Our nation’s Founders, in the US Constitution, elected not to restrict its fundamental guarantees to the present generation.

Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and the other Architects of our democracy, instead, aimed to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

They thus took account of future generations by establishing an enduring guide to those principles most relevant to just resolution of our nation’s fundamental challenges, including those arising centuries after the Constitution’s signing.

Our nation’s manifestly outsized role in causing dangerous climate change presents such a fundamental problem. Though we compose less than 5% of the world population, cumulative fossil fuel emissions from the US exceed 25% of the world total, far outstripping contributions from China, Russia, Germany, or Britain over time.

In light of the long atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide (CO₂), America bears a heavy measure of responsibility for present and future climate damages. There is no climate-related impact to persons or other living things for which our nation is not substantially liable.

Today’s court case in Oregon

A judge in the US District Court in Oregon, is today (9th March 2016) considering whether a constitutional challenge to federal actions that underwrite fossil fuel emissions may proceed.

Brought by youth plaintiffs, and by me on behalf of future generations, the lawsuit alleges that by permitting, authorizing, and subsidizing the exploitation, production, transport, and burning of fossil fuels, our government has caused or substantially contributed to the present emergency in which the very viability of a hospitable climate system is at stake.

We argue that such federal actions infringe upon the fundamental guarantees of the 5th Amendment, including the rights to life, liberty, property, and equal protection of the law.

Industry intervenors and the government urge the court to duck the fundamental issues, alleging they are ‘political’ or encroach on Executive prerogatives now that the President has begun to act, however inadequately.

But our nation would be more riven with turmoil and injustice had our courts failed to rise, at critical junctures, to defend our fundamental constitutional rights against legalized segregation and other forms of officially sanctioned abuse.

Our courts face such a challenge now, with global warming, an issue on which our federal government has to date dithered, and worse, in the face of the gathering storm.

A massive thermal imbalance is arleady evident

Because of the buildup of CO₂ in the atmosphere, stemming mainly from the burning of fossils fuel, Earth is in a state of significant energy imbalance.  That imbalance now averages about 0.6 Watts/m² over the entire planet – equivalent to exploding more than 400,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year.

This imbalance, more energy coming in than going out, means that additional warming of terrestrial and ocean systems remains ‘in the pipeline’, to be felt by future generations. Already, based on modern instrumental and paleoclimate records, Earth’s surface temperature is rising out of the range of the Holocene, the current 10,000 year geological period characterized by a relatively stable climate and coastlines that enabled civilization to develop.

Continued failure to phase out fossil fuel emissions will consign our children and our Posterity to a diminishing existence. Their compromised prospects are described in reviews of national and international scientific bodies – including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the US National Academy of Sciences.

They include deteriorating food security, soil desiccation and groundwater depletion, shrinking snowpack and consequential reduced freshwater supplies, recurrent superstorms, ocean acidification, increasing wildfires, worsened air pollution, a host of assaults on human health, and widespread species extinction.

Perhaps worst of all – as colleagues and I describe in a paper now in press – our planet’s major ice sheets are likely subject to disintegration if the buildup of atmospheric CO₂ is not soon abated.

This would raise sea levels several meters, jeopardizing the functionality of coastal cities. There is no prospect of economical adaptation to this looming catastrophe, if it is not averted.

Exxon knew. And so did the US Government

Our case will show that federal officials have been aware for decades of the major risks even as they approved or underwrote fossil fuel project after project without CO₂ controls.

A 1965 White House report, for instance, warned that continued CO₂ addition to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas “will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable though local or even national efforts, could occur.”

Similarly, a 1991 Congressional Office of Technology Assessment report observed that “the decision to limit emissions cannot await the time when the full impacts are evident. The lag time between emission of the gases and their full impact is on the order of decades to centuries; so too is the time needed to reverse any effects.”

In over 40 years of service at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies – as its Director from 1981-2013 – I provided federal officials climate data and testimony warning of our progressively worsening situation of atmospheric CO₂ build-up and the need for effective, prompt action to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

There is, then, no excuse. Continued delay in implementing serious climate remedies challenges the vision of our Founders, eviscerating fundamental constitutional guarantees. Congress and the President manifestly lack the requisite resolve. Accordingly, the Court should immediately order the government to develop and implement a climate recovery plan.

Effective measures, in my view, should include a rising fee on carbon emissions to ensure that fossil fuel industry costs now imposed on our health and our children’s future are accounted for in energy purchase and investment decisions. Such a plan could pave the way for deep decarbonization of our industrial system, and guide effective international action.

It will take such a court order to extricate our nation from the looming danger that our government’s actions have done so much to bring about. Our children’s lives, their prospects, and the Blessings of Liberty we are obliged to secure for them, hang in the balance.

Dr. James Hansen, formerly Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions. Best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue, Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and was designated by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of the 100 most influential people on Earth.

This article was originally published on the CSAS website.

Our nation’s Founders, in the US Constitution, elected not to restrict its fundamental guarantees to the present generation.

Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and the other Architects of our democracy, instead, aimed to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

They thus took account of future generations by establishing an enduring guide to those principles most relevant to just resolution of our nation’s fundamental challenges, including those arising centuries after the Constitution’s signing.

Our nation’s manifestly outsized role in causing dangerous climate change presents such a fundamental problem. Though we compose less than 5% of the world population, cumulative fossil fuel emissions from the US exceed 25% of the world total, far outstripping contributions from China, Russia, Germany, or Britain over time.

In light of the long atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide (CO₂), America bears a heavy measure of responsibility for present and future climate damages. There is no climate-related impact to persons or other living things for which our nation is not substantially liable.

Today’s court case in Oregon

A judge in the US District Court in Oregon, is today (9th March 2016) considering whether a constitutional challenge to federal actions that underwrite fossil fuel emissions may proceed.

Brought by youth plaintiffs, and by me on behalf of future generations, the lawsuit alleges that by permitting, authorizing, and subsidizing the exploitation, production, transport, and burning of fossil fuels, our government has caused or substantially contributed to the present emergency in which the very viability of a hospitable climate system is at stake.

We argue that such federal actions infringe upon the fundamental guarantees of the 5th Amendment, including the rights to life, liberty, property, and equal protection of the law.

Industry intervenors and the government urge the court to duck the fundamental issues, alleging they are ‘political’ or encroach on Executive prerogatives now that the President has begun to act, however inadequately.

But our nation would be more riven with turmoil and injustice had our courts failed to rise, at critical junctures, to defend our fundamental constitutional rights against legalized segregation and other forms of officially sanctioned abuse.

Our courts face such a challenge now, with global warming, an issue on which our federal government has to date dithered, and worse, in the face of the gathering storm.

A massive thermal imbalance is arleady evident

Because of the buildup of CO₂ in the atmosphere, stemming mainly from the burning of fossils fuel, Earth is in a state of significant energy imbalance.  That imbalance now averages about 0.6 Watts/m² over the entire planet – equivalent to exploding more than 400,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year.

This imbalance, more energy coming in than going out, means that additional warming of terrestrial and ocean systems remains ‘in the pipeline’, to be felt by future generations. Already, based on modern instrumental and paleoclimate records, Earth’s surface temperature is rising out of the range of the Holocene, the current 10,000 year geological period characterized by a relatively stable climate and coastlines that enabled civilization to develop.

Continued failure to phase out fossil fuel emissions will consign our children and our Posterity to a diminishing existence. Their compromised prospects are described in reviews of national and international scientific bodies – including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the US National Academy of Sciences.

They include deteriorating food security, soil desiccation and groundwater depletion, shrinking snowpack and consequential reduced freshwater supplies, recurrent superstorms, ocean acidification, increasing wildfires, worsened air pollution, a host of assaults on human health, and widespread species extinction.

Perhaps worst of all – as colleagues and I describe in a paper now in press – our planet’s major ice sheets are likely subject to disintegration if the buildup of atmospheric CO₂ is not soon abated.

This would raise sea levels several meters, jeopardizing the functionality of coastal cities. There is no prospect of economical adaptation to this looming catastrophe, if it is not averted.

Exxon knew. And so did the US Government

Our case will show that federal officials have been aware for decades of the major risks even as they approved or underwrote fossil fuel project after project without CO₂ controls.

A 1965 White House report, for instance, warned that continued CO₂ addition to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas “will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable though local or even national efforts, could occur.”

Similarly, a 1991 Congressional Office of Technology Assessment report observed that “the decision to limit emissions cannot await the time when the full impacts are evident. The lag time between emission of the gases and their full impact is on the order of decades to centuries; so too is the time needed to reverse any effects.”

In over 40 years of service at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies – as its Director from 1981-2013 – I provided federal officials climate data and testimony warning of our progressively worsening situation of atmospheric CO₂ build-up and the need for effective, prompt action to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

There is, then, no excuse. Continued delay in implementing serious climate remedies challenges the vision of our Founders, eviscerating fundamental constitutional guarantees. Congress and the President manifestly lack the requisite resolve. Accordingly, the Court should immediately order the government to develop and implement a climate recovery plan.

Effective measures, in my view, should include a rising fee on carbon emissions to ensure that fossil fuel industry costs now imposed on our health and our children’s future are accounted for in energy purchase and investment decisions. Such a plan could pave the way for deep decarbonization of our industrial system, and guide effective international action.

It will take such a court order to extricate our nation from the looming danger that our government’s actions have done so much to bring about. Our children’s lives, their prospects, and the Blessings of Liberty we are obliged to secure for them, hang in the balance.

Dr. James Hansen, formerly Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions. Best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue, Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and was designated by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of the 100 most influential people on Earth.

This article was originally published on the CSAS website.

In September, 2015, six young people initiated a lawsuit in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania against Governor Tom Wolf and six state agencies including the departments of Environmental Protection, of Conservation and Natural Resources, and of Agriculture.

