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)
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.
Subject : Bill C-291 – regarding labelling of genetically modified food.
Honourable Ms Qualtrough,
I write to you with regard to bill C-291 which aimed to amend the Food and Drug Act and include a clause to mandate labelling of genetically modified foods in Canada. This bill got defeated in the parliament with 216 Nay votes and 67 Yea votes. You voted against it, as did virtually all of the conservatives and most of the liberal MPs. A handful of Liberal MPs voted in favour of labelling GMOs, Honourable liberal MP Terry Beach of Burnaby BC being one of them. This letter is copied to him since he is referred here.
Common sense tells me that GMO aught to have been labelled, irrespective of what science says about it, of if one prefers to eat or avoid genetically modified food. It is the right of the people, I feel, to know what they are eating, and GMO is one such information that aught to have been identified to consumers.
But I do not write this letter regarding what I feel aught to have been or what my idea of common sense is.
I write this letter for two specific reasons. These are
1) To inform you that in my view you have violated the duty you were to perform when you got elected to represent us, by making your own decision to vote against the bill instead of checking with your constituents first.
You have often held meetings in Delta to gather public opinion on various issues. I have received invitations from your office to attend such meetings and have attended a few and voiced my concerns there. I presume the reason you hold such meetings is to gauge the opinions and feelings of the constituents and to reflect them back in Ottawa.
However, you failed to invite us to express our opinion on this important issue of labelling GMOs which has great relevance to food safety and general health as well as food security, preservation of biodiversity and independence from corporate ownership of living organisms. How I know you avoided checking public opinion is that you failed to hold a meeting on this and I did not receive an invitation from your office to attend any such meeting.
2) Since in my view you may have violated the sacrosanct duty that you were constitutionally required to perform, I believe I may have a reason to question your suitability in performing the task of a public servant to protect our interest. I therefore might decide to perform my citizens duty, to alert voters that you may have assumed dictatorial powers and decided to make unilateral decisions on what the people of Delta should know about their food.
In my book, only two kinds of persons can make such unilateral decisions for the people. These two are – a dictator, or an emperor. I do not believe you are either, though I suspect you might have forgotten what your specific duty is.
I write this letter to you not expecting an answer per se. I know politicians are usually quite good at staying silent on questions that they would rather not answer.
I am nonetheless writing this to publicize and circulate it among voters within my capacity, and also to set an example for other citizens, in Delta and outside, to take a queue and question their own respective representatives about what authority they had in making decisions without checking with the people first.
While I do not expect any response, I shall be glad to receive one, to discuss how you voted against this bill. Either way, this letter is going to be public.
If I do not succeed in changing your behaviour with regard to voting on sensitive bills, I sure hope to change views of a few of the citizen voters with regard to their perception of their representatives in our parliament.
If you find this letter a bit harsh, you will forgive me, since I do not feel particularly amicable after seeing how you voted against this bill.
Thanking you
Tony Mitra
10891 Cherry Lane Delta BC.
A response received from the office of Ms Carla Qualtrough. This is a good omen. Among all the letters I have sent to various MPs, MLAs and Mayors and councillors in Canada,very few will come back with a response.
However, this is an example that, if one tries hard enough, one might get a few responses time to time. More importantly, perhaps this is a sign that if enough folks approach their representatives, there will be a collective pressure that might translate into positive movements in our government to represent issue of vital importance for our people.
Bill C291 (Labelling of GMO) What the people might do about it
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
This was the bill, for mandatory labelling of GMO, that was hugely defeated in the Canadian parliament recently, because most of the conservatives and liberals voted against it, while all of NDP, Bloc Québécois and a handful of Liberals voted for it.
The full list of who voted which way, is available on Govt. web site, and I have downloaded it, converted it to pdf and uploaded it in my website for reference.
Idea is to check how our elected representatives voted and challenge them when they voted against it – and encourage other people to do the same, because of a simple require of our constitution – the MPs were NOT supposed to vote according to their feelings or bias, but were SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT THE WISHES OF THEIR CONSTITUENTS.
