War In the Forests

A recent article in the Prince George Daily News entitled “Death from the sky in Northern BC” included pictures of a wetland, green and abundant with plants, insects, amphibians, birds and mammals and “the same wetland gripped by a grey death after being sprayed from helicopters with the herbicide glyphosate.”

Those images were from a recent meeting at UNBC entitled “Starving moose, burning forests and contaminated blueberries: a case for broadleaves and a new paradigm in Central British Columbia”. Glyphosate is sprayed on 10,000 to 20,000 hectares of forests yearly resulting in over 1.3 million hectares having been affected since 1980.

By Dr. Jeremy L. Caradonna, Environmental Studies, University of Victoria

and Dr. Thierry Vrain, Head of Biotechnology at Agriculture Canada’s Summerland Research Station (retired)

The total sale of products with ‘Non-GMO’ labeling is now in the billions, and the growth of this market is certainly to be applauded. However, the Non-GMO label inadvertently shields health-conscious consumers from one of the scarier realities of the modern food system—that glyphosate, which is the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, is also being applied to non genetically modified crops.