Fish in Britain’s rivers are under threat from warmer waters. Cold-water species such as Atlantic salmon and brown trout, are struggling to cope as climate change brings significant increases in temperature.

Today there’s a call for urgent action to Keep Rivers Cool by planting broadleaf native trees alongside river banks, creating dappled shading and stopping water from warming up.

Shade can reduce temperatures in small rivers by on average 2- 3C compared to un-shaded streams; and by more on hot summer days.

Now Keeping Rivers Cool is calling for action. Speaking on behalf of the KRC partnership^{Diane Millis, from the Woodland Trust said: “We’re asking people who value our rivers to survey their local river bank, and look at specific areas which may need shade. Landowners, Rivers Trusts, anglers, farmers and ecological groups can all help. “}

The KRC partnership is asking groups working in catchment areas to take up the challenge using a practical guide for planting along river margins, available on the Woodland Trust website. The manual gives step-by-step instructions for planting, species selection and location, ensuring the right balance of shade for fragile river ecosystems.

The Keeping Rivers Cool partnership can provide landowners and groups working in catchment areas with first hand specialist advice; and the Woodland Trust can also offer generously subsidised trees.  Shade maps showing locations along English rivers which are at risk from direct sun and may need more riparian shade can be accessed here via The Rivers Trusts 

Brown trout start to die when water temperature hits between 22C-25C for more than seven consecutive days. In hot summers, a small number of sites in the New Forest, have recorded maximum water temperatures over 31C – warmer than many heated swimming pools. 

Already Keeping Rivers Cool schemes are underway in Northumberland, Hampshire, the South east and the North West of England.

It’s not only shade that’s important; woody debris, which drops into streams creates cooler patches under the water, which protect fish, invertebrates and plants. 

Trees planted alongside rivers also bring other benefits to the natural environment; they help stabilise banks, reduce and slow the flow of floodwaters downstream, and improve water quality by filtering agricultural run-off from nearby land. Currently only 17 % of English rivers meet good ecological water quality standards.

A report published in the journal Science  in 2015 estimates that about eight million tonnes of plastic ends up in global waters each year: “We calculate that 275 million metric tons (MT) of plastic waste was generated in 192 coastal countries in 2010, with 4.8 to 12.7 million MT entering the ocean.” (www.science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768)

In the UK alone there are five plastic bags for each foot of coastline according to Science magazine. And last week it was announced that plastic bag use in the UK has plummeted since the introduction of a 5p charge last year (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/30/britain-banishes-plastic-bags-as-5p-tax-sees-usage-plummet-by-6).

Since the levy was enacted October, 2015, 640 million plastic bags have been used just across seven major supermarkets in England. Compare this to 2014 where the waste reduction charity Wrap estimates that these very same supermarkets had used 7.64 billion bags over one year and the result show a six fold reduction in plastic bag use (www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/UK-Voluntary-Carrier-Bag-Agreement-Presentation_v4_0.pdf).

However, the self-congratulatory media is hardly impressive to those aware of the ecological damage originated by plastic bags and the need to completely ban plastic bags instead of charging 5p for them. Given the feasible ecological alternatives to plastic, it is troubling that a capitalist measure was endorsed as a “solution” instead of the enforcement of biodegradable bags made from organically-sourced materials. Many other countries in Europe and cities in North American have completely banned plastic bags and while the UK has actively sought to block the use of biodegradable bags.

In 2011, the Italian government introduced a ban on the sale of non-biodegradable plastic bags after studies demonstrated that 73 percent of human waste on the sea bed off the Italian coast was composed of plastic bags. (www.plasticsnews.com/article/20130610/NEWS/130619998/italy-passes-plastic-bag-ban-despite-uk-opposition). Since this time, Italy became the first country to promote the use of compostable plastic bags with its major supermarket chains having sold biodegradable plastic bags.

However, its smaller shops were still using non-biodegradable bags until 2013 simply because the  United Kingdom objected to the Italian ban claiming that it was illegal under EU packaging laws and internal market rules. (www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2333059/Plastic-bags-hypocrisy-How-ministers-use-EU-law-block-ban-Italy–backing-efforts-reduce-bags-here.html and www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10083487/Italy-furious-as-British-block-ban-on-plastic-bags.html)

Outraged by the UK move, Italy pointed out that it has 8,000 km of coastline to protect and that this ban had already improved conditions compared to countries like Ireland which merely imposed a bag tax similar to the recent UK model. 

