Friday, July 31, 2015

KEEP STATES RIGHTS AND UPHOLD GMO LABELING LAWS


Activists take part in a march against US agrochemical giant Monsanto and GMO food products, May 23, 2015, in Los Angeles, California. Thousands of people hit the streets in cities across the world Saturday to protest against the American biotechnology giant Monsanto and its genetically modified crops and pesticides. AFP PHOTO / ROBYN BECK (Photo credit should read ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

Don't Leave GMOs in the Dark

There's no reason to prevent states from passing GMO labeling laws.

Yes, let it happen.
Activists take part in a march against US agrochemical giant Monsanto and GMO food products, May 23, 2015, in Los Angeles, California. Thousands of people hit the streets in cities across the world Saturday to protest against the American biotechnology giant Monsanto and its genetically modified crops and pesticides. AFP PHOTO / ROBYN BECK (Photo credit should read ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images) By + More
In politics you often hear people call for "states' rights" as a way to justify certain positions. This argument sounds like recourse to a high Constitutional principle, but really, it's anything but that. Regardless of the issue, both liberals and conservatives respect states' rights when they don't have enough power to win in Washington. And both sides conveniently forget about states' rights when they can prevail at the federal level. It's just a flag of convenience.
For example, Southern conservatives waved the banner of states' rights when they fought the civil rights battles of the 1960s and beyond. And liberals implicitly wave the states' rights banner when fighting over state or local regulations (like minimum wage or engine emissions or marriage equality) where they lack sufficient power to win at the federal level.
Allowing states to set their own higher (or lower) standards makes sense in many cases. It respects the will of the voters, which may vary from state to state. And it lets the U.S. run a 50 state experiment to see what does work and what doesn't work. Then, after the experiment has run its course, we can federalize the approaches that work the best.
[READ: Are GMOs Really That Harmful to Eat?]
But sometimes it's important to allow the federal government to overrule individual state policies, a doctrine called "federal preemption." If there is an overriding moral principle at stake, it may not be just to allow a few states to ignore it. And if complying with a patchwork of individual requirements is prohibitively expensive it may be necessary to find some way to set common standards.
The cost argument gets overplayed though: For example, in California you can't buy certain kinds of chain saws because the small gas engines that power them emit too much pollution for California air quality standards. But alternatives have emerged. California doesn't seem to be suffering for lack of stinky two-stroke engines.
Right now this contest between state and federal power is playing out in regard to labeling of foods containing Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs.


The use of GMOs is controversial. There is debate in the scientific community as to whether the consumption of GMO foods hurts people directly. But there is no denying that GMOs result in vastly more herbicide (such as Roundup, a top weed killer) being dumped on food crops, and that glyphosphate (the active ingredient in Roundup) probably causes cancer in the quantities used. Other Roundup ingredients are suspect as well.
[READ: GMOs – From a Farmer’s Perspective]
Those who oppose GMOs don't have the upper hand in Congress and so they are not proposing an outright ban. Instead, they seek to establish a uniform labeling system so that food producers clearly identify whether their products have GMOs or not. Labeling is very popular among American consumers: In multiple polls conducted over the years by many different firms, about 90 percent of Americans consistently support mandatory labeling.
Mandatory labeling initiatives are in play in many states, and have passed in three (Maine, Vermont and Connecticut). But Big Ag (including Monsanto, which makes Roundup and Roundup-ready seed) is spending heavily to block these efforts as they come up. For example, in Oregon, companies spent over $18 million in opposition, while supporters spent about half that. The bill lost by three-tenths of 1 percent. Three years ago, California voters defeated Prop 37, a mandatory GMO labeling bill, by a narrow 3 percent margin after more than $44 million was spent by industry to oppose it.
[SEE: Political Cartoons on the Economy]
Right now, the House and Senate are listening to Big Ag rather than to American consumers. The House recently passed a bill that gives the appearance of supporting GMO disclosure while doing the opposite. The bill, H.R. 1599, carries a brilliantly deceptive name that would make George Orwell proud. Called the "Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2014" the bill would reinforce the current voluntary disclosure system but would prohibit individual states and counties from enacting more stringent legislation. Not to be outmaneuvered in the naming department, the detractors have branded this bill the "DARK Act" as in "Deny Americans the Right to Know" or "Keep Americans in the DARK".
The real reason for the act has nothing to do with Constitutional principle or the practical cost of compliance. It doesn't cost much to phase in a new label with the words "Contains GMO food" or "No GMOs inside." The real reason for the act is that Big Ag is afraid that if consumers know what's in the food, they won't buy it. So let's run the experiment and find out. If a state requires GMO labeling, then consumers will be able to choose. Those consumers who want to pay more for GMO-free food will have that option. Those consumers who want to pay as little as possible and don't care about GMO's will have that option. Isn't that the way markets are supposed to work?
After a few years we'll have enough information to know whether state-level GMO labeling laws help the economy or hurt it. And we'll know whether GMO labeling helps or hurts public health. Then we can make a sound decision about whether to require labeling at a national level.

Source:  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/07/30/dont-stop-states-from-passing-gmo-labeling-laws

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

NANOTECH HERBICIDE COCKTAIL "MIRACLES" JUST DON'T WORK

Scientists say supposedly miraculous ingredients in weedkillers don't work


Companies are promoting nanotech adjuvant products as a miracle cure for herbicide-resistant weeds
 
EXCERPT: An adjuvant called ChemXcel, from a Minnesota-based company called C&R Enterprises, claims to "kill herbicide-resistant weeds" when mixed with common herbicides like glyphosate. It works its magic through "patented, proprietary nano-drivers" that "alter the glyphosate chemistry" by "coating the individual DNA gene-sequencing molecules internally," the company claims.

