots with the same industry they badmouth and follow their doctrine of denying acknowledgement of select scientists and their contribution, because what these scientists say is uncomfortable. But it is alright to steal their words and make hay with knowledge and information gained from them.

These are the kind of scum that we find masquerading as the spearhead of a dysfunctional resistance system in a region that is speeding towards a toxic doomsday, California court case of Johnson versus Monsanto notwithstanding.

The picture at left is of Anthony Samsel, in San Francisco with Michael Baum last year when Samsel testified before the CA EPA and gave them the Lymphoma cancer data and the malignant Hemagioendothelioma cancer data he extracted from Monsanto’s raw data files.  Monsanto hid the data from the report summary to the EPA.  He gave the extra data he found to Michael Baum  which their consultant Chris Porter had missed – information received from Anthony Samsel.

I don’t need a fan club

I have said it before and I shall say it here again – I know that many of these hypocritical false guru characters have a large fan club. I know some of this fan club members are also my  friends or follow me on social media. I know I am likely to annoy many of them by criticising these undesirables that they idolize. And I know I might alienate such people.

Well, thats OK with me. Unlike Smith, Shiva and the rest of the gang, I do not need public support. Whatever I do, I do by myself, and within my means. So, I for one do not mind at all if ardent admirers of Vandana Shiva, or Jeffrey Smith etc leave my circle of acquaintance. It was nice knowing you, and good bye.

Injustice to Samsel and Seneff is a symptom of a degenerative west

But I shall be damned if I do not speak truth as I see it, with regard to the injustice done to scientists like Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff by what I judge as phoney and hypocritical group leaders that feed on human misery while pretending to be against glyphosate.

Damned if I am going to support lies and liars just to be popular. I am through with that crap.

This article will, after adding to it and polishing it off, go into a chapter or a section of my next book – Lonely Road.

Glyphosate causing birth defect in domestic cattle

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Prominent underbite in a calf

There is an unending series of bad news and devastation across the landscape, triggered by suspected harmful effects of man made toxins in our midst. This blog is to do with glyphosate in the food and feed of domestic cattle. The material for this blog is provided by Montana used wildlife scientist Judy Hoy.

I had received a lot of information over the years from Judy. She is listed as one of the four scientists I have most learned from regarding the ravages causes globally by glyphosate. Her name and picture, along with those of Anthony Samsel, Stephanie Seneff and Don Huber, occupy one slide of my presentation on glyphosate when I am asked to speak, in India.

Deer from New Brunswick, Canada

I had contacted her when folks from New Brunswick, Canada, contacted me asking about the weird phenomenon being noticed among hunted deer, which showed mismatched jaws. She confirmed this is merely an extreme case of a common birth defect where a fetus in a mothers womb is poisoned by specific toxins such as glyphosate. The reason for this damage is complex, but has to do with disruption of some of the growth programs in the fetus, due to damage to hormones, enzymes and other proteins that are critical, and also from severe deficiency of specific mineral nutrients during that phase of foetal development. Both these conditions will happen if glyphosate is in the food and foliage that the pregnant mother forages and eats. Glyphosate will get itself mis-incorporated into proteins by being an analog of glycine. Glyphosate will also steal minerals from food by being a chelator.

There has been a lot of feedback from Judy over the years about degeneration in North American wildlife and the very real possibility that its very survivability is now questioned. Wildlife in North America, in other words, faces a serious existential threat and likely will go under due to birth defects not just in jaws but in many organs including reproductive organs. Percentage of bison, and all kinds of deer wild goats and sheep, as well as other carnivores and herbivores, that have visible birth defects including malformed reproductive organs, as observed by naked eyes and available from photographs and video, are approaching 100%. Many of them will not be producing viable off springs to propagate survival of the species. We have brought nature and wildlife to the brink through man made toxins.

But what about domestic cattle?

I wondered what was happening to domestic cattle, which should be far more affected by glyphosate through greater human contribution in their food and feed. Well, here is what Judy had to say about it, along with a few pictures of calves from Mexico.

Hi Tony,

Cattle in the United States, Mexico and of course Canada are born with an underbite, just like the wild grazing animals. Here in our area, some of the larger ranchers were loosing up 30 or 35 calves each spring in the late 1990s, through 2001. I put letters to the editor in our local papers saying that the symptoms on the calves were consistent with thyroid hormone disruption as a result of mineral deficiencies. I also told local veterinarians. I suddenly stopped hearing about birth defects on calves here in our area and called a rancher friend to ask him if the ranchers were doing something different. He said they were having their cows tested to determine what minerals they were deficient in and then giving their herd the specific minerals they needed. That apparently mitigated the birth defects significantly, suggesting that chelation of the minerals the livestock obtained in grass and hay by exposure to the Roundup on the grass or hay was the likely culprit. As far as I know, their grass and hay was never tested for glyphosate, because the ranchers wouldn’t believe that Roundup was responsible. Many spray their Roundup Ready alfalfa fields and didn’t want to admit that they were poisoning their own animals. Funny how that works.

