Anupam Paul, Assistant Director of Agriculture, Government of West Bengal, India, is in charge of the Agricultural Training Centre, one of seven in the province, at Fulia, district of Nadia, WB, India.
Employed by the government, his job is to be the link between Agriculture policy and schemes of the government and the farming community. But Paul is a maverick and breaks the typical mould.
The government policy is largely influenced by the agrochemical industry, and six out of seven training centres in the province promote that practice, which is neither sustainable, nor economically viable, and is poisoning the planet and the consumers.
Mr. Paul is a maverick that breaks the mould. He is conserving hundreds of folk rice types on one side, some collected from Dr. Debal Deb, and the rest from farmers, to be distributed to other farmers that wish to make a transition to sustainable organic farming of folk rice. On the other side, he uses completely organic and chemical free methods to plant and conserve rice in his institution, and trains visiting farmers and assistant directors of agriculture, to do likewise.
It is a wonder that the government is allowing Paul to go organic at his training centre. It is also encouraging to see that his efforts are, while an exception to the rule, is influencing a small but rising group of rice farmers to go sustainable, go desi (farmers of indigenous folks rice), and go chemical free.
I visited the Agricultural Training Centre at Fulia in late March 2018 to see what was happening there, including meeting some farmers, some assistant agricultural directors from various regions of Bengal and hear their story about promotion of organic cultivation sustainable chemical free folks rice varieties.
Here is another 90 second video, where Mr. Tathagata Das, Assistant Agricultural Director from Rampurhat town of district Birbhum speaks to me of his own experience in promotion of organic rice farming and his conviction that this is the only sustainable way of cultivating rice.
There is a need to raise awareness about the dangers involved in chemical dependent hybrid rice, which have adverse effects on human health, on wildlife, on ecology, on farming economy and is based on a systematic industry driven propaganda of lies.
There is also a need to provide a link between organic rice farmers and consumers, so farmers can economically benefit by selling these better rice varieties and cutting out as much as the corporate middleman as practical, so consumers too can find high value food at reasonable prices.
I am scheduled to meet another person, who has been trying to link these organic rice farmers, to potential urban clients. Organic food business is going to grow as more people become aware of the chemical attack through biocides and convinced about the need for clean food. However, to keep prices reasonable and within reach for the poorer strata of the population, there might be a need to find ways to restrict profiteering by the middle man.
There should also be a need to offer honest testing, certification and labelling so people can rely on these to separate clean clean from toxic and heirloom folk varieties from imported, even genetically tampered traits.
More on these issues down the line – watch this space.
Feel free to add your comments and feedback at the bottom of this blog.
I have read Mukherjee’s book Churchill’s secret war. I have also read this Swami person’s article on Times of India. And I decided to jot down this quick response. I do not have time for a longer one.
First – I do not consider Times of India to be a fair independent news outlet. In fact I am not sure India, or the US or UK or Australia (countries whose news media I can read because of a common language – English), have any independent free press left.
Times of India does not even have the guts to publish what they found through interviewing me, with regard to wholesale slow poisoning of the people through disastrous glyphosate based herbicides approved illegally, and allowed to be used recklessly in agriculture, while the nation refuses to even test its food to find out how much of the poison has entered the food system.
So, to start with, I refuse to take articles on TOI to be worth more than a cheap and bad quality toilet paper.
Next, about this Swami person. He admits not having read the book of Mukherjee and yet agrees to disagree with her point of view and readily refers to Tharoor. I do not know Tharoor to be any serious researcher. His books, a few that I have read, appear to be scratching at the surface and playing for the gallery in superficiality with regard to India, the west and everything else. I do not consider Tharoor to be a suitable person to use as reference on any topic as serious as mass extermination of three million people.
Next, this Swami guy gives lots of examples from past and going forward to Nepoleon, the Tzar and to Chiang Kai Shek and what they did or would have done, to more or less justify what Churchill did, since everyone else did it too.
The thing is – all those characters such as Nepoleon, Tzar and generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek, were in effect emperors or dictators, who ruled over their people by force and not necessarily with the approval of the people.
Churchill, the last time I checked, was an elected public servant, and although he was only elected by the British and not by Indians, the charter, the best I understand, was for him to be a servant at the pleasure of the King or the Queen of England, and not at any time, have the authority to act unilaterally, least of all involving mass murder. Churchill also did not take permission from the British citizens who voted him into power, for permission to kill millions of Bengali people in order to support the war effort in the far east. Lastly, he and his government did its best so the knowledge of the man made famine and preventable mass murder did not reach the media.
So, by equating Churchill with Nepolean and the Tzar, Mr. Swami perhaps displays a lack of depth in his perception of what makes an elected public servant and what makes a dictator. Perhaps someone should educate him on this subtle difference.
