Last weekend I was talking to an alfalfa farmer at my home in Idaho. He wanted to see my organic geothermal greenhouse. I told him my concerns about crop spraying, and Round-Up Ready GMO alfalfa, but that I understood why farmers go with it to be competitive. Then he said something that surprised me. He said he's going away from the GMO alfalfa back to conventional because China, the biggest hay importer, won't buy Roundup Ready alfalfa, and his Japanese buyers don't want it either. Mexico is also pushing back. They want to ban glyphosate by 2024. And the US government, concerned about what that would do to crop exports, is making all kinds of stink about that, urged on by Monsanto, the makers of Roundup, and Big Agriculture. To me, it amounts to international bullying and stinks of corruption. Thailand tried to ban glyphosate in 2019 and mysteriously reversed course 4 days before it was to take effect after intervention by the US Trade Representative. In the meantime, Monsanto is settling over 100,000 cancer lawsuits for about $11B.
It just seems strange to me that the US government was best buddies with the World Health Organization during the pandemic. And both the WHO and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have declared glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans." Politics and medicine. Not a good mix.
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