Over the last decade, Detroit residents have seen water rates rise by 119 percent. Credit: Bigstock/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2014 (IPS)

When the United Nations reaches out to resolve a water or sanitation crisis, it is largely across urban slums and remote villages in Asia, Africa or Latin America and the Caribbean.

But a severe water crisis in the financially bankrupt city of Detroit in the U.S. state of Michigan has prompted several non-governmental organisations and activists to appeal for U.N. intervention in one of the world’s richest countries.

“This is unprecedented,” said Maude Barlow, founder of the Blue Planet Project, a group that advocates water as a human right.

“I visited the city and worked with the Detroit People’s Water Board several weeks ago and came away terribly upset,” she told IPS.

"Water bills are regressive, so low-income households pay a disproportionate amount of their income for water service." -- Mary Grant, researcher at Food & Water Watch
She pointed out that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly African Americans, are having their water ruthlessly turned off.

Families with children, the elderly and the sick, cannot bathe, flush their toilets or cook in their own homes, she added.

“This is the worst violation of the human right to water I have ever seen outside of the worst slums in the poorest countries in failed states of the global South,” said Barlow, a one-time senior advisor on water to a former President of the U.N. General Assembly.

Last March, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) announced plans to shut off water service for 1,500 to 3,000 customers every week if their water bills were not paid. And on Tuesday, the City Council approved an 8.7-percent water rate increase.

According to a DWSD document, more than 80,000 residential households – in a city of 680,000 people – are in arrears, with thousands of families without water, and thousands more expected to lose access at any moment.

A group of NGOs has submitted a report to Catarina de Albuquerque, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, urging the United Nations to weigh in on the crisis and help restore water services and stop further cut-offs.

In a joint report released Wednesday, the Detroit People’s Water Board, the Blue Planet Project, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organisation and Food and Water Watch made several recommendations, including an appeal to the state of Michigan and the U.S. government to respect the human right to water and sanitation.

The report also calls on the city of Detroit to abandon its plans for further cut-offs and restore services to households that have suffered water cuts.

Mary Grant, researcher at Food & Water Watch, an advocacy group based in Washington DC, told IPS people often think the United States has fully met the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and provides universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

But as the crisis in Detroit shows, the situation is more complex and certain communities lack these essential services, she added.

When the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Water visited the United States last year, Food & Water Watch wrote a report delineating violations of the human right to water and sanitation across the country, primarily in rural, Latino and immigrant, Native American and homeless communities.

Grant said water shutoffs for non-payment are one way these violations are occurring.

In Detroit and other cities, she pointed out, households can lose access to drinking water and wastewater service when they cannot afford to pay their water bills.

The few low-income assistance programmes that exist are inadequate and fail to meet the needs of struggling households, she added.

“Water bills are regressive, so low-income households pay a disproportionate amount of their income for water service. Unfortunately, water rates across the country are increasing.”

She said there are many factors driving this: federal assistance for water infrastructure has been cut back by more than three-quarters since the 1970s, ageing systems are reaching the end of their lifespan, and water quality standards are getting stronger “as we learn more about the health risks of substances that contaminate our water.”

Large cities, in particular, are struggling to maintain and modernise water systems without making water service unaffordable for their least well-off residents, said Grant.

Food & Water Watch’s research has found that communities experience even larger water rate increases when systems are privatised.

Grant said the shutoffs appear to be an attempt to make the water and sewer system more appealing to potential private investors.

Over the last decade, Detroit residents have seen water rates rise by 119 percent, according to a press release Wednesday.

With unemployment rates at a record high and the poverty rate at about 40 percent, Detroit water bills are unaffordable to a significant portion of the population.

Many of those affected by the shut-offs were given no warning.

“The infirm have been left without water and functioning toilets, children cannot bathe and parents cannot adequately prepare food for their families”, the press release said.

Barlow told IPS Detroit is “the canary in the coal mine.”

