I guess I’m now old enough to be classed as a ‘grumpy old man’. I usually try to keep my blogs upbeat, but…
What prevents our country's leaders from prioritising citizens' interests when facing pressure from powerful corporate interests?
The ongoing controversy surrounding Glyphosate (aka Roundup) provides a telling example. Globally 800 million kilos of the stuff is used every year.
I can remember as a farm consultant over 40 years ago when it first hit the market it was declared to be safe enough to drink, though I don’t think anyone actually did drink it.
Thirty years later, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified Glyphosate as 'probably carcinogenic to humans,' and Bayer has paid several billion dollars to settle lawsuits alleging links between glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the USA.
But evidence is gaining pace, culminating in recent multi-factorial, multi-institute, multi-year series of peer-reviewed experiments with rats. “You can also see a whole range of different cancers whose incidence has gone up in male and female animals, especially in males. These cancers range from blood cancer to those that affect the skin, liver, thyroid, the nervous system, bone and mammary glands. Glyphosate alone gave rise to numerous different types of cancer,” concludes Professor Antoniou.
Bayer disputed these findings, stating that the experiments 'contained serious methodological flaws.
Most of us have now heard of ‘ultra-processed food’ (UPF). They were highlighted in the excellent book by Chris van Tulleken (and excellent not just because it mentioned our ice-cream as the only non-UPF ice cream, at least under its old formulation!) called Ultra Processed People.
UPFs are scientifically designed to be highly addictive and are able to bypass our bodies’ natural ability to regulate intake, resulting in the pandemic of overweight and obesity, along with associated diet-related diseases like type-2 diabetes, heart and circulatory diseases, depression and even cancer. It is a primary cause of our overwhelmed NHS and economic malaise.
Seems to me if someone was standing on the street pedalling proven addictive substances that were damaging to our health and wellbeing, someone would be doing something about it!
Well, someone is! Okay, they’re just a bunch of kids calling themselves ‘Bite Back’. But at least they are trying. Their online literature states –
“From the moment we are born junk food has us surrounded.
“Giant food companies flood our world with their products, then manipulate us using cute, colourful, clever marketing. They deceive us with packaging, and pump millions into making sure their junk-filled products are always in the spotlight. It’s constantly being forced down our throats. It’s the cultural wallpaper. It’s hidden in the small print.
“Now, it’s endangering the health of a generation. The good news? It’s totally preventable. And we’re biting back.”
The only fault I find with that is that it doesn’t start from the moment you are born. According to charted psychologist Kimberly Wilson’s book ‘Unprocessed’, the damage begins in the womb!
Power to your elbow kids!!
What else is there to moan about?
Plastics? As I type, there are 10 Greenpeace activists hanging under the Forth Road Bridge to stop an Ineos tanker of fossil fuel gas destined for the manufacture of plastics.
Now, as I imagine the US’s NRA might say, ‘It isn’t the plastic that is doing all the damage. It’s what we do with it.’
It’s the total disconnect between the manufacture, use and disposal of plastic that is at fault here.
According to Greenpeace,
- UK households are throwing away on average 60 pieces of plastic packaging per household weekly, an estimated 1.7 billion pieces of plastic nationally weekly, equating to 90 billion pieces of plastic packaging being thrown away annually.
- The 90 billion figure is consistent with the first count in 2022, despite overwhelming support for reduction, showing how little progress has been made by supermarkets and big brands in reducing plastic packaging.
Less than half of all plastic in the UK is recycled and only 17% of domestic plastic. Most is burned or exported.
I remember a piece of research carried out by experienced marine scientists from the Roslin Innovation Centre which estimated that the population of tiny plants of the oceans (the phytoplankton – the foundation of the marine food chain) had fallen by 50% in the past 70 years. They placed the blame firmly on the micro plastics floating in the top 200m of the oceans, where the phytoplankton lived, that attracted and were coated with thousands of unregulated chemicals. These chemicals were disrupting the life cycle of the phytoplankton and were the primary cause of the population collapse.
This population collapse meant that the buffering effect of the phytoplankton that used ocean dissolved CO2 to manufacture food by means of photosynthesis was greatly diminished. Meaning that more of this CO2 was turning into carbolic acid, causing ocean acidification with potentially catastrophic results. Not just ocean dwellers but also for diatom pollution of the atmosphere, which would impact every living creature on the planet. Plastics and chemicals, two further disasters resulting from our use/abuse of fossil fuels.
That must be about it? Oh wait! There’s another one…
I remember giving a lift to someone from Inverness down to Glasgow back in 2002. Turned out this person had been one of the Munlochy protesters who had trashed a trial crop of GMO oilseed rape.
Shortly after that I attended a government consultation on GMOs. The questions were blatantly biased to favour a positive outcome for the use of GMO technology. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. The corporates slunk off to lick their wounds and plot a come-back.
Well now it’s happening again and this time we know little about it. But this time GMOs have been re-labelled as Gene Edited (GE) and the technology is so safe, apparently, that it is just like speeding up natural selection. Proponents argue this means it requires less stringent regulation than traditional GMO techniques. I recently contributed to a Crowdjustice campaign for a judicial review.
Right now, 25 experimental field trials of gene-edited wheat and barley are taking place on commercial farms across England. Critics argue these trials, conducted under current regulatory frameworks, lack sufficient public transparency, comprehensive environmental assessment, and independent oversight.
At the same time, government acknowledges that these novel organisms must legally be kept out of the organic supply chain (and out of Scotland!). But, without labelling or traceability, our thriving organic food and farming sector will find it nearly impossible to maintain that separation.
Something you may not know is that the new regulations don’t just apply to agricultural plants. They also open the door to the use of these new GMOs in wild nature; in trees, grasses, flowers, seaweeds and algaes, for example. Within 2 years’ time, the government has committed to extending the legislation to livestock – and wild animals – as well.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?!