Mexican Brahman calf with underbite

Most of the ranchers here in our area that I asked never actually admitted that their calves had a high rate of underbite, except for one rancher’s wife, who told me in 2003 that about 1/3 of their calves were born with underbite. In addition to calves, domestic goats, sheep and camelids here in the United States are also born with underbite. I was told that in 2001, over 50 horse foals born that spring in our county were shot because they were born with an underbite. Livestock owners don’t want anyone to know that their livestock have birth defects. They will kill a newborn rather than admit it, because they are all told that it is bad genes of the parent animals. Livestock owners are afraid no one will buy their animals if people know that there is a fairly high prevalence of birth defects in their herd. Apparently, giving lots of minerals while the cow, sheep, goat, mare, etc. are pregnant, keeps the prevalence of birth defects down. Also, most livestock owners, except for horse breeders don’t even look at the mouth of their newborn livestock, so don’t know the prevalence.

If you type in (an animal species, like beef calves underbite images) on Google, lots of photos will come up that were posted by people of calves with underbite from throughout the United States. The same happens if you type domestic goat, sheep, llama, horse foal, etc. – lots of photos that have been posted from throughout the U.S.

Wildlife scientist Judy Hoy of Montana

I have been communicating for some time with a veterinarian in Mexico. I have attached two photos of the same Brahman calf born with underbite that he sent me. They have sprayed fields there in Mexico that are close to where the cattle graze in their pastures. They are very careful about breeding, so there is no way that their prized show Brahman calves are inbred.

I think that the Brahman cattle in India have a fairly high prevalence of underbite, but I have no way to tell for certain. I have seen photos on the internet of Brahman cattle with underbite taken in India and a lot of domestic goats there with underbite.

Underbite in a Mexican Brahman calf

Just like the Fish and Game departments are hiding the birth defects on the wild grazing animals to protect their ability to sell hunting licenses, the livestock owners hide the birth defects on their livestock so people will keep buying their animals. That makes it really difficult to get anyone to do something to stop the cruel, inhumane poisoning of the newborns. It has been much easier to just say that the few researchers who have worked on the issue are wrong, lying or don’t know what they are talking about. I get that a LOT here in Montana.
We included small samples of beef calves and domestic goat kids in our 2011 study which I attached so you can see the prevalence. Of 20 goat kids that I examined from several small herds for that study, every kid had a fairly severe underbite, making prevalence 100% in 2009 in the small sample. You can share this information with whomever you want.

I will send the study by Wetransfer.

I hope this helps.

All the best,
Judy

What about India ?

Question that remains to be answered is, what about India? Glyphosate has penetrated into the Indian landscape, legally or illegally, through a combination of corruption among chemical pushing agents and government officials in pushing it where it should not be used, along with ignorance of unaware farmers, abject lack of control or supervision by the Government of India, and possible tacit collusion by the pesticide industry.

However, we shall not know the extent of the damage unless one starts vigorous investigation and record keeping of the conditions of newborn domestic cattle.

This will be an added item to alert Indians about, including elected officials. India needs its own Judy Hoys, just as Canada and every other nation does.

Another thing, please take pictures of calves with an underbite in India and send me, with date, location and any other relevant detail you can find. This will be important to track how much glyphosate and other toxins have already entered the food and feed of the pregnant cattle in India.

Tony Mitra

Releasing glufosinate tolerant crop is a braindead thing to do

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There are three recently published scientific papers that seem to indicate that glufosinate can trigger microcephaly.

Microcephaly is a serious birth defect where a baby is born with an impaired brain and a smaller head than normal. The cause for this birth defect can include pregnant mother being subjected to acute starvation, or more commonly, exposure to toxins.

There has been various hot debates around the world on the reason this defect. The birth defect has been noticeable where pregnant women may have been exposed to agro-chemicals such as glyphosate in regions such as Argentina or the Yakima valley in USA. Zika virus has been blamed for some of the cases of microcephaly. However, scientists believe the real culprit to be NALED insecticide often used to kill mosquitoes, to be the cause at least in the Yakima valley and possibly also in Brazil. NALED, like Glyphosate, is also an organophosphate. However, glyphosate has remained under focus in many other regions including in the US due to the sheer volume of it being used and the plethora of diseases it is suspected to be connected to, including brain disorder, it being an amino acid analogue of glycine and easily able to cross the blood brain barrier.

