Poisoned food

 While healthy and non-toxic foods must be labeled - and they make us pay dearly for it - those that are sprayed with poison pass for normal and it is not necessary to declare it on any label.

This is how foods produced with pesticides are sold (euphemistically called agrochemicals to make them appear more neutral and that we do not protest). Who benefits from this deception of the public, from this outrage on health and the environment, from seizing public money on a large scale for the costs of pollution and disease? The 10 multinationals that control 90 percent of the sale of pesticides worldwide, of which Syngenta, Bayer, Basf, Monsanto, Dow and DuPont are the largest. Sound familiar? Of course, they are exactly the same ones that control one hundred percent of the transgenic seeds. It is no coincidence: they created transgenics to sell more poison.

GMOs are a paradigmatic example of this scam to the public: more than 80 percent are manipulated to tolerate greater use of pesticides, so that everything around the plant dies, but that the transgenic plant remains alive after the intensive poison bath. That not only remains in the earth and water: it also leaves a high content of toxins in the food that is made with them. In most countries that grow transgenic soybeans, they had to change health laws to increase up to 200 times the level of pesticide residues allowed in food, otherwise it would be illegal food as it is a health risk.

The cultivation of transgenics has meant the greatest use of the herbicide glyphosate in the history of agriculture. Because its use is so intense, it has caused resistance in the herbs it claims to fight, finding more than 20 invasive herbs that are now totally immune to glyphosate. For this reason, companies sell the product more and more concentrated, adding surfactants and other chemicals to make it penetrate better (turning glyphosate, which the industry claims is moderately toxic, into a high-powered poison). But in the face of increasing inefficiency, they are spreading even more toxic poisons on crops (such as endosulfan, atrazine, dicamba, and the famous 2,4 D that is a component of the chemical weapon Agent Orange). Now companies are going for GM corn and soy resistant to dicamba and 2.4 D, which will further increase their use.

In Argentina, the world's third largest producer of transgenics, the towns of several provinces have begun to organize against the spraying of the areas of transgenic crops, a situation related to the increase in cancer cases and various allergies and serious diseases, including the deformation of neonates.

While in that country the first trial against the fumigation of transgenic soybeans was recently carried out in Ituzaingó, Córdoba, due to the diseases and contamination that have been demonstrated, in Mexico the commercial planting of 235 thousand 500 hectares of this crop has just been authorized in several states of the Yucatan peninsula, in Chiapas and the Huasteca region, condemning to death the production of organic honey and the livelihood of more than 40 thousand families. Added to this is the approval of new open field tests of transgenic corn in northern states, continuing the attack against peasant corn in its center of origin.

In addition to direct damage to producers, bees, pollination, biodiversity and soils, the massive planting of transgenics in the Yucatan peninsula, due to its particular porous soils and karst systems, will lead to the rapid contamination of aquifers and underground systems, for so the entire population of the peninsula is directly threatened with contamination.

Due to these serious impacts and others, the release of transgenic soy had a negative opinion from Conabio, Ine and Conanp, official institutions that must participate by law in the decision process. But against the grain of abundant data and these opinions, his release was still approved. Greenpeace filed a lawsuit against the responsible officials and several beekeepers and farmers organizations defended themselves against this decision, clearly unfair and illegal. A decision against health, biodiversity and the economy of the population, only to favor a transnational and a few industrialists.

This agricultural model based on pesticides - of which transgenics are its greatest exponent -, the role of the six corporations that hold it, the complicity of governments and the deaths and violence they have generated, were presented to a session of the Permanent Court of the Peoples in Bangalore, India, in December 2011. The verdict concluded, among other points, that it is a model that implies a clear global injustice, where six transnationals are responsible for the systematic and widespread violation of the right to health and life, economic, social and cultural rights, as well as other political and civil rights, and of women and children.

To justify pesticides, they told us that they were to feed the world, just as with transgenics. There are more hungry than ever and millions of children are born into a toxic future. But the lie is exposed and resistance continues to grow.