Even if you haven’t heard of glyphosate yet, chances are you’ve either used it at home (it’s the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer) or you’ve eaten food that’s been grown with a little help from it – from a glyphosate-based herbicide used in Roundup ready crops (GMOs) or as pre-harvest treatment.
Glyphosate awareness ticked up a notch in March when the World Health Organization (WHO) raised a serious red flag. We’re using hundreds of millions of pounds of the substance all over the globe, and we’ve been told it’s completely safe. In fact, it wasn’t even on the radar here at Walk a Mile until WHO chimed in. So why the change?
Well on March 20th 2015, they released a new evaluation of glyphosate from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), declaring the substance “probably carcinogenic to humans”. That announcement, not surprisingly, brought a whirlwind of different reactions, ranging from Monsanto’s immediate response, which was “We are outraged with this assessment,” to a sudden uptick in glyphosate testing requests at labs.
The news prompted me to do a little more digging on glyphosate, and in doing so, it dawned on me that, since we take things all the way back to the beginning here when we’re trying to solve a problem, we really shouldn’t skip over glyphosate – because it was a huge factor in the birth of GMOs. Monsanto already had this very successful glyphosate-based herbicide in place, and it really wanted to create a GMO crop that could resist the effects of that herbicide while all the weeds around the crop would be destroyed. Now not all GMOs are glyphosate-dependent, but a lot of them are, including the canola that we talked about on GMO Truth Podcast #5 with Canadian farmer Abe Wiens.
And since one of our primary focuses is to make sure we ask the right questions, well, Glyphosate was approved for use way back in the 1970s. Monsanto’s RoundUp is the most famous and the original version of it, and it’s been around since 1974. Say what you want about the GMO “Feed the world” mantra, but understand, Monsanto wanted the GMO seeds tied to their herbicide, there’s no questioning that part of the motivation, as it’s really how GMO’s began with any success. So asking about glyphosate related to the dawn of GMO crops is definitely one of the right questions.
Our first phase of research was looking into why we need to dig deeper into the GMO situation. We discovered that Monsanto’s past put up a massive red flag, indicating that yeah, we better make darn well sure we’ve covered all the bases when it comes to the relatively new GMO technology. Their PCB incident alone was a massive catastrophe.
Considering that glyphosate-based herbicide pre-dates GMOs, and evidence is mounting that this stuff is everywhere, we need to immediately include glyphosate and Roundup in the conversation. It’s not the exact same conversation, and we need to make that crystal clear because it doesn’t include every single GMO crop, but when Monsanto decided to go down the Roundup Ready route to start GMOs, they inextricably tied glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides into the GMO conversation.
And if there are more red flags popping up regarding glyphosate, and the stuff is being used all over the world, and in well over a hundred different formulations… we need to make sure, quickly, that this isn’t PCBs the sequel. We need to make sure that Monsanto hasn’t created yet another toxin that is everywhere, while ho-humming along the whole time that it’s perfectly safe. We already watched that movie once, and didn’t have a happy ending.
So the question we need to answer is:
Is Glyphosate putting us all at risk?
We’ll be using the tag Glyphosate Risk or #GlyphosateRisk, so you can use that at anytime to follow this sequence online at The Walk a Mile Project.
Much more coming over the next few weeks, and I’m sure there will be news breaking on that topic with regularity, in light of the World Health Organization new probable carcinogen stance… so keep it here at The Walk a Mile Project – and if you aren’t on our email list yet, just click here now to sign up and stay informed.
You can also get a head start on our investigation by watching GMO TRUTH Podcast #6, as we’re already well underway…
