One of the more bizarre actions in terms of the health and safety of EU citizens is the saga of Monsanto and its toxic herbicide or weed-killer, Roundup, the most widely used weed-killer on the planet. On October 25, 2017 the European Union Commission again announced that it lacked the necessary member state votes to approve a ten year license extension for weed-killer glyphosate. They will try again. Behind this seeming routine announcement is one of the hottest battles over food and human health the world has seen since the 1972 USA decision to ban spraying of deadly DDT pesticides on crops. This time the stakes go far beyond the ban on glyphosate. It affects the future of human fertility or lack of it.
In June 2016 the EU Commission made a rotten compromise to allow an 18 month extension of use in EU of glyphosate-based weed killers, during which time more scientific studies would supposedly clarify whether glyphosate was a carcinogen. It was the same member- states deadlock over whether to grant the toxic glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto Roundup herbicide, a license renewal as we saw this October.
In March 2017 the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) of the EU, issued a report stating that “available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria in the CLP Regulation to classify glyphosate for specific target organ toxicity, or as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or for reproductive toxicity.” The ECHA, based in Hensinki is a body created only in 2007 and established to monitor safe use of chemicals and to make information available rather than conduct its own tests on safety of chemicals. It made no independent study or tests to determine if glyphosate is or is not a probable carcinogen, a fact which Brussels and the pesticide industry slickly glosses over.
In March 2015, the WHO’s Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which has such research competence, classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen.”
In October 2015 before the license expiry deadline, some 47 environmental, health and cancer organizations, scientists and doctors wrote an open letter to EU Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis calling on the Commission to ban glyphosate pending a full scientific assessment. The assessment that the EU Commission was using was provided by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), and was based on industry safety studies given to BfR by Monsanto and other industry sources.
EU Corruption and human health
The determination of “non-carcinogenity” for glyphosate by using the ECHA was an apparent political ploy by the corrupt EU commission to get another “yes” body to back their pro-glyphosate stance, a stance that benefits only Monsanto and other agro-chemical producers at the expense of human life and health.
The source for both the EU’s European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency statements that glyphosate was non-carcinogenic, in contradiction to the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), is the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) responsible within the EU for the evaluation of glyphosate for the EU.
According to stated EU regulations, a substance is to be considered carcinogenic if two independently conducted animal studies show an increased tumor incidence. In the case of glyphosate, at least seven out of twelve such long-term studies found an increased tumor incidence.
A report by German toxicologist Dr Peter Clausing found that the EU bodies and the German body designated by the EU to evaluate the safety of glyphosate, the German BfR ignored those relevant studies. Clausing states, “BfR failed to recognize numerous significant tumor incidences, due to its failure to apply the appropriate statistical tests stipulated by the OECD and ECHA. BfR had instead relied on statistical tests applied by industry…” And the German BfR report was the basis for the later rubber-stamp determinations of EFSA and now of ECHA, the EU bodies entrusted with protecting the population from dangerous chemical toxins. Someone is being played for fools by Brussels, but the stakes involve far more in terms of human health and even human reproduction itself.
Sperm disruptor?
The dimensions of the human and animal exposure to the enormous quantities of glyphosate-based weed-killers in the world food chain are only dimly beginning to be appreciated. The reason is the enormous clout of the agro-chemical industry lobby around companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer AG, soon to be the owner of Monsanto. They have so far managed to use their financial resources and their legal resources to distort test results and to win regulatory approval from the demonstrably corrupt Monsanto-influenced Washington Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
From there it has spread to the EU Commission and relevant agencies such as EFSA and European Chemicals Agency, this despite the overwhelming popular rejection of GMO crops.
A recent study published by the Journal of Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology–a study given no visibility in mainstream media–sounds the alarm over the effects of long-term human exposure to glyphosate for the healthy production of human sperm, an issue that is beginning to be cause of great alarm across the western countries where chemical herbicides and pesticides are used in massive doses by agro-industry producers.
The study, which definitely warrants major follow-up studies, found effects of a glyphosate-based herbicide after an 8-day exposure of adult rats, including
“a significant and differential expression of aromatase in testis.” Aromatase is an enzyme responsible for a key step in the biosynthesis of estrogens according to Wikipedia, found among other locations of the body in the brain and in the gonads, and is an important factor in sexual development. The authors concluded that, “The repetition of exposures of this herbicide could alter the mammalian reproduction.”
Ample tests now exist, independent of Monsanto and other corrupt industry sources demonstrating to an alarming degree that the exposure of human and animal species to glyphosate-based herbicides or weed-killers can cause cancer tumors but can also be damaging to human sexual reproduction, that is, as in the future of the human species.
Other tests have revealed presence of significant amounts of glyphosate from spraying of weed-killers in major portions of the population in the United States where Monsanto Roundup and other glyphosate-based weed-killers are used in massive doses in agriculture as well as in home gardens. A study of urine samples of willing volunteers seeking to know if they had glyphosate exposure by the University of California at San Francisco found glyphosate in 93% of the urine samples tested at an average level of 3.096 parts per billion (PPB). Children had the highest levels with an average of 3.586 PPB. The highest levels of glyphosate were found in the American West and Midwest, the heart of US agribusiness farming. The US-based Detox Project which published the study notes that “Glyphosate has never been studied by regulators or the chemical industry at levels that the human population in the U.S. is being exposed to–under 3 mg/kg body weight/day. This is a huge hole in the risk assessment process for glyphosate, as evidence suggests that low levels of the chemical may hack hormones even more than high levels…many toxic chemicals have as much or even more of an influence on our health at low doses– these chemicals are known as hormone hackers or endocrine disruptors. “
Isn’t that what eugenics advocates such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, the Rockefeller family and more recently Britain’s Prince William are cheering for? Culling of the human herd so that the wealthy have more wildlife species? vii
Frederick Osborn, first President of John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council, and a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, formulated the problem the eugenics advocates around Rockefeller, people who financed Nazi eugenics research in Berlin, faced after the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps was uncovered and their inhuman experiments in eugenics of killing off inferior human beings as defined by the Third Reich.
In a 1956 article in the Rockefeller-financed Eugenics Review, “The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters…. We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong? We have all but killed the eugenic movement.” Osborn had a ready answer: people for some reason refused to accept that they were “second rate” compared to Osborn, Rockefeller, Sanger and their “superior class.” As Osborn put it, “We have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in human nature. People are simply not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character was formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation…. They won’t accept the idea that they are in general second rate….”
The refusal of Monsanto, a company founded in World War I as part of the Rockefeller network of war chemicals makers, and which numbered a Rockefeller on its board until recently, to remove glyphosate-based Roundup, or even to allow independent testing of its “trade secret” adjuvants that by some estimates make the glyphosate 2000% more toxic, has more to do with that long-standing Rockefeller eugenics agenda of killing off or “culling” the human herd than with corporate profit. Prince William’s grandfather, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in an interview in 1988 with a German press agency declared, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” Hmmmmm…
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.”