The youngsters want to compel state authorities to properly address the causes and effects of climate change, using a little known principle of customary law called the Public Trust Doctrine to underpin their case.

They claim that the defending agencies are failing in their lawful duty by not doing enough to regulate Pennsylvania’s carbon dioxide emissions, and are therefore not safeguarding the atmosphere for the well-being of present and future generations.

This type of legal action is known as Atmospheric Trust Litigation. Groups of frustrated citizens, tired of authorities’ lack of action to deal with climate change are challenging their incompetency in the courts.

There are pending lawsuits, similar to the Pennsylvania case, right across the United States and also in the Philippines, the Ukraine, Uganda and the Netherlands.

Although little used, the Doctrine is applicable in many countries

The Public Trust Doctrine is incorporated in the constitutions of many nations: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda and the United States. It obliges governments to manage natural resources and the commons in the best interests of their citizens and has three main elements:

1. Common natural resources cannot be privately owned, and instead are held within a Public Trust.

2. Governments are merely trustees, and must therefore make sure that the natural capital ‘fund’ of the Earth is respected and maintained in the long term.

3. The beneficiaries of the Trust (both present and future citizens) can hold the trustees accountable for its mismanagement.

As a protector of nature, the Doctrine is emerging as a formidable force for change. In 1970, American law professor Joseph Sax re-invigorated the quiescent principle in his article The Public Trust Doctrine in Natural Resources and later in the book Defending the Environment.

Sax urged people to use the doctrine to pressure authorities to fulfil their duty in protecting and preserving natural resources in the wider public interest, and not for the economic benefit of a minority. He broadened the doctrine’s scope beyond rivers and seashores to include other natural habitats and features: land, air, wildlife, seas, forest, lakes, wilderness and archaeological sites.

More recently, echoing Sax’s rationale, Mary Christina Wood has proposed using the doctrine to define and codify government’s environmental responsibilities. Her book Nature’s Trust is an eloquent call to action, encouraging us to hold government to account for the poor management and squandering of natural resources.

She argues that the judiciary should order the executive and legislative branches of government to protect natural resources for the common good. Ms Wood says that governments are currently “doing next to nothing to address this crisis, which is threatening the future survival and welfare of the youth of this nation and future generations.”

Safeguarding the seas through additional legal protection

But what does this have to do with the sea?

Many of us have been aware of the environmental and ecological crisis in the oceans for some time. We’ve seen television documentaries about overfishing, news reports on plastic pollution, articles in the press and high profile campaigns about the suffering and loss of wildlife.

We’ve felt saddened and despondent about the situation for years. Now people want governments to act. Could the ‘exasperated by inept authorities’ come together and help safeguard the marine environment, in the same way as the young people are doing in Pennsylvania to help safeguard the atmosphere?

The combined area of the territorial waters of nations with the Public Trust Doctrine embedded in their constitutions amounts to almost 28% of all territorial waters – meaning if those nations properly observe their own laws, 38,600,000 square kilometres of the world’s marine environment would be well-managed and safeguarded.

The world’s seas and oceans are already protected by statutory law with the United Nations Law of the Sea (1982). But regulating authorities consistently fail to enforce the elements of the treaty that concern marine conservation at regional, national and international levels. This is double whammy bungling.

By breaching both treaty law and customary law, governments and leaders are enabling the ruin of marine environments, whilst also denying citizens’ rights to all that oceans provide – not least food and employment for millions of people.

As Earth’s largest producer of oxygen (due to photosynthesizing marine phytoplankton) even the system which supplies the air we breathe is weakened. Is this a job for the Public Trust Doctrine? Could the collective power of disgruntled citizens take ancient customary law to make governments comply with contemporary treaty law? I believe the answer is ‘Yes!’

In the words of master landscape photographer Ansel Adams, “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” Horrifying and absurd, but that is what we have to do.

Deb Wright has worked for Marinet since 2009. Her publication entitled Conserving the Great Blue – Overturning the Dominant Ocean Paradigm reviews the serious challenges which our seas and oceans now face and outlines proposals for fundamental changes in marine management to solve this crisis using an ecosystem-based approach.

This article was originally published by The Daily Catch.

The food industry’s fight to stop Vermont from labeling genetically engineered foods is heading to the floor of the US Senate.

And the spotlight on labeling is underscoring the need for our country to have a more honest conversation about GMOs.

Two recent videos illuminate the deep divide between the stories we hear from opponents and proponents of the controversial food technology.

In the first video, the Wall Street Journal‘s Rebecca Blumenstein interviewed Bill Gates about his views on the topic. Gates explained:

“What are called GMOs are done by changing the genes of the plant, and it’s done in a way where there’s a very thorough safety procedure, and it’s pretty incredible because it reduces the amount of pesticide you need, raises productivity (and) can help with malnutrition by getting vitamin fortification.

“And so I think, for Africa, this is going to make a huge difference, particularly as they face climate change … “

Blumenstein asked, “Do you think there’s a certain naiveté that, without that, it could be done anyway? I mean you’ve seen the results on the ground of conventional (breeding).”

Gates responded: “Well, the Africans it’s up in the air, and Kenya just approved a Bt (genetically engineered) maize. The Europeans have decided they don’t want to use it, most of them, which is fine. They’re not facing malnutrition and starvation. If they want to pay a premium for food of a (certain) kind, it’s not a huge deal.

“The US, China, Brazil, are using these things and if you want farmers in Africa to improve nutrition and be competitive on the world market, you know, as long as the right safety things are done, that’s really beneficial. It’s kind of a second round of the green revolution. And so the Africans I think will choose to let their people have enough to eat.”

If Bill Gates is right, that’s great news. That would mean the key to solving world hunger is to lower the barriers for biotechnology companies to get their climate-adaptable, enhanced-nutrient genetically engineered crops to market.

Another perspective

The second video, a short film by the Center for Food Safety, tells a very different story. It describes how the state of Hawaii, which hosts more open-air fields of experimental GMO crops than any other state, has become contaminated with high volumes of toxic pesticides, in large part because Hawaii is the top testing ground for new genetically engineered crops.

The video and report explain that five multinational agrichemical companies run 97% of GE field tests on Hawaii, and the large majority of the crops are engineered to survive the spraying of herbicides. Many of these crops are also routinely treated with fungicides and insecticides.

According to the video: “With so many GE field tests in such a small state, many people in Hawaii live, work and go to school near intensively sprayed test sites. Pesticides often drift so it’s no wonder that children and school and entire communities are getting sick. To make matters even worse, in most cases, these companies are not even required to disclose what they’re spraying.”

If the Center for Food Safety is right, that’s a big problem. But both these stories can’t be right at the same time, can they?

Facts on the ground

Following the thread of the Gates’ narrative, one would expect the agricultural fields of Hawaii – the leading testing grounds for biotechnology crops – to be bustling with low-pesticide, climate-resilient, vitamin-enhanced crops.

Instead, the large majority of GMO crops being grown on Hawaii and in the US are herbicide-tolerant crops designed to withstand spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.

Last year, the World Health Organization’s cancer experts classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. In the 20 years since Monsanto introduced ‘Roundup Ready’ GMO corn and soy, glyphosate use has increased 15-fold and it is now “the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in the history of the world”, reported Douglas Main in Newsweek.

The heavy herbicide use has accelerated weed resistance on millions of acres of farmland. To deal with this problem, Monsanto is rolling out new genetically engineered soybeans designed to survive a combination of weed-killing chemicals, glyphosate and dicamba. EPA has yet to approve the new herbicide mix.

But Dow Chemical just got the green light from a federal judge for its new weed-killer combo of 2,4D and glyphosate, called Enlist Duo, designed for Dow’s Enlist GMO seeds. EPA tossed aside its own safety data to approve Enlist Duo, reported Patricia Callahan in Chicago Tribune. The agency then reversed course and asked the court to vacate its own approval – a request the judge denied without giving reason.

All of this raises questions about the claims Bill Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview about thorough safety procedures and reduced use of pesticides.

Concerns grow in Hawaii, Argentina, Iowa

Instead of bustling with promising new types of resilient adaptive GMO crops, Hawaii is bustling with grassroots efforts to protect communities from pesticide drift, require chemical companies to disclose the pesticides they are using, and restrict GMO crop-growing in areas near schools and nursing homes.

Schools near farms in Kauai have been evacuated due to pesticide drift, and doctors in Hawaii say they are observing increases in birth defects and other illnesses they suspect may be related to pesticides, reported Christopher Pala in the Guardian and The Ecologist.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, prenatal and early-life pesticide exposures are linked to childhood cancers, decreased cognitive function, behavioral problems and adverse birth outcomes, including physical defects.

In Argentina – the world’s third largest producer of GMO crops – doctors are also raising concerns about higher than average rates of cancer and birth defects they suspect are related to pesticides, reported Michael Warren in The Associated Press. Warren’s story from 2013 cited evidence of “uncontrolled pesticide applications”:

“The Associated Press documented dozens of cases around the country where poisons are applied in ways unanticipated by regulatory science or specifically banned by existing law. The spray drifts into schools and homes and settles over water sources; farmworkers mix poisons with no protective gear; villagers store water in pesticide containers that should have been destroyed.”

In response to the story, Monsanto defended glyphosate as safe and called for more controls to stop the misuse of agricultural chemicals. In the follow-up story, Warren reported:

“Argentine doctors interviewed by the AP said their caseloads – not laboratory experiments – show an apparent correlation between the arrival of intensive industrial agriculture and rising rates of cancer and birth defects in rural communities, and they’re calling for broader, longer-term studies to rule out agrochemical exposure as a cause of these and other illnesses.”

