Spraying Our Killing Fields with Agent Orange ...
Could it be that some people are deliberately trying to maim and kill us?
The
United States Department of Agriculture is rapidly challenging the war
machine of the Pentagon for the most wanted and most feared honor of
creating the world’s largest and most effective killing fields. Killing
fields is of course a reference to the compelling British movie of the
1980’s about the US war in Cambodia which Nixon ordered in May, 1970, in
frustration at the lack of victory in neighboring Vietnam. These
killing fields, however, are the golden green fields of US GMO corn and
the endless acres of GMO soybeans which make up almost all US corn and
soybean production today.
Would you knowingly feed your family a
documented toxin that is said to cause cancers, autism and other
illnesses? If you are old enough to recall the tragic history of the
Vietnam War of the 1970s and the US military’s massive spraying across
the rich jungles of Vietnam with a highly toxic defoliant or weed-killer
nicknamed Agent Orange, the following might give you pause.
‘Super-weeds’
The advent of the widespread use of
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), the direct result of President
G.H.W. Bush’s collusion with Monsanto in 1992, opened a Pandora’s Box
for the human and animal food chain which is only now beginning to be
seriously looked at by a larger scientific and lay public. To date,
almost all GMO patented seeds or crops, whether soybean, corn or cotton,
have been modified for one trait enhancement–that they are resistant to
the powerful and highly toxic weed-killer glyphosate, the main
component of Monsanto’s Roundup, the world’s best-selling weed-killer.
At the beginning of US commercialization
of GMO in the mid-1990s, glyphosate herbicides, whether from Monsanto,
Dow, DuPont or Syngenta or others, appeared to farmers to be salvation
for weed control. It killed everything, everything, except the
genetically modified GMO corn or soybean crops which had been
genetically manipulated, not to increase harvest yield as Monsanto slick
PR would have us believe, but only to “resist” glyphosate and Roundup.
Farmers were delighted at the beginning. Monsanto GMO plantings spread
across the fields of America to the point today, according to a recent
USDA survey, GMO soybeans sprayed with glyphosate weed-killer chemicals
comprise fully 94% of the entire US soybean harvest. That means
virtually every food product on US supermarket shelves containing soy or
soybean derivative is GMO, sprayed with glyphosate. The figure was only
17% in 1997. The USDA figure for GMO corn drenched in glyphosate
chemicals this year will reach 92% of all corn produced in America. The
United States is the world’s largest corn producer and the largest
exporter, and the world’s largest soybean producer.
US produced GMO corn and soybeans
covered with glyphosate, are exported to the European Union and even to
China under various legal loopholes, despite a de facto prohibition of
GMO planting in those countries. It is exported as high protein “power
feed” for animals–chicken, pigs, cattle.
Initially into the turn of the century
all seemed to be going well. Owing to the collusion between G.H.W. Bush
and subsequent US presidents Clinton, Baby Bush and Obama, Americans
were denied the basic human right to know what they were feeding their
family. It was prohibited that the US Government Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) or the USDA or any other government agency
independently test the approved GMO patented crops for health and
safety. It was known as the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence and it’s
a criminal fraud in force since 1992 when old Bush agreed with Monsanto
on that. Farmers have since sprayed tons of glyphosate chemicals on
their crops of GMO corn or soybeans or cotton–the three major US GMO
crops.
After several years however, nature
found devious ways to outfox Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and their glyphosate
weed-killers. Nature mutated new varieties of so-called super-weeds.
Today an estimated 50 percent of US farmland is being strangled by new
super-weeds requiring application of far more tons of chemical
weed-killers than with normal non GMO and non-glyphosate-treated crops.
The spread of giant fields of
super-weeds is worst in the southeastern United States where most
soybeans and cotton crops are grown. There, as of 2013, a reported 92
percent of cotton and soybean fields were infested as a result of
Roundup Ready crops.
