It is a victory for Mother Nature!
Austrian parliamentarians approved the total ban on using glyphosate in their country last month, which makes it the first country in Europe to make the right choice! Even though this ban is not yet applied at the European level, it is an encouraging initiative and gives us hope that things can change!
The civil society in Europe is fed up with this poison, Greenpeace is also campaigning for its interdiction, petitions in order to ban it are being created even in France where conventional agriculture is very expanded. Over 150,000 people already signed the petition in France!
However multinationals such as BASF, Monsanto, Syngenta etc. are very powerful and they do whatever it takes to keep selling their toxic glyphosate-based products. This includes: lying about the dangers, lobbying, defaming researchers (who remembers Séralini affair in 2012?), even falsifying research results! For the moment they managed to convince the European Comision to delay the ban in Europe for another 18 months...
Glyphosate is a controversial systemic herbicide, used in conventional agriculture, with massive side effects:
- pollution of soil and water
- toxicity for life forms (plants, humans, bees, mosquitoes, frogs, probably soil fauna also)
- even the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans"!
- appearance of resistant weeds which led to the creation of GMO crops tolerant to glyphosate (such as 89% of corn, 94% of soybeans, 89% of cotton in USA) but it's a never-ending vicious cycle...
If you check the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds (www.weedscience.org) you'll notice that already 258 species of weeds all over the world are resistant to herbicides today! "Weeds have evolved resistance to 23 of 26 known herbicide sites of action and to 167 different herbicides"!
Do you know what that means? There are only 3 herbicide sites of action inside weeds' cells left to use! So multinationals, go ahead, continue researching, but soon enough you will attain that limit. Mother Nature is smarter than you, it is alive and continuously evolving and adapting. After that, please leave us alone, your herbicides will be completely useless!
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