Lastly, he could have taken the trouble of studying the Bengal famine, even without reading Mukherjee’s book, merely because it was the single biggest manmade famine of the time if we discount the 1776 famine of Bengal. By manmade famine, I mean famine that was not related to draught and where food was available and yet mass starvation happened. I do not know if Mr. Swami’s apathy is due to lack of interest in reading Mukherjee’s book or because the victims were Bengali and not from southern India, He could still have found out that the millions did not die directly because all the food was siphoned away for the soldiers. Rather, there was a perception that the price of food was going to rise because the British were buying up rice. And because of this perception, merchants started hoarding the food out of sight, and thus food became unavailable except for those that could pay for it, and that this “disappearance” of food happened mostly in rural bengal and not in towns, so the townsfolks and newspaper people did not come to know about it.
Churchills involvement comes from the fact that he stopped humanitarian aid being offered by countries such as Canada and Australia, who wanted to send shiploads of free grain to address the artificial famine. All these could have easily been averted without stopping the supply of food to the war effort, if Churchill wanted. He was informed about it all. He refused to allow help to reach rural Bengal. he refused to put in place mechanisms that would stop the hoarding. He allowed the mass starvation to happen on his watch, as if he secretly willed it to happen. He wanted the Bengali poor to die in huge numbers, without being implicated in it.
Thus, it is implied by Mukherjee and with good reason, along with actual facts such as shipment issues and transcripts of meetings between Churchill and ministers on this issue, that Churchill stands guilty of wilful genocide.
Swami claims that an independent India, under the same circumstance, would have done the same. He is wrong. Amartya Sen has in his earlier groundbreaking studies on the economics of famine, explained how the man made famine in Bengal was acceptable under British rule because the Indian starving masses had no vote, but in a democratic system politicians care more about retaining their chair than even winning a war, and would never allow mass starvation to happen to voters on their watch. Sen is correct as the future years of Independent India shows.
Mr. Swami appears to be poorly educated and ill-informed on this issue, and displays a lack of depth and penetration in his deductive ability. He seems to have remarkable similarity with Tharoor in scratching at surfaces of issues and remaining superficial in his analysis.
But, at the end of the day, India is a free country. Everybody has a right to be stupid.
cc: Ravi Kahlon, NDP, MLA from my constituency of Delta, BC
Thank you for your email dated March 28, 2018, asking for donations, which I received from info@bcndp.com, which strangely carries the name of leader John Horgan, but I am sure it is not read by any leader, but likely read by a ghost person working for your party.
Before I consider making any donation, I would like to know what you will do for the people specifically in area where I have spent considerable amount of time and effort, freely, for the benefit of Canadian ecology and health. I am talking about glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp as well as many other branded herbicide products, which is by far the most used biocide (killer chemical) ever used in Canada and the rest of the world. Approval of glyphosate is consider illegal by me, since the safety data and report, that is supposed to prove that the chemical’s presence in food does not harm humans or animals, has been “illegally” kept hidden by the Canadian government for over 40 years. Glyphosate hurts us as a seriously harmful broad spectrum antibiotic that messes up our microbiome, our ability to digest food, our ability to pick up nutrients from food, our immune system through damaging the bacterial colony that assists our immunity, and finally by molecular mimicry, its ability to slip through our defences and be mis-incorporated into our proteins, thus turning them into rogue proteins which is the beginning of a journey to a cascading series of diseases down the line. There is a concerted effort by the industry to de-fund or otherwise downplay findings to these dangers, but you can find out the details if you were really interested. I can help you, if you like.
[youtube ERBZ6Ze6ZYc]
I have been fighting a lone battle in Canada for quite a while to :
1) get Ottawa to disclose all safety data and document that prove glyphosate is safe. I am not interested in getting a fat list of hundreds of “reports” which found glyphosate to be safe. All these reports are third party opinions, which can be filtered to present an impressive volume of rubbish. What constitutes safety test data, is a study of animals subjected to glyphosate in their food, and their health parameters compared with identical animals living identical life and eating identical food, but without glyphosate. That, and that alone, proves if glyphosate is or is not safe. I have a long standing Access To Information Case with the Canadian government. Through that case I learned the following a) that I, and every Canadian citizen, have right to this document, and yet the government hides such data, b) therefore, approval of glyphosate is to be considered illegal. Government may not approve any product for release to the public while withholding safety data of the product, c) Ottawa has over 130,000 pages of such document, and was willing to allow me to visit Ottawa to see the documents sitting at their library, but would not allow me to copy, scan or otherwise take any page out of the place. It was willing to let me see all that data, keep it all in my head, and then if I was to tell Canadians that glyphosate is unsafe according to these safety tests, that would only be my opinion because I cannot furnish the proof.
Chart from book – Poison Foods of North America – by Tony Mitra
So, I would first like to know, in plain english, what you and your party are prepared to do, to address this runaway use of glyphosate in agriculture, forestry, prairie and environment. I warn you, this is not the first time I have asked such a question to Canadian politicians including members of the DNP. If you do not respond, you will not be the first to disappoint me.