Asked for Monsanto’s position on this, company spokesman Thomas Helscher told the AP in an email of 22nd October 2013 that “the absence of reliable data makes it very difficult to establish trends in disease incidence and even more difficult to establish causal relationships. To our knowledge there are no established causal relationships.”

The absence of reliable data is compounded by the fact that most chemicals are assessed for safety on an individual basis, yet exposures typically involve chemical combinations.

‘We are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals’

A recent UCLA study found that California regulators are failing to assess the health risks of pesticide mixtures, even though farm communities – including areas near schools, day care centers and parks – are exposed to multiple pesticides, which can have larger-than-anticipated health impacts.

Exposures can also occur by multiple routes. Reporting on health problems and community concerns in Avia Teria, a rural town in Argentina surrounded by soybean fields, Elizabeth Grossman wrote last month in National Geographic:

Because so many pesticides are used in Argentina’s farm towns, the challenges of understanding what may be causing the health problems are considerable, says Nicolas Loyacono, a University of Buenos Aires environmental health scientist and physician.

In these communities, Loyacono says, “we are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals.”

In Iowa, which grows more genetically engineered corn than any other state in the US, water supplies have been polluted by chemical run off from corn and animal farms, reported Richard Manning in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Scientists from the state’s agricultural department and Iowa State University have penciled out and tested a program of such low-tech solutions. If 40% of the cropland claimed by corn were planted with other crops and permanent pasture, the whole litany of problems caused by industrial agriculture – certainly the nitrate pollution of drinking water – would begin to evaporate.

These experiences in three areas that lead the world in GMO crop production are obviously relevant to the question of whether Africa should embrace GMOs as the solution for future food security. So why are they often missing from the conversation?

Propaganda watch

GMO proponents like to focus on possible future uses of genetic engineering technology, while downplaying, ignoring or denying the risks, as Gates did in his Wall Street Journal interview.

Proponents of the technology often try to marginalize critics who raise concerns as uninformed or anti-science; or, as Gates did, they suggest a false choice that countries must accept GMOs if they want “to let their people have enough to eat.”

This logic leaps over the fact that, after decades of development, most GMO crops are still engineered to withstand herbicides or produce insecticides (or both) while more complicated (and much hyped) traits, such as vitamin-enhancement, have failed to get off the ground.

“Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality”, Tom Philpott reported in Mother Jones.

Meanwhile, the multinational agrichemical companies that also own a large portion of the seed business are profiting from herbicide-resistant seeds and the herbicides they are designed to resist, and many new GMO applications in the pipeline follow this same vein.

These corporations are also spending tens of million dollars a year on public relations efforts to promote industrial-scale, chemical-intensive, GMO agriculture – using similar points Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview, and that Gates-funded groups also echo.

For a recent article in The Ecologist, I analyzed the messaging of the Cornell Alliance for Science, a pro-GMO communications program launched in 2014 with a $5.6 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

My analysis found that the group provides little information about possible risks or downsides of GMOs, and instead amplifies the agrichemical industry’s false talking points that the science is settled on the safety and necessity of GMOs. For example, the group’s FAQ states,

“You are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than be hurt by GE food – and that’s not an exaggeration.”

This contradicts the World Health Organization, which states, “it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all GM foods.” Over 300 scientists, MDs and academics have said there is “no scientific consensus on GMO safety.”

The concerns scientists are raising about the glyphosate-based herbicides that go with GMOs are also obviously relevant to the safety discussion. Yet the Cornell Alliance for Science engages in propaganda on these issues, aligning with associates who downplay concerns about pesticides in Hawaii and attack journalists who report on these concerns.

It’s difficult to understand how these sorts of shenanigans are helping to solve hunger in Africa.

Public science for sale

The Cornell program is the latest example of a larger troubling pattern of universities and academics serving corporate interests over science.

Recent scandals relating to this trend include Coca-Cola funded professors who downplayed the link between diet and obesity, a climate-skeptic professor who described his scientific papers as “deliverables“ for corporate funders, and documents obtained by my group US Right to Know that reveal professors working closely with Monsanto to promote GMOs without revealing their ties to Monsanto.

In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped expose the Flint water crisis, warned that public science is broken.

“I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get funding are just extraordinary. We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill – pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index – and the idea of science as a public good is being lost … “

People don’t want to hear this. But we have to get this fixed, and fixed fast, or else we are going to lose this symbiotic relationship with the public. They will stop supporting us.

As the world’s wealthiest foundation and as major funders of academic research, especially in the realm of agriculture, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is in a position to support science in the public interest.

Gates Foundation strategies, however, often align with corporate interests. In a recent report, the UK advocacy group Global Justice Now argues that Gates Foundation spending, especially on agricultural projects, is exacerbating inequality and entrenching corporate power globally.

“Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that despite its aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media, there is an absence of critical voices”, the group said.

But corporate voices are close at hand. Rob Horsch, who spent decades of his career at Monsanto, heads up the Gates Foundation agricultural research and development team.

The case for an honest conversation

Rather than making the propaganda case for GMOs, Bill Gates and Gates-funded groups could play an important role in elevating the integrity of the GMO debate, and ensuring that new food technologies truly benefit communities.

Technology isn’t inherently good or bad; it all depends on the context. As Gates put it, “as long as the right safety things are done.” But those safety things aren’t being done.

Protecting children from toxic pesticide exposures in Hawaii and Argentina and cleaning up water supplies in Iowa doesn’t have to prevent genetic engineering from moving forward. But those issues certainly highlight the need to take a precautionary approach with GMOs and pesticides.

That would require robust and independent assessments of health and environmental impacts, and protections for farmworkers and communities.

That would require transparency, including labeling GMO foods as well as open access to scientific data, public notification of pesticide spraying, and full disclosure of industry influence over academic and science organizations.

It would require having a more honest conversation about GMOs and pesticides so that all nations can use the full breadth of scientific knowledge as they consider whether or not to adopt agrichemical industry technologies for their food supply.

Stacy Malkan is co-founder and co-director of the consumer group US Right to Know. She is author of the book, ‘Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry‘, (New Society Publishing, 2007) and also co-founded the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. Follow Stacy Malkan on Twitter: @stacymalkan.

The food industry’s fight to stop Vermont from labeling genetically engineered foods is heading to the floor of the US Senate.

And the spotlight on labeling is underscoring the need for our country to have a more honest conversation about GMOs.

Two recent videos illuminate the deep divide between the stories we hear from opponents and proponents of the controversial food technology.

In the first video, the Wall Street Journal‘s Rebecca Blumenstein interviewed Bill Gates about his views on the topic. Gates explained:

“What are called GMOs are done by changing the genes of the plant, and it’s done in a way where there’s a very thorough safety procedure, and it’s pretty incredible because it reduces the amount of pesticide you need, raises productivity (and) can help with malnutrition by getting vitamin fortification.

“And so I think, for Africa, this is going to make a huge difference, particularly as they face climate change … “

Blumenstein asked, “Do you think there’s a certain naiveté that, without that, it could be done anyway? I mean you’ve seen the results on the ground of conventional (breeding).”

Gates responded: “Well, the Africans it’s up in the air, and Kenya just approved a Bt (genetically engineered) maize. The Europeans have decided they don’t want to use it, most of them, which is fine. They’re not facing malnutrition and starvation. If they want to pay a premium for food of a (certain) kind, it’s not a huge deal.

“The US, China, Brazil, are using these things and if you want farmers in Africa to improve nutrition and be competitive on the world market, you know, as long as the right safety things are done, that’s really beneficial. It’s kind of a second round of the green revolution. And so the Africans I think will choose to let their people have enough to eat.”

If Bill Gates is right, that’s great news. That would mean the key to solving world hunger is to lower the barriers for biotechnology companies to get their climate-adaptable, enhanced-nutrient genetically engineered crops to market.

Another perspective

The second video, a short film by the Center for Food Safety, tells a very different story. It describes how the state of Hawaii, which hosts more open-air fields of experimental GMO crops than any other state, has become contaminated with high volumes of toxic pesticides, in large part because Hawaii is the top testing ground for new genetically engineered crops.

The video and report explain that five multinational agrichemical companies run 97% of GE field tests on Hawaii, and the large majority of the crops are engineered to survive the spraying of herbicides. Many of these crops are also routinely treated with fungicides and insecticides.

According to the video: “With so many GE field tests in such a small state, many people in Hawaii live, work and go to school near intensively sprayed test sites. Pesticides often drift so it’s no wonder that children and school and entire communities are getting sick. To make matters even worse, in most cases, these companies are not even required to disclose what they’re spraying.”

If the Center for Food Safety is right, that’s a big problem. But both these stories can’t be right at the same time, can they?

Facts on the ground

Following the thread of the Gates’ narrative, one would expect the agricultural fields of Hawaii – the leading testing grounds for biotechnology crops – to be bustling with low-pesticide, climate-resilient, vitamin-enhanced crops.

Instead, the large majority of GMO crops being grown on Hawaii and in the US are herbicide-tolerant crops designed to withstand spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.

Last year, the World Health Organization’s cancer experts classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. In the 20 years since Monsanto introduced ‘Roundup Ready’ GMO corn and soy, glyphosate use has increased 15-fold and it is now “the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in the history of the world”, reported Douglas Main in Newsweek.

The heavy herbicide use has accelerated weed resistance on millions of acres of farmland. To deal with this problem, Monsanto is rolling out new genetically engineered soybeans designed to survive a combination of weed-killing chemicals, glyphosate and dicamba. EPA has yet to approve the new herbicide mix.

But Dow Chemical just got the green light from a federal judge for its new weed-killer combo of 2,4D and glyphosate, called Enlist Duo, designed for Dow’s Enlist GMO seeds. EPA tossed aside its own safety data to approve Enlist Duo, reported Patricia Callahan in Chicago Tribune. The agency then reversed course and asked the court to vacate its own approval – a request the judge denied without giving reason.

