More problems with glyphosate: Rice growers sound alarm

By Rady Ananda

Adding to the natural rice industry’s woes after Bayer CropScience contaminated a third of the US rice supply with transgenic rice in 2006, the widespread application of Bayer’s glufosinate and Monsanto’s glyphosate is reducing crop yields, and burning and deforming rice plants that survive. [Image: Glyphosate deforms the growing points on rice plants.]

The Mississippi Rice Council (MRC) has sounded a national alarm over damage caused by aerial drift of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, calling for severely restricted aerial application.

MRC president Mike Wagner recently told crop dusters at this year’s Mississippi Agricultural Aviation Association annual meeting that glyphosate is wreaking havoc on the natural rice industry where “non-transgenic rice is planted in a sea of genetically modified crops that are tolerant to glyphosate.”

Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup linked to birth defects

Baby with hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, a common effect of agrochemical exposure – Photo by Jorge Galeano. Nearly all soy in the US is GM Roundup Ready soy.

By F. William Engdahl
Global Research

A major new scientific study has confirmed the growing conviction that the world’s most widely used chemical herbicide, Monsanto Corporation’s Roundup, is toxic and a danger to humans as well as animals. The latest scientific research carried out by a multinational scientific team headed by Professor Andrés Carrasco, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Embryology at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School and member of Argentina’s National Council of Scientific and Technical Research, presents an alarming demonstration that Monsanto and the biotech agribusiness industry have systematically lied about the safety of the product. Roundup in far lower concentrations than used in agriculture is linked to birth defects.

The health implications are huge. All major GMO crops on the market today are genetically manipulated to “tolerate” the herbicide Roundup.