2) I have had better success in getting the Ottawa government to seriously start testing foods for presence of glyphosate, thanks to a then NDP MP Mr. Alex Atamanenko. This resulted in Canada being the first and as far as I know only country to test multiple thousands of foods for glyphosate. I further succeeded in getting a copy of all the rest results, and analyzed them, thus discovering that Canadian food, along with foods grown in the US, are far and away the most toxic in the entire planet. I compiled and tabulated the data received from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, made representative charts, and published the findings in a 400 page book on Amazon, titled ’Poison Foods of North America”. I do not expect you to buy or read that book. I have come to the conclusion that politicians, including Canadian politicians, prefer to be selectively educated on issues and would rather tap dance around subjects that the party likes to avoid addressing. I have come to the conclusion that fighting wholesale and long term slow poisoning of Canada through toxic chemicals in our food an environment is one such issue Canadian politicians are unwilling to face squarely.
I take the trouble of writing this long response, even if I expect you to do nothing, because I am driven by the desire to do what I need to do, as a citizen, towards fulfilling my civic duty, even if the effort is useless, and our politicians will remain blind to the problem, as long as this does not threaten their ability to hold on to their political chair.
Thus, I have also become an activist, hoping that one day millions of Canadians will wake up, grab the nonplussed political system by the scruff of its neck and shake it to its foundations. That is perhaps the only language that a politician understands. This letter, therefore, will be a public letter. The idea is, if you do not respond, perhaps the people will.
I look forward to what to have to say, or do not have to say. I shall most certainly not donate even a cent of my hard earned savings, unless I get a response that proves to me that NDP has glyphosate in its radar.
I am copying this email to MLA Ravi Kahlon, and Lana Popham. Mr. Kahlon had met me before election to learn about glyphosate. I am still waiting to see what he is prepared to do about it, other than passing the buck to someone else, such as agriculture minister Lana Popham, who herself refuses to consider testing local food for glyphosate and disclosing both he results and the source of the food, to the people, so people can decide what to avoid, if the government will remain inactive in pushing back at this poison.
This letter might end up in blog, video and/or on petitions aimed at tackling glyphosate, raising awareness, and encouraging citizens to take this up in greater numbers against our disastrous political establishment that refuses to address avalanche of poison on my dinner plate and a 900 pound gorilla named glyphosate in my kitchen.
If you or any party volunteer is interested to know if and how this letter ends up on social media, you may find me (Tony Mitra) on Facebook, on youtube, and tonu.org, my blog on the web.
My last comment, about the subject heading of your email, which is “Can we work together”? my response is – yes we can, but that needs to be a two-way street.
Thanking you
Tony Mitra
(I voted NDP in last federal and provincial election, and I have been disappointed with NDP so far. Not that I am happy with any other party)
Talking about glyphosate poisoning of the planet, political corruption that makes it possible, and how the buck stops are your feet – all in 17 minutes.
Well – we are facing an existential crisis, and the buck stops are our feet.Question is, what are we, as individual citizens, prepared to do?
Here is my take, on Glyphosae, political and scientific corruption, and the need for citizen activism.
Glyphosate, being a mineral chelator, was denying our body from picking up essential nutrients from food by chelating (stealing) the minerals.
About a third of all our proteins (say around 40,000 kinds, give or take) function with a metallic ion placed in them. When our body creates a new protein of this kind, say to replace damaged one, it needs a metallic ion such as Manganese, or Iron, etc. to be attached to them in order for the proteins to function properly. This mineral is to be picked up from our food. However, glyphosate, if present in the same food, is able to steal that mineral. So, newly formed proteins would be denied its essential mineral, and remain non-functional as a result. Non-functional proteins lead to a pathway of diseases.
We humans and all animals have evolved in symbiosis with the bacterial kingdom, and a mass of bacteria use our body as host and in return perform essential services such as helping digest our food and assist our immune system.
Glyphosate kills bacteria, and thus it indirectly harms all of us, if we consume glyphosate along with our food. The claim that glyphosate is safe is patently false and to make it stick, industry has acquired a stranglehold on scientific research, destroying its neutrality and objectivity. More on this later.
Our immune system has not learned to identify glyphosate as a harmful substance because it is a synthetic molecule that did not exist in nature in the 4 billion year evolutionary history of life on earth. Our evolutionary process did not have to deal with it. That is why we have no defence against Glyphosate. This molecule was invented by man, only two generations ago, and as such is of extraterrestrial nature. It aught to be made extraterrestrial again – sending it out of planet earth. Let them make it and store it on Jupiter.
As if all this was not enough, glyphosate is a biological mimic of glycine, a canonical amino acid that is among the most common of the 22 amino acids that form the basic building block of all life. By molecular mimicry, it slips past all our defences and gets mis-incorporated into our proteins. This invasion of glyphosate into our proteins turns them into rogue proteins, which can lead to a cascading series of diseases including synthetic diseases that did not exist before.
For scientific confirmation – one may read peer reviewed papers of Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, linked in my blog tonu.org.
