As my days in India is slowly drawing to a close, I have become hard pressed to complete various writings, mainly focussed on glyphosate as an unwanted element in our food web, but also including problems relating to Government policy on agriculture from scientific standpoint as well as socio-economic issues where small holder farmers are perhaps to be forced out of farming by design, so agriculture can be captured by corporations and share holders, for profit, while food sovereignty, food safety as well as welfare of hundreds of millions of farmers and health concerns of over a billion citizens are up for grabs.
The issues here are complex. Most Indians I meet, know less than zero about almost any of it. Very very few people ever heard the name Codex Alimentarius, or glyphosate, or amino acid. Very few understand how our body actually processes food.
To write about these, for the average folks, and that too in vernacular language where many of the English technical terms do not have a suitable local word due to non-use, is not easy for someone like me.
Nonetheless, I understand that such literature is required, in English as well as in local languages. I also understand that, for various reasons, I might be among the best suited to compose such material.
Consequently, I wrote this one page flyer, or hand bill, which can not only be shared on social media which, at the end of the day, may not be the best way in my view in achieving direct measurable positive result on the ground, but also be printed and posted in rural areas where village folks could read the local language. If the text is simplified to the degree where it is comprehensible to the layman – all the better.
This is my first attempt, on the property of chelation by glyphosate and how that affects us. Since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, I included a picture of hemoglobin protein, which is mentioned in the text. I borrowed the image from the internet, since I did not have the time to draw it from scratch. I added a few Bengali words on it.
I shall perhaps repeat that in English too. While I can speak and read Hindi, unfortunately I am not good at writing it any more, although I could do that as a child. So I cannot do it in Hindi at this point of time.