All of this raises questions about the claims Bill Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview about thorough safety procedures and reduced use of pesticides.

Concerns grow in Hawaii, Argentina, Iowa

Instead of bustling with promising new types of resilient adaptive GMO crops, Hawaii is bustling with grassroots efforts to protect communities from pesticide drift, require chemical companies to disclose the pesticides they are using, and restrict GMO crop-growing in areas near schools and nursing homes.

Schools near farms in Kauai have been evacuated due to pesticide drift, and doctors in Hawaii say they are observing increases in birth defects and other illnesses they suspect may be related to pesticides, reported Christopher Pala in the Guardian and The Ecologist.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, prenatal and early-life pesticide exposures are linked to childhood cancers, decreased cognitive function, behavioral problems and adverse birth outcomes, including physical defects.

In Argentina – the world’s third largest producer of GMO crops – doctors are also raising concerns about higher than average rates of cancer and birth defects they suspect are related to pesticides, reported Michael Warren in The Associated Press. Warren’s story from 2013 cited evidence of “uncontrolled pesticide applications”:

“The Associated Press documented dozens of cases around the country where poisons are applied in ways unanticipated by regulatory science or specifically banned by existing law. The spray drifts into schools and homes and settles over water sources; farmworkers mix poisons with no protective gear; villagers store water in pesticide containers that should have been destroyed.”

In response to the story, Monsanto defended glyphosate as safe and called for more controls to stop the misuse of agricultural chemicals. In the follow-up story, Warren reported:

“Argentine doctors interviewed by the AP said their caseloads – not laboratory experiments – show an apparent correlation between the arrival of intensive industrial agriculture and rising rates of cancer and birth defects in rural communities, and they’re calling for broader, longer-term studies to rule out agrochemical exposure as a cause of these and other illnesses.”

Asked for Monsanto’s position on this, company spokesman Thomas Helscher told the AP in an email of 22nd October 2013 that “the absence of reliable data makes it very difficult to establish trends in disease incidence and even more difficult to establish causal relationships. To our knowledge there are no established causal relationships.”

The absence of reliable data is compounded by the fact that most chemicals are assessed for safety on an individual basis, yet exposures typically involve chemical combinations.

‘We are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals’

A recent UCLA study found that California regulators are failing to assess the health risks of pesticide mixtures, even though farm communities – including areas near schools, day care centers and parks – are exposed to multiple pesticides, which can have larger-than-anticipated health impacts.

Exposures can also occur by multiple routes. Reporting on health problems and community concerns in Avia Teria, a rural town in Argentina surrounded by soybean fields, Elizabeth Grossman wrote last month in National Geographic:

Because so many pesticides are used in Argentina’s farm towns, the challenges of understanding what may be causing the health problems are considerable, says Nicolas Loyacono, a University of Buenos Aires environmental health scientist and physician.

In these communities, Loyacono says, “we are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals.”

In Iowa, which grows more genetically engineered corn than any other state in the US, water supplies have been polluted by chemical run off from corn and animal farms, reported Richard Manning in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Scientists from the state’s agricultural department and Iowa State University have penciled out and tested a program of such low-tech solutions. If 40% of the cropland claimed by corn were planted with other crops and permanent pasture, the whole litany of problems caused by industrial agriculture – certainly the nitrate pollution of drinking water – would begin to evaporate.

These experiences in three areas that lead the world in GMO crop production are obviously relevant to the question of whether Africa should embrace GMOs as the solution for future food security. So why are they often missing from the conversation?

Propaganda watch

GMO proponents like to focus on possible future uses of genetic engineering technology, while downplaying, ignoring or denying the risks, as Gates did in his Wall Street Journal interview.

Proponents of the technology often try to marginalize critics who raise concerns as uninformed or anti-science; or, as Gates did, they suggest a false choice that countries must accept GMOs if they want “to let their people have enough to eat.”

This logic leaps over the fact that, after decades of development, most GMO crops are still engineered to withstand herbicides or produce insecticides (or both) while more complicated (and much hyped) traits, such as vitamin-enhancement, have failed to get off the ground.

“Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality”, Tom Philpott reported in Mother Jones.

Meanwhile, the multinational agrichemical companies that also own a large portion of the seed business are profiting from herbicide-resistant seeds and the herbicides they are designed to resist, and many new GMO applications in the pipeline follow this same vein.

These corporations are also spending tens of million dollars a year on public relations efforts to promote industrial-scale, chemical-intensive, GMO agriculture – using similar points Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview, and that Gates-funded groups also echo.

For a recent article in The Ecologist, I analyzed the messaging of the Cornell Alliance for Science, a pro-GMO communications program launched in 2014 with a $5.6 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

My analysis found that the group provides little information about possible risks or downsides of GMOs, and instead amplifies the agrichemical industry’s false talking points that the science is settled on the safety and necessity of GMOs. For example, the group’s FAQ states,

“You are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than be hurt by GE food – and that’s not an exaggeration.”

This contradicts the World Health Organization, which states, “it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all GM foods.” Over 300 scientists, MDs and academics have said there is “no scientific consensus on GMO safety.”

The concerns scientists are raising about the glyphosate-based herbicides that go with GMOs are also obviously relevant to the safety discussion. Yet the Cornell Alliance for Science engages in propaganda on these issues, aligning with associates who downplay concerns about pesticides in Hawaii and attack journalists who report on these concerns.

It’s difficult to understand how these sorts of shenanigans are helping to solve hunger in Africa.

Public science for sale

The Cornell program is the latest example of a larger troubling pattern of universities and academics serving corporate interests over science.

Recent scandals relating to this trend include Coca-Cola funded professors who downplayed the link between diet and obesity, a climate-skeptic professor who described his scientific papers as “deliverables“ for corporate funders, and documents obtained by my group US Right to Know that reveal professors working closely with Monsanto to promote GMOs without revealing their ties to Monsanto.

In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped expose the Flint water crisis, warned that public science is broken.

“I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get funding are just extraordinary. We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill – pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index – and the idea of science as a public good is being lost … “

People don’t want to hear this. But we have to get this fixed, and fixed fast, or else we are going to lose this symbiotic relationship with the public. They will stop supporting us.

As the world’s wealthiest foundation and as major funders of academic research, especially in the realm of agriculture, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is in a position to support science in the public interest.

Gates Foundation strategies, however, often align with corporate interests. In a recent report, the UK advocacy group Global Justice Now argues that Gates Foundation spending, especially on agricultural projects, is exacerbating inequality and entrenching corporate power globally.

“Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that despite its aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media, there is an absence of critical voices”, the group said.

But corporate voices are close at hand. Rob Horsch, who spent decades of his career at Monsanto, heads up the Gates Foundation agricultural research and development team.

The case for an honest conversation

Rather than making the propaganda case for GMOs, Bill Gates and Gates-funded groups could play an important role in elevating the integrity of the GMO debate, and ensuring that new food technologies truly benefit communities.

Technology isn’t inherently good or bad; it all depends on the context. As Gates put it, “as long as the right safety things are done.” But those safety things aren’t being done.

Protecting children from toxic pesticide exposures in Hawaii and Argentina and cleaning up water supplies in Iowa doesn’t have to prevent genetic engineering from moving forward. But those issues certainly highlight the need to take a precautionary approach with GMOs and pesticides.

That would require robust and independent assessments of health and environmental impacts, and protections for farmworkers and communities.

That would require transparency, including labeling GMO foods as well as open access to scientific data, public notification of pesticide spraying, and full disclosure of industry influence over academic and science organizations.

It would require having a more honest conversation about GMOs and pesticides so that all nations can use the full breadth of scientific knowledge as they consider whether or not to adopt agrichemical industry technologies for their food supply.

Stacy Malkan is co-founder and co-director of the consumer group US Right to Know. She is author of the book, ‘Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry‘, (New Society Publishing, 2007) and also co-founded the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. Follow Stacy Malkan on Twitter: @stacymalkan.

The food industry’s fight to stop Vermont from labeling genetically engineered foods is heading to the floor of the US Senate.

And the spotlight on labeling is underscoring the need for our country to have a more honest conversation about GMOs.

Two recent videos illuminate the deep divide between the stories we hear from opponents and proponents of the controversial food technology.

In the first video, the Wall Street Journal‘s Rebecca Blumenstein interviewed Bill Gates about his views on the topic. Gates explained:

“What are called GMOs are done by changing the genes of the plant, and it’s done in a way where there’s a very thorough safety procedure, and it’s pretty incredible because it reduces the amount of pesticide you need, raises productivity (and) can help with malnutrition by getting vitamin fortification.

“And so I think, for Africa, this is going to make a huge difference, particularly as they face climate change … “

Blumenstein asked, “Do you think there’s a certain naiveté that, without that, it could be done anyway? I mean you’ve seen the results on the ground of conventional (breeding).”

Gates responded: “Well, the Africans it’s up in the air, and Kenya just approved a Bt (genetically engineered) maize. The Europeans have decided they don’t want to use it, most of them, which is fine. They’re not facing malnutrition and starvation. If they want to pay a premium for food of a (certain) kind, it’s not a huge deal.

“The US, China, Brazil, are using these things and if you want farmers in Africa to improve nutrition and be competitive on the world market, you know, as long as the right safety things are done, that’s really beneficial. It’s kind of a second round of the green revolution. And so the Africans I think will choose to let their people have enough to eat.”

If Bill Gates is right, that’s great news. That would mean the key to solving world hunger is to lower the barriers for biotechnology companies to get their climate-adaptable, enhanced-nutrient genetically engineered crops to market.