For me, glyphosate is unacceptable for a simpler and more ominous reason. A product may not be approved by a government for general release without disclosure of its safety documents and providing the proof that it is safe. However, test data and documents that prove glyphosate is safe for consumers, have not been disclosed by any nations anywhere, despite it being approved for use since the 1970s. To me, this itself makes approval of glyphosate illegal.
Also, no government was engaged in broad based testing of food to detect levels of concentration of glyphosate, the most used herbicide on the planet. This is not just irresponsible and unacceptable. It should be criminal.
Personally I could not get any organization, anti-GMO groups and various talking heads to join me in asking the government in Canada to disclose hitherto hidden safety document on glyphosate. Neither could I find anyone to join me asking the Canadian government to start testing our foods for glyphosate. That is how I decided to go alone.
In 2013 Canada did not even have a lab that could test glyphosate in food, mainly because neither our government nor the medical establishment had so far been interested in testing foods for glyphosate. As a result, labs did not gear themselves up for a non-existent market.
I subsequently started a single handed two pronged effort to get the Canadian government, as the time under Stephen Harper and the conservatives, to get off its backside and first disclose all safety documents and data based on glyphosate was approved for the first time, back in the 1970s. Then, on a separate appeal, I asked the ministry of health to get some labs ready to test foods for glyphosate and to answer why Canadians could not test presence of the most used herbicide in our food.
The first effort is still dragging on. The government does agree I have a right to see the safety documents. And yet, it drags it feet forever. I also learned that I was the first person in Canada to officially as for this information, although the molecule has been approved back in the 1970s.
The second effort was more successful. In fact, it moved mountains, primarily due to a dedicated member of parliament, Mr. Alex Atamanenko, who took up my cause and demanded that the then minister of health answers me why Canadians cannot test food for glyphosate. This resulted in the ministry of health finally responding to me in a letter and also arranging to have its food inspection agency to start broad based testing of all foods available in Canada, produced locally and imported, for presence of glyphosate.
As soon as I learned that the wheels of the Government was finally beginning to turn in favour of testing our food for glyphosate, I asked the Canadian government discloses all test results to me – not just for the emerging records on glyphosate but for all biocides in food that the government had already tested for. And thus December 2016 I got almost 8,000 just concluded test results of glyphosate in foods and later another almost 100,000 records of results of other biocides in foods.
Analysis of the glyphosate records proved to be a shocker.
First, seed based foods and food products produced in the US and Canada were an order of dimension more toxic with glyphosate than same foods produced anywhere else on the planet. North America produces the most poisonous foods on the planet. I call glyphosate to be poisonous on the grounds that its safety data has been kept hidden. By that omission, I consider approval of glyphosate as illegal and the product as unsafe and downright a slow and deadly poison. Also, That it in fact is a deadly slow poison, has been explained by scientists such as Samsel and Seneff in their peer reviewed papers.
Not only that, I found out that conventional non-GMO crops such as wheat, rye, oats, barley, chickpea etc have an order of dimension more glyphosate than GM crops like soy and corn. Thus conventional non-GMO foods were, in my view, very much more poisonous than GM crops.
In my view, going after Monsanto is a useless exercise, because Monsanto does not necessarily break the law. What is does is corrupt our governments and gets our politicians to change the law to suit its business model. I believe its claim of safety of glyphosate to be fraudulent. I believe that is why it influences governments to hide this safety record from the people and prevents independent scrutiny of these data. Our governments is thus knowingly or unknowingly helping slow poisoning of the people, by allowing widespread use of glyphosate in agriculture.
Therefore, if one has to identify the rogues that are responsible for poisoning our food, our health, and our future, one needs to focus on our ineffective and possibly corrupt political process and perhaps corrupt or illiterate politicians that could not distinguish glyphosate from their elbow, who are unfortunately in charge of the regulatory mechanism and end up changing the laws of the nation to allow glyphosate to be used in agriculture.
Other scientists have found problems not just with glyphosate, but also with other chemicals packaged around it to make the branded product such as RoundUp. While this may be correct, it is glyphosate and glyphosate alone, that goes to regulatory mechanism and passes approval that ends up as RoundUp herbicide. In my view the cumulative damage that glyphosate does, not just at the toxicological level but in destroying our biology by molecular mimicry, sets this molecule apart from other adjuvants that goes into the packaging of RoundUp and even other herbicides.
And while we have other herbicides, pesticides, insecticides that are all possibly harming the ecosystem, glyphosate again stands out by the sheer volume of it that is produced and used, compared to all other biocides.
GMO are also based on fraudulent logic, exploitative ethics, twisted science as well as designed to undermine food security and freedom of a nation. However, there are hundreds and hundreds of them, each following different sets of scientific detail. If I have to fight a single battle and not a thousand battles, then I would choose glyphosate to be in my primary target. Glyphosate is the 900 pound gorilla in our food web and environment. Killing it would effectively also kill the GMO project. We shall be on the way to have all foods grown everywhere to be naturally organic as well as belonging to the people and the region that grows these foods, and not property of western corporations and banks .