Through years of corruption and mismanagement, deep cuts to infrastructure and social security, the city is now bankrupt and unable to care for its people, she noted.

And years of neoliberal policies such as free trade, de-regulation and privatisation have allowed the wealth to be diverted to the suburbs and jobs to move overseas.

“Detroit is our collective future if we do not start re-investing in essential services, education and health care, local communities and sustainable local economic development,” said Barlow.

She said, “What is happening with these cut-offs is a social crime.Here in North America we are creating failed states and punishing the most vulnerable among us with these ruthless polices of savage capitalism.”

She said the city has experienced flight of wealth and business and as a result, the poorest and most vulnerable have had to pick up the tab for essential public services.

“Water rates have gone through the roof and people cannot pay. Let Detroit be our wake-up call. President Barack Obama must step in,” Barlow pleaded.

(END)

Livestock production has long been suspected as a key incubator of antibiotic resistance in the United States. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 27 2014 (IPS)

Pharmaceutical companies have overwhelmingly agreed to new U.S. government guidelines aimed at decreasing the use of antibiotics in the raising of livestock, new data shows.

In December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal government’s main regulator for these sectors, unveiled a new, voluntary programme to reduce the use of “medically important” antibiotics, the hundreds of drugs considered important for human health."Any time antibiotics are used for routine disease prevention, that’s a sign that something else is wrong with the livestock system.” -- Sarah Borron

The agency targeted 26 of the world’s largest manufacturers of livestock antibiotics, requesting their compliance. On Wednesday, the FDA announced that all but one of those companies, accounting for more than 99 percent of the supply, had agreed to the new guidelines.

“As of March 26, [25 companies] have agreed in writing that they intend to engage in the judicious use strategy by seeking withdrawal of approvals relating to any production uses and changing the marketing status of their products from over-the-counter to use by [veterinary] prescription,” the FDA stated Wednesday.

“FDA is encouraged by the response thus far and will continue to monitor ongoing participation and provide public updates on a periodic basis.”

The only targeted company not to agree to the new guidance is PharmaqAS, a Norwegian manufacturer of drugs used on farmed fish. A spokesperson for the company told IPS that its products are only used to treat diseased fish rather than to promote growth in livestock, and Pharmaq “interpreted the proposed voluntary program not to be relevant for our products.” However, it is currently reviewing the FDA request.

The U.S. meat industry has come under increased criticism in recent years over the widespread practice of feeding low levels of antibiotics to healthy livestock over an extended period, as a way of forcing animals to put on weight more quickly. Motivated by surging reports of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” around the world, public health officials have increasingly looked for ways to decrease this practice.

At base, the new guidance offers a simple tweak to labelling requirements for antimicrobial drugs intended for livestock. These 25 companies will no longer include reference to their drugs’ growth-enhancing potential on their labels, in effect outlawing the practice by farmers.

The use of antibiotics for truly sick animals will still be allowed, but only with a prescription from a registered veterinarian.

While public interest groups are supportive of the fact that U.S. regulators are finally taking action over growing antibiotic resistance, many are concerned that the FDA’s guidelines are too weak.

“We did some analysis of the drugs being affected by the guidance and found that of the drugs that will stop being used for growth promotion, 63 percent can still be used for disease prevention,” Sarah Borron, a researcher with Food and Water Watch (FWW), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“The problem is, that’s a very similar type of use. Farmers still give low doses of antibiotics to entire herds for long periods, and that still promotes the development of antibiotic resistance. Any time antibiotics are used for routine disease prevention, that’s a sign that something else is wrong with the livestock system.”

Concerns over the possibility of antibiotic resistance have been around almost since the discovery of antibiotics themselves. Credit: Bigstock

Some U.S. lawmakers are expressing similar concerns.

“This voluntary pro-industry approach is a step in the wrong direction,” Rosa DeLauro, a member of the House of Representatives, said when the plan was announced in December.