So, in opposition to the UK, Italy still passed the plastic bag ban and began enforcement of the law in 2013 with the exception of bags with a thickness exceeding 200 microns which could be reused and those bags containing a percentage of recycled plastic of at least 30 percent if intended food use. (www.plasticsnews.com/article/20130610/NEWS/130619998/italy-passes-plastic-bag-ban-despite-uk-opposition and http://ens-newswire.com/2013/04/08/italy-clarifies-plastic-bag-law-enforcement-starts-in-may)

And from 1 July of this year, France followed in Italy’s path outlawing the distribution of plastic bags in French shops given the 122 million plastic bags polluting the the 5,000km French coastline. (www.konbini.com/en/lifestyle/france-bans-plastic-bags)

Now compulsory to replace single-use plastic bags with paper, biodegradable, or fabric, the content of organically-sourced materials will gradually increase from 30% in 2017 to 60% in 2025. The ecological plastic bag industry is a boon for manufacturers of organically-sourced bags. But scratch the surface as to which countries are producing which type of biodegradable bags, and it is immediately apparent what lies behind the UK’s drive to keep Italy in the plastic bag business.

There are two primary types of degradable bags. One is the “biobag” which is typically based on starch-based films made from fibre from corn, soy, or potatoes. These bags decompose in a controlled composting environment in 10-45 days.

Oxo-degradable bags are the second major type of degradable bags, quite distinct from biobags. Oxo-degradable bags are additive-based biodegradable bags rely on additives to the resin to expedite degradation upon exposure to various conditions with the breakdown beginning as a chemical process followed by a biological process. As they are a mixture of plastic and corn or potato starch which partially break down into water and CO2, they are not completely biodegradable as they tend to fragment into microplastic, remaining an environmental hazard and harming the ecosystem and its fauna.   Where biobags made of starch or fibre are compostable, oxo-degradable are not with myriad studies demonstrating the difficulty of recycling the latter.

While oxo-degradable bags do not have the support of green campaigners, they pose a conflict of economic interest for the UK as they are marketed by the British-based company, Symphony. On the other side of this paradigm is Novamont, an Italian company which produces bio-plastics from vegetable matter.  These are the products which environmentalists support but the political designation of both options make each side in this argument appear to be managing economic interests, not necessarily ecological ones. Happy coincidence or not, the Italian model is the more ethical and ecological solution.  One can only question why the UK has not followed Italy and France by outlawing plastic bags while removing the 5p tax.

This Author:

Julian Vigo is an anthropologist, filmmaker and human rights consultant. Her latest book is Earthquake in Haiti: The Pornography of Poverty and the Politics of Development (2015). 

She can be reached at: julian.vigo@gmail.com

I have been asked to share some foodie thoughts with you here, and I am looking forward to it but I am also a little nervous. I have been asked to keep it up beat, and not berate anyone for mis behaving with their food purchasing. I will try to keep the soap box locked away but I know that from time to time I will be exasperated and loose the battle, please bear with me, we have a long way to go together and I am still making the journey myself. It’s a different trip for everyone, for all sorts of reasons and often there is no wrong or right, just ideal, and less so. I will begin at the beginning, like some later-day cross dressing leftie wishy washy version of Maria in The sound of music…..it is after all, a very good place to start.

I am not an academic. I have been a chef for over 20 years. For a long time I didn’t really care about anything to do with my ingredients except freshness and quality. But, I come form a rural background, I have an interest in farming, fishing, foraging and hunting. I became disillusioned by waste and unseasonal cookery whilst working in London restaurants and later as a corporate chef for a Formula One team.

Since then I have changed the way I view food, placing it’s provenance, ethics and welfare at the top of the priority list. I have read, researched, got it wrong and got it right. I have worked with others to promote better awareness of issues within food production, both during my time with River Cottage and after. The way ahead is not always clear, but I have found that often, almost always, when you seek out the best, freshest, most local ingredients you will find you are more or less on the right path to making the food you consume both less damaging to the environment and far more tasty.

Someone asked me the other day, a question that I have asked myself a lot but have yet to come up with a complete answer to (I don’t think I ever will). That question is one we should all be considering and making an effort to answer. The question in question is one I am certain we will hear asked more and more over the coming years, and by a wider and wider section of society as food prices become more real and less subsidised (and as we export less poverty).