In short, if they were unsure of public sentiment, (and polls say an overwhelming percentage of the people wanted GMO labelling), they were supposed to open a channel of communication to assess feelings of the voters of their riding and then vote on the bill accordingly.
My Liberal MP neither checked with the people (I got no notification from her that she was at all interested in my view) and went and voted against the bill.
So, here is one more example of where Canadians might write to their MPs and demand on know what right they had to make unilateral decision without without checking views of the people they represent. According to my understanding of the Canadian constitution, these MPs had absolutely no right to make either an unilateral decision, or to go with the party boss, or to be influenced by industry.
However, it is still our (citizen’s) duty to make this work, and to either force a change in the behaviour of our MPs, or to see that they soon become unemployed politicians.
If the citizens are not ready to take back control of politics of this nation – the citizens do not deserve a functioning democracy.
I shall be writing to my MP, for sure. I shall also be sharing it with the people.
For those that wish to check the link vote list for Bio C-291 – click on the above picture.
Remember Canadians :
Democracy is NOT A FREE LUNCH. We have to earn it.
And while you are at it, you might copy your letter to the MP that sponsored this bill, Pierre-Luc Dusseault of Sherbrooke, Quebec at Pierre-Luc.Dusseault@parl.gc.ca
The top five origins whose food samples were the most in number as tested by CFIA are: United States, Unknown, Canada, India and China.
The chart below gives one view of the average glyphosate content in foods from these five origins, calculated as the total glyphosate in all foods divided by the number of food samples that actually contained glyphosate, excluding the clean samples, for each region. This represents the average level of contamination among the contaminated samples. The averages for all samples is the basis by which contamination levels are calculated for the rest of the book. The median line represents sort of the average, but is weighted according to the number of samples. Since number of samples are the highest from the United States, ‘Unknown” and Canada, the median is more influenced by them than by India or China. If there were equal number of samples from all these regions and more so from other countries from the world, the median would have been much lower as an indication of world average. In the chart below, this dotted red line carries a value of 204 as a whole number.
The good the bad and the ugly (median)
Thus, the United States and ‘Unknown’ are seen as sort of average, not an ideal average though. Canada is rated as bad because of having levels of contamination in its food that is 50% worse than even the median. India and China, having much lower levels of contamination, are rated good.
The table/chart below is one way to explain how foods available in Canada that originated in Canada, Unknown, the United States, India and China compare between them, with regard to glyphosate contamination.
The table gives two sets of values for each region. the chart superimposed over the table presents the same two values for each region.
These two values are average level of glyphosate contamination for each region, but calculated in under two different criteria, using two different ratio.
The bottom line, in green represents the values in the second column from left, titled “overall ppb”. This means, all the readings of glyphosate from samples from the region that had any glyphosate, was added, and then divided by the total number of samples, including samples that had no glyphosate.
The upper line, in black, represents the last column from left, where the same total amount of glyphosate was divided by only the number of samples that had any glyphosate.
In other words, the bottom line shows average glyphosate for every sample of the region, irrespective of if they were clean samples or dirty samples, while the top line is the average glyphosate content for only those samples that did have some glyphosate.
These two lines would merge in cases where a region had no clean sample at all, and all the samples contained some glyphosate, or where 100% of the samples were contaminated.
Both of them give varied but statistically significant indication for a consumer, about foods from which countries that are available in Canada, contain how much glyphosate. Foods imported from China ranked fifth number of samples, and proves to be the best food with the least amount of glyphosate in them, in either representation.
This may not be what the people of China are eating, but this is how those varieties that are exported by them to Canada, compare with the rest.
Meanwhile I made a 3 minute video on who the book Poison Foods of North America is for.
Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) had nearly 8,000 records of foods tested for presence of glyphosate, which I came to acquire a copy of after years of working on this issue with various levels of the Canadian Government going back some number of years, to the time when Mr. Harper was the Prime Minister. My interactions started with the issues that Canada at the time did not even have a lab that would test foods for glyphosate, which I considered to be an outrageous and unacceptable state of affair. Thankfully, within a year, labs started getting themselves accredited for testing foods for glyphosate, more or less concurrent with the time when World Health Organization classified glyphosate to be a probable carcinogen.