“Companies will either disregard the plan altogether or simply switch from using antibiotics for routine growth promotion to using the same antibiotics for routine disease prevention. For the good of public health, FDA should step up and implement tighter restrictions on antibiotic usage.”

DeLauro said that 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States are given to healthy animals, often to “overcompensate for crowded and unsanitary conditions”.

23,000 deaths annually

Concerns over the possibility of antibiotic resistance have been around almost since the discovery of antibiotics themselves, a breakthrough that many say is among the most important of the modern age. Yet such reports have spiked in recent years.

While this resistance is a growing problem in countries on every continent, governments outside of the United States have taken more proactive steps. The European Union, for instance, has banned the use of antibiotics to fatten livestock since at least 2006.

Data from E.U. countries suggest that overall antibiotics use for livestock can be reduced fairly easily, through simple yet often cost-ineffective changes to farming practice.

The United States, meanwhile, has seen major outbreaks of food-borne illness with resistance in recent years.

In 2011, for instance, the U.S. company Cargill was forced to recall 36 million pounds of ground turkey, over concerns that it may have been contaminated with an antibiotic-resistant form of salmonella. Hundreds more became sick from similar infections this past October, reportedly traced to a chicken farm in California.

Also last fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency, estimated that some two million people in the United States are getting sick from antibiotic-resistant infections every year, causing some 23,000 deaths. Further, the agency cautioned that those numbers were minimum estimates based on conservative assumptions.

In April, CDC director Dr. Tom Friedman told the U.S. House of Representatives that antibiotic resistance constitutes one of the country’s “most serious health threats”.

Livestock production has long been suspected as a key incubator of antibiotic resistance in the United States. Yet the FDA ultimately decided to make its new programme voluntary rather than mandatory.

The agency says it took this decision in order to speed up what would otherwise have been a long and likely contentious regulatory process. But analysts like FWW’s Borron say this is cause for concern.

“Whenever there’s voluntary guidance, we worry about whether companies will follow,” she notes. “In this instance, there’s the sense that the FDA has been working on something that the industry can accept.”

In this approach, the FDA appears to have been successful. Both the animal pharmaceuticals manufacturers and the meat industry appear to be backing the new guidelines, though some express some reservations.

“The response to FDA reflects the shared commitment of those who raise poultry and livestock to the judicious use of medicines for the care and well being of healthy animals,” Keith Williams, a spokesperson for the National Turkey Federation, a trade group, told IPS.

The pork industry, meanwhile, is warning that the new guidelines will mean “real changes” for producers. Liz Wagstrom, the chief veterinarian at the National Pork Producers Council, told IPS that “farmers will need to work with their veterinarians to come up with alternative strategies to keep their animals healthy.”

Pharmaceutical manufacturers will now have three years to phase in the new labelling requirements.

The U.S. government is in the final stages of weighing approval for an overhaul of regulations governing the country’s poultry industry that would see processing speeds increase substantially even while responsibility for oversight would be largely given over to plant employees.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) inspector at a poultry processing facility in Accomac, Virginia checking for cleanliness and testing poultry for the Avian Influenza (AI) virus. Credit: USDA/public domain

The plan, which was originally floated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) two years ago, is currently slated to be finalised by regulators next month. Yet opposition has been heating up from lawmakers as well as labour, public health and consumer advocacy groups.

On Thursday, over 100 such groups and businesses delivered a letter, along with nearly 220,000 petitions, to President Barack Obama, asking that the proposal be withdrawn.

“The proposed rule puts company employees in the role of protecting consumer safety, but does not require them to receive any training before performing duties normally performed by government inspectors,” the letter states.

“And lack of training is not the only impact this rule will have on workers. Increased [production] speeds will put worker safety in jeopardy … This proposed rule would let the fox guard the hen house, at the expense of worker safety and consumer protection.”

The proposed rule would see top chicken-processing speeds increased from the current 140 per minute to as high as 175. The rule would also decrease the number of federal inspectors assigned to processing plants by 75 percent, leaving the slack to be picked up by company employees.

