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Pesticides - most serious environmental threat
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Environment
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 Genetically modified (GM) foods have aroused fierce opposition. Leading Africans, a majority of the public in Europe, a wide range of non-governmental organisations and even the Prince of Wales are united in rejecting GM food. Transnational corporations have enormous power to promote GM food. The £1 million worth of advertisements placed in the British press by the US pesticide company Monsanto - makers of Roundup (glyphosate), the world's biggest selling herbicide - are an example of the way the GM food industry hopes to use the power of public relations, especially clever, expensive advertising, to change people's minds. The fact that they need to do this is itself illuminating - nothing else would persuade people.
The industry claims that its foods are needed to feed the world, that they are safe and will provide a cleaner environment. Its case is riddled with weaknesses. Knowing them can help to counter the claims. The impact of GM food is unpredictable. Genes work in complex ways that scientists are only just beginning to understand. No one knows how safe these foods are to eat. Once GM food crops are introduced into the environment they are there to stay.
 They allow for no second chances. Their traits could spread to crops in neighbouring fields, seriously reducing food output. Many GM crops are made to resist herbicides. But studies have found direct toxicity and indirect habitat impacts on both test and field applications of beneficial insects, mites and spiders. If GM seeds spread, more herbicide would have to be applied and weeds in nearby fields may develop resistance to the poison. Such 'super
weeds' will require higher doses of herbicide, leaving larger amounts of chemical residue behind on the crops. These could be a threat to human health.
Crops that are genetically engineered to generate their own pesticide will cause the evolution of pesticide-resistant insects and may potentially undermine agro-ecosystems. Smallholder farmers could be driven into bankruptcy by having to pay for seeds and agro-toxin packages which become ever more expensive as more poisons are needed to deal with insect and seed resistance. The spread of GM crops would mean that consumers would eventually have no choice.
 All commercial seed will be genetically engineered. The right of consumers not to buy GM foods will disappear. It is not true that GM foods are needed to feed the world. Small-scale farmers in many countries are doubling and even tripling crop yields by improving their own systems, often without the use of pesticides.
Professor Ashford, co-author (with Claudia Miller) of the book Chemical Exposures says - low levels and high stakes, explains that pesticides may be the most common initiators of an illness which leaves sufferers sensitised to other common chemical substances such as detergents, tobacco smoke and traffic fumes. There is no known cure for the condition. In some cases, sensitised patients have been found to react to levels of chemicals so low that they are undetectable by all the usual laboratory testing methods; this means that their symptoms baffle doctors who, unable to diagnose a classic cause-and-effect sickness, frequently conclude that the illness must be a mental problem.
 Professor Ashford says that the huge rise in pesticide use since the second world war could be responsible for an untold number of illnesses with a common range of symptoms, such as skin rashes, breathing problems, cancers and birth defects. Addressing the idea that sensitivity to chemicals might be all in the mind of the sufferer, Professor Ashford feels: "The last seven years of research has not furthered the case for psychosomatic origins at all, but it has definitely furthered the case for physiological origins". He explained that endocrine disruption and cancer, was probably initiated by exposure to one chemical, such as a pesticide, and then promoted by subsequent contact with others. "The toxicologists are leaving after the first act; how can they know what's going to happen in the end? And the doctors and clinical ecologists are walking in half way through the second act; they see what's going on, but it makes no sense to them".
 Pesticides are nerve poisons; they damage the brain and are also known to be endocrine disruptors. Why isn't the research being done now to discover the true effects of pesticides on human health? Transnational corporations are using the image of the poor and hungry from our countries to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly nor economically beneficial to us, is a statement by African delegates attending a meeting of the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources meeting. To resort to using the developing world as a battering ram to try to increase support for GM crops again shows the weakness of the industry's case. It can be stopped by concerted and united opposition, from Third World farmers to Western consumers.
Courtesy: Pesticides News
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