The question itself sounds simple enough, but it isn’t really a question, it’s a beginning, an introduction to a whole new world, the world of the ethical foodie and it is a tough place to inhabit. It’s also a very rewarding one. I will come to the point: the question was “How can I most reduce the environmental impact of the food I buy?” It’s a biggie, no doubt about that and there are many different ways to look at it and its myriad facets.

When I say it’s the starting point of a journey, I mean it. And not in the whimsical, dreadfully trite media use of the word ‘journey’. It’s a personal awakening for many and as so often is the case in life, it’s a journey most people don’t even think about taking until it becomes personal. More and more people are finding their way to less environmentally damaging ways of consuming their food via animal welfare than by a concern for the direct and indirect impact of agriculture and its globalisatio. I don’t care. Just so long as we get there. The beginning is the best place to start and that is why I have started here, with THE BIG question.

Once you are on this journey you quickly discover various things. The first is that conflicting arguments, or at least seemingly conflicting arguments, abound. Some of my favourites are the Organic vs Local argument and that leads me to one of my favourite examples. The humble tomato.

Now, if you eat only fresh foods that are in season in your locality then you are one of the lucky few because you really know what a tomato is and how good it tastes. You are unlikely to be sold a shoddy one as you are more likely to be looking for the real thing and will know where to get it. You are also in a brilliant place because you are prepared to go 9 or 10 months of the year without eating any fresh tomatoes. That’s quite easy really with so many low cost preserved tomato products out there and worthwhile too, as you then get to only eat the very best fresh tomatoes and you appreciate it far more because its been nine long dark months since you last had a tomato.

However, what most people do – and this is a criticism – is buy more or less the same things they have always bought but just worry more. They opt for organic tomatoes in December. Well, if you must that’s a good(ish) way to go but frankly they still wont be really very good and they are likely to have been produced a long way from home and to have undone all their good work in being organic by traveling so far.

Ah ha! I hear you say, “So local is best, well, I have seen these tasty looking British tomatoes in the shops in May so that’s better than organic right?” Well, er wrong, sorry. (By his point the conversion is getting pretty awkward and the other person is failing badly to hide the fact that they wish they had never asked).

What you have there is a tomato grown at its extreme northern range, outside of its season in a heated greenhouse. And that’s when we get down to the point, there is no good answer, one will be marginally better than another but it’s beside the point. If you can help it, simply don’t buy tomatoes. Buy something else. Its the same with many, many things….

This is all getting a bit heavy and all I really wanted to do here was to set the scene for a few thoughts I would like to share, some research I would like to do and some ideas I have. I will look into many issues in more depth and I will have more to say, but for now I just wanted to make a start.

I think most of us are still living in much the same way we were 20 years ago (or a worse way even) in terms of food and I am a little fed up of nit picking. Should we all be vegetarian? It would certainly be easier to feed the world if we eat a great deal less meat, but what if we want to eat meat and can produce a little in a low impact way? After all the whole idea of livestock for meat was a way of saving excess food to be consumed later. A pig, for example is essentially a type of ancient refrigerator, keeping meat fresh by keeping it alive.

And so, I hope, the Ethical Foodie stage is set.

I will be sharing a few thoughts on specific issues with you over the coming months. I will do my utmost to be practical and realistic about it. I will deal with the everyday, the low hanging fruit, the easy wins. I will do my best to find the best way for now, and look to changes in the future of our food systems that could herald better things to come.

I intend to start with the average weekly shop. After all, if we can all change a little, that is so much more effective than a few changing a lot.

Who knows, maybe one day there wont be any sodding fresh tomatoes in the shops in December, wont it be nice not to have to worry about which ones to buy?

I will end with a promise for now. I will try to focus not on the “we should” or “shouldn’t” and simply focus on the how and why of making food less damaging and more rewarding.

This Author

Tim Maddams is a passionate and creative foodie, unafraid to face the difficult arguments that surround food. Having grown up in rural Wiltshire Tim spent time cooking for various notable chefs in London before a return to the west country saw him take the helm at the river cottage canteen in Axminster, later taking on a key role within the Fish Fight campaign. Tim now works as a private chef, food writer and presenter, based in beautiful east Devon

@TimGreenSauce

A letter calling on leading bread producers and supermarkets to cease stocking and supplying products which contain traces of the herbicide Glyphosate has been sent out by the Soil Association.