The poultry industry has reportedly been pushing for these changes for decades. In return, the government would require that processors bathe each chicken carcass in chlorine and other chemicals, aimed at killing any pathogens that remain on the bird.

Last week, Bennie G. Thompson, a member of Congress, warned that the USDA is “unnecessarily endangering the lives of millions of Americans”.

Weak data

Federal pilot projects have been testing the new approach since the late 1990s. Yet critics warn that the results have been far less clear-cut than either the government or the industry has suggested.

“We did a snapshot analysis of how many defects employees were missing at these pilot plants, and found there was no consistency,” Tony Corbo, a senior lobbyist Food & Water Watch, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“In one turkey plant, for instance, there was a 99 percent error rate for one inspection category. We became concerned that the USDA was moving forward too fast with this change.”

The federal government’s official watchdog agency has formally corroborated this conclusion.“The industry says there’s no safety problem, but they’re in denial." -- Tom Fritzsche

The USDA “has not thoroughly evaluated the performance of each of the pilot projects over time,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in a report published in August, the second time it had come out with such findings.

“GAO identified weaknesses including that training of plant personnel assuming sorting responsibilities on the slaughter line is not required or standardized and that faster line speeds allowed under the pilot projects raise concerns about food safety and worker safety.”

In response to the report, the poultry industry noted that the USDA had already updated its analyses in support of the new rule, and that the sector’s safety record is not linked to processing speeds.

“Over the past 14 years of this pilot program there has been no evidence to substantiate the assertion that increased line speeds will increase injuries,” Ashley Peterson, a vice-president with the National Chicken Council (NCC), a trade group, said in a statement.

“It is not in a poultry company’s best interests to operate at speeds that would harm its workers, and common sense tells you it is not in a company’s best interest to operate at speeds that cannot produce safe and high quality poultry products.”

(The NCC has published responses to criticisms of the proposed regulatory changes here.)

For the moment, the Obama administration appears set on pushing through the new rule, characterising it as a cost-cutting measure.

Under the president’s new budget proposal, released earlier this week, the USDA’s inspections funding would be cut by nearly 10 million dollars, despite the fact that no rule has yet been finalised. Earlier, the federal savings have been estimated even higher – some 90 million dollars over three years.

“The 2015 budget recognises fiscal realities,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Tuesday. “Our leaner workforce continues to find ways to implement increasingly complex programs with fewer resources.”

For major poultry companies, meanwhile, speeding up processing speeds would save more than 250 million dollars a year.

“Most vulnerable” workers

Beyond public health, there are significant civil rights concerns surrounding the new poultry regulations proposal, as well. Last week, a national coalition of groups representing minority and poor workers briefed lawmakers here on concerns that the new rules would exacerbate existing labour problems.

“This proposal has us very concerned, as there are already pending requests with the regulators to require a reduction in these work speeds,” Tom Fritzsche, a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“The health consequences for workers are already very severe, and the concern is that those injury rates are going to go way up. We’re joining other groups in asking whether the same hazards would be so prevalent if the poultry workforce were not made up mostly of women of colour.”

Last year, Fritzsche authored a study on poultry workers in the state of Alabama, three-fourths of whom said they had experienced injury or illness due to their work. Three-quarters also said that the speed of the processing line made their job more dangerous, in addition to broader allegations of egregious safeguards.

Workers “describe what one called a climate of fear within these plants,” the report states. “[E]mployees are fired for work-related injuries or even for seeking medical treatment from someone other than the company nurse or doctor … they describe being discouraged from reporting work-related injuries.”

The report calls poultry workers “among the most vulnerable” in the United States.

“The industry says there’s no safety problem, but they’re in denial. There is a huge and well-documented undercounting in employer-reported data,” Fritzsche says.

“Workers are repeating the exact same motion between 22,000 and 100,000 times per shift, and can develop some permanent disabilities from these repetitive motions. One study out of South Carolina found that 42 percent of workers had carpal tunnel syndrome – that’s astronomically high, and far higher than the industry ever likes to quote.”

