NIKKI ALEXANDER's List: AGENT ORANGE REVISITED...NEW REVELATIONS

• And perhaps even more startling than the drastic increase in herbicide usage is the fact that Dow AgroSciences’ new genetically modified soy is actually specifically designed to resist an especially toxic herbicide known as 2,4-D, a toxic compound used in the well-known Vitetnam War defoliant Agent Orange. Known to have killed or maimed at least 400,000, and causing an additional 500,000 birth defects according to conservative Viatnamese estimates, Agent Orange is one of the deadliest concoctions on record.
  

  • documentary connection bet GMOs and Agent Orange......
• The solution until now has been to simply spray more Roundup, but now Dow AgroSciences has come up with a new ‘solution’. Dow is creating new corn and soybean super-crops that are not only resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup, but will also be able to withstand large amounts of the company’s aforementioned ‘agent orange’ herbicide, 2,4-D. This way, farmers will be able to apply both herbicides to their fields, with the super toxic 2,4-D killing what Roundup cannot.
  
• What Dow is very happy about (while disregarding public health) is that the USDA has shown interest in deregulating both products, with the most recent signaled approval being in early July for the GE soybeans. In fact, the USDA put out a key a document in the regulatory process for GMOs known as the Plant Pest Risk Assessment. Not surprisingly, the USDA’s assessment of Dow’s soy ended with “highly unlikely to pose a plant pest risk.”
  
• So what will be the outcome of all of this? Millions of farmland acreage to be drenched in more herbicides by the millions of pounds. Unfortunately, the claim to safety for the new GE products doesn't mean much, as both herbicides and GMOs are consistently shown to cause some form of damage, whether that damage be to the environment, human and animal health, or the biosphere as a whole.
  
• Dow’s 2,4-D herbicide, like glyphosate found in Monsanto’s Roundup, is already present in drinking water supplies, so individuals everywhere are already consuming the chemical. But now, exposure to this herbicide is more than likely to exponentially increase, only to cause more complications.
  

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• From the USDA's perspective, superweeds—and the toxic cocktails they call forth upon the to land—are simply something we have to live with.
• As for Monsanto, well, as I reported Tuesday, Roundup sales are booming. The company expects to clock $700 million in profit from that product alone this year.

• t will develop crops resistant to other poisons, creating whole new cycles of profit and ecological destruction. The Post-Dispatch reports:

   

   
• Dicamba is a truly nasty poison—it makes the Pesticide Action Network's "bad actor" list, and is classified as a "developmental or reproductive toxin.
• Source delivered an impressive body of evidence that Monsanto's flagship herbicide causes "endocrine disruption, damage to DNA, reproductive and developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, and cancer, as well as birth defects." Those are explosive claims, given that Roundup and other forms of glyphosate are now the most-used herbicide in the world. I'll be digging into the report over the next couple of weeks

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