The now-Roundup-resistant Palmer
amaranth is just one example of the weeds spreading across America’s
farmland. It’s a fast-growing weed that can reach eight feet in height,
outcompeting soybeans or cotton; it develops a tough stem that can
damage farm machinery. Other aggressive super weeds, impervious to
Roundup or other glyphosate weed-killers, are spreading rapidly through
the Midwest and the Corn Belt. The cause is the widespread use since the
mid-1990s of GMO crops sprayed with Roundup or other glyphosate based
weed killers. Nature is clever in finding solutions and the nature of
super weeds is far cleverer, it seems, than the minds of the GMO
Monsanto scientists devising weed-killers.
Roundup resistant Super weeds are covering American GMO acres
Some of the super-weeds have incorporated genetic material from the
GMO plants into their own genetics and used it to grow taller, stronger,
and with greater vitality than the previous weeds that were killed by
glyphosate when it was first introduced to genetically modified crop fields.
2,4-D-a cure worse than the disease
Now the even-cleverer scientists at
Monsanto-rival Dow Chemical have rolled out a new, likely even more
toxic cocktail they claim will solve the super-weed crisis the
glyphosate weed-killers caused in the first place. Only this “solution”
is worse than the super-weed disease itself. It involves mixing the
glyphosate chemicals together with something chemists call 2,
4-Dichlorophenoxy acetic acid or simply 2,4-D.
Dow Chemical has won USDA and
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approval for its new herbicide,
“Enlist,” which is based on 2,4-D as well as other non-disclosed
(company confidential) chemical adjuvants. They claim it will solve the
problem of glyphosate-resistant super-weeds caused by widespread GMO
crop spraying with Monsanto’s Roundup. The EPA claims that “tests” have
proven 2,4-D completely safe even for the fetus inside a mother’s womb.
The only problem is that the safety tests were funded and given to the
corrupt EPA by Dow Chemical itself.
The US Government EPA is a cesspool
today of chemical industry influence. Decisions on permitting toxic
chemicals to be sprayed on food crops are not made as to whether there
is any human health risk from the chemical. Rather the EPA criterion is a
bizarre “cost-benefit analysis.” The agency calculates the social cost
of possible illnesses even deaths from spraying with a given chemical.
It weighs those costs against the benefits to farmers, to the corporate
profit, to the economy of approving a new weed-killer. Since it was
created in the mid-seventies, the EPA has issued regulations restricting
the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more than eighty
thousand in the environment.
One since-fired EPA whistle-blower
described the corrupt relation between the chemical industry and the EPA
that is supposed to safeguard the public from harmful chemicals. Dr.
Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, former Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of
the Administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency told about
the collusion between the EPA and the chemical companies. She was fired
for publicly protesting the poisoning of South African mine workers by a
US corporation in 2000. She describes the EPA culture: “…when I first
arrived at EPA, it was not unusual to have someone from Dow Chemical
sitting at a desk in the corner in the same office that you were in, who
was also writing environmental policy. … It took me a while to sort of…
get a handle on who was a government official and who was from the private sector…”
In announcing approval of the new
weed-killer, Enlist, Dow AgroSciences President, Tim Hassinger, said it
promised to be the biggest selling and most profitable in the history of
Dow’s agriculture division.
History of Agent Orange
But the US Department of Agriculture and
the EPA are lying to the public about the benign effects of Dow’s
Enlist super weed killer containing 2,4-D. They claim that 2,4-D is
harmless and that even though it was a component in the deadly Agent
Orange used during the Vietnam War as a jungle defoliant. They claim
that the “harmful” part of Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, an unintended
by-product of the manufacture was responsible for the negative health
effects and eventually led to the ban on Agent Orange. We are supposed
to believe 2,4-D is as harmless as a vanilla milkshake.
Agent Orange’s ingredient 2,4-D, was
first developed during World War II as one of many chemical warfare
agents, used as a herbicide or plant killer that was sprayed by air to
kill enemy crops. Later during the Korean and Vietnam wars it was
compounded with another chemical to create what came to be called Agent
Orange. Agent Orange contained both 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. According to the
National Pesticide Information Center Dioxin, an unintended by-product
of the manufacture of 2,4,5-T, was blamed for the negative health
effects and eventually led to the ban of Agent Orange.