The past year has seen multiple state-level legislative attempts to label or ban GM products. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 3 2014 (IPS)

A third of U.S. organic farmers have experienced problems in their fields due to the nearby use of genetically modified crops, and over half of those growers have had loads of grain rejected because of unwitting GMO contamination.

Of U.S. farmers that took part in a new survey, the results of which were released on Monday, more than 80 percent reported being concerned over the impact of genetically modified (GM) crops on their farms, with some 60 percent saying they’re “very concerned”."USDA has been extremely lax and, in our opinion, that’s due to the excessive influence of the biotech industry in political circles.” -- Organic farmer Oren Holle

The findings come as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken the unusual step of extending the public comment period for a controversial study on how GM and non-GM crops can “coexist”. During a major review in 2011-12, the USDA Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture (AC21) concluded that it lacked sufficient data to decide on the extent to which GM contamination was happening in the United States, or to estimate the related costs incurred by organic and other non-GM farmers.

The AC21 recommendations came out in November 2012 and were criticised for being weighted in favour of industry. Critics have subsequently seized on the USDA’s decision to revisit those conclusions, and the new study, produced by an association of organic farmers and Food & Water Watch, a Washington advocacy group, aims to fill the committee’s professed gaps.

“The USDA said they didn’t have this data, but all they had to do was ask,” Oren Holle, a farmer in the midwestern state of Kansas and president of the Organic Farmers’ Agency for Relationship Marketing (OFARM), which assisted in the new study’s production, told IPS.

“Our very strong feeling is that the introduction and propagation of the genetically modified products that are coming out under patent at this point have not had the regulatory oversight that they should have, and need to involve a far broader section of stakeholders. USDA has been extremely lax and, in our opinion, that’s due to the excessive influence of the biotech industry in political circles.”

Misplaced responsibility

While GM crop use has expanded exponentially across the globe over the past two decades, nowhere has this growth been more significant than in the United States. While just one percent of corn and seven percent of soybeans grown in the U.S. came from GM seeds during the mid-1990s, by last year both of those numbers had risen to above 90 percent.

In the new study, nearly half of the farmers polled said they did not believe that GM and non-GM crops could ever “coexist”, while more than two-thirds said that “good stewardship” is insufficient to address contamination.

“The USDA’s focus on coexistence and crop insurance is misplaced,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said Monday, referring to an AC21 recommendation that GM contamination problems be dealt with through a federal insurance scheme set up to lessen the impact of natural disasters.

“The department must recognise the harm that is already being done to organic and non-GMO farmers and put the responsibility squarely where it belongs – with the biotech companies … Now USDA can no longer claim ignorance about this problem.”

Even as contamination reports continue to grow, the U.S. government’s most recent response, drawn from the AC21 recommendations, has been to encourage “good stewardship” practices and communication between neighbouring farmers. Yet non-GM farmers say that, in practice, this has meant substantial outlays of both time and money in order to safeguard their crops – and virtually no corresponding responsibility on the part of farmers using genetically modified crops.

Beyond regular testing and certification requirements, U.S. farmers are required to set aside a substantial buffer zone around their fields to guard against GM contamination. Averaging around five acres, this buffer zone alone costs farmers anywhere from 2,500 to 20,000 dollars a year in lost income, according to the new survey.

Other farmers resort to waiting to plant their crops until after their neighbours’ GM crops have pollinated. Yet this delay, too, imposes a financial burden of several thousand dollars per year.

“I’m getting tired of maintaining these miles of buffers,” one farmer wrote in response to the new survey, complaining about the heavy use of herbicides typically associated with GM crops. “How about the guy that sprays up to the fence be liable for the damage that is done?”

Old playbook

OFARM’s Holle says the findings on just how much farmers are paying to avoid GM contamination took him by surprise. Of this imbalance, he says U.S. regulators are continuing to play out of an “old playbook”.

