Organics in the News

After long battles, three farmers in France have won legal claims that their cases of cancer and Parkinson's disease were caused by working with pesticides. Now they want to help others fight similar cases

Paul François says he is lucky to be alive. In April 2004, he went to clean out what he thought was the empty tank in his agricultural spraying machine. When he opened the cap, noxious fumes of some remaining pesticides escaped. He was not wearing a mask and therefore breathed in a lungful. Immediately admitted to hospital, he fell into a coma.

Since then his illness continues to affect his kidneys and nervous system and he has again fallen into comas on several occasions. Today, he is working on his case against Monsanto, the company that produced Lasso, the culprit pesticide that was taken off the market in 2007.

In addition to the considerable questions about the safety of GMOs and their effects on mammals, what about other potential side effects to crop producers of GMO crops and their use?

Dust is a common factor that all of us in crop production must deal with. Whether it comes from a country road or a combine harvesting a crop, dust is present in many places in rural America.

A crop farmer in northwest Iowa had some keen observations in regards to dust and decided to do some testing. This gentleman, who we will call John, noticed a significant amount of dust in the hog building where he custom feeds hogs. John gathered a sample of the dust from inside the hog building and placed it in a zip lock bag and identified it as hog dust.

When John received the results from Midwest Labs there was a note for him to call the lab. When John called the lab, they were interested in where these samples had been taken from. The concern was due to the health hazards that these molds could pose to people working in the environment where this dust was located. The lab strongly advised that anyone working in the area of this dust should a wear protective breathing apparatus.

On a farm in coastal Maine, a barn is going up. Right now it's little more than a concrete slab and some wooden beams, but when it's finished, the barn will provide winter shelter for up to six cows and a few head of sheep. None of this would be remarkable if it weren't for the fact that the people building the barn are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post's gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it. "Why?" asks Coleman, tromping through the mud on his way toward a greenhouse bursting with December turnips. "Because I care about the fate of the planet."

Ever since the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization released a 2006 report that attributed 18% of the world's man-made greenhouse-gas emissions to livestock — more, the report noted, than what's produced by transportation — livestock has taken an increasingly hard rap. At first, it was just vegetarian groups that used the U.N.'s findings as evidence for the superiority of an all-plant diet. But since then, a broader range of environmentalists has taken up the cause. At a recent European Parliament hearing titled "Global Warming and Food Policy: Less Meat = Less Heat," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, argued that reducing meat consumption is a "simple, effective and short-term delivery measure in which everybody could contribute" to emissions reductions. (See the top 10 green ideas of 2009.)

A new study entitled "Gene amplification confers glyphosate resistance in Amaranthus palmeri" from a research team including Monsanto scientists Dafu Wang and Douglas Sammons echoes conclusions from The Organic Center (TOC) report "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use in the United States: The First Thirteen Years." Published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in December 2009, the Monsanto-funded research states that "evolution of resistance to the widely used, nonselective herbicide glyphosate in weedy species endangers the continued success of transgenic glyphosate-resistant crops and the sustainability of glyphosate as the world's most important herbicide."

Similarly, TOC's report demonstrates compelling evidence linking the increase in herbicide use on GE, herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops to the emergence and spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds including Amaranthus palmeri. Based upon data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), report author Dr. Charles Benbrook shows that glyphosate-based, HT corn, soybeans and cotton have increased herbicide use by 383 million pounds in the U.S. from 1996 to 2008 with 46 percent of the total increase occurring in 2007 and 2008.

"This unequivocal admission of serious problems with glyphosate-based HT cropping systems will hopefully accelerate major changes in where and how HT technology is deployed," said Dr. Charles Benbrook, chief scientist of The Organic Center. "Such changes are needed to slow the increase in cash expenditures by farmers on herbicides and public health and environmental problems triggered by increased use of herbicides on GE crops."

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear a first-time case about the risks of genetically engineered crops. Named Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, No. 09-475, the case before the high court will be yet another step in an ongoing battle waged by the Center for Food Safety to protect consumers and the environment from potentially harmful effects of genetically engineered (GE) crops.

