Glyphosate found in many food products

From 2015 https://www.organicgardener.com.au/blogs/truth-about-glyphosate

A campaign by UK charity the Soil Association is calling on bread manufacturers and retailers to stop using wheat that has been sprayed with glyphosate.

Glyphosate, the world’s most used herbicide, is commonly sprayed on wheat crops just before harvest to kill weeds and make harvesting easier, and government testing has shown the chemical to be present in up to 30 per cent of UK bread, the Soil Association says.

The bread industry says the levels are very low and the association is unfairly targeting bread. However, the Soil Association points out that the European Union’s maximum residue limits were set before April this year, when the United Nations International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

https://weedsmart.org.au/a-first-australia-didnt-want/

Recently, Australian Herbicide Resistance Initiative (AHRI) researchers in Western Australia detected the nation’s first glyphosate resistant wild radish (Raphanus Raphanistrum L.) population.

This discovery is big news in Australia and should serve as another warning – if we rely exclusively on herbicides they will eventually fail.

Glyphosate resistance is a global issue

This issue is not limited to Australia. The USA is now the world leader in glyphosate resistant weeds and Australia may soon follow suit, unless we incorporate more diversity into our weed control programs.

Professor Stephen Powles, AHRI Director, says that the introduction of glyphosate resistant crops in the US was so effective that there was almost universal adoption and then exclusive use of glyphosate for weed control.

“Initially the weed control was outstanding, encouraging even more overreliance on glyphosate. However, the economic savings experienced are now being eroded by the evolution of glyphosate resistant weeds.

“Nearly all the US corn, soybean and cotton crops are glyphosate resistant and many of these fields are starting to show glyphosate resistant weeds. This problem will only double, triple and quadruple in the coming years due to over-reliance on glyphosate,” Professor Powles

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-ben-jerrys-ceo-get-pesticides-out-of-your-ice-cream-go-organic

Ten of 11 samples of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream tested positive for glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s dangerous Roundup herbicide.

The ice cream brand claims its social mission “seeks to meet human needs and eliminate the injustices in our local, national and international communities,” and that its focus is “on children and families, the environment and sustainable agriculture on family farms.”

Ben & Jerry’s (owned by the multinational corporation Unilever) has done an excellent job of convincing consumers that the company cares about progressive issues. But behind the iconic ice cream brand’s greenwashed façade is an unfortunate truth: The company relies on a #dirtydairy industry that produces contaminated food, poisons Vermont’s waterways, abuses animals, exploits workers, bankrupts farmers and contributes to climate change.

Unless Ben & Jerry's goes organic, its practices are responsible for:

•    Running Vermont family farms out of business.

•     Polluting Vermont’s waterways.

•    Abusing animals.

•    Exploiting farmworkers.

•    Contributing to climate change.

•    Putting human health at risk.

In addition to the above problems, pesticides like Roundup, atrazine and metolachlor—all carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and all used to grow the GMO crops fed to dairy cows—have devastating effects on human health. And some of them are in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

It’s time for Ben & Jerry’s to come clean. The only way to do that is to transition to a 100% organic supply chain.

From Friends of the Earth www.foe.org

Monarch butterflies are in trouble. They’ve declined by 90% in the last 20 years. And a key culprit is the massive increase in the use of glyphosate – a.k.a. Monsanto’s Roundup ®.

It’s a simple formula: More Roundup® = less milkweed = fewer monarchs.