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MMWD
The Marin Municipal Water District's Deal With The Devil - Part I
On the eve of Marin County's review of the "Marin Biodiversity and Vegetation Management Plan" I'm reposting this blog from October of 2014.
In fall 2012 the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) started the environmental review process for the district's Wildfire Protection and Habitat Improvement Plan (WPHIP). As a major component of that process, the current Board of Directors of the Marin Municipal Water District supported and continues to support ongoing studies to consider the use of glyphosate-based herbicides in our watershed.
This overview looks at the facts and analyzes the risks of this decision.
PART I
MMWD’s Deal with the Devil
In 1970, after years of failed attempts to develop a weed-killing compound, a chemist named John Franz discovered a broad spectrum herbicide that showed great promise. The substance was extremely effective in killing all types of annual and perennial weeds with little evidence of potential harm to humans and animals. Herbicide experts called his discovery “virtually ideal” and Franz was acclaimed for his work. He even wrote a book about it: "Glyphosate: A Unique Global Herbicide" with Michael K. Mao and James A. Sikorski.
The substance Franz discovered was called “glyphosate” and the fruits of his labors benefitted his lifelong employer, the Monsanto Corporation. Over the years Monsanto has become infamous for manufacturing chemicals like DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange, and bovine growth hormone. But glyphosate was to be the biggest triumph for their bottom line.
Blame the French
Native to the Mediterranean, French broom is a flowering shrub that was introduced the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-nineteenth century as an ornamental plant. It’s turned out to be a highly invasive species that proliferates rapidly. An average-sized plant can produce up to 8,000 seeds per year, and those seeds are very hardy and drought tolerant and can survive five years or more.
Today French broom is engulfing great expanses of the Marin Municipal Water District’s watershed, crowding out native species and increasing the fire danger. Mature plants can grow up to 15 feet high and this classifies broom as a “ladder fuel” that allows a wildfire to reach up into the tree canopy and turn a bad wildfire into a truly horrific one.
In April 2014, Bay Nature reported that last year the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) had teams of volunteers spend about 7,000 hours trying to eradicate French broom by hand in the Marin watershed. But despite their earnest digging, cutting and pulling, French broom was still spreading at the rate of 50 acres per year.
Clearly, it’s time for Plan B. Toward that end the incumbent MMWD Board members are suggesting the widespread application of glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Monsanto’s Roundup, throughout the Marin watershed. This leads directly to the question of whether glyphosates are safe to introduce in our water supply and our ecosystem’s food web.
For the reasons noted below I think that would be a monumentally bad idea.
Franz’s “Miracle” and Monsanto’s Grand Plan
In 1974 Monsanto began marketing its “miracle,” glyphosate-based herbicide under the brand name Roundup®. By 2007 glyphosate herbicides (mostly in the form of Roundup or copycat generic versions sold by other companies) were the most widely used herbicide in the world and still are today, with over 1.5 billion pounds of it applied to crops and home gardens, annually.
Monsanto’s worldwide patents expired by 2000, and glyphosates are now manufactured by many other companies (Bayer, Dow AgroSciences, Du Pont, Cenex/Land O’Lakes, Helena, Platte, Riverside/Terra, and Zeneca). However, Monsanto still produces and sells half of all the glyphosate-based herbicides used in the world, and they’ve continued to dominate the industry because back in the 1980’s, Monsanto saw potential in glyphosate herbicides that John Franz never imagined.
Monsanto realized that they could control the market for the world’s most important food and industrial crops by patenting and selling bio-engineered seed that was resistant to the effects of glyphosates, and then selling farmers Roundup herbicide that would kill everything else but their genetically modified (GM) crops.
This resulted in the birth of a huge business in genetically modified food crops and a huge increase in the sales of Roundup herbicide.
Today, the Monsanto Corporation is the largest producer of GM seeds in the world. Monsanto makes genetically engineered seeds for soy, corn, canola, cotton, alfalfa and sugar beets that it markets in 120 countries around the world. And all of the seeds Monsanto sells are Roundup/glyphosate resistant, or “Roundup Ready” as they like to call it.
Monsanto has always claimed that Roundup is completely safe for humans and animals and the “good” crops it has bio-engineered. This is because glyphosates block what is called the ESPS synthase enzyme in plants, which prevents the synthesis of important amino acids (life’s building blocks) that plants need for growth. So when Roundup is applied to the leaves of a plant, it basically starves it to death. But since human and animal cells don’t have this enzyme pathway, Monsanto has always claimed that glyphosates must be safe.
This hypothesis has been accepted as proof of safety, even by U.S. health agencies. In fact, because of this glyphosate is not even included in compounds tested for by the Food and Drug Administration's Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program nor are they in the United States Department of Agriculture's Pesticide Data Program. [National Pesticide Information Center fact sheet]
In the past decade scientists and researchers have started to wonder if glyphosates were really as safe as Monsanto claimed. But if testing on humans was out of bounds, where else could they look?