Another perspective

The second video, a short film by the Center for Food Safety, tells a very different story. It describes how the state of Hawaii, which hosts more open-air fields of experimental GMO crops than any other state, has become contaminated with high volumes of toxic pesticides, in large part because Hawaii is the top testing ground for new genetically engineered crops.

The video and report explain that five multinational agrichemical companies run 97% of GE field tests on Hawaii, and the large majority of the crops are engineered to survive the spraying of herbicides. Many of these crops are also routinely treated with fungicides and insecticides.

According to the video: “With so many GE field tests in such a small state, many people in Hawaii live, work and go to school near intensively sprayed test sites. Pesticides often drift so it’s no wonder that children and school and entire communities are getting sick. To make matters even worse, in most cases, these companies are not even required to disclose what they’re spraying.”

If the Center for Food Safety is right, that’s a big problem. But both these stories can’t be right at the same time, can they?

Facts on the ground

Following the thread of the Gates’ narrative, one would expect the agricultural fields of Hawaii – the leading testing grounds for biotechnology crops – to be bustling with low-pesticide, climate-resilient, vitamin-enhanced crops.

Instead, the large majority of GMO crops being grown on Hawaii and in the US are herbicide-tolerant crops designed to withstand spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.

Last year, the World Health Organization’s cancer experts classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. In the 20 years since Monsanto introduced ‘Roundup Ready’ GMO corn and soy, glyphosate use has increased 15-fold and it is now “the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in the history of the world”, reported Douglas Main in Newsweek.

The heavy herbicide use has accelerated weed resistance on millions of acres of farmland. To deal with this problem, Monsanto is rolling out new genetically engineered soybeans designed to survive a combination of weed-killing chemicals, glyphosate and dicamba. EPA has yet to approve the new herbicide mix.

But Dow Chemical just got the green light from a federal judge for its new weed-killer combo of 2,4D and glyphosate, called Enlist Duo, designed for Dow’s Enlist GMO seeds. EPA tossed aside its own safety data to approve Enlist Duo, reported Patricia Callahan in Chicago Tribune. The agency then reversed course and asked the court to vacate its own approval – a request the judge denied without giving reason.

All of this raises questions about the claims Bill Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview about thorough safety procedures and reduced use of pesticides.

Concerns grow in Hawaii, Argentina, Iowa

Instead of bustling with promising new types of resilient adaptive GMO crops, Hawaii is bustling with grassroots efforts to protect communities from pesticide drift, require chemical companies to disclose the pesticides they are using, and restrict GMO crop-growing in areas near schools and nursing homes.

Schools near farms in Kauai have been evacuated due to pesticide drift, and doctors in Hawaii say they are observing increases in birth defects and other illnesses they suspect may be related to pesticides, reported Christopher Pala in the Guardian and The Ecologist.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, prenatal and early-life pesticide exposures are linked to childhood cancers, decreased cognitive function, behavioral problems and adverse birth outcomes, including physical defects.

In Argentina – the world’s third largest producer of GMO crops – doctors are also raising concerns about higher than average rates of cancer and birth defects they suspect are related to pesticides, reported Michael Warren in The Associated Press. Warren’s story from 2013 cited evidence of “uncontrolled pesticide applications”:

“The Associated Press documented dozens of cases around the country where poisons are applied in ways unanticipated by regulatory science or specifically banned by existing law. The spray drifts into schools and homes and settles over water sources; farmworkers mix poisons with no protective gear; villagers store water in pesticide containers that should have been destroyed.”

In response to the story, Monsanto defended glyphosate as safe and called for more controls to stop the misuse of agricultural chemicals. In the follow-up story, Warren reported:

“Argentine doctors interviewed by the AP said their caseloads – not laboratory experiments – show an apparent correlation between the arrival of intensive industrial agriculture and rising rates of cancer and birth defects in rural communities, and they’re calling for broader, longer-term studies to rule out agrochemical exposure as a cause of these and other illnesses.”

Asked for Monsanto’s position on this, company spokesman Thomas Helscher told the AP in an email of 22nd October 2013 that “the absence of reliable data makes it very difficult to establish trends in disease incidence and even more difficult to establish causal relationships. To our knowledge there are no established causal relationships.”

The absence of reliable data is compounded by the fact that most chemicals are assessed for safety on an individual basis, yet exposures typically involve chemical combinations.

‘We are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals’

A recent UCLA study found that California regulators are failing to assess the health risks of pesticide mixtures, even though farm communities – including areas near schools, day care centers and parks – are exposed to multiple pesticides, which can have larger-than-anticipated health impacts.

Exposures can also occur by multiple routes. Reporting on health problems and community concerns in Avia Teria, a rural town in Argentina surrounded by soybean fields, Elizabeth Grossman wrote last month in National Geographic:

Because so many pesticides are used in Argentina’s farm towns, the challenges of understanding what may be causing the health problems are considerable, says Nicolas Loyacono, a University of Buenos Aires environmental health scientist and physician.

In these communities, Loyacono says, “we are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals.”

In Iowa, which grows more genetically engineered corn than any other state in the US, water supplies have been polluted by chemical run off from corn and animal farms, reported Richard Manning in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Scientists from the state’s agricultural department and Iowa State University have penciled out and tested a program of such low-tech solutions. If 40% of the cropland claimed by corn were planted with other crops and permanent pasture, the whole litany of problems caused by industrial agriculture – certainly the nitrate pollution of drinking water – would begin to evaporate.

These experiences in three areas that lead the world in GMO crop production are obviously relevant to the question of whether Africa should embrace GMOs as the solution for future food security. So why are they often missing from the conversation?

Propaganda watch

GMO proponents like to focus on possible future uses of genetic engineering technology, while downplaying, ignoring or denying the risks, as Gates did in his Wall Street Journal interview.

Proponents of the technology often try to marginalize critics who raise concerns as uninformed or anti-science; or, as Gates did, they suggest a false choice that countries must accept GMOs if they want “to let their people have enough to eat.”

This logic leaps over the fact that, after decades of development, most GMO crops are still engineered to withstand herbicides or produce insecticides (or both) while more complicated (and much hyped) traits, such as vitamin-enhancement, have failed to get off the ground.

“Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality”, Tom Philpott reported in Mother Jones.

Meanwhile, the multinational agrichemical companies that also own a large portion of the seed business are profiting from herbicide-resistant seeds and the herbicides they are designed to resist, and many new GMO applications in the pipeline follow this same vein.

These corporations are also spending tens of million dollars a year on public relations efforts to promote industrial-scale, chemical-intensive, GMO agriculture – using similar points Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview, and that Gates-funded groups also echo.

For a recent article in The Ecologist, I analyzed the messaging of the Cornell Alliance for Science, a pro-GMO communications program launched in 2014 with a $5.6 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

My analysis found that the group provides little information about possible risks or downsides of GMOs, and instead amplifies the agrichemical industry’s false talking points that the science is settled on the safety and necessity of GMOs. For example, the group’s FAQ states,

“You are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than be hurt by GE food – and that’s not an exaggeration.”

This contradicts the World Health Organization, which states, “it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all GM foods.” Over 300 scientists, MDs and academics have said there is “no scientific consensus on GMO safety.”

The concerns scientists are raising about the glyphosate-based herbicides that go with GMOs are also obviously relevant to the safety discussion. Yet the Cornell Alliance for Science engages in propaganda on these issues, aligning with associates who downplay concerns about pesticides in Hawaii and attack journalists who report on these concerns.

It’s difficult to understand how these sorts of shenanigans are helping to solve hunger in Africa.

Public science for sale

The Cornell program is the latest example of a larger troubling pattern of universities and academics serving corporate interests over science.

Recent scandals relating to this trend include Coca-Cola funded professors who downplayed the link between diet and obesity, a climate-skeptic professor who described his scientific papers as “deliverables“ for corporate funders, and documents obtained by my group US Right to Know that reveal professors working closely with Monsanto to promote GMOs without revealing their ties to Monsanto.

In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped expose the Flint water crisis, warned that public science is broken.

“I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get funding are just extraordinary. We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill – pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index – and the idea of science as a public good is being lost … “

People don’t want to hear this. But we have to get this fixed, and fixed fast, or else we are going to lose this symbiotic relationship with the public. They will stop supporting us.

As the world’s wealthiest foundation and as major funders of academic research, especially in the realm of agriculture, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is in a position to support science in the public interest.

Gates Foundation strategies, however, often align with corporate interests. In a recent report, the UK advocacy group Global Justice Now argues that Gates Foundation spending, especially on agricultural projects, is exacerbating inequality and entrenching corporate power globally.

“Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that despite its aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media, there is an absence of critical voices”, the group said.

But corporate voices are close at hand. Rob Horsch, who spent decades of his career at Monsanto, heads up the Gates Foundation agricultural research and development team.

The case for an honest conversation

Rather than making the propaganda case for GMOs, Bill Gates and Gates-funded groups could play an important role in elevating the integrity of the GMO debate, and ensuring that new food technologies truly benefit communities.

Technology isn’t inherently good or bad; it all depends on the context. As Gates put it, “as long as the right safety things are done.” But those safety things aren’t being done.

Protecting children from toxic pesticide exposures in Hawaii and Argentina and cleaning up water supplies in Iowa doesn’t have to prevent genetic engineering from moving forward. But those issues certainly highlight the need to take a precautionary approach with GMOs and pesticides.

That would require robust and independent assessments of health and environmental impacts, and protections for farmworkers and communities.

That would require transparency, including labeling GMO foods as well as open access to scientific data, public notification of pesticide spraying, and full disclosure of industry influence over academic and science organizations.

It would require having a more honest conversation about GMOs and pesticides so that all nations can use the full breadth of scientific knowledge as they consider whether or not to adopt agrichemical industry technologies for their food supply.

