An article in the Detroit Free Press highlights the concern that U.S. scientists have expressed to the USDA, in allowing a product on the market that combines both 2, 4-D and Glyphosate. http://foodexposed.co.za.www100.jnb2.host-h.net/usda-announces-intent-to-approve-dicama-and-glyphosate-combo-despite-public-and-u-s-congress-protest/
A chemical factory, the former Velsicol Chemical site, on the banks of Pine River was a major manufacturer of toxic chemicals in the 1930’s including DDT and polybrominated biphenyl, or PBB, a flame retardant.
Decades later birds are still dropping from the sky. Matt Zwiernik, a Michigan State University environmental toxicologis collected 29 dead birds, including 22 robins, last year from a nine-block residential area near the now demolished plant. Only a small portion of the dead birds they could have collected, Zwiernik said.
The birds’ falling from the sky syndrome has been traced to contaminated worms, grubs and insects, poisoned by the area’s toxic soils.
Detailed forensic testing of the dead birds revealed that brain and liver abnormalities were found in 12 of the 29 birds. Chemical analysis for DDT presence specified that total level of DDT in the collected robins’ brains was 552 parts per million. Thirty parts per million of DDT are known to cause death in many bird species.
“The local residents, they are not surprised; they know what’s going on. They’ve seen it for 20 years,” Zwiernik said. “I think it’s the rest of the world that’s shocked that there’s a situation in this day and age where a larger portion of the city has such contamination that birds are falling from the sky”.
The USDA and the EPA would prefer to hoodwink the consumer public that there is no environmental risk associated with combining two severely toxic substances to produce genetically resistant crops and as a herbicide applicant to crops.
However, the USDA’s own initial environmental assessment specified that using glyphosate merely increased glyphosate resistance, forcing farmers to use an increased amount of toxic herbicides, creating an intolerable environmental risk.
“This nearly exclusive use of glyphosate over the past fifteen years led to the selection of glyphosate resistant (GR) weeds, weeds that could survive an application of the herbicide that once would kill earlier generations. Herbicides do not create resistant weeds, but rather through time, individual plants may survive a treatment. In a field of weeds, individual plants vary in their genetic makeup and in their resistance to a particular herbicide. Plants that survive the herbicide treatment may produce seed resulting in even more plants that are resistant to the herbicide. Plants that are not resistant die and do not leave off-spring. In this way, the herbicide “selects” for resistant plants and against sensitive plants and the resistant plants are disseminated as a result of seed production and dispersal.”http://www.aphis.usda.gov/brs/aphisdocs/24d_deis.pdf
We can expect an unprecedented environmental catastrophe across the United States, with the preliminary approval of new generation toxic plants and chemicals.