“You cannot have human health until you first have soil health,” says Rick Clark, a fifth-generation regenerative farmer.
Clark joined public health and public policy experts Monday at The Heritage Foundation to discuss “Feeding America Safely: A Practical Path Forward on Pesticides.”
The discussion focused on the importance of openness and transparency, the negative effects of pesticide residues in food on both human health and the environment, and the issue of liability shields for pesticide manufacturers.
Dr. Jay Richards, The Heritage Foundation’s vice president for social and domestic policy, opened the conversation with Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general and a professor at the University of Florida, by asking about the importance of “an attempt to increase openness and transparency in health and public health for the citizens of Florida.”
Ladapo said the public had long been complacent and inattentive to the lack of openness and transparency of the government’s public health system before the COVID-19 pandemic. He also warned about the potential problems that could arise if COVID-19 vaccines were mandated for everyone.
“I think one of the benefits of the COVID pandemic, despite all the tremendous suffering that it brought and continues to wreak, is that more people became aware of the fact that things we assumed were OK or assumed were free of corruption or well-intended are completely not,” Ladapo said.
Dr. Meryl Nass is a medical researcher and physician who, incidentally, had her license suspended for dissenting from mainstream COVID-19 policy.
She said that glyphosate, a chemical commonly used in pesticides, is legally classified as a pesticide but is actually an herbicide, meaning “it kills plants; it kills bacteria, most plants.”
“There may be other things that glyphosate does. It has been shown, for example, that it is genotoxic. It can actually cause damage to DNA, and it also increases oxidative stress. And either of those mechanisms potentially can lead to cancers and other illnesses in humans,” Nass said.
Major agricultural biotech corporations such as Monsanto have been able to continue producing this chemical and selling it at high profit because they “point the finger at the regulator and say, ‘Look, they agree with us on the science. This stuff doesn’t cause an issue,’” said Pedram Esfandiary, a partner and trial attorney at Wisner Baum.
“We are seeing the effects. We’re not in a position where we’re saying, ‘Well, let’s try this. Everything seems to be fine.’” said Heritage’s Dr. Richards. “We’re in a position where we’re seeing the effects. It has to be something that we’re doing to our environment.”
To see the original story, click here.