Glyphosate, more commonly known by its trade name Monsanto’s Roundup, was found in March 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to be “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

However, despite these findings, in May 2016 a joint meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, a panel of experts on pesticide residues in food and the environment and the World Health Organisation (WHO) Core Assessment Group on Pesticide Residues (JMPR) concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet, when focused on the occurrence of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.

With this conflicting research, use of the chemical remains controversial, but nonetheless the EU has approved its use after a three-year assessment.

The Soil Association is concerned that glyphosate is used on crops immediately before harvest, and subsequently makes its way into our food. Taking action against glyphosate use, they have launched the ‘Not In Our Bread’ Campaign, with Policy Director Peter Melchett writing to Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Morrisons, ASDA, Co-op, M&S, Warburtons, Hovis, Braces Bakery, Allied Mills, The Federation of Bakers, and NABIM to ask that they refrain from stocking any flour that comes from wheat sprayed with glyphosate.

The letter was sent out on July 18, and a spokesperson for the Soil Association said: “Using glyphosate, and glyphosate-based products, as a pre-harvest treatment is fundamentally wrong, and we are calling for an end to it with our campaign. Wheat harvest will start in the next few weeks, and we are asking bread companies to act now and put a stop to glyphosate as a pre-harvest desiccant in their supply chains. The EU has just advised glyphosate use as a pre-harvest spray on food crops should be restricted – but it’s up to individual member states to decide if they want to implement this or not.”

According to the Soil Association glyphosate use in UK farming has increased by 400% in the last 20 years and it appears regularly in regular testing of British bread, with it showing in 30 per cent of samples tested by the Defra Expert Committee on Pesticide Residues in Food (PRiF).

Glyphosate is one of the world’s most widely used broad-spectrum herbicides and accounts for around 25% of the global herbicide market. Roundup itself can be used as a garden weed-killer.

The EU made its decision on renewing glyphosate’s licence through an authorisation procedure involving three partners: EFSA, the European Commission and Member States. EFSA’s role is to carry out risk assessments of pesticides and to provide the European Commission and Member States with scientific support in the decision-making process. At any time the Commission can review approval of a pesticide and the EFSA continues its review of the Maximum Residue Levels (MRL) for glyphosate.

Responding to the letter from The Soil Association, Gordon Polson, Director of The Federation of Bakers said: “All UK bakers take the safety of the food they produce very seriously.

“Glyphosate has been approved for use by the EU.

“The analysis of glyphosate in bread is carried out by the Pesticides Residues in Food (PRiF) Expert Committee on behalf of the Government. Where glyphosate was found in bread it was always well below the MRL and at a level which PRif considered would not have an effect on human health.

“The use of glyphosate is closely monitored and is only applied when necessary to minimise damage and loss of the crop.

“The Federation of Bakers endeavours to continue working closely with suppliers to ensure any incidence of residues remains low and will follow all developments with regards to the safety of pesticides, including glyphosate, to ensure the upmost safety to consumers.”

Warburtons said as members of the Federation they also support this statement.

Marks & Spencer said they would send a detailed response to the Soil Association directly, adding: “We have always taken a leading stance on the control and use of pesticides with our farmers, growers and food suppliers, working closely with them on good agricultural practice. We have tested our bread and found no residues of glyphosate. When working with our suppliers on our approach to pesticides we will continue to review the EFSA work on pesticides and any new scientific evidence.”

A Waitrose spokesperson said they would be engaging with the Soil Association, adding: “Leckford Estate – the Waitrose Farm – already has strict protocols in place around the use of glyphosates and it’s never used there as a pre-harvest desiccant to dry out crops.”

The US company Monsanto itself faces The Monsanto Tribunal, to be held in The Hague from October 12-14. The tribunal will assess allegations against the company including human and environmental damage caused by its products, including Roundup. Read more in our comment piece “Holding Monsanto to account: the People’s Tribunal“, by Heidi Chow.

Laura Briggs is an Ecologist news reporter

On 12 July, there was an anti-badger culling event, to launch the Badger Mosaic outside the Houses of Parliament. Team Badger, a large coalition of national, local and grass roots animal and wildlife welfare organisations, was urging the government to abandon the roll out of new badger culling areas, indeed to abandon the culling policy altogether.

Following this, a meeting took place inside Parliament. MPs, journalists and members of various animal-related organisations gathered to hear presentations from three ‘badger experts’, Professors John Bourne, Ranald Munro and Rosie Woodroffe.