Agri-corporations and their enablers in our government is quick to show the weighty evidence of science papers that claim glyphosate is safe. Promoters of this model of agriculture peddling increased sale of toxic chemicals, support a viewpoint that there is a baseless conspiracy theory and paranoia created in the minds of people by some miscreants and hapless scientists, which is resisting progress and modernism in agriculture and fighting glyphosate. There is a misconception that a little bit of toxicity in food in way of glyphosate is both acceptable and necessary, in view of the increased population of the world. All these claims by the promoters of toxic agriculture are fraudulent and not supported by honest facts and honest science. But my response to this chemical onslaught is simple. I say – disclose the safety documents, or shut up.
As to the weight of scientific evidence and the so called science based assessment – this is what I have to say.
Scientific research on safety of technologies such as glyphosate and GMO needs to be public funded and public owned. Instead, it is funded by the industry. Our politicians have allowed this travesty to come about. The public has bought into this on the false idea that this makes science free for the people and reduced our tax burden. This is false. There is no free lunch. You pay junk money for science, and you get junk science.
The industry is not interested in funding scientists that wish to check if products such as glyphosate has a problem. As a result, research on possible negative effects of glyphosate does not get any funding. Science has thus become one sided. It has lost its neutrality and objectivity. This, to me, is not science. This is voodoo, and so called “scientists” promoting it are not true scientists. They are pedlars.
Lastly, all this talk sidesteps a few important points – and these are to do with my perception of what constitutes democracy, the role of citizenry and what should be my personal duty to uphold our democratic process where the people are the masters of the government, and not some poison peddling corporation.
The most important stake holder in democracy is the citizen. It is my view that we, each of us, incur a debt to society and to democracy, as we grow up. The society does a lot to groom us. And we are to pay this debt back through the course of our lives by doing something in return for our society, our neighbourhood and our nation. We take a lot from the the society. We are supposed to put back more than we take, so that we leave the kitty is a bit richer and not sucked dry in our lifetime.
And there is the crux. We as individuals, within our individual capacity, are to engage in citizen activism to uphold and improve the wheels of the nation. This is our job, and not the job of the politicians. The politicians job is to represent us, take our views, and execute our wishes as our temporary servants. Our job is to be ever vigilant to ensure that these temporary servants are not robbing us and selling us off.
If we are caught napping, and stop controlling the politicians, then our politics will start being controlled by someone else or something else – which does not have our best interest at heart. Democracy then begins to fail, or morphs into forms of dictatorship, or fascism or other forms of rogue governments.
As they say – if you have a nation of sheep, you get a government of wolves. So, I appeal to you, the people, to get busy paying your debt to the nation, and start holding the feet of your politician to the fire.
We are facing an existential crisis. The very well beings of your children and grand children depends on you doing your duty in your own lifetime. Nothing else will do. The buck stops at your feet.
I have been jotting down ideas in a loosely arranged new book, called “Lonely Road” or “My Lonely Road of Glyphosate activism.
Why do I write it ? It is my personal feeling that, for an activist concerned with glyphosate, or destruction of biodiversity and ecology, or a planet facing mass extinction and perhaps human civilization facing a systemic collapse – writing a book is an useless pursuit.
This of course is my personal opinion. Book writing is for book writers, for them to earn a living and for people to have something to read.
Don’t get me wrong. There is a need for books, for a thousand different reasons.
But, in my view, in my personal experience of an anti-Glyphosate activist, writing a book about it is an useless pursuit, if the goal of the writer is to trigger a chain of events that might help put a stop to the reckless use of glyphosate on planet earth.
But then why am I writing this book. contradicting my own beliefs?
Well, one of the reason is a selfish one – a human’s desire to leave something behind when he/she kicks the bucket. Another reason may be that some humans are instinctively record keepers and like to leave behind a footnote to future generations, a statement that someone else had walked this path before. Also, it can be just that some folks believe they ave a flair of writing, or that they have a story worth telling.
Some of those reasons may apply to me – but there is also another. It is a constructive way to pass idle time.
I do not watch TV, and have started avoiding mainstream newspapers and magazines, mainly because I am not only fed up with them, but suspect I might become brain damaged if I spent too much time watching or reading them. While internet provides a sort of alternative pathway to news, it is also heavily controlled and also as full of rubbish as any other platform designed for public consumption.
I don’t go to watch much movies. I don’t do drugs, and don’t drink. I do not frequent pubs and bars. I find idle yapping with folks to be boring to the point of being intolerable.
I like conversation and exchange of ideas with folks that share similar interests or are able to talk on global issues with some depth and not superficially. Unfortunately, such people are very hard to find. As a result, I am often speaking with such folks over the phone, across great physical distances.
I am rather opinionated and do not suffer fools well.
All these are my psychological baggage and that results in me having certain amount of quiet time for introspection.
And right now, I am in India. Have been here for a number of months and likely to be here for a bit more, for personal reasons. And, I have less ways to use my time constructively. Yes, I am doing some bird-watching. Yes, I have visited interesting places and met interesting people.
But, not being in my own environment back in Canada, I have more idle time with myself.
