We were living in a farm cottage, one of a pair. We rented it on the most binding contract I have ever entered into – the farmer said ‘We won’t bother with them solicitors’, held out his hand and said ‘I won’t looss you down if you don’t looss me down.’ The water supply came from a brick tank on the hill that fed drinking troughs for the stock as well as the farm and the pair of cottages. I was married with two young children and was making my living making traditional cider and perry.
I came over the hill one Friday afternoon to see the manhole in the brick water tank open and white froth bubbling over, and empty boxes for a spray called glyphosate were lying around. At that time there was a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture in Hereford, the site since sold off for housing. I called them. They weren’t keen to do anything. They said I must be mistaken. Even if the sprayer had taken water from our water supply, there was a non-return valve on the sprayer to stop any backflow. It couldn’t have happened. And anyway glyphosate was harmless. I said I wanted them to take a sample. They weren’t keen – it was a Friday afternoon. And anyway, they said, glyphosate broke down so quickly into harmless substances that it would not show up in any analysis on Monday.
I insisted, of course. I had young children. I didn’t want them bathing in this stuff, much less drinking it. I made them take a sample, and I went to fetch water for my family from the ‘spout’ that the travellers used. The Ministry men seemed a bit surprised the following week when they had to admit that there was quite a bit of glyphosate in the water. But it was perfectly harmless, they said. The farmer had died before this incident happened, but his wife said she wasn’t going to stop drinking it. She trusted the Ministry men. She belonged to the Never done me no ’arm school of thought on pesticide safety, that makes me wonder if brain damage should be included in the list of side effects. She died of a kidney problem six months later, though no one made any connection with the glyphosate except us.
I didn’t know much about glyphosate at the time. I didn’t know that it is carcinogenic, and interferes with the body’s endocrine system, causing liver and kidney problems, as well as causing environmental damage. More worryingly, neither did the ministry, at least not in Hereford, and I began to suspect a pretty cosy relationship between the ministry and the chemical manufacturers.
Some while later a smallholder friend who had studied agriculture at Wye College showed me an article in a respected horticultural society journal published ten years earlier, that warned that glyphosate was so persistent, and so persistently harmful, that if it was sprayed on growing corn in summer to stunt the straw so that it wouldn’t ‘lodge’, and if the straw was then used as bedding in the following winter, and became manure in the following spring, it was still not safe to use in horticulture. The glyphosate was, after all that time and those processes, still active enough to cause stunted and mis-shaped growth in horticultural crops. This was the chemical I had been told would be gone by Monday.
If I had needed evidence that the Ministry of Agriculture had an all too cosy relationship with the agro-chemical industry, and not much concern for the environment and indeed the public, I began to feel I had it. Either that or they were dangerously ignorant and complacent. Or possibly, even probably, both.
But what is even more shocking is that now, when those children have left home and didn’t even ask for my consent to be converted into a grandfather, the global glyphosate market is projected to reach USD 9.91 billion by 2022. It is the most widely used herbicide in the world..
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) says that glyphosate is safe. However, most of their research is provided by the industry which created the herbicide. A recent court case in the US revealed that Monsanto, who had the patent for glyphosate, had suppressed research which highlighted potential links between glyphosate and cancer; has sponsored academics to deliver studies favourable to Monsanto; had written research papers on behalf of academics which suggested glyphosate was safe (‘ghost writing’) and had then used this body of evidence to lobby regulators in the US and the EU that the use of glyphosate was safe. This is spectacularly easy in the UK in particular because there is a lack of government-sponsored research which, in a better world, might be impartial, and we rely on the pesticide industry to provide us with the safety data for its own products based on ‘research’ they themselves have carried out.
It is lucky (though depressingly futile too) that there have been a lot of studies carried out by research scientists who are not funded or bribed by the manufacturers. These studies, by people who have no financial interest in lying, suggest that glyphosate is carcinogenic, causes endocrine problems that can damage the liver and kidneys, increases the problem of antibiotic resistance, damages soil organisms and kills earthworms, and persists in the soil for up to 3 years. The literature is full of research revealing serious harm to a wide range of reptiles, birds and animals, and it is worth noting that even creatures that are not currently known to be harmed by glyphosate are likely to be harmed by the disruption to ecosystems that will create imbalances, heavy predation or simple starvation.
Policy on herbicides in the EU has included several admirable principles, to the limited extent that policy regarding food production that depends on the use of poisonous chemicals can be admirable. One of these is Integrated Pest Management, which states that poisonous chemicals should be used in conjunction with a range of other strategies, such as rotations, plant breeding, use of natural predators such as nematodes or ladybirds. It also states that chemicals should not be used prophylactically. You are supposed to use chemicals only when you have a problem, and not just in case.
Around here farmers use glyphosate-based sprays to kill all plants in fields before they are cultivated. You’ll have seen fields that suddenly turn yellow in autumn. After cultivation they use a spray cocktail that includes glyphosate to deal with weeds that haven’t even germinated. Glyphosate is used to stunt the growth of cereals so that they are less likely to be blown down (to lodge) in wet and windy weather. It is used before harvest on rape and cereals to kill the plants in order to avoid waiting for natural ripening. Not much sign of Integrated Pest Management there, and plenty of prophylactic use. When I was a kid you ploughed the weeds under. And you didn’t insist on crops growing in a sterile soil with no weeds. You won’t come across heartsease growing on the headland or poppies in the corn, because the same obsession with tidiness that sees our road verges mowed into sterile lawns infects all farming now. Ground bearing a crop of wheat could potentially be treated five times during the summer – before cultivation, for ‘pre-emergent weeds, to stunt the straw to stop lodging, to desiccate the crop before harvest, and then to ‘spray off’ the ground after harvest. And that’s not counting the fungicides and insecticides that will be used on that same crop.
Then there is the Precautionary Principle, which the EC adopted as “full-fledged and general principle of international law” in 2000. The precautionary principle requires that, if there is a strong suspicion that a certain activity may have environmentally harmful consequences, it is better to control that activity now rather than to wait for incontrovertible scientific evidence. This principle is expressed in the Rio Declaration, which stipulates that, where there are “threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing … measures to prevent environmental degradation.” This basic principle is often applied in international law, as when the EU banned the import of US hormone-fed beef, but seems to be completely ignored domestically when it comes to the big business of farmers and chemical manufacturers, two very powerful lobbying groups, continuing to use chemicals of extremely questionable safety for the environment. I had been going to write ‘both for humans and the environment’ but of course it is time we stopped thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from the environment. If you think we aren’t part of the environment, try telling that to the curlews, or the small farmland birds, or the swallows, or the cuckoo, or the sticklebacks. If you can find any.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/25/monsanto-dewayne-johnson-cancer-verdict
Another great article Richard. Further substantiated by the case of Dewayne Johnson, reported in The Guardian today.