Stacy Malkan is co-founder and co-director of the consumer group US Right to Know. She is author of the book, ‘Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry‘, (New Society Publishing, 2007) and also co-founded the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. Follow Stacy Malkan on Twitter: @stacymalkan.

The food industry’s fight to stop Vermont from labeling genetically engineered foods is heading to the floor of the US Senate.

And the spotlight on labeling is underscoring the need for our country to have a more honest conversation about GMOs.

Two recent videos illuminate the deep divide between the stories we hear from opponents and proponents of the controversial food technology.

In the first video, the Wall Street Journal‘s Rebecca Blumenstein interviewed Bill Gates about his views on the topic. Gates explained:

“What are called GMOs are done by changing the genes of the plant, and it’s done in a way where there’s a very thorough safety procedure, and it’s pretty incredible because it reduces the amount of pesticide you need, raises productivity (and) can help with malnutrition by getting vitamin fortification.

“And so I think, for Africa, this is going to make a huge difference, particularly as they face climate change … “

Blumenstein asked, “Do you think there’s a certain naiveté that, without that, it could be done anyway? I mean you’ve seen the results on the ground of conventional (breeding).”

Gates responded: “Well, the Africans it’s up in the air, and Kenya just approved a Bt (genetically engineered) maize. The Europeans have decided they don’t want to use it, most of them, which is fine. They’re not facing malnutrition and starvation. If they want to pay a premium for food of a (certain) kind, it’s not a huge deal.

“The US, China, Brazil, are using these things and if you want farmers in Africa to improve nutrition and be competitive on the world market, you know, as long as the right safety things are done, that’s really beneficial. It’s kind of a second round of the green revolution. And so the Africans I think will choose to let their people have enough to eat.”

If Bill Gates is right, that’s great news. That would mean the key to solving world hunger is to lower the barriers for biotechnology companies to get their climate-adaptable, enhanced-nutrient genetically engineered crops to market.

Another perspective

The second video, a short film by the Center for Food Safety, tells a very different story. It describes how the state of Hawaii, which hosts more open-air fields of experimental GMO crops than any other state, has become contaminated with high volumes of toxic pesticides, in large part because Hawaii is the top testing ground for new genetically engineered crops.

The video and report explain that five multinational agrichemical companies run 97% of GE field tests on Hawaii, and the large majority of the crops are engineered to survive the spraying of herbicides. Many of these crops are also routinely treated with fungicides and insecticides.

According to the video: “With so many GE field tests in such a small state, many people in Hawaii live, work and go to school near intensively sprayed test sites. Pesticides often drift so it’s no wonder that children and school and entire communities are getting sick. To make matters even worse, in most cases, these companies are not even required to disclose what they’re spraying.”

If the Center for Food Safety is right, that’s a big problem. But both these stories can’t be right at the same time, can they?

Facts on the ground

Following the thread of the Gates’ narrative, one would expect the agricultural fields of Hawaii – the leading testing grounds for biotechnology crops – to be bustling with low-pesticide, climate-resilient, vitamin-enhanced crops.

Instead, the large majority of GMO crops being grown on Hawaii and in the US are herbicide-tolerant crops designed to withstand spraying of the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.

Last year, the World Health Organization’s cancer experts classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. In the 20 years since Monsanto introduced ‘Roundup Ready’ GMO corn and soy, glyphosate use has increased 15-fold and it is now “the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in the history of the world”, reported Douglas Main in Newsweek.

The heavy herbicide use has accelerated weed resistance on millions of acres of farmland. To deal with this problem, Monsanto is rolling out new genetically engineered soybeans designed to survive a combination of weed-killing chemicals, glyphosate and dicamba. EPA has yet to approve the new herbicide mix.

But Dow Chemical just got the green light from a federal judge for its new weed-killer combo of 2,4D and glyphosate, called Enlist Duo, designed for Dow’s Enlist GMO seeds. EPA tossed aside its own safety data to approve Enlist Duo, reported Patricia Callahan in Chicago Tribune. The agency then reversed course and asked the court to vacate its own approval – a request the judge denied without giving reason.

All of this raises questions about the claims Bill Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview about thorough safety procedures and reduced use of pesticides.

Concerns grow in Hawaii, Argentina, Iowa

Instead of bustling with promising new types of resilient adaptive GMO crops, Hawaii is bustling with grassroots efforts to protect communities from pesticide drift, require chemical companies to disclose the pesticides they are using, and restrict GMO crop-growing in areas near schools and nursing homes.

Schools near farms in Kauai have been evacuated due to pesticide drift, and doctors in Hawaii say they are observing increases in birth defects and other illnesses they suspect may be related to pesticides, reported Christopher Pala in the Guardian and The Ecologist.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, prenatal and early-life pesticide exposures are linked to childhood cancers, decreased cognitive function, behavioral problems and adverse birth outcomes, including physical defects.

In Argentina – the world’s third largest producer of GMO crops – doctors are also raising concerns about higher than average rates of cancer and birth defects they suspect are related to pesticides, reported Michael Warren in The Associated Press. Warren’s story from 2013 cited evidence of “uncontrolled pesticide applications”:

“The Associated Press documented dozens of cases around the country where poisons are applied in ways unanticipated by regulatory science or specifically banned by existing law. The spray drifts into schools and homes and settles over water sources; farmworkers mix poisons with no protective gear; villagers store water in pesticide containers that should have been destroyed.”

In response to the story, Monsanto defended glyphosate as safe and called for more controls to stop the misuse of agricultural chemicals. In the follow-up story, Warren reported:

“Argentine doctors interviewed by the AP said their caseloads – not laboratory experiments – show an apparent correlation between the arrival of intensive industrial agriculture and rising rates of cancer and birth defects in rural communities, and they’re calling for broader, longer-term studies to rule out agrochemical exposure as a cause of these and other illnesses.”

Asked for Monsanto’s position on this, company spokesman Thomas Helscher told the AP in an email of 22nd October 2013 that “the absence of reliable data makes it very difficult to establish trends in disease incidence and even more difficult to establish causal relationships. To our knowledge there are no established causal relationships.”

The absence of reliable data is compounded by the fact that most chemicals are assessed for safety on an individual basis, yet exposures typically involve chemical combinations.

‘We are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals’

A recent UCLA study found that California regulators are failing to assess the health risks of pesticide mixtures, even though farm communities – including areas near schools, day care centers and parks – are exposed to multiple pesticides, which can have larger-than-anticipated health impacts.

Exposures can also occur by multiple routes. Reporting on health problems and community concerns in Avia Teria, a rural town in Argentina surrounded by soybean fields, Elizabeth Grossman wrote last month in National Geographic:

Because so many pesticides are used in Argentina’s farm towns, the challenges of understanding what may be causing the health problems are considerable, says Nicolas Loyacono, a University of Buenos Aires environmental health scientist and physician.

In these communities, Loyacono says, “we are breathing, eating, and drinking agrochemicals.”

In Iowa, which grows more genetically engineered corn than any other state in the US, water supplies have been polluted by chemical run off from corn and animal farms, reported Richard Manning in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Scientists from the state’s agricultural department and Iowa State University have penciled out and tested a program of such low-tech solutions. If 40% of the cropland claimed by corn were planted with other crops and permanent pasture, the whole litany of problems caused by industrial agriculture – certainly the nitrate pollution of drinking water – would begin to evaporate.

These experiences in three areas that lead the world in GMO crop production are obviously relevant to the question of whether Africa should embrace GMOs as the solution for future food security. So why are they often missing from the conversation?

Propaganda watch

GMO proponents like to focus on possible future uses of genetic engineering technology, while downplaying, ignoring or denying the risks, as Gates did in his Wall Street Journal interview.

Proponents of the technology often try to marginalize critics who raise concerns as uninformed or anti-science; or, as Gates did, they suggest a false choice that countries must accept GMOs if they want “to let their people have enough to eat.”

This logic leaps over the fact that, after decades of development, most GMO crops are still engineered to withstand herbicides or produce insecticides (or both) while more complicated (and much hyped) traits, such as vitamin-enhancement, have failed to get off the ground.

“Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality”, Tom Philpott reported in Mother Jones.

Meanwhile, the multinational agrichemical companies that also own a large portion of the seed business are profiting from herbicide-resistant seeds and the herbicides they are designed to resist, and many new GMO applications in the pipeline follow this same vein.

These corporations are also spending tens of million dollars a year on public relations efforts to promote industrial-scale, chemical-intensive, GMO agriculture – using similar points Gates made in his Wall Street Journal interview, and that Gates-funded groups also echo.

For a recent article in The Ecologist, I analyzed the messaging of the Cornell Alliance for Science, a pro-GMO communications program launched in 2014 with a $5.6 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

My analysis found that the group provides little information about possible risks or downsides of GMOs, and instead amplifies the agrichemical industry’s false talking points that the science is settled on the safety and necessity of GMOs. For example, the group’s FAQ states,

“You are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than be hurt by GE food – and that’s not an exaggeration.”

This contradicts the World Health Organization, which states, “it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all GM foods.” Over 300 scientists, MDs and academics have said there is “no scientific consensus on GMO safety.”

The concerns scientists are raising about the glyphosate-based herbicides that go with GMOs are also obviously relevant to the safety discussion. Yet the Cornell Alliance for Science engages in propaganda on these issues, aligning with associates who downplay concerns about pesticides in Hawaii and attack journalists who report on these concerns.

It’s difficult to understand how these sorts of shenanigans are helping to solve hunger in Africa.

Public science for sale

The Cornell program is the latest example of a larger troubling pattern of universities and academics serving corporate interests over science.

Recent scandals relating to this trend include Coca-Cola funded professors who downplayed the link between diet and obesity, a climate-skeptic professor who described his scientific papers as “deliverables“ for corporate funders, and documents obtained by my group US Right to Know that reveal professors working closely with Monsanto to promote GMOs without revealing their ties to Monsanto.