The modified alfalfa seed at the heart of the dispute has been engineered to be immune to Monsanto’s flagship herbicide Roundup. Monsanto intervened in a 2007 federal district court ruling that the Department of Agriculture’s approval of GE alfalfa was illegal. The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a 2006 lawsuit on behalf of a coalition of non-profits and farmers who wished to retain the choice to plant non-GE alfalfa. CFS was victorious in this case – in addition CFS has won two appeals by Monsanto in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit: in 2008 and again in 2009. Now, upon Monsanto’s insistence, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

“This is truly a ‘David versus Goliath’ struggle, between public interest non-profits and a corporation bent on nothing less than domination of our food system,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety. “That Monsanto has pushed this case all the way to the Supreme Court, even though USDA’s court-ordered analysis is now complete, and the U.S. government actively opposed further litigation in this matter, underscores the great lengths that Monsanto will go to further its mission of patent control of our food system and selling more pesticides.”

The former school lunch employee-turned-advocate was among a group of six who visited the school system Wednesday to learn more about the city's efforts to provide school lunches made of fresh, local organic foods. In addition to Baltimore, the group's tour includes schools in New York City and Arlington County in Virginia.

"My goal is that no child will go hungry and that the next generation will have an idea where their food comes from and how it is produced," said Orrey, who has led her nation's efforts to provide local, organic foods in schools.

Tony Geraci, director of food and nutrition services for Baltimore schools, served as the group's tour guide of the 33-acre farm equipped with several greenhouses, a number of honey-producing beehives, 50 chickens and six goats. In the less than two years since the farm has opened, Geraci and his staff have transformed the former orphanage into a self-sustaining organic farm with the potential to become the home of an "agri-hospitality" charter school.

More than 2,000 students have visited the farm. In addition, fruit and vegetables grown there have been used to support 25 families with food, according to Geraci, and six local restaurants purchase produce from the site.

Those looking to cut energy costs on the farm may be able to do so with the sun, thanks to a new business agreement.

A Menomonie company that’s producing its own solar thermal collectors hopes to provide discounted bulk rates to members of Organic Valley farm cooperative under a deal announced this week. The Vice President of Bubbling Springs Solar, Luisa Gerasimo, says the idea is not to produce on-farm electricity – but rather to harness the sun’s ability to heat the large amounts of hot water needed for example, to clean milking equipment. She says producing heat from electricity generated by the wind or sun is inefficient, but it makes sense to use the sun to produce heat, which it does naturally.

Ever since Olga Owen Huckins shared the spectacle of a yard full of dead, DDT-poisoned birds with her friend Rachel Carson in 1958, scientists have been tracking the dramatic toll on wildlife of a planet awash in pesticides. Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation’s major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation’s aquifers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and birds that unsuspectingly expose themselves to this chemical soup die by the millions every year.

But as regulators grapple with the lethal dangers of pesticides, scientists are discovering that even seemingly benign, low-level exposures to pesticides can affect wild creatures in subtle, unexpected ways — and could even be contributing to a rash of new epidemics pushing species to the brink of extinction.

In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and — most recently — bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years.

Last year, a set of studies came out suggesting that the problem with high-fructose corn syrup was simply that people consumed too much of it. There was, according to these studies, nothing unique to the chemistry of HFCS that suggested it played an oversized role in the current obesity epidemic (aside from HFCS’s little mercury problem, of course). Even at the time, however, there was a tantalizing suggestion in the media coverage that maybe, just maybe there was still some special risk to consuming HFCS due its higher fructose concentration:

[T]he research appears to show that sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup are not that different, [Professor of clinical nutrition Elizabeth] Parks says. She believes there’s some evidence that the way they are metabolized in the liver is different, but not in a way that makes the calories from high-fructose corn syrup more likely to be stored as fat.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, some resourceful scientists in UC Davis recently decided to look into that. And here’s what they found:

Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fuelling the obesity crisis.

Fructose, a sweetener derived from corn, can cause dangerous growths of fat cells around vital organs and is able to trigger the early stages of diabetes and heart disease.

Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto's patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family's dinner table. That's because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto's patented genes.

Monsanto's methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.