There are more than 750 products for sale in the USA alone which contain glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto's herbicide that has been selling since the 1970s.
The agency is comprised of an international review board which determined that glyphosate is indeed carcinogenic. Considering that more than '80% of the biotech-created GM crops' throughout the world were manufactured to be used with this herbicide - it would logically follow that the majority of our food supply is now contaminated by a cancer-causing agent(s).
Following the release of the report, the country of Sri Lanka decided to ban glyphosate completely, and other countries are considering a similar move. Is this information just too much to swallow for more immediate action to follow, or have governments been infiltrated so completely by biotech that the announcement that most of our food is covered in poison will simply be ignored?
The National Pesticide Information Center has done nothing to update its website to inform citizens that the IARC has declared that this herbicide is carcinogenic.
In fact, they instead post the following, word for word:
This is an outrageous lie that should be removed immediately - but it won't be because we are dealing with an industry which regulates itself. Unless people around the world take massive, grass-roots action, instead of waiting on their governments to respond, Monsanto and the biotech industry will continue to sell known cancer-causing agents."Is glyphosate likely to contribute to the development of cancer?
Animal studies have not shown evidence that glyphosate exposure is linked to cancer. Studies with people have also shown little evidence that exposure to glyphosate products is linked with cancer."
I've been deeply involved in alien weed control in natural areas for almost thirty years, and I've yet to find a weed that can resist what I call "PHR" -- persistent hand removal. There was a time when most American agriculture used this method, and I grew up using it on small family farms. But PHR is too expensive for Big Ag and the people who used to do it all moved to the cities, where they found better jobs than running a hoe. And now that those "better jobs" in the cities are disappearing, it's easier to go on welfare or beg as a homeless person than to reverse the migration back into the agricultural hinterlands to become the nation's new farm labor class. For the corporations running most of our farmland today it's just a bottom-line question: Is it cheaper to douse a field with herbicides, or to hire a small mob of farm laborers? Since the farm labor no longer exists, there's no place to house them if they did, and labor laws, tax laws, Obamacare, and everything else that goes along with having employees makes not having them very attractive, the field is gonna get doused. Solving this problem is going to take a generation and some big changes in attitudes about being or hiring farm labor.
The inescapable fact is that any chemical that can kill something as tough as a weedy species is going to have some nasty side effects. Current mechanical weed control methods have not changed in hundreds of years and inevitably miss many of the weeds. Our choices for weed control now are chemical, mechanical, or human labor; all have their problems. I suggest diverting some of the vast research budget for military robots towards solar-powered robots that can roll down a row in a field, visually identify every weed species, and pluck or surgically dig 100% of them, leaving a weed-free field with no side effects.