A report of the Natural Resources Defense Council on 2,4-D states:
Over the past 40 years, dozens of
studies have shown the connection between 2,4-D and non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma (cancers of the blood) and soft-tissue sarcoma in people. Other
research reveals that 2,4-D enters breast milk and semen where it
disrupts normal hormone functions, which can also cause serious and
lasting effects during fetal and infant development. In fact, in
Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, researchers have
found higher rates of certain birth defects in areas with the highest
use of 2,4-D and other similar herbicides. The higher rate of birth
defects was most evident in infants conceived in the spring—the time of
year when the herbicide is most used. Those birth defects were
significantly higher in males, and consisted mostly of cardiac and lung
abnormalities.
New England Journal of Medicine calls for Halt
Dow AgroSciences in October, 2014 got
EPA approval for a second variant of “Enlist” containing 2,4-D. This is
called “Enlist Duo.” Enlist Duo contains 2,4-D choline and glyphosate.
It has been approved in Canada and the US. It’s used on genetically
modified soybeans and genetically modified maize that is resistant to
2,4-D and glyphosate. If the EU is foolish or corrupt enough to approve
Washington’s Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Enlist Duo
will soon be spread across the farm fields of the EU as well.
The New England Journal of Medicine, the
most respected medical science journal in the United States, has now
come out sounding the alarm on the decision by the EPA and USA to
approve Dow’s Enlist Duo. In an article in the August 20, 2015 issue, Dr
Philip Landrigan M.D. and Charles Benbrook, PhD call for a drastic
policy change regarding the Dow herbicide combination.
They point out that the recent spread
since the mid-1990’s of GMO herbicide-resistant crops “has led to
overreliance on herbicides and, in particular, on glyphosate. In the
United States, glyphosate use has increased by a factor of more than 250
— from 0.4 million kg in 1974 to 113 million kg in 2014. Global use has
increased by a factor of more than 10. Not surprisingly,
glyphosate-resistant weeds have emerged and are found today on nearly
100 million acres in 36 states. Fields must now be treated with multiple
herbicides, including 2,4-D, a component of the Agent Orange defoliant
used in the Vietnam War.”
The authors focus on the safety issue
regarding GMO crops arising from the October, 2014 EPA decision
approving Enlist Duo, stating:
“It will be marketed in tandem with
newly approved seeds genetically engineered to resist glyphosate, 2,4-D,
and multiple other herbicides. The EPA anticipates that a 3-to-7-fold
increase in 2,4-D use will result. In our view, the science and the risk
assessment supporting the Enlist Duo decision are flawed. The science
consisted solely of toxicologic studies commissioned by the herbicide
manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s and never published…These studies
predated current knowledge of low-dose, endocrine-mediated, and
epigenetic effects and were not designed to detect them. The risk
assessment gave little consideration to potential health effects in
infants and children, thus contravening federal pesticide law. It failed
to consider ecologic impact, such as effects on the monarch butterfly
and other pollinators. It considered only pure glyphosate, despite
studies showing that formulated glyphosate that contains surfactants and
adjuvants is more toxic than the pure compound.”
They add, “The second new
development is the determination by the (World Health Organization’s)
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2015 that
glyphosate is a ‘probable human carcinogen’ and 2,4-D a ‘possible human
carcinogen.’ These classifications were based on comprehensive
assessments of the toxicologic and epidemiologic literature that linked
both herbicides to dose-related increases in malignant tumors at
multiple anatomical sites in animals and linked glyphosate to an
increased incidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans.”
The authors conclude that GMO foods
and the herbicides applied to them “may pose hazards to human health
that were not examined in previous assessments. We believe that the time
has therefore come to thoroughly reconsider all aspects of the safety
of plant biotechnology…we believe the EPA should delay implementation of
its decision to permit use of Enlist Duo. This decision was made in
haste. It was based on poorly designed and outdated studies and on an
incomplete assessment of human exposure and environmental effects.
Second, the National Toxicology Program should urgently assess the
toxicology of pure glyphosate, formulated glyphosate, and mixtures of
glyphosate and other herbicides.”
Could it be that some people are deliberately trying to maim and kill us?
F. William Engdahl is
strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics
from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and
geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/10/31/spraying-our-killing-fields-with-agent-orange/
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/10/31/spraying-our-killing-fields-with-agent-orange/
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