As a result, I took up filling out some of the chapters of my book here.
Question – why do I have a chapter on Steve Wozniak in a book about Glyphosate activism ? Is Wozniak a known critic or supporter of Glyphosate ?
Frankly, I do not know. However, I do believe there is a link between recent comment made by Wozniak in Delhi, India, which has been twisted around some by the media, and the reason why Glyphosate, and toxic technologies from the west, manages to get strongholds in countries such as India.
And I intend to write a chapter on this.
I read a few articles on what Wozniak said. Apparently he mentioned that Indians, the upwardly mobile Indians that migrate to the US, are usually academic types (book pushers) that get MBAs, get fat jobs and might drive a Mercedes. However, they lack creativity. The papers seem to say that Wozniak commented to the effect that this lack of creativity is the reason India does not get companies like Apple, Google or Facebook.
I am not sure if Wozniak meant exactly that, but feel pretty confident that he said what he did as a positive criticism of the Indian system, mostly education system, that encourages copybookism (a term I just coined) as against independent thinking, which is why the upper half Indians following this system end up being successful techno-coolies designed to be well paid cogs in the US style corporate machinery, like a new age incarnation of the century old character played by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. This is why Yuppy Indians are unlikely to be pathfinders of new horizons.
If Wozniak actually meant all this, then I disagree with him, again in a constructive way, and I think this has great relevance to why and how technologies such as chemical farming and glyphosate get a purchase in countries like India.
First – Indians are no more nor less creative than Americans. In fact there is no good way to even define an American, since most so called creative people in the US came from somewhere else, or their parents of grandparents did. But what essentially set the US apart from other countries, and especially apart from India, is that the system in the US encouraged creativity and brilliance, as well as encourage hard working coopybookists (another term I coined just now).
India, on the other hand, has a system where corporations grease their way through the Government which legislates and legitimizes business tycoons to get a stranglehold on certain sectors of business, often to the great detriment of the environment and the people, and shuts all doors to independent thinking, rational thinking, and creative thinking.
In short, it is not so much the people of India, but the system that Indians have rigged for themselves after independence, that promotes cronyism, corruption and hegemony and suppresses creativity, independent thinking, or rational thinking.
Of course, I am perhaps being a bit more harsh on India than I should be, but then, perhaps the readers will forgive me, since I come from years of frustrating glyphosate activism.
But hang on – things are not all that hunky dory for USA either, and this is another area that Wozniak is either unaware of, or is unwilling to touch. The vaunted US system is virtually bankrupt and on the point of collapse.
One could also argue if Facebook, Google and Apple are actually helping or harming the planet – but that would really drag this chapter into an endless road. I shall leave it for others to ponder.
US does not any more have a system that is just or which rewards rational thinking. It is a system that has given rise to the One World Order, a system that is busy devouring the planet. And its political establishment is corrupt to the core, borrowing a term from Shiv Chopra’s book.
But back to India. The upwardly mobile, english educated Indian population, both in India and outside, have largely become cultural slaves of the US system. They are hypnotized, like a deer caught in the headlights. They are unable to think straight or think outside of the American bubble.
And this cultural slavery is working in favour of glyphosate, in favour of Monsanto and in favour of industrial, chemical agriculture as much as many other items that only promote US hegemony and destruction of the biodiverse sustainable ecology of the planet, all in the name of phoney and fraudulent idea of “development” and “progress”.
And that is the link, in my mind, between whatever Wozniak might have said, and my take on why India appears to be almost blindly allowing their people to be poisoned in order to make profit for agro-corporations.
Anyhow, this is just part of one chapter of my book – in the making.
You can perhaps guess, this book is not designed to be popular either in India, or in the US.
In this first of three part interview, on items to be covered in a new article that Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff are currently writing, Samsel discloses his research on how glyphosate gets into all parts of horses that are fed glyphosate laced diet, including its hooves, which caused the hooves to collapse and not carry the weight of the horses.
Research on horses covered their blood, urine, feces, hooves and even semen. Glyphosate gets into the blood and can get into all tissues and all parts of the horse biology wherever glycine is needed. This indicates the near certainty that this is also happening to all other mammals including humans.
He got fingernail samples of human patients that are suffering from Scleroderma, and he found presence of glyphosate in their finger nails.
This ability of glyphosate to penetrate deep into our biology and integrate itself in places where it is unwanted, can cause an near endless chain of illnesses. What is even more surprising, is that most of these observations were already done back in the 1970s by Monsanto and Dupont. Anthony Samsel reconfirmed that by independent analysis that this indeed is the case and is also making the subject public, 45 years after they were first observed by the promoters of the product – and kept from our scrutiny. This hiding of the safety data on glyphosate, in my view, makes the approval of glyphosate illegal, apart from being extremely dangerous for all life on the planet.
To: Minister of Agriculture, BC, Honourable Ms Lana Popham,
AGR.Minister@gov.bc.ca
Dated: Thursday, October 5, 2017
Subject: Request to see you regarding banning of glyphosate from British Columbian agriculture
Minister Popham,
Greetings.