In Argentina, Roundup-Ready soy is being replaced reportedly by another GM seed variety that is tolerant to glufosinate, because glyphosate had become a controversial and hated herbicide, and was also starting to fail due to extensive resistance among the weeds.

While discussing this with US scientist Stephanie Seneff, she pointed out three recent science papers that seem to also link glufosinate with microcephaly. These three papers are as follows:

The first paper, from 2010, involving research in Florida and Texas, in the US, finds a conserved glutamate to be critical in the construction of an enzyme called Asparagine Synthetase.

The second paper from 2013 involving an international group from Canada, Israel and the US, points to encephalopathy resulting from a deficiency in this same asparagine sythetase enzyme, which is essential for the development and function of the brain.

The third – from a French group, published in 2016 indicates that female rats exposed to glufosinate at a critical stage of pregnancy lead to neurogenesis or impaired brain in the babies.

Now, Stephanie pointed out, as had Anthony Samsel to me before, that just as glyphosate is an amino acid analogue of glycine, glufosinate is an amino acid analogue of glutamate. Both glycine and glutamate are among the 20 canonical amino acids that are used as basic building blocks of life, for protein construction of all living biology on planet earth.

So, while getting rid of glyphosate is an absolute must, replacing it with glufosinate is the very worst alternative imaginable.

This is not only of vital importance to Argentina and everybody else going for glufosinate based herbicides, but also for India, where genetically engineered mustard has been under focus for a while.

I personally was astonished and horrified to learn that this GM mustard was tolerant to glufosinate. I found that to be far more dangerous and objectionable, than whatever gene altering of mustard might do to the consumer. However, the best I know, the debate in India remained focused on the theory of genetic alternation and its legal, social, economic and political implications. Glufosinate, far as I recall, remained under the radar, much like glyphosate has remained under the radar in India until local papers and MPs started picking up my warning that India was likely being mass poisoned with glyphosate from imported pulses, and the matter reached both the Indian Parliament as well as pulse growers association in Canada.

Just a minder – one more time:

  • There are 20 amino acids that form all the proteins of all the living world.
  • Glycine is the most common of them all.
  • Glyphosate mimics glycine and thus gets inside our proteins, turning them rogue.
  • Glyphosate is suspected to cause a plethora of diseases through multiple mechanisms that affect living cellular biology. This includes cancer, autoimmune disease and brain disorder.
  • Glutamate is another of the 20 amino acid building blocks of life.
  • Glufosinate mimics glutamate.
  • Glufosinate will very likely also lead to encephalopathy or partially formed brains in newborns, as the three papers mentioned here indicate.

For India – GM mustard is glufosinate tolerant – a braindead way of developing new food strains.
For Argentina – replacing Roundup ready soybean with glufosinate tolerant soybean represents a catastrophic failure of safety concerns.

My thanks go to Stephanie Seneff for bringing this to my attention while discussing glufosinate resistance. I am forever grateful to Samsel, Seneff, Huber and Hoy for keeping my eyes open on this issue.

The image at right on Microcephaly and the figure for India, found through google search, puzzles me. How many cases are found in India. It says less than 1 million. But one million is a lot. Is it less than 10,00 or 1,000?

If I take annual birth rate to be around 20 million one million cases of microcephaly would mean an extreme high rate of one in twenty or 5% !

I would really love to get my hands on the real figures for India, and also the trend. Is the occurrence of microcephaly rising year to year ? If so, how much?

By the way, the red arrow in the image above is my addition.

If you google Microcephaly in India, the search result starts to show up a whole list of links relating to zica virus. There are regions where the zica virus has reportedly been present since the 1940s and yet there is no microcephaly. On the other end, there are cases of microcephaly where no zica virus has been found. But reports that link microcephaly with exposure to glufosinate is given right here, below, though in real life, the direct link has not yet been established. Potentially, glufosinate can lead to microcephaly since it is a neurotoxin. The insecticide NALED (Formula: C4H7Br2Cl2O7P), often used for mosquito control, has been almost always present where microcephaly has been noted, with the exception of Argentina. The warning is even present on the package of NALED – not to let it get into drinking water. In other words, it can harm any animal eating or drinking it.

What is going on with google search ?