In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped expose the Flint water crisis, warned that public science is broken.

“I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get funding are just extraordinary. We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill – pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index – and the idea of science as a public good is being lost … “

People don’t want to hear this. But we have to get this fixed, and fixed fast, or else we are going to lose this symbiotic relationship with the public. They will stop supporting us.

As the world’s wealthiest foundation and as major funders of academic research, especially in the realm of agriculture, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is in a position to support science in the public interest.

Gates Foundation strategies, however, often align with corporate interests. In a recent report, the UK advocacy group Global Justice Now argues that Gates Foundation spending, especially on agricultural projects, is exacerbating inequality and entrenching corporate power globally.

“Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that despite its aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media, there is an absence of critical voices”, the group said.

But corporate voices are close at hand. Rob Horsch, who spent decades of his career at Monsanto, heads up the Gates Foundation agricultural research and development team.

The case for an honest conversation

Rather than making the propaganda case for GMOs, Bill Gates and Gates-funded groups could play an important role in elevating the integrity of the GMO debate, and ensuring that new food technologies truly benefit communities.

Technology isn’t inherently good or bad; it all depends on the context. As Gates put it, “as long as the right safety things are done.” But those safety things aren’t being done.

Protecting children from toxic pesticide exposures in Hawaii and Argentina and cleaning up water supplies in Iowa doesn’t have to prevent genetic engineering from moving forward. But those issues certainly highlight the need to take a precautionary approach with GMOs and pesticides.

That would require robust and independent assessments of health and environmental impacts, and protections for farmworkers and communities.

That would require transparency, including labeling GMO foods as well as open access to scientific data, public notification of pesticide spraying, and full disclosure of industry influence over academic and science organizations.

It would require having a more honest conversation about GMOs and pesticides so that all nations can use the full breadth of scientific knowledge as they consider whether or not to adopt agrichemical industry technologies for their food supply.

Stacy Malkan is co-founder and co-director of the consumer group US Right to Know. She is author of the book, ‘Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry‘, (New Society Publishing, 2007) and also co-founded the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. Follow Stacy Malkan on Twitter: @stacymalkan.

A battle of corporate profit vs people’s needs has been fought out at the European Union over the past two days as heated negotiations took place about the re-licencing of a chemical that probably causes cancer in humans.

It just so happens that this very same chemical makes millions in profit for the giant chemical and seed company Monsanto.

For now, neither side has emerged victorious as the decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, which was due to be voted on today, has been postponed until May.

The news of postponement would have come as a particular blow to Monsanto who have a lot at stake – glyphosate is the key ingredient in Monsanto’s flagship product Roundup, the world’s most widely sprayed weedkiller and the product responsible for one third of Monsanto’s total earnings. 

It is used everywhere from our gardens, local parks and school playgrounds to our food, clothes and cosmetic products. In the last ten years 6,133 million kilos have been sprayed globally and its use is rapidly increasing.

Glyphosate is now so widespread that traces can be found in one out of every three loaves of bread consumed in the UK, it appears in all of Germany’s top 14 beers and it recently made headlines after being identified in numerous feminine hygiene products across Europe.

Corporate titans against the public interest

For those of us who take seriously the public’s wellbeing, and are less interested in Monsanto’s profit margins, the pending decision about whether or not to relicense glyphosate for another 15 years has a lot resting on it.  

Concerns about the safety of glyphosate were corroborated by the World Health Organisation’s 2015 breakthrough study finding glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic to humans“.

This serious threat to public health was behind the decision of a number of member states including France, Sweden, Netherlands and Italy to announce in recent days that they would be voting against the relicensing of glyphosate. Brussels, Bulgaria, Denmark, Austria, Belgium are also rumoured to be opposing licence renewal. One and a half million people have signed Avaaz’s petition urging the EU not to relicense the herbicide.

This resistance to one of Monsanto’s key chemicals goes beyond Europe with hundreds of bans, restrictions and campaigns across the world. From countries such as Sri Lanka, El Salvador and Colombia either banning or restricting its use, to local communities in New York and California banning it from their public spaces.

Instead of following suit and taking steps to protect all European citizens from this chemical, the EU called for its own European Food Standard Agency (EFSA) to carry out an alternative study. Their conclusions reject the WHO’s findings and claim glyphosate is in fact safe for humans.

Having two studies with such conflicting conclusions is confusing for anyone who simply wants to avoid eating food that has been sprayed with cancer causing chemicals, or just wants to avoid using toxic products in their gardens. But what makes it worse is that this can’t be resolved by a simple process like having independent scientists re-visit the two studies, or even allow people to compare the two and make a decision themselves.

‘Hidden, secretive and dirty’

This is because of EFSA’s insistence that the data used in their study remains strictly secret and unavailable for any external scrutiny. The secretive study has also kept anonymous the names of the researchers. This makes it impossible to know whether any conflicted interests were at stake, which is particularly worrying given that EFSA’s research into product safety are well known to be reliant on industry sponsored studies.

This is all in stark contrast to the WHO study which has made public all its data and named all the scientists involved. It was this scandalous lack of transparency that triggered 96 prominent scientists to write a fierce letter calling for the EFSA findings to be disregarded.

You don’t need to be an expert in scientific research to find it mind boggling that the European Commission wants to make a decision, with such serious implications for people’s health, on the conclusions of a secret study while disregarding the WHO findings.

The sensible thing to do, if of course the main concern is public wellbeing, would be to exercise the precautionary principle and stop the use of glyphosate once and for all.

While it is notoriously difficult to unravel the specific details of the secretive way in which Monsanto works in influencing these decisions, they are well known for exerting power behind closed doors via lobbying groups such as the European Association for Bioindustries (Europabio), the Crop Protection Association and the glyphosate Task Force.

According to lobbying monitor group Corporate Europe Observatory Monsanto’s lobbying activities in Europe are “hidden, secretive and dirty“.

Challenging a global network of corporate power

If approved, the implications go beyond Europe and beyond Roundup. If global leaders can continue to approve Monsanto’s products despite serious public health concerns, and based on secret evidence, then we need to be seriously worried because Monsanto currently positions itself as the global expert on sustainable food production.

It is among a handful of large companies in the agriculture industry who are increasingly pitted as the solution to feeding the world’s growing population. A reputation that Monsanto fiercely defends with slick PR campaigns, and a £90 million annual advertising budget.

Monsanto is hugely influential in global food and agricultural policy, it is regularly given a platform at the UN’s Food and Agriculture body (FAO) and is involved in numerous international agricultural projects and agreements, increasingly including those related to Africa. It is a part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and GROW Africa.

Under the guise of being development projects, these schemes have actually helped Monsanto expand its African markets and have enforced drastic changes to laws and policies in order to ensure more favourable business environments for Monsanto and their friends.  

Like in Europe, Monsanto’s Africa division benefits from new rules passed by regional governmental bodies that help keep Monsanto’s business booming. Such was the case with the little reported but hugely controversial 2015 Arusha Protocols – an agreement that enforces strict new legislation that is essentially about the commercialisation of seeds.

It gives new rights to private seed breeders and companies (like Monsanto) while criminalising traditional farming practices of swapping and saving seeds, which is devastating for small-scale farmers. As expected in such negotiations, Monsanto weren’t named at the table but were very much present through their membership of the African Seed Trade Association who had a heavy presence.  

This pattern of Monsanto lurking behind decision makers as they take important decisions regarding our food and agriculture needs to end if we want a food system that puts the needs of people before profit. Monsanto needs to be stopped, the health of the world literally depends on it.

This is our opportunity to do just that – let’s stop this relicensing and stop Monsanto.

Aisha Dodwell is campaigns and policy officer for Global Justice Now , working across the food, energy and trade campaigns.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.

Berta Cáceres could be seen raising many flags. She was a defender of human rights, of women rights, and the co-founder and coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).

Her spirited fight in defense of the right of peoples to land and natural resources, and against the construction of hydroelectric projects awarded by the Honduran government to national and transnational corporations, crossed borders. In 2015, her work was recognized internationally when she won the Goldman Environmental Prize.

Indigenous and social movement leaders from around the world, artists, politicians and regional and international organizations have expressed their rejection and condemned the crime.

Among them, the recently award-winning actor, Leonardo Di Caprio, and the Nobel Peace Prize, Rigoberta Menchú, have expressed their condemnation and distress at the assassination of the Lenca people’s leader. The Lenca are one of the most impoverished, exploited and excluded indigenous people in Honduras.

But the persecution and threats on Berta’s life were not recent. She was one of the women leaders of the indigenous resistance against the coup in 2009, backed by the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Because of her struggle for the rights of peoples and her strong opposition to the civilian-military power that ousted Manuel Zelaya Rosales, she was targeted with serious threats, including rape and murder.

This is why, from that year on, given the military harassment around her home, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) granted precautionary measures to protect her life and integrity.

Unfortunately, in Honduras, such measures were not taken seriously by the state. Berta is not the first person enjoying such protection to be killed.

As detailed in a 2015 report from Global Witness, Honduras is the most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists.

Gustavo Castro, key witness and campaigner, held in detention

And now we learn that Gustavo Castro – coordinator of Friends of the Earth Mexico / Otros Mundos Chiapas, the Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining (REMA) and the Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4) – is being held against his will by the Honduran authorities.

On 6th March, after giviong witness statements to the police, Castro was intercepted by Honduran authorities before passing through migration in the Tegucigalpa International Airport, on the basis that he had to give further testimony. He was attempting to leave Honduras legally, under the protection of the Mexican Embassy.