This is a follow up on the earlier email sent to you on the 28th of August, 2017, on this subject, which started a petition initiated by me on change.org, to request your government to ban glyphosate from British Columbian agriculture. The reasons for the petition were covered in that letter, but I shall take the liberty of mentioning three most important of them. These are
1)
Ottawa has registered glyphosate for use in Canadian agriculture forty years ago. Yet, till date, safety documents that are supposed to prove the biocide to be harmless to us have not been disclosed. By safety documents I mean results of actual tests done on animals exposed to glyphosate and their health parameters measured, over their lifetime, and compared against identical animals living identical lifestyle and eating identical foods but without glyphosate. Study of this comparison is what constitutes actual evidence if the biocide is harmful or harmless to higher mammals. Instead of this document, we are constantly dumped with reports on third party opinions of who said what and where, about glyphosate. All these third party views are just noise.
According to our understanding of the law, it is illegal to allow release of a product while withholding documents that prove its safety.
Also, without such safety data, any maximum residue limit (MRL) set by the government with regard to glyphosate contamination in food is unsubstantiated, and in our view, also illegal.
2)
My analysis of near 8,000 foods collected in Canada and tested by CFIA (titled Poison Foods of North America) shows how industrially grown seed based foods produced in North America contain by far the highest concentration of glyphosate in the world, and how food samples collected in Western Canada proved to contain higher concentration of glyphosate than even foods collected elsewhere in Canada.
3)
Repeated attempts from my end to get the Ottawa government, both under PM Harper and now under PM Trudeau, to get Health Canada, to disclose hitherto hidden safety documents on glyphosate have failed or is going through a slow motion dragging of feet spanning multiple years of frustratingly endless chain of correspondence. Support from a handful of sympathetic MPs, all of then NDP, has failed to nudge Ottawa out of its studied stupor on this issue.
All this makes this petition not just a casual matter or health concern, but a life and death issue for the long term well being of the people.
A month has passed since this petition was created, and as of today, it has 16,585 supporters. People from 55 countries have supported the idea of British Columbia banning glyphosate from agriculture. Out of these, Canadians alone constitute 97%.
Within Canada, support came from all provinces, of which the top four are British Columbia with 6,614, Ontario with 4,940, Quebec with 1,626 and Alberta with 1,394 supporters. Many of them are waiting to see if BC succeeds so that they can take take a page out of this effort and hope to repeat it in their provinces.
I request that you grant us an hour to see you at your office, to present all the details of the petition, its list of supporters, their comments and all the textual and video updates made on the petition on a DVD disk to you.
I also request you to consider allowing me to bring a small delegation, of say six notable persons that may give their views on the matter, people such as retired Agriculture Canada scientists, or committed campaigners against Canadians being exposed to synthetic biocides.
We consider this unbelievable concentration of glyphosate in our food to be the front and centre most alarming of all the myriad problems that mankind faces across the world and in Canada today, and we are not going to give up our efforts to push back at what we consider to be an illegally approved clandestine slow poisoning of the masses, especially those that are uninformed or too poor to afford organic foods.
If you need assistance from the people to explore or initiate steps to restrict glyphosate from our food, you will not find more dedicated helpers than us.
If you agree, please indicate a date and time when we might present our petition and our views to you.
This letter is being sent as an email. It will also be printed, signed and physically mailed to you. Finally, this letter will also be read live on camera, as an update to the petition itself, and will be included in the DVD disk to be prepared for you.
We know some of the root causes behind the avalanche of toxic chemicals that has gotten into the food system and environment in the west in general and in North America in particular, is rooted in possible extreme penetration within and corruption of our political institutions, and through it into our media, healthcare system, judiciary, economic systems and scientific institutions, by the poison peddling agro-industries. The corruption is not unique to Canada, and originates from the US but has now permeated the global scenario, enveloping much of the known world.
In my view, the fault for this sorry state of affairs where every decision is one-sided and tilted to favour anti-people policies, lies at the feet of the citizenry. In a functioning democracy, if we still have it, the responsibility of ensuring that the political process remains balanced and policies are driven primarily by the will of the people and not by a handful of foreign corporations, lies at the feet of the citizenry, and citizenry alone.
But, in a fast paced world where the controlled media constantly bombards you with manufactured or tinted news, where you are being programmed to think it might be the right thing to do to use your tax dollars to bomb some third world country that has never attacked you, just because the leader of that country is unilaterally and without court trial projected as a bad guy, therefore justifying the military industrial complex to obliterate their towns and villages and turn their cities into rubble, all in the name of international peacekeeping.
In this scenario, a whole group of people get employed in scientific institutions whose pay check may be coming from sources that mandate them to speak in favour of pesticide dependent agriculture. They are trained to look at select science, deny existence of alternative views that cast doubt on chemical dependent agriculture, to the extent that they often are either in denial or totally ignorant of a world outside of controlled junk science of glyphosate or other biocides in food and nature.
