Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Many a time have I heard something along the lines of if it wasn’t safe, the government wouldn’t approve it.

There has been exposed a global lobbying and sabotage effort by chemical companies to ensure the continued flow of their products and profits which I wrote about this past fall. But this issue keeps gathering evidence, and it seems to be happening at a quicker pace after decades of being in the dark.

This week I would like to bring your attention to some excellent journalistic work being done here in Canada by journalist Max Fawcett-Atkinson at the independent outlet National Observer. Fawcett-Atkinson has for several months now been slowly detailing just how much of an effect lobbyists for the chemical companies have on the Canadian government, even to the point of collusion with the chemical companies to continue the use of their products, leading to approvals of chemicals that are already banned elsewhere on the planet for good reason.

This past week, Fawcett-Atkinson published a new piece on total lack of rigour in the regulatory process regarding the class of pesticides known as neonecitinoids. For anyone interested in this topic, I highly suggest following Max’s work at the National Observer (and if you want to support this kind of independent journalism, they are having a great deal on subscriptions right now).

As a grower going into seed catalog season and as someone who is about to start ordering a large quantity of seeds for the 2025 season, there are still companies operating in Canada who sell seeds which are themselves coated in neonicotinoids. This is a very common practice of applying pesticides or fungicides to seeds, supposedly a prophylactic strategy to prevent whatever plagues on your crops in advance (but then you have to spray more later anyway!) and again for those interested, buying vegetables in the store, may have been grown with seeds coated in this kind of stuff. With all the information coming out regarding the importance of microbiomes in seeds and their ability to affect epigenetics, it is the opinion of the author of this here blog that putting any chemical on a seed is an overall net negative for plant health and an idea that goes contrary to the fundamental nature of the seed.

It is not uncommon for chemicals that have been banned in certain places in the world to be sold to others, where their effects on the human body are well-known, while the chemical company rakes in billions of dollars in sales and continues to deny any adverse health effects. A farmer in Brazil was recently featured in The Guardian having been poisoined by a weedkiller. “All of the right side of my body was paralysed. I couldn’t feel my foot and my hand. My mouth twisted to the right,” he says.”

There is a long lineage of brave people from Rachel Carson onward who have continuously warned against the widespread and wanton use of these chemicals and their unintended consequential effects on not only the environment, but on human physiology, even in the parts per billion. As we see with our regulatory institutions or lack of regulations, it is business as usual. This is unfortunately the era of history we currently live in. The hypocrisy really comes out when there are comparatively benign biologically-based products that are held up in the regulatory process and that farmers across Canada are currently unable to access.

As in my last post…life happens on the molecular level. We are introducing these synthetic compounds at an absurd rate into our surroundings, which we ultimately end up ingesting. Our bodies have no way of dealing with these alien lab creations, no way to defend against them, and no way to break them down into inoffensive components.

The way forward is not to dig our heels in and make sure business as usual continues. But if that is the case for now, we are hurting our agricultural sector in the long term by not incentivizing and educating our agricultural sector on how to move away from these chemicals.

Agricultural history is full of innovators over millennia. Regulating in favour of reducing innovation and fostering reliance is a strategy sure to leave our agricultural sector playing catch-up.

Graham

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