The three papers can be read or downloaded here:
1) A Conserved Glutamate Controls the Commitment to Acyl- adenylate Formation in Asparagine Synthetase
2) Deficiency of asparagine synthetase causes congenital microcephaly and a progressive form of encephalopathy
3) Perinatal Exposure to Glufosinate Ammonium Herbicide Impairs Neurogenesis and Neuroblast Migration through Cytoskeleton Destabilization

4) Separately – Watanabe 1997 comes to the same conclusion on glufosinate. Although glufosinate was not considered to be teratogenic, mutagenic nor carcinogenic, this study found that it indeed was teratogenic in mice and rats in whole embryo culture, and that it specifically induces apoptosis in the neuroepithelium of developing embryos

Don Huber sent a note:

Tony,
Keep up the good work!  Also remember that all of these chemicals are
mineral chelators and that minerals are the enzyme cofactors for all of
these processes cited.
Thanks for sharing.
Don
Don M. Huber
Professor Emeritus, Purdue University


Anthony Samsel explaines : Glufosinate cannot be used in place of Glyphosate on genetically engineered crops unless they have been specifically engineered to be resistant to this herbicide. The encoding of the Phosphinothricin acetyltransferase (PAT) gene imparts glufosinate resistance.

Dual herbicide (Glufosinate and Glyphosate) resistant genetically engineered crops, which include some varieties of corn etc have both the PAT gene and a glyphosate tolerant gene.  I have 50 varieties of these GE corn hybrids in my seed refrigerator for experimental purposes which also includes these GLyphsoate/glufosinate  dual herbicide resistant varieties. 
 
The Glyphosate resistance genes include:
 
  1. The cp4 epsps gene.
  2. The cp4 epsps (aroA:CP4) gene is the gene which produces an over abundance of 5-enolpyruvyl-3-phosphoshikimic acid impart resistance 
  3. The Glyphosate oxidoreductase gene (GOX)  
  4. The gat4621 gene which uses the glyphosate N-acetyltransferase enzyme to catalyze the inactivation of glyphsaote herbicide.  It essentially converts glyphosate to the N-acetyl form rendering it non-toxic to the plants.
  5. There is also the mepsps gene which is a modified 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-ohosphate synthase (EPSPS) enzyme which imparts Glyphosate resistance.
Glufosinate is an analog of Glutamic acid one of our 20 proteinogenic amino acids.  Its principal metabolite found in urine and feces is 3-[hydroxy(methyl)phosphinoyl]propionic acid.  Glutamate has been used in reference to Glutamic acid.  I like to use Glutamic acid.  Glufosinate is an analog of Glutamic acid.  You can see the difference between Glutamic acid (the anion) and Glutamate below.  Glutamic acid in H2O ionizes attaching a hydrogen atom (glutamate form).  Glufosinate, an analog of glutamic acid, has an amine group in place of an oxygen molecule.
It is possible that glufosinate can also cause microcephaly.  Glufosinate is a neurotoxin.  Glufoiosinate was found to have teratogenic effects in mice (Watanabe, 1997) as apoptosis (cell death) in the neuroepithelium of developing embryos.

The abstract of the Watanabe/Sano paper is copied here:

Herbicides containing glufosinate ammonium are widely used in many countries including Japan. Many Japanese cases of accidental and suicidal poisoning by glufosinate have been reported since 1989. We report a case of a 64- year old man who ingested glufosinate in an attempted suicide. The patient suffered mental disturbances and hematological changes together with gastrointestinal effects shortly after ingesting the poison, and later developed generalized convulsions, impaired respiration and circulatory failure. During recovery he exhibited loss of short-term memory (retrograde and anterograde amnesia). Neurotoxicity is a characteristic of glufosinate poisoning, although the mechanism is not clear. From the analysis of clinical symptoms of previously published cases, glufosinate toxicity appears to arise both from the active ingredient and the surfactant in the formulation.

The glufosinate containing herbicide brand used in the above case was reported to be BASTA, the same product the GM mustard developed for release in India is reportedly resistant to.

Cheers and have a great day all.

Tony Mitra

Are the wheels of Glyphosate juggernaut in India about to hit potholes?

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Yesterday a Telegu language newspaper from Hyderabad, the province of Telengana, came up with this news on glyphosate, and indirectly mentioned what I had been talking about, without naming me.