“There’s been a lot of new technology introduced in agriculture over the past 50 years. But there’s always been a point of law that, whatever happens on my side of the fence, I’m still responsible for how it might affect my neighbour,” Holle notes.

“GMOs take away that neighbour-to-neighbour relationship, however, as the ways in which unintended presence occurs is a completely different set of concerns from other new technologies. For that reason, they need a completely different set of rules.”

While Holle says the USDA has been slow in recognising this new reality, he’s guardedly optimistic that a regulatory rethink is now taking place.

“This additional comment period, I think, points out that they were paying some attention to the initial comments that came in,” he says.

“It does appear that they’re taking a step back. It’s our hope that our efforts have at least gained some traction in recognition that all is not well and that they, perhaps, need to do some re-evaluation.”

Against what he says is an onslaught of lobbying by the biotech industry, Holle says the voice of non-GM farmers has strengthened largely through newfound consumer demand. The past year alone has seen multiple state-level legislative attempts to label or ban GM products, while stores have acted unilaterally.

On Monday, the United States’ two largest grocery chains indicated that they would not sell genetically modified salmon, a product currently being weighed by regulators here. Some 9,000 stores countrywide have reportedly made similar pledges.

“At least 35 other species of genetically engineered fish are currently under development,” Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, stated Monday. The “decision on this genetically engineered salmon application will set a precedent for other genetically engineered fish and animals … to enter the global food market.”

According to a 2013 poll, 93 percent of U.S. respondents want GE ingredients or products to be labelled, despite strident pushback by industry.

Environmental safety groups are stepping up efforts to prevent a reportedly dangerous yet widely used herbicide from being sold in the United States, even as the country’s primary environmental regulator is considering increasing the amount of the herbicide allowed in the U.S. food supply.

The agricultural giant Monsanto has for years relied on its flagship product, a weed-killer known as Roundup. The primary ingredient in Roundup is an herbicide called glyphosate, which Monsanto has used to selectively kill weeds while allowing genetically modified versions of sugarcane, corn, soy and wheat crops to grow.“Part of the problem is that there is no ethical way to prove that [glyphosate] is as toxic as it is.” -- Sayer Ji of GreenMedInfo

“We are increasingly seeing more and more samples of surface water coming up with residues [of glyphosate], and this is affecting frogs that live there,” Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, an advocacy group, told IPS. “Potatoes and carrots are also picking it up in the soil – there are multiple routes of exposure.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the federal regulatory agency, is currently preparing to increase the allowable amount of glyphosate in crops like carrots, sweet potatoes and mustard seeds. A public comment period on the proposal to do so ends Monday night, and the EPA has reportedly already received some 9,000 comments.

The new EPA regulation would allow “oilseed” crops such as flax, canola and soybean oil to contain glyphosate at levels up to 40 parts per million (ppm), up from 20 ppm, which is over 100,000 times the concentration needed to cause cancer according to a recent study. It also raises the allowable glyphosate contamination level for food crops such as potatoes from 200 ppm to 6,000 ppm.

Glyphosate has previously been shown to be an “endocrine disruptor”, which the National Institutes of Health has shown to have long-term effects on reproductive health. They can be very dangerous at low levels, thus restricting the amount allowed will not be effective.

“The EPA is failing to protect human health and the environment by neglecting to regulate the excessive use of herbicides,” a current Food & Water Watch petition states. “Instead, it is just changing its own rules to allow the irresponsible and potentially dangerous applications continue.”

Monsanto, meanwhile, claims glyphosate is safe because it only acts on a biological process that is present in plants, not animals.

“We are very confident in the long track record that glyphosate has,” Jerry Stainer, Monsanto’s executive vice president of sustainability, has stated in the past. “It has been very, very extensively studied.”

Yet new research says glyphosate interferes with gut bacteria, which can disrupt immunity and vitamin synthesis.