Scientists say supposedly miraculous ingredients in weed killers don't actually work

By Tom Philpott
Mother Jones, 29 July 2015
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/07/are-farmers-using-nanotech-fight-superweeds
[excerpts only; links to sources at URL above]

Before pesticides go from the laboratory to the farm field, they have to first be vetted by the Environmental Protection Agency. But they're commonly mixed—sometimes by the pesticide manufacturers, sometimes by the farmers themselves—with substances called adjuvants that boost their effectiveness (to spread more evenly on a plant's leaf in the case of insecticides, or to penetrate a plant's outer layer, allowing herbicides to effectively kill weeds). Despite their ubiquity, adjuvants aren't vetted by the EPA at all; they're considered "inert" ingredients.

I first wrote about them last year, when adjuvants mixed with fungicides came under suspicion of triggering a large bee die-off during California's almond bloom. Recently, an eye-popping article by Purdue weed scientists in the trade journal Ag Professional brought them to my attention again. The piece illustrates the unregulated, Wild West nature of these additives.

In the article, the authors note that two companies are hotly promoting adjuvant products as a kind of miracle cure for the ever-increasing scourge of herbicide-resistant weeds. That's a bold claim, given that resistant weeds now plague more than 60 million acres of farmland.

Odder still, both companies attribute their products' effectiveness to nanotechnology, a controversial, lightly regulated engineering tool that leverages the fact that when you break common substances into tiny particles, they behave in radically different ways than they do at normal sizes. Nanoparticles are so tiny, their size is measured in nanometers—a billionth of a meter. (A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick; nanoparticles typically measure in at less than 100 nanometers.)

An adjuvant called ChemXcel, from a Minnesota-based company called C&R Enterprises, claims to "kill herbicide-resistant weeds" when mixed with common herbicides like glyphosate. It works its magic through "patented, proprietary nano-drivers" that "alter the glyphosate chemistry" by "coating the individual DNA gene-sequencing molecules internally," the company claims.

Then there's NanoRevolution 2.0, marketed by a company called Max Systems. When goosed with a bit of NanoRevolution 2.0, the company states, "the herbicide 'piggybacks' onto the nano particles as they penetrate the leaf structure, carrying the herbicide directly to the root system for a faster enhanced plant absorption of herbicides even on hard-to-control weeds."

Taken aback by the claims and the use of nanotech, I contacted the EPA to see what, if anything, the agency had to say. "While we are not familiar with those particular products, EPA has jurisdiction over substances that meet the definition of pesticides, that is, claims are made for them that they kill, repel, prevent, or otherwise control pests," an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson wrote in an email. "As long as pesticide adjuvant products don’t make pesticidal claims, they are not pesticides and the components of adjuvants are therefore not pesticide ingredients (either active or inert)"—and thus not subject to EPA vetting. Manufacturers aren't even required to list ingredients in adjuvants….

Purdue weed scientist Bill Johnson, who co-authored the Ag Professional piece, says he and his team found that neither of these "nano" products work as advertised. "I began getting calls about reports that these things were being pushed in northern Indiana, and I thought, we need to prove or disprove the claims."

So he and colleagues tested the products on a weed patch known to be glyphosate resistant, mixing them with glyphosate at levels recommended by the manufactures. The results, published in the trade journal Ag Professional, were underwhelming. On its own, Roundup (Monsanto's version of the glyphosate herbicide) killed just 13.8 percent of weeds. Mixed with ChemXcel, it killed 15 percent of weeds, while the called NanoRevolution 2.0/Roundup mix killed 18 percent of weeds.

Johnson explained that herbicides are always mixed with adjuvants—they're typically needed to help the herbicide penetrate a weed's outer layer. But these particular ones perform no better or worse than conventional adjuvants on the market. But they don't come anywhere near to solving the herbicide-resistance problem, as the companies claim to do.

C.J. Mannenga, co owner of C&R Enterprises, pushed back strongly on Johnson's assessment and challenged his results. "We know our product works," he said. "We've shown it in Georgia, we've shown in Ohio, we've shown it in Missouri, we've shown it in Iowa," he said. When we spoke Tuesday afternoon, Mannenga told me that he was in Osborne, Kansas, about to "meet with a major [agrichemical] distributor" who is "extremely interested in the product ... I'm going to do a demonstration to show them indeed it does work."

While the product's information sheet doesn't list its active ingredients, he readily revealed it to me: "it's just carbon nanotubes."

Carbon nanotubes  are one of the most controversial nanoparticles—often compared to asbestos for their ability to lodge into the lungs and cause trouble when they're breathed in. This 2014 assessment by researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell is hardly comforting:

“Though ecosystem impacts remain understudied across the CNT [carbon nanotube] lifecycle, evidence suggests that some aquatic organisms may be at risk. While there have been significant advances in the regulation of CNTs in recent years, the lack of attention to the potential carcinogenic effects of these nanomaterials means that current efforts may provide a false sense of security.”

Meanwhile, no one employed by NanoRevolution 2.0 maker Max Systems returned my request for comment.
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