While this matter was kept outside of the media or Government outlets, i was fully aware of a scheme going on to test foods available in Canada, of both Canadian and imported kind, for glyphosate. This started my next level of effort with the Government to get my hands on the food test records. In between all this there has been letters, meetings, petitions and motions initiated by me and sent to Health Ministers spanning two governments, demanding disclosure on various aspects on glyphosate, from its approval for agriculture, to setting of MRLs, to its aerial use over forests, prairies and watersheds. Those details may not have a direct relation with this blog, but all these efforts and years of involvement brought me to where I was three months ago, sitting on a huge pile of test records on foods collection in Canada, and around a thousand and five hundred of those records involved foods originating in the United States, and a similar number for foods grown in Canada. India and China provided the most samples after USA and Canada.
All these records were scanned by me and converted to editable text and numbers using optical character recognition software, and error corrected. Finally, multiple giant spreadsheets were created to sort through the data for analysis. That prompted me to write and publish an online e-Book to alert the people. I named it “POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA”.
The book is over 300 page long and has more than 300 tables, along with charts and images. Many of the tables give the actual raw data with regard to glyphosate content and description of the food sample, its origin etc.
Some of the findings were as expected while some are totally unexpected, and often shocking.
Here are a few examples:
Canada and USA produce the most toxic foods on the planet, with regard to glyphosate contamination.
Within North America, Canada produces foods with significantly higher levels of glyphosate.
Within Canada, the west is where one can find more glyphosate contaminated foods than from other regions within Canada.
Western Canada is ground zero, for finding nasty foods.
Cleanest of food suppliers are Peru, Thailand, France, South Africa, Mexico, and China. China apparently exports cleaner foods than what locals consume inside China. For example, imported foods from China, averaging 3 ppb contamination, is 28 times cleaner than foods produced in the US, and over 45 times cleaner than foods produced in Canada.
Foods imported from Mexico is 70 times cleaner than Canadian foods and over 40 times cleaner than foods originating in the United States.
Conventional foods desiccated by glyphosate is far more contaminated than GM crops that are roundup ready.
Out of the main cereals, rice is about the only one that is more or less without any glyphosate, except for some rice, rice flour or rice based products produced in Canada and the US.
Lentils and chickpea (garbanzo) produced in North America, as well as foods made with these ingredients are highly contaminated with glyphosate.
Although soy flour may contain high glyphosate, tofu made out of soy has none.
Wheat bran produced in Canada has an average of around 2,500 ppb of glyphosate in every sample.
Foods from over sixty nations have been tested, but not all of them contributed large number of samples. However, a few nations did have high sample depth, USA is among them.
The table here was truncated from a long one, with each and every type of food that was recorded by CFIA to have come from the United States. Then, for now, all food types that hat had less than 10 samples were set aside.
Of the remaining samples, how many belonged to which food type was entered in the second column from left, against each food types. How many of that food type proved ‘negative’ or had to glyphosate, was checked. These two figures allowed calculations on what percentage of the samples were dirty (proved positive in glyphosate screening). Then all the glyphosate and AMPA values were added and then divided by the total number of samples for each food type, to get average ppb contamination level, which is shown in the last column.
Then the table was sorted by ppb values in descending order, and included as the first item within the subchapter of foods from the United States.
So this table is the dirty dozen of American foods.
We shall then proceed with looking at more details of some of the dirty dozen that have high glyphosate levels and high enough sample depth to provide a glimpse of what is happening with toxicity in US grown foods.
The top two items in the second table above are in violation of the MRL (Maximum residue Limit) set by the Canadian Government. What is interesting to ponder, or perhaps correspond with the authorities about, is what happens with such violations are noted. Ideally, the product should be withdrawn. Public should be notified and warned not to buy or consume it. Those that already bought this item should be advised to return it to the store and get a refund. The producer should be prosecuted. The issue should be out on mainstream media for public awareness.
None of that, as far as I can remember happened or happens. I do not remember a single instance with I was aware of such foods being recalled or public warned.