Castro, who had been staying in Berta’s home on the night before her murder, was the only witness to the early morning attack. He also appears to have been an intended victim in the attack, during which he received a gunshot wound. He is considered to be in severe danger so long as he remains in Honduras.

Civil society groups around the world are now demanding his immediate release and an end to the criminalization of environmental activists and land defenders in Honduras.

“The killing of Berta Caceres was a political assassination”, said Jeff Conant, senior international forests campaigner with Friends of the Earth US. “Now the Honduran state appears be manipulating  the investigation in order to continue criminalizing and maligning her and the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras.

“The US State Department should take immediate action to withdraw security aid from Honduras, and should pressure the Honduran authorities to ensure the security and prompt release of our colleague Gustavo Castro, of Friends of the Earth, Mexico.”

Erich Pica, president of FoE US, added: “We continue to fear for the life of our colleague Gustavo Castro, and ask that US authorities do everything in their power to ensure his safety, to ensure that the parties responsible for killing Berta Cáceres are brought to justice, and to end the criminalization of environmental activists in Honduras.”

State murder or state collusion in murder?

Berta’s case not only reflects the lack of political will to protect human rights defenders, but is also the result of the impunity in which the murders of dozens of indigenous people, peasants and social movement leaders remain unresolved in Honduras.

It would be frivolous to hastily attribute Berta’s crime to the government. The government, however, must show a public commitment to carry out serious investigations leading to find out those responsible for the crime, and prosecute them.

And according to COPINH, there are also reasons to fear that the Honduran state may be implicated in Berta’s murder:

• early in the morning on 3rd March, the day of Berta Cáceres’ murder, witnesses saw hit men from DESA in a blue Ford 150 vehicle near La Esperanza, and heard them speaking ill of Berta Cáceres.
• on 25th February, during the forced eviction of COPINH Lenca families in Jarcia, Guinse, Intibuca, by the police and military, a member of the National Direction of Criminal Investigation (DGIC in Spanish) police unit harassed Berta Cáceres and told her that they would not be responsible if anything happened to her.
• on 20th February, during COPINH’s protest against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, the vice-mayor of San Francisco de Ojuera publicly asked that Berta Cáceres be killed.
• on 16th February, armed men followed Berta Cáceres and other COPINH members near Rio Blanco.

Since Berta enjoyed precautionary measures, however, it is clear that even if the state investigates and convicts the murderers, it will not be able to elude its international responsibility as a state, for not having effectively guaranteed the right to life of the indigenous leader.

Although they managed to extinguish her life, Berta’s light will keep on shining. Although they killed the human being, her example as a courageous woman, her example of struggle and consistency, will live on.

Petition: ‘Release Gustavo Castro, at risk in the community of La Esperanza, Honduras‘.

Verenice Bengtsson is a Swedish lawyer specialising in human rights, and a columnist for Asuntos del Sur.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Berta Cáceres, Honduran eco-defender, murdered‘.

This article was previously published by Asuntos del Sur. It was republished by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. This version includes additional reporting by The Ecologist. Original version also available en Español.

The Flint water crisis and the sad story of Freddie Gray’s lead poisoning have catalyzed a broader discussion about lead poisoning in the United States. What are the risks? Who is most vulnerable? Who is responsible?

Lead is an enormous and pervasive threat to public health. Almost any level of exposure causes permanent cognitive problems in children. And there are many sources.

Ten million water service lines nationwide contain lead. Some 37 million US homes contain lead-based paint somewhere in the building. Soils in many areas are contaminated with lead that was added to gasoline and emitted from car exhaust.

But the risk is not evenly distributed. Some Americans face a ‘triple whammy’ of increased risk based on poverty, race, and place. Evidence dating back to the 1970s has shown that lead poisoning rates are higher in inner cities and low-income and minority neighborhoods than in white, affluent, and suburban neighborhoods.

And although children’s blood lead levels have fallen significantly in recent decades, these disparities still exist. My dissertation research shows that government-supported suburban development and racial segregation after World War II contributed to lead poisoning by concentrating minority families in substandard urban housing.

An urban epidemic

Humans have used lead for thousands of years in products ranging from ceramic glazes to cosmetics. Exposure increased in the industrial era. Lead piping and paint came into wide use in the 19th century, followed by lead batteries and leaded gasoline in the 1920s.

Health experts knew that lead was toxic, but childhood lead poisoning did not become a sustained public health concern until the second half of the twentieth century, due in part to obstruction from the lead industry.

After World War II, child lead poisoning cases spiked in many cities, especially among low-income African-Americans. In Baltimore child lead poisoning cases rose from an average of 12 per year between 1936 and 1945 to 77 cases in 1951 and 133 cases in 1958.

Lead poisoning cases also increased in Cincinnati and other cities in the 1950s and ‘60’s. Experts identified a key source: peeling and flaking lead-based paint. The victims were mainly from poor, minority families in deteriorating inner-city neighborhoods.

One obvious solution would have been to find better housing – and indeed, during this period millions of Americans were moving from cities to suburbs. But discriminatory government policies effectively excluded minority families from buying homes in suburban neighborhoods, leaving them trapped in cities, where a vicious cycle of deterioration and disinvestment exacerbated lead hazards.

Racially-segregated developments and mortgages

Suburbanization and home ownership in America exploded after World War II. Many urban scholars identify federal housing and highway policies as the most important drivers of 20th-century suburbanization.

One key agency, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), was created during the Great Depression to make homeownership more feasible by offering federal insurance for home mortgages. FHA loans favored new suburban housing, especially from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Agency guidelines, such as those for minimum lot size, excluded many inner-city homes, such as Baltimore’s classic row houses. Other FHA guidelines and suggestions for neighborhoods – such as minimum setbacks and street widths – favored new suburban developments.

FHA appraisal standards warned against “older properties” and “adverse influences” on home value, including smoke, odor and traffic congestion. Until the late 1940s the agency considered “inharmonious” racial groups a housing finance risk.

After the Supreme Court declared racial covenants legally unenforceable in 1948, the FHA moderated its policies. But for the next decade it made little effort to curb housing discrimination, with some of its major administrators continuing to defend racial segregation.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of FHA loans went to single-family, new homes in the suburbs. According to the US Commission on Civil Rights, less than two percent of FHA loans issued from 1947 through 1959 went to African-Americans.

Federal transportation policy also spurred and shaped post-war suburbanization. In 1956 Congress enacted the Interstate Highway Act, which was designed to ease traffic congestion. The act authorized billions of dollars to complete about 42,000 miles of highways, half of which were to go through cities.

The proliferation of interstates and automobiles made downtowns increasingly obsolete and furthered movement to the suburbs. According to one estimate, each highway built through a city reduced the city’s population by 18%.

And suburban automobile commuting contributed directly to urban lead poisoning. Inner city residents absorbed the bulk of lead gas pollution from commuters who converged on cities daily. Lead gas exhaust contaminated soil in city neighborhoods.

White flight and urban blight

As black populations in cities increased, African Americans began moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods. ‘White flight’ followed: panicked white homeowners moved away. Often the cycle was inflamed by ‘blockbusters‘ – people who used the threat of integration to get white homeowners to sell for low prices.

Real estate speculators who acquired these cheap properties sold some of them (at inflated prices) to minority buyers. Many used highly exploitative contracts. Black homeowners had to make high interest payments, leaving them with little money for maintenance.

Conditions were even worse for black renters. Slumlords often neglected maintenance and tax payments on their properties. Even when city health codes targeted lead paint, as in New York and Baltimore, landlords milking properties for profit often failed to comply.

Disinvestment in inner city housing became a self-perpetuating cycle. A 1975 study for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded that landlords who had low-income renters and few financing options scrimped on maintenance, furthering housing decline. Eventually landlords abandoned their rentals, which led to further neighborhood disinvestment.

Cleaning up urban lead – a 17 to 211-fold return on investment

Cleaning up lead contamination is expensive. One recent study estimates that it would cost US$1.2 billion to $11 billion to eliminate lead risks in one million high-risk homes (old buildings occupied by low-income families with children). But it also calculated that every dollar spent on lead paint clean-up would generate from $17 to $221 in benefits from earnings, tax revenue and reduced health and education costs.

Government agencies and nonprofits have poured money into lead research, screening, and hazard reduction programs, but more is needed. The largest source, HUD’s Lead Hazards Control Program, has received $110 million annually from 2014 to 2016, only enough to fund lead abatement in about 8,800 homes yearly.

Moreover, in the past few years, the Congress has sought to cut HUD’s budget even further, by a half in 2013 and by a third just in the past year. Fortunately, those proposals were not successful, but even without them, lead hazard reduction funding is woefully inadequate.

Can we find other sources? Since government housing policies have contributed to lead poisoning, perhaps we should tap them to fund cleanup. For example, the home mortgage interest tax deduction subsidizes new homes in the suburbs, and is particularly beneficial to more affluent homeowners.

Reforming the mortgage interest deduction, which costs the federal government $70 billion annually, could generate funding to remediate older rental houses. Some of this money could also be used to expand programs run by federal agencies, local governments and nonprofits that fund multiple improvements in low-income housing, including mold abatement and energy efficiency upgrades.

Time to right a deep historic wrong

Another strategy would be to create a mechanism modeled on Property Assessed Clean Energy programs for lead paint removal. PACE programs allows state and local governments or other authorities to fund the upfront costs of energy efficiency upgrades, then attach the costs to the property. Owners pay the costs back over time through assessments which are added to their property tax bills.

The United States has heavily subsidized suburban home ownership for more than 80 years. This policy helped many Americans, but hurt others, including families still trapped in homes where they are at risk of lead poisoning.

Today, as many observers hail a US urban renaissance, the persistence of lead poisoning highlights a continuing need for more investment in housing and health in our inner cities.

Leif Fredrickson is a Ph.D. student and Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.