Professor Ron Huber is a retired award-winning, internationally-recognised scientist and professor of plant pathology. Because he has retired and has no fear about his future career development, he is able to speak out about important issues concerning the safety of food that is widely available. These issues include:
- glyphosate (the main poison in Roundup) being a more powerful toxin than DDT – and not being neutralised on contact with soil, as is claimed;
- how the other chemicals (especially surfactants) in Roundup multiply the toxicity of glyphosate by up to 1000 times;
- the powerful negative antibiotic effect of glyphosate on plant, animal and human health;
- the reduction in nutrient availability in food resulting from glyphosate use;
- the damage that new proteins created in Genetically Manipulated Organisms (GMOs) do to human health;
- the myth that GMOs are needed to feed the world (rather than leading to yield gains, GMOs have been aimed primarily at allowing crops to soak up more glyphosate and other toxins so that the crops do not die while insects and ‘weeds’ do – this extra poison, once soaked up, goes into the food chain – oh, but that’s OK because the solution is just to raise the levels of poison that are allowed in food by the regulators!);
- the role of glyphosate in honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder;
- the effect of GMOs and glyphosate on the human immune system.
He believes that “we have pretty much sacrificed a whole generation of children”, talking about the evidence linking glyphosate & GMOs to 30 diseases, including autism, and how glyphosate has been found in high levels in human breast milk.
Listen to him speak of this in an excellent podcast via the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, or read/watch a video of him via the Mercola website.
Don’t forget – unless you eat all organic food, you will more than likely be eating at least some GMO/glyphosate-produced food.
As the 2007 British Soil Association’s report Silent Invasion: The Hidden Use of GM Crops in Livestock Feed set out:
- “Nearly all the milk, dairy products, pork and red meat as well as many frozen and processed meat and dairy products sold in UK supermarkets are now being produced from animals fed on genetically modified (GM) crops and are being sold without GM labels”;
- “Fresh chicken, turkey and eggs, and beef and lamb from animals fed exclusively on grass, are the only livestock products in the supermarkets generally produced without GM animal feed, apart from organic food”.
That was the case in 2007 – this year (2014), it has been reported that the UK imports an estimated 140,000 tonnes of GM soya and as much as 300,000 tonnes of GM maize annually for use as animal feed.
See also a 2013 Ecologist report on the devastating effect of GMO & glyphosate on pigs (before you think about eating your sausages!)
All of this information is readily available – despite the efforts of ‘big agriculture’ and the big agro-chemical companies, who do their best to influence food regulatory bodies and governments worldwide. The operation of government lobbying by big business is reasonably well known – less well known is the ‘revolving door’ whereby Executives of companies such as Monsanto take jobs on food regulatory bodies, influence policy in favour of the industry, then return to the industry itself! Despite the mounting evidence against GMOs and glyphosate, there is serious pressure from lobbyists to promote GM, as witnessed by the Environment minister Owen Paterson’s support for GM and recent ‘advice’ being given to David Cameron to open the doors still wider to GM in the UK.
It is simple: it is up to us individually to decide which information sources we trust (our politicians?!) and then to decide if we care enough about the implications of that information to act on it. Dare you ask what is in your food?
Moor Wholesome beef, hogget and mutton is pasture-fed (with haylage from a local Organic farmer in the winter); on the odd occasion they get nuts, these are Certified Organic (Rumigan brand – but that is very rare, only when they need tempting to move to a small enclosure). The pasture receives no chemical fertilisers nor pesticides. Moor Wholesome pigs graze pasture and clear scrub-ground, getting some comfrey and crops that are grown at Arcady – this is supplemented by Certified Organic feed from the local agricultural store. Moor Wholesome eggs come from hens supplied by a Certified Organic producer – these hens graze 3 acres of pasture at Arcady for grubs, worms, insects and nutritious greens, as well as feeding on Certified Organic pellets).
UPDATE: GMO Myths and Truths (2nd Edition) report now released – free download.