Professor Bourne was the Chairman of the Independent Scientific Group in charge of the well-known Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT).

Professor Munro chaired the Independent Expert Panel that was given the task of deciding whether the 2013 pilot badger culls in Somerset and Gloucester were safe, humane and effective.

Professor Woodroffe was an assistant on the RBCT and has since done other badger and bovine TB-related studies.

Following their individual presentations, Dominic Dyer, CEO of the Badger Trust, posed a challenging question: Why, he asked, does any scientific debate or study about bovine TB always start with badgers? Why do they assume that badgers are a major part of the problem, when there is almost nil evidence that badgers are the cause of TB in cattle?

Dyer said he had only traced one experimental study in which badgers produced TB in cattle, and that took place in very unnatural and manufactured conditions.

This was not what the panel wanted to hear, and the reaction was defensive. But Dyer is correct. There is always this given in any discussion on bovine TB – that badgers are part of  ‘the problem’, when it appears that none of the governmental scientific community wants to seriously study the cattle-to-cattle problem.

But why this assumption – this bias? Where does it come from?

There is, unfortunately, a section of humanity that seeks thrills through blood-lust; that gets its pleasure, its ‘sport’, from killing animals, and in particular wild animals; and that thinks setting dogs onto a hounded, trapped and cornered animal which fights for its life and gets ripped to bloody pieces, is the best thrill ever.

Bear baiting only stopped in Britain because we had killed all our native bears and it became too expensive to import them. Bull baiting was finally outlawed but badgers continued to be persecuted. Over the centuries the population dropped – almost, in some areas, to extinction. They were gassed, poisoned, snared, trapped, baited and their setts were damaged and destroyed. Many farmers still regard them as dirty vermin that need to be cleared from the land.

Despite that, wildlife champions fought for their protection. But in 1971 something happened that took badgers back to square one. The first badger was found with bovine TB. A woman who had worked for a vet during the early 1970s said that she couldn’t understand why farmers were suddenly coming in with dead badgers and other wild animals, demanding that the vet tested them for bTB.

All the measures that had almost eradicated TB in our herds during the 1950s-60s had just been dropped and over the years incidents of bTB started to rise again. But now farmers had something to blame – the badgers themselves.

So the badger was not only a commonly persecuted animal, it was now a scapegoat for a problem that had arisen among cattle. And despite modern science and various studies, it is still the first thing mentioned in any discussion about bTB.

Consider the RBCT. The final report is titled:

Bovine TB: the Scientific Evidence

A Science Base for a Sustainable Policy to Control TB in Cattle

An Epidemiological Investigation into Bovine Tuberculosis

Then why is the whole exercise known as the Randomised Badger Culling Trials?

Professor Bourne makes the point that a lot of their work concerned cattle rather than badgers; that their conclusion was that ‘culling badgers would make no meaningful contribution to controlling TB in cattle’; and that cattle-based measures were the way to go. He supports ‘a determined focus’ on such measures. However, the only cattle-based measures he mentions are vaccination and risk-based trading.

When asked why scientists and the Government weren’t, for example, pushing for the enforcement of biosecurity measures on farms, his reply was: “It would cost the farmers too much.” But bTB is costing the farmers. Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to install measures that prevent cattle-to-cattle transmission, by far the greatest provable source of bTB in cattle?

It was Professor Woodroffe’s PowerPoint presentation on the perturbation of badgers that highlighted a problem with this whole debate.

The starting point is that culling a significant percentage of badgers will cause the remaining members of any sett/clan to flee their territory and integrate with other badger groups. However, Irish research has shown that the borders of sett territories can be fairly fluid, and that badgers visit other groups in order to mate. How else would they avoid inbreeding?  So ‘perturbation’ of some kind already exists among badgers.

The PowerPoint images Woodroffe uses make the assumption that the badgers which are fleeing their territories are, without exception, infected with TB. The next images go on to assume that the fleeing badger will infect all the badgers in the new group. It is this kind of thinking which allows a study headed by Woodroffe to find that only around 6% of infected cattle catch bTB from badgers, yet the badgers are then judged to be ultimately responsible for around half of cattle infection.

She has now produced another study in which they collared and tracked badgers’ interaction with cattle. Not surprisingly, they found that badgers tend to avoid close contact with cattle (already proven in the Irish study) and cattle also tend to avoid grazing near badger latrines, so there must be some other way that badgers infect cattle. And there is the bias.