Indeed, according to EPA analysts, the consequences linked to exposure to the chemical include lung congestion and shortness of breath. Further, according to a study published in April, scientists have linked exposure to glyphosate to gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility and cancer.

“Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body,” the study states.

“Part of the problem is that there is no ethical way to prove that [glyphosate] is as toxic as it is,” Sayer Ji, director of GreenMedInfo, an advocacy group, told IPS. “Yet meanwhile, no new research is proving it’s safer, but rather the opposite. I think the EPA is really damaging its credibility.”

According to Lovera, the EPA tends to be very slow in taking new studies into account. (The EPA was unable to provide comment for this story before deadline.)

180 million pounds

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 180 million pounds of glyphosate are applied to U.S. soil annually. Herbicide use has increased by 26 percent since 2001, according Food & Water Watch.

Instead of pushing more environmentally friendly techniques to combat weeds – such as varying crops from year to year or using crop covers – biotech companies have focused on inventing genetically engineered crops  that can withstand the use of Roundup and other herbicides.

Yet the impacts of this massively increased use of chemical inputs on environmental systems and human communities are only slowly being understood.

Scientists have repeatedly found that the numbers of migrating monarch butterflies, for instance, are today at their lowest point in decades. Environmental advocacy groups say this is because milkweed plants – the only plant on which these butterflies lay their eggs – are being killed off by these herbicides.

Nor are plants and animals the only ones reportedly being affected by this increased use of glyphosate.

In its Farm Family Exposure Study, GreenMedInfo looked at the glyphosate concentration in the urine of 48 farmers, their spouses and 79 of their children on the day before, the day of, and for three days after a glyphosate application on their farms.

Of the farmers studied, 60 percent had detectable levels of the chemical the day of the application. So too did four percent of their spouses and 12 percent of their children.

“For consumers in the United States, the best way to get around this is to look for organic labels on food, because they are not allowed to use Roundup,” Lovera told IPS. “That’s one of the biggest distinctions between conventional and organic products.”

Just five countries grow nearly 90 percent of all biotech crops. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 14 2013 (IPS)

A consumer protection group here is accusing U.S. diplomats of engaging in a concerted and at times forceful advocacy campaign on behalf of genetically modified seeds and even specific biotechnology companies, particularly aiming to influence governments in developing countries.

In a report released Tuesday, Food & Water Watch (FWW) offers new research suggesting that the U.S. State Department over the past decade has offered centralised directives to U.S. embassies to promote biotech products and respond to industry concerns.“Biotech is such a controversial policy...why would this be a central tenet of U.S. development and foreign policy?” -- Darcey O’Callaghan of Food & Water Watch

U.S. diplomats were reportedly told to work to change negative public perceptions on biotechnology – going so far as to target high school students in Hong Kong – and to push governments in developing countries to create laws friendly to the industry.

“Between 2007 and 2009, the State Department sent annual cables to ‘encourage the use of agricultural biotechnology,’ directing every diplomatic post worldwide to ‘pursue an active biotech agenda’ that promotes agricultural biotechnology, encourages the export of biotech crops and foods and advocates for pro-biotech policies and laws,” the report notes.

“The State Department views its heavy-handed promotion of biotech agriculture as ‘science diplomacy,’ but it is closer to corporate diplomacy on behalf of the biotechnology industry.”

The conclusions come after researchers looked through a sampling of diplomatic cables from 113 countries dating from 2005 to 2009, released as part of the WikiLeaks 2010 data dump. According to a survey of nearly a thousand cables, FWW reports that the number of diplomatic missives discussing biotechnology rose each year, from 106 references in 2005 to 254 in 2009.

“Biotech is such a controversial policy – even here in the United States, where campaigns are currently underway in over 20 states to require labelling of foods with genetically modified ingredients,” Darcey O’Callaghan, the international policy director at Food & Water Watch, told IPS.

“In such a situation, why would this be a central tenant of U.S. development and foreign policy?”