A helpful organic farming entrepreneur from Hyderabad, Mr. Ramchandra has translated it over the phone for me. It says, in brief:

  • Glyphosate is very dangerous
  • It is used to kill weeds but it is also killing people
  • Sri Lanka had banned it in 2014 because farm workers were dying from kidney failure
  • Argentina banned it in 2017, because of pregnant women exposed to glyphosate were experiencing two to four times more birth defects than national average.
  • India has allowed glyphosate to be used for tea plantations, but the approval for this use may be controversial and questionnable.
  • Provinces of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana are working to ban this herbicide. An investigation is being initiated by the Government into possible corruption and briery involved where farmers are illegally being encouraged to use this herbicide by unscrupulous people for financial gain. As a result, glyphosate is illegally being used everywhere.
  • 87% of Red Lentil (Masoor Dal) imported into India from Canada is reported to be highly contaminated by glyphosate.
  • India is also importing pulses from Australia that are highly poisonous from glyphosate.

So, is the glyphosate juggernaut in India turning a corner, and coming to a possible road block in future? Are breaks beginning to be applied to the wheels of this juggernaut ?

Meanwhile, in Bengal, I have so far met two minsters of the government of West Bengal, India, regarding glyphosate. These are Mr. Purnendu Basu, minister of skilled labour (ex minister of agriculture) and Mr. Subhendu Adhikari, the minister of environment. While the issue of glyphosate has been brought to their ear, there has been no positive movement as yet, for the government to start focussing on the ravages to the land and its biomass from illegal and reckless use of glyphosate.

Having said that, I am lagging behind on a letter I am supposed to write to the Environment Minister as a follow up. I am delayed because I am unable to lay y hands of two documents that I was asked to attach to the letter. These are:

  • Copy of the original order from Sri Lanka, banning the import, sale, or use of glyphosate
  • Document showing the intent of the Government of Telangana, with regard to considering banning of all illegal use of Glyphosate. This is a new development, the details of which I do not have much information.

Mr. Adhikari, the Minister of Environment, Government of West Bengal, in the middle, with me with a cap on, and Dr. Samar Bagchi at right.

The fact that I am unable to get any help on the above two items, and do not know who to ask, is causing some frustration from my end. I hope to nail those two issues subsequently. Meanwhile, I appeal to all readers, if you can help, please do. However, please do not send me links to news articles about Sri Lanka and glyphosate. I do not need them. I am only looking for official document, signed by a Government official, such as the president of someone, passing the order or confirming the decision that the government of Sri Lanka is banning glyphosate.

And as to Telengana, I need whatever original document is available, for example, and appeal make to the government by some official, asking it to ban glyphosate.

Then there is a plan to go talk with rice farmers in the district of Purulia about glyphosate. But I must convert my presentation into Bengali, something I have never done on this technically heavy subject. But Mr. Rabin Bannerji has helped convert some rice farmers to move away from input intensive, chemical dependent hybrid rice to sustainably grown, chemical free organic folk rice, black rice in particular. This is a remarkable story in itself and whether the effort survives or fails in the micro level may be a pointer to if India is going to save itself at a macro level, from going under, both in agriculture as well as in its biodiversity and ecosystems. I am therefore interested to see first hand what Mr. Bannerji is doing in Purulia. I am told the audience would largely be women rice farmers and largely illiterate – but not uneducated. These women did not study beyond the first few years in school, so they might be considered barely literate. But they are certainly not uneducated. The instinctively know the wisdom of living in harmony with nature instead of in conflict with it.

Meanwhile, on the scientific front, we have already spoken many times about glyphosate being an amino acid that is analog to glycine and how it gets mis-incorporated into protein construction, thus producing dysfunctional proteins that trigger a plethora of diseases.

I often converse on email with scientists such as Anthony Samsel, Stephanie Seneff, Don Huber, Judy Hoy, Andé Comeau, and Thierry Vrain. When I hear something I like I ask them if I might quote it. And here is one quote from Stephanie seneff, about glyphosate getting into proteins as an amino acid.

The discussion that was preceding was various salts of glyphosate that are in the herbicide packages. Apparently, glyphosate itself is not too soluble in water. Therefore, corporations selling the herbicide cannot sell larger concentrations into smaller packages of solution that is easier to transport. In order to increase solubility in water, the producer sells it in some form of salt of glyphosate that is readily soluble. That solution ionises glyphosate and the salt making it easy not just for the plants to pick the toxin up, which often kills them if they are a weed, but also for animals to pick them up to, as explained by Stephanie Seneff above.

 Then there is the question of the metabolite of Glyphosate. Most things usually decay or breakdown over a period of time. So does glyphosate too. However, some of the first stages of such decay produces variants that are still very toxic, such as AMPA. It is no more a mimic of glycine, but it is very harmful on its own, without being picked up in place of glycine in protein construction. This is explained by Anthony Samsel below.

A lot is now known about harmful effects of Glyphosate and its first stage metabolites. A lot more needs to be discovered, as explained by Samsel in the last two sentences above.

To be continued …

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.