Pesticide illness triggers anti-Monsanto protest in Argentina
Pesticide illness triggers anti-Monsanto protest in Argentina
Monsanto pesticides are causing birth defects and cancer in Argentina, according to a new report. In a farming community near Córdoba, residents say they have been poisoned by pesticides.
Date 25.10.2013
Author Eilis O'Neill, Córdoba
Editor Saroja Coelho
Sofía Gatica sits in the sun on a café patio in the Argentine city of Córdoba. She talks about raising her three children in Ituzaingó, a Córdoba suburb surrounded by soy fields. In the mid-1990s her oldest son became extremely ill.
"When he was four years old, he came down with the illness that left him temporarily paralyzed," she recalls. "He was admitted to the hospital. They told me that they didn't know what was wrong with him."
The Gatica family lived just fifty meters from fields planted with genetically-modified soy. Planes regularly flew overhead, spraying the plants with the herbicide glyphosate. Slowly, the entire suburb started getting sick.
"Children were being born with deformities," Sofia says, "little babies were being born with six fingers, without a jawbone, missing a skull bone, with kidney deformities, without an anus - and a lot of mothers and fathers were developing cancer."
In 1999, Sofía Gatica gave birth to her fourth baby, a little girl. Three days later, the baby died of kidney failure. The loss of her child prompted Gatica to take action. She decided to find out what was happening in her neighborhood.
"I went door-to-door and did a survey - asking each mother for the sick person's name, address, clinic, everything. And each mother sent me to another, and to another, and so on."
More:
http://www.dw.de/pesticide-illness-triggers-anti-monsanto-protest-in-argentina/a-17013525
= new reply since forum marked as read
Monsanto Claims Pesticide Safe Despite Huge Rise in Cancer and Birth Defects in Argentina
Amanda Ritchie • October 28, 2013
Argentina’s reckless use of a pesticide is having a devastating impact on the health of its people, according to an Associated Press report released early this week. Though proper use of these agrochemicals has been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the AP investigation in Argentina found farmers using the pesticides in illegal manners.
To maximize harvests and battle the ever-growing number of resistant weeds, Argentine farmers add in more toxic chemicals and use twice as much pesticide per acre as U.S. counterparts, according to the report.
Cancer rates in towns surrounded by soy farming in Argentina are two to four times higher than the national average, and birth defects in one province have quadrupled since 1996, the year Argentina began to use genetically modified seeds and companion pesticides. In addition, 80 percent of children carry pesticides in their blood in one Argentine neighborhood surrounded by industrial agriculture, according to the AP.
In response to the report, Monsanto Co. is calling for more controls on agrochemicals, though company spokesman Thomas Helscher criticized the report’s indication of causal relationships in “the absence of reliable data.” Monsanto also called the AP report “overbroad in indicting all ‘pesticides’ when we know that glyphosate is safe.”
[center]
[/center]
More:
http://thegoodhuman.com/2013/10/28/monsanto-claims-pesticide-is-safe-despite-huge-rise-in-cancer-and-birth-defects-in-argentina/