Woodroffe is reported as saying “There is strong evidence that badgers transmit bTB to cattle, as well as for cattle to cattle transmission and for livestock to give the disease to badgers.”  Again, badgers are put first as the cause of TB in cattle and where, might one ask is this ‘strong’ evidence?

Most wildlife people would agree with Woodroffe’s conclusion that the infection can lie in the ‘environment’, but talking about possibly infected badger urine and latrines while ignoring the many thousands of acres of pasture covered with cattle slurry every year from herds containing infected cattle, not to mention the possibly infected faeces from cattle grazing in fields, is scientific nonsense.

Whether cattle defecate or slurry is spread, earthworms rise to the surface to feast on the result.  During dry periods when the ground is hard and worms are not close to the surface, digging through cow pats is the badger’s best opportunity to access its favourite food.  The worms may carry the TB bacillus.  Or the badger may ingest some of an infected cow pat.  That is one sure way a badger can become infected.

But what about the cattle?  

They slobber and lick, and breathe heavily over their companions. They graze on grass that has been fertilised by spreading cattle slurry, and a walk over any field with cattle turned out in it will demonstrate how closely they graze to their own droppings.

They eat silage made from grass fertilised with slurry, and in her interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Woodroffe stressed how very long (“…weeks, even months…”) the TB bacillus can last in the environment. One of the ignored findings of the RBCT was that farms that made pasture silage showed a higher incidence of bTB.

Dominic Dyer welcomed the new research “as it adds more weight to previous research that proves cattle and badgers largely avoid each other.”  He outlined his summing-up of the research but said that the message being put out to the media yet again blamed the badgers. And he added: “I think this now largely comes down to the fact that leading scientists and academics in the field of bovine TB research do not want to admit they got it wrong and that badgers cannot easily pass TB to cattle.”

As he suggested at the Westminster meeting, the assumptions about badgers and bTB, like those fabled and non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction that led us to invade Iraq, have become an accepted ‘truth’ on which to build government policies. Defra always claims it is ‘using every tool in the box’ to defeat bovine TB, but badger culling is the only tool that hits the news.

No science properly addresses how badgers could really infect cattle, and science certainly has not produced the hard evidence to support what are at the moment only assumptions. Nor will scientists or Defra seriously address the various ways in which TB in cattle is not only constantly re-infecting the cattle, but is also infecting wildlife. For the sake of our farmers, their cattle and the wildlife, it really is time they did.

And for those of us trying to protect the badger and, incidentally, also wanting to see farms with healthy TB-free cattle, our lobbying must be directed at forcing the government into ending the badger culls and enforcing effective cattle-based measures.

Yes, it may cost the farmers but surely, dealing with bovine TB in their cattle in the current fashion is costing them and the country far more.

This Author:

Lesley Docksey is a freelance writer who writes for The Ecologist and other media on the badger cull and other environmental topics, and on political issues for UK and international websites.

Dominic Dyer’s book Badgered to Death (Canbury Press), tearing apart the case for blaming the badger for spreading TB to cattle, has now been published.

Monsanto may not be a household name in the UK but as one of the world’s leading seed and chemical companies, its activities affect us all.

Its best-selling weedkiller is made from a chemical called glyphosate that the World Health Organisation has found to probably cause cancer. Yet its use is now so widespread that traces are found in one out of every three loaves of bread in the UK.

That’s why earlier this year, in the lead up a EU decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, we mounted public pressure on decision makers through our Monsanto honest marketing campaign.

We sent out thousands of spoof labels to individuals which ended up on supermarket shelves across the UK telling the truth about Monsanto’s products and their corporate power. Our campaign was part of widespread opposition across Europe, which resulted in a rejection of the automatic 15-year relicense in the EU, as expected by Monsanto. Instead, glyphosate was only relicensed for 18 months pending further research.

Unbelievably, selling toxic chemicals to the mass market is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Monsanto’s appalling record. Monsanto is at the forefront of pushing a model of agriculture that takes control away from small-scale farmers as well as causes environmental damage. Monsanto maintains it market dominance by getting farmers hooked onto its expensive weedkillers and seeds that have be purchased every year from Monsanto.

