The governmental “eco”: Poison instead of plow
Spring is coming, the meadows are covered with colourful spring flowers. But increasingly also with the yellowish-rusty-red autumn colours of direct sowing.
The departments for agriculture took the fears of the population seriously and committed to the protection of nature: With beautiful photos they present the horse-drawn, soil-damaging plow, behind it the tractor with the saviour of the earth, the resource-protecting glyphosate
Because glyphosate instead of plow is environmental protection?!
“Eco”-policy cancer instead of plow
The IARC (the cancer research division of the UN) classifies glyphosate as probably carcinogenic.
In most industrialized countries, gigantic funding flow into this innovative eco-strategy with its many nice new labels: No-till, no-tillage, direct seeding, minimum tillage….
And their record amounts of glyphosate seeping into the groundwater.
Environmental protection thanks to even larger amounts of pesticides? How could the agricultural ministries finance and push such an eco-strategy beyond all good spirits?
Plows are primarily used to convert a meadow into a crop field, they kill the grasses. And that’s exactly what a herbicide can do too.
But how can the harmless plow be transformed into such a danger that even a cancer risk can be sold as an ecological-progress?
The pesticide industry needed a trustworthy partner for this sale strategy: The most ideal, of course, was climate protection, because who would dare to oppose saving the future? Even the most absurd nonsense can be based on an originally good idea. And even the most honest commitment can be abused in the most surreal way: The Kyoto Protocol once ratified the incorporation of CO2 into biomass and soils.
In 2008, the chairman of our Swiss pesticide/genetic engineering company Syngenta, now ChemChina, announced that they could store up to 80 billion tons of carbon in the fields over the next 25 years, most of the excess CO2.
Glyphosate instead of plow saves the climate, Eureka! The authorities cheered and showered the saviour of heaven and earth with their financial blessing.
To die for a fistful of dollars!?
The glyphosate promoters managed to taboo the real climate footprint: Glyphosate direct seeding was supposed to incorporate a maximum of 500 kg of carbon per hectare and year.
Since one hectare of wheat produces about 6 tons of wheat, and the Europeans eat about 60 kilos of wheat per year, one hectare of wheat is enough for a hundred people.
We finance a maximal accumulation of a carcinogen in all our bread, pasta and pizza in order to save about 5 liter of gasoline per person per year?!
Probably the most dangerous of all conceivable climate protection methods?!
If this kind of climate protection would had worked, but it didn’t. The Swiss agriculture department knew this long before it introduced the no-till resource protection subsidies. In order to conceal this madness, they downsized the once proclaimed climate and soil protection into the empty slogan of a “resource protection”.
Exorbitant increases of the limit values
Direct seeding uses record amounts of glyphosate, that seeps into the groundwater.
With the no-till-subsidies, the limit values for glyphosate residues in food were increased by a hundredfold, for the water a thousandfold increase was planned.
At the same time, the “siccation” was introduced in the EU: Wheat and potato plants are poisoned with glyphosate, they die, so the harvest dates can be be adjusted to the agendas of the agricultural managers, regardless of the weather conditions.
As agriculture is allowed to poison food crops to death, the question arises why limit values for pesticides are needed, because the use of even more pesticides than for fatal poisoning of the crops is pointless.
Every second person will be diagnosed with cancer, and now this rate of suffering and death is increased by the “ecological” funding for a toxin suspected of causing cancer. This shows the priorities of our agricultural policy: To promote and finance health risks.
The arrogance of power
“Alcohol is more toxic than glyphosate.” With this argument, the Minister for Economy Schneider-Ammann, rejected years ago our appeal against this “ecological” strategy.
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The tip of the iceberg
Ecology = Maximum toxic levels for the fields and the people?!
Is this greenwash of a cancerogene an isolated case? Or the future of our agricultural policy?
The agrarian transition promised non-toxic, sustainable solutions to problems, the eco-subsidies could have financed an agriculture compatible with health, environment and climate.
But a true ecological or organic agricultural would have meant the end of the toxic agrochemical/-genetic industries.
That’s why the nepotism of the agricultural departments misused the idealistic trends, demands and laws for the rescue of the agribusiness: The glyphosate direct seeding subsidies prepare the field for the introduction of glyphosate/RR-technology in GMO -resistant Switzerland: Machinery and cultivation methods are established, now it just needs the acceptance of GM products.
These innovative strategies are Trojans, the tip of the iceberg, there are even more toxic pesticides in the queue, because the resistance of the weeds to the glyphosate is increasing. The USA approved a new generation of “green” GM plants that are resistant to the herbicide 2,4 D, better known under the brand name “agent orange”. An even more embryotoxic poison, also suspected of causing cancer.
It is time for a parliamentary investigative commission, or the justice to investigate against the fraudulent funding for the “resource protection” of the glyphosate direct seeding.
Let’s not fool ourselves: The idealists would have built a paradise on earth long ago.
But the problem creators always managed to entrust themselves with the leadership in the fight against their own lucrative business strategies.
Science and herbicides
Healthy and eco are trendy? So the agricultural ministries decorate innovative record quantities of glyphosate with proven fake eco-greenwash labels in order to save this most likely cancer-causing pesticide from the social critics and fears.“The sleep of reason produces monsters” Francisco Goya
The only thing we can’t split is concrete
Resource-protecting agrochemicals?
One of the best-kept secrets of agricultural policy: When it comes to wheat, our basic food, the European farmers produced twice the yields per hectare of the US farmers.
Glyphosate direct seeding was never supposed to protect the soil, but just to mitigate the soil destruction caused by industrial agriculture, but in reality it compacts the soils into hard rock. That’s why the yield measurements are usually forgotten in the publications of glyphosate direct seeding…