She notes that little change in policy took place after President Barack Obama’s administration took over.

Feeding the future

More than a decade and a half after genetically engineered (GE) crops were first introduced in the United States, during the mid-1990s, by last year just five countries are said to have been growing nearly 90 percent of all biotech crops. That’s a potentially lucrative market for the industry.

“Although the U.S. commodity crop market is nearly saturated with biotech seeds, most of the world remains biotech-free,” the report states. “The seed companies need the power of the U.S. State Department to force more countries, more farmers and more consumers to accept, cultivate and eat their products.”

The State Department says it has not yet reviewed the new report.

“It is important to note that the State Department works to ensure market access for all U.S. agricultural products, including organic, conventional and GE crops,” a spokesperson told IPS. “We work in partnership with agencies across the federal government to promote biosafety regulatory systems in developing countries to enhance access to new agricultural technologies.”

The department says it supports the adoption of transparent and science-based regulations in other countries, which it suggests works to increase market access for U.S. products while also promoting innovation in developing countries.

In addition, U.S. policy currently sees biotechnologies as an important tool for making strides against global hunger.

“Agricultural production will need to increase by 60 percent or more by 2050, as the global population goes from seven billion to nine billion people,” the spokesperson said.

“New technologies are critical to achieving this goal in a more sustainable manner, using less land, less water, less fertiliser and fewer pesticides. The challenge is enormous if we are to feed a growing world with fewer inputs in the midst of climate change.”

Yet critics have long held that the use of genetically modified seeds yokes farmers to agribusinesses, requiring ongoing purchases of company-specific inputs.

“An overwhelming number of farmers in the developing world reject biotech crops as a path to sustainable agricultural development or food sovereignty,” Ben Burkett, president of the National Family Farm Coalition, an advocacy group, said Tuesday.

“The biotech agriculture model using costly seeds and agrichemicals forces farmers onto a debt treadmill that is neither economically nor environmentally viable.”

In addition, FWW points to evidence that GE products do not necessarily deliver on the promises made by their promoters.

“Biotech agriculture is uniquely unsuited to the farmers of the developing world,” the report states. “[But] there are a host of promising, lower-impact agricultural approaches that have been shown to increase productivity, maximize economic return for farmers and enhance food security.”

Aid firewall

None of the WikiLeaks cables used in the FWW research were secret. Further, the State Department’s focus on biotechnology is already fairly well known, while the agency’s mandate to promote U.S. interests abroad is an inherent responsibility.

Rather, critics’ concerns revolve around the seemingly forceful use of U.S. diplomatic strength to push narrow interests on an issue that not only has potentially lasting implications but also remains under intense debate. Consumers in the European Union, for instance, have been repeatedly found to oppose genetically modified crops, and E.U. countries have been at the forefront of requiring the labelling of foods with GE ingredients.

Indeed, FWW points to a State Department memo that specifically aimed to attempt to “limit the influence of EU negative views on biotechnology.” (In 2006, the World Trade Organisation backed the United States in ruling that an E.U. ban on the import of GE foods was illegal.)

Further, while legislative action has lagged in most developing countries, broad-based civil society opposition has been widely documented. Late last year, Peru and Kenya both imposed bans on the import of genetically modified foods, while Nigeria was reportedly considering following suit, citing lack of scientific consensus on the long-term impact of GE materials.

In November, some 400 civil society organisations urged the African Union to impose such a ban on a continent-wide basis.

FWW’s O’Callaghan says the new evidence highlights a “conflict of interest” in the State Department, which is tasked with promoting U.S. interests abroad while simultaneously housing USAID, the government’s main foreign aid agency.

“USAID is ostensibly a development organisation,” she says. “But when you put those two interests – development and corporate priority – side by side, which do you think will win out?”

FWW is urging the imposition of a “firewall” around U.S. development efforts, warning that pushing a “pro-corporate agenda in the guise of foreign policy is misguided and undermines the U.S. image abroad.”