The “Soya Republic”
Jeff Ritterman is a medical doctor and vice president of the board of directors of the SF Bay Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. He is the retired Chief of Cardiology at Kaiser Richmond and a former Richmond, California, city councilman. Dr. Ritterman has been investigating the impacts of glyphosate-based herbicides and Roundup when they are introduced into ecosystems and food webs in South America.
The “Soya Republic” is an area of intense soy bean cultivation that covers approximately 125 million acres across parts of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay. This region has undergone a major transformation since GM plants and Roundup resistant crops were introduced in 1996. Today, it’s one of the most heavily sprayed, “Roundup Ready,” agricultural regions in the world.
As documented by Dr. Ritterman, Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez, a pediatrician in Argentina who specializes in environmental health, describes the region’s transformation.
"The change in how agriculture is produced has brought, frankly, a change in the profile of diseases. We've gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before. What we have complained about for years was confirmed and especially what doctors say about the sprayed towns and areas affected by industrial agriculture. Cancer cases are multiplying as never before in areas with massive use of pesticides."
In 2010, Dr. Damian Verzeñassi, professor of social and environmental health from the National University at Rosario, the largest city in the central region of Argentina, began going from house-to-house doing an epidemiological study of what ended up to be 65,000 people living in the “Soya Republic.” As reported by Dr. Ritterman, he found cancer rates that were two to four times higher than the national average, with increases in breast, prostate and lung cancers.
Commenting on his findings, Dr. Verzeñassi said, “Cancer has skyrocketed (here) in the last fifteen years."
In 2012, two Argentinian villages were compared – one, a heavily sprayed farming village, the other, a non-sprayed ranching area. Dr. Ritterman notes that “In the farming village, 31 percent of residents had a family member with cancer while only 3 percent of residents in the ranching village had one.”
These findings are typical of data collection and epidemiological studies that have poured in recently from around the world.
Smoking Guns
"The tobacco companies denied the link between smoking and cancer, and took decades to recognize the truth. The biotech and agrochemical corporations are the same as the tobacco industry; they lie and favor business over the health of the population."
~ Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez, an Argentinian pediatrician specializing in environmental health
Monsanto and other glyphosate manufacturers have dismissed all claims that glyphosates are harmful. They’ve argued that although a study might show a correlation with disease that it was not proof of causality of disease. The “gold standard” for such proof is a randomized, controlled, clinical trial.
While that may be true, it ignores the overwhelming evidence of a correlation between the use of glyphosate herbicides and disease. And again, as Dr. Ritterman emphasizes, it “would be unethical in this instance. You cannot ethically expose humans to an herbicide” to test for toxicity.
However, consider the following:
- Scientists from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the US Dept. of Health and Human Services published the results of a Childhood Brain Cancer Study in 2009. They found that if either parent had been exposed to Roundup during the two years before the child's birth, the chances of the child developing brain cancer doubled.
- In April of 2014, scientists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a review of 25 years of research on the relationship between glyphosate herbicide exposure and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
- A review of hundreds of scientific studies about glyphosates, published in 2013 by the National Institutes of Health, concluded that “Glyphosate impairs the cytochrome P450 (CYP) gene pathway, which creates enzymes that help to form and also break down molecules in cells. Because the CYP pathway is essential for normal functioning of various systems in our bodies, any small change in its expression can lead to disruptions.” [New Review Points to Glyphosate’s Dangerous Health Effects, Food and Water Watch, April 2013]
- Dr. Fernando Manas at the National University of Rio Cuarto in Argentina believes glyphosate is causing cancer by inducing DNA damage. In his research he’s found significantly more DNA damage in people exposed to glyphosate herbicides than in unexposed control groups [Monsanto’s Roundup Linked to Cancer Again, J. Ritterman, MD, October 6, 2014]. DNA damage is the most prominent precursor of every kind of cancer in humans and animals.
- Genetics researchers in Quito, Ecuador, found that “Those exposed to the [glyphosate] herbicide… showed significantly more DNA damage.” than the control group of the general population [Monsanto’s Roundup Linked to Cancer Again, J. Ritterman, MD, October 6, 2014].
- Scientists in Thailand, studying the impacts of glyphosate herbicides on breast cancer cells, found that “The herbicide was able to bind to the cancer's estrogen receptors, thus mimicking the effects of estrogen and accelerating tumor growth.”
- A 10-year Agricultural Health Study (1993-2003), summarized by the EPA in proposing new safety rules for farm pesticide use, and glyphosates stated that "Current medical research suggests that while farmers are generally healthier than the general U.S. population, they (the ones using glyphosate herbicides) may have higher rates of some cancers, including leukemia, myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and cancers of the lip, stomach, skin, brain, and prostate." [Glyphosate is a Disaster for Human Health, The Ecologist, April 30, 2014]
In other words the evidence is overwhelming that glyphosates and Roundup herbicides pose significant dangers to human health and natural ecosystems and should probably either be heavily regulated or outright banned. Yet glyphosate producers continue to claim that the herbicide is safe and continue to intimidate and aggressively sue those whom it perceives to be harming their “business.”
With controversy about glyphosates rising around the world you would think the US government would be paying more attention. But Monsanto’s most powerful backer, it seems, is the government of the United States itself.
READ MORE: GO TO PART II