So, are we to suppose that those MRLs which are themselves set arbitrarily without providing any proof of their authenticity, are also not being implemented? In our food safety mechanism we might have a reproduction of the “wild west”.
In the case of violations on foods imported, in this case from the US, should the US Government and public also not be notified? Is anybody from the US aware of this situation?
I use the term toxic and poisonous interchangeably to mean the same thing, and I deny the mainstream any right to control the meaning of the terms toxic or poisonous with regard to glyphosate.
As long as the public is denied independently verifiable proof that glyphosate in food is safe at any level, over the lifetime of animals consuming it even in low dose, to me, all talks of glyphosate being safe is worth little more than magic or voodoo.
Mainstream can continue to consider glyphosate as safe, and I shall continue to believe it is the most dangerous synthetic chemical to have entered our food system and threatens to undo the long term health of the human society as well as all flora and fauna of the land.
And thus, the table above is the opening section of the “dirty dozen” of US foods. We shall also have more such tables covering the remaining items in dirty dozens list from USA, Canada, Unknown, and some other countries.
The book is already online, but constantly being improved, proof read, new tables, charts, subjects and value added. All updates should be free for legal owners of previous copies. However, there is a catch. Apparently, free updates are decided on case by case basis by Amazon after receiving an application from the author. Standard guidelines provided by Amazon mentions that additional chapter and added pages do not qualify for free access to later versions of the book by folks that bought an earlier version. I did not know that till I started inquiring with Amazon. Now I am trying to impress upon them that this book is a reference and analysis of the most controvercial herbicide in our food system and there is no other book of this kind, covering data that is not available to anybody else at this point of time. And later versions cover critical data on foods form the US, a significant producer of foods that are contaminated with this herbicide. I hope to impress upon them to make a difference and allow free updates to owners of earlier copies.
Otherwise, I would suggest that potential readers might like to wait for about a weak or two before purchasing the book. For all these confusions, the price of the book is lowered temporarily by a few dollars. It will be back up to around $ 9.99 as soon as sections covering US foods and foods from China and India are completed. Target is by the first week of April, 2017.
The book can be found in Amazon, NAMED “Poison foods of North America”. Book cover, designed by me, is shown here with the link.
I also made a three minute video on the book, as shown below.
Lastly, this book is not designed to add to the debate on if glyphosate is safe and at what level. I have no interest to join any such debate. I am uninterested in the opinion of the glyphosate supporting industry and their supportive political and media outlets. I live in a free country and the meaning of any word or term such as toxic or poisonous, is not owned by the industry. The meaning is not even etched in stone and changes with times depending on perception by the people.
So, the mainstream can continue to harp that glyphosate is safe. I shall continue to believe it is dangerous and unsafe at any level of concentration, until proven otherwise by independent verification and the regime of secrecy around it has been dismantled.
So who is this book for? It is for those that have, like me, already decided that glyphosate is a seriously harmful molecule in their food web and they would rather find a way to avoid it right now. Those are the people this book is for.
The mainstream science, media, political class and the regulatory authority has lost public trust on this issue. This book is not aimed at influencing their opinion. This book is for the people – the rest of us.
I received over 7,800 records of foods tested by the Canadian Government on glyphosate contamination in foods.
I am writing an e-book on my analysis of the data, and am both shocked and outraged to find that Canadian food is the most poisonous in the entire planet, with US foods running second.
This book is not designed to weigh in on any debate on if glyphosate is safe or not, to be in food.
I have drawn a line in the sand, and decided that one part per billion glyphosate in my food is one part too much. I completely uninterested in what mainstream media or the corporate lobby or the politicians have to say about it, since they refuse to provide any proof that glyphosate in any level of concentration is safe.
This book is for people that already have reached similar decisions, and merely want a tool to navigate their way through the food web, in order to avoid food wit high glyphosate content and to pick out the better ones in hope of avoiding being poisoned by what they eat.
That is who the book is designed for.
Attached nine minute video explains the issue about the book, earmarked to be available by end March or first week of April 2017.