People of this kind have infiltrated into major scientific institutions in most countries, but particularly in the west. They are programmed to believe that the west is the best, and are taught to challenge any opposing view by a few standard tactics. One of them is to stay away from the topic, and attack the messenger, trying to imply that the person having the opposing view is mentally challenged, is scientifically illiterate, or is a fear mongered, or is trying to make a buck or has some personal motive. Therefore, he or she is not worth paying attention to, and whatever they say, does not need to be answered.
If such anti-pesticide person remains in the sidelines, he or she may be ignored. But should he-she gain prominence somehow, then these pesticide peddling trolls begin to emerge out of the wood work.
My point here is – it may be worthwhile for the citizens to identify such junk scientists and demand that the institutions fire them. Perhaps these myopic poison pushers need to be encouraged to find an alternative profession – leave science and take up selling newspapers.
The long letter has lots of selective junk science I shall not go into right now. The main issues that prompted me to single this person out, considering him to qualify being included in a blog are:
His writing to me without identifying himself, as if he is as important as Lord Buddha and I should revere him immediately.
His extreme prejudice and racial/cultural hubris, implying that people from the Indian subcontinent might be mentally unfit to decide on glyphosate due to extreme proximity of human excreta.
If this person was just an ordinary man on the street, I’d have ignored him. But he apparently is part of the national academia and in the body of research scientists – the same group that we believe may have been penetrated and corrupted by the poison peddling corporations through political corruption in Canada.
And, he displays an extreme case of racial and cultural arrogance, prejudice and hubris, about people of the south-Asian subcontinent.
So I decided to record both the email received as well as this blog.
To me, this person is still too small a fish, and I have more important tasks at hand, such as trying to convince local governments to push back at the practice of using glyphosate in agriculture and environment.
But perhaps someone else might like to take this up with the authorities such as the University of Montreal, or the Research Council of Canada, and ask them if their policy allows employing people with people that display extreme racial and cultural bigotry.
I am likely to include a video later on, on this issue, that can be included here as well as in an update on the petition itself.
Someone from New Brunswick asked for my opinion of the CBC audio interview with Mr. Len Ritter. The interview was about the issue of the town of Moncton, NB objecting to the practice of spraying glyphosate around the Turtle Creek Reservoir that supplies water to over 100,000 people. The province of New Brunswick overrode the objection and claims that Glyphosate is safe.
I have a lot to say about it all, including:
My opinion of CBC’s neutrality and our responsibility in this regard
The value of science today and the qualification of Len Ritter
Non-disclosure of safety data on glyphosate & possible illegality about its continued use.
The need for glyphosate to be at all sprayed
My views are in the above 20 minute video.
To start with, I do not consider Len Ritter to be qualified to talk on the issue from neutral standpoint. He has made a career of allowing toxic chemicals in our environment – in my judgement.
I do not consider science to be neutral and objective any more, thanks to removal of public funding in science.
Questions directed to Mr. Ritter did not mention the fact that the government has hidden the safety data based on which it approved the use of glyphosate, which is, in my judgment, illegal. And my idea of safety data involves subjecting a group of test animals to the herbicide and their health parameters compared with another identical group subjected to clean food. This comparison, and analysis, constitutes actual safety test – and not someone else’s opinion on if glyphosate is safe or unsafe.
Canada should demand such tests be done specifically for registration of glyphosate in Canada and the promoter should be asked to pay for these tests, but the tests should be done by competent neutral institutions outside of control of either the industry or the government. The cost of this should be borne by whoever wants to register it in Canada.
This is just one area where we have junk approval of glyphosate. Without disclosure of their safety data, its use is illegal in my view.
Why spraying was at all necessary near Turtle Creek was not asked bY CBC.
We have junk science, junk scientists and junk media, covering this issue of life and death importance to the people of Moncton.
I am a Canadian citizen that lived in the US before moving to Canada. I am a food security activists that wrote the book ‘Poison Foods of North America‘ covering high toxicity in Canadian and US grown foods with glyphosate contamination.
I have studied issues with vaccines too and am aware of their possible link to a cascade of diseases for all sorts of reasons including presence of Glyphosate.
Since you are appointed by the US president to be part of a team to study vaccine safety, your involvement in this field has caught the attention of many, including people in Canada.
I have been advised by some folks that attended your recent visit to Ontario in some public event where you were there with Vandana Shiva and others. These attendees were concerned that your opposition to vaccines appeared to be very limited, only on the presence of mercury and not other things that are also considered as much if not more damaging to the people. In particular, about the presence of possible GMO and glyphosate and the extent of damage that these ingredients children that receive these vaccines.
In other words, there was a nagging suspicion in some of their minds that you gave the corporations such as Monsanto a pass, by failing to identify their products as potentially dangerous ingredients in vaccines.
I would like you to clarify your position in this regard.
My second concern is the difficulty in finding your email address, so this question could be asked to you directly, instead of through a public blog or an youtube. It is my view that people involved in serving the public should not hide their emails from the people. I wonder if you have anything to say on this.