Not only is this costly for cash-strapped subsistence farmers, but it’s unnecessary. Scientific evidence shows that organic, non-chemical methods are effective for growing healthy food as well as better for the environment. Being able to keep, save and exchange a wide range of seeds also helps maintain biodiversity, assists with climate adaptation and supports resilience in farming.

Putting Monsanto in the dock

It’s for these reasons that civil society groups from around the world are holding an international ‘people’s tribunal’ to hold Monsanto to account for its impacts on communities and the environment.

Additional ‘crimes’ being put before this people’s tribunal include Monsanto’s history of producing toxic chemicals for warfare, its well-documented manipulation of scientific evidence, misleading and dishonest marketing campaigns and underhand lobbying efforts to promote its products.

The Tribunal will be held at The Hague and conducted by legal professionals and practicing judges. It will consider whether Monsanto is guilty of the following:

• Violating the right to a healthy environment; the right to food; the right to health and academic freedom. These rights are enshrined in legal texts such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
• Complicity in war crimes for supplying herbicides to the US military for Operation ‘Ranch Hand’ during the Vietnam War (see photo). This will be considered under the Rome Statute, which allows the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction to try alleged perpetrators of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.
• Committing ecocide – this concept, which is gaining currency in international law, is understood as “causing serious damage or destroying the environment so as to significantly and durably alter the global commons or ecosystem services upon which certain human groups rely.” The Tribunal will also examine whether the Rome Statute should include this crime.

Despite the legal frameworks being used in the Tribunal, the outcomes will not be legally binding as there is currently no mechanism to bring criminal charges against a company like Monsanto. Instead, the significance of the Tribunal will be largely symbolic in order to demonstrate how a corporation could be brought to account.

A UN treaty on business and human rights?

The arguments brought against Monsanto will demonstrate the problems of corporate-controlled agriculture, which will apply to other agribusinesses too. The Tribunal’s work will also give victims and their legal counsel the arguments and legal ground for further lawsuits against Monsanto within their national jurisdictions. Experts and witnesses from around the world will come to the Tribunal to give testimony and Monsanto has been invited to give its defence.

Corporate power and the pursuit of profit at the expense of human rights, environmental protection and democratic processes lies at the heart of many of the social and economic injustices that the world faces today. Efforts to constrain this power have been given a fresh impetus through a UN initiative to set up an international, legally binding mechanism to regulate corporations.

A UN treaty on business and human rights could enforce minimum standards for corporations to abide by and failure to do could lead to legal action. The potential for curbing corporate power would be huge but it would also take many years to achieve.

In the meantime, the Monsanto Tribunal will not only expose the consequences of Monsanto’s activities on livelihoods, health, human rights and the environment, but will also demonstrate to the world what could happen if citizens were able to hold corporations accountable.

Heidi Chow works on Global Justice Now‘s agribusiness campaign to challenge the corporate take-over of Africa’s food systems as well as supporting the global movement for food sovereignty. Heidi has previously campaigned on issues such as food speculation, Europe’s bilateral trade deals, the World Trade Organisation and stopping RBS’s unethical investments.

Monsanto Tribunal: The trial will take place in The Hague beginning on 16th August 2016. More information.

Events: Global Justice Now will be bringing one of the witnesses to the UK for a speaker tour in five locations (London, Edinburgh, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds) alongside a photo exhibition showing the impacts of corporate agriculture on communities in October (dates to be confirmed). This will give audiences in the UK an opportunity to hear some of charges against Monsanto, first-hand.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.

On 12 July, there was an anti-badger culling event, to launch the Badger Mosaic outside the Houses of Parliament. Team Badger, a large coalition of national, local and grass roots animal and wildlife welfare organisations, was urging the government to abandon the roll out of new badger culling areas, indeed to abandon the culling policy altogether.

Following this, a meeting took place inside Parliament. MPs, journalists and members of various animal-related organisations gathered to hear presentations from three ‘badger experts’, Professors John Bourne, Ranald Munro and Rosie Woodroffe.

Professor Bourne was the Chairman of the Independent Scientific Group in charge of the well-known Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT).

Professor Munro chaired the Independent Expert Panel that was given the task of deciding whether the 2013 pilot badger culls in Somerset and Gloucester were safe, humane and effective.

Professor Woodroffe was an assistant on the RBCT and has since done other badger and bovine TB-related studies.

Following their individual presentations, Dominic Dyer, CEO of the Badger Trust, posed a challenging question: Why, he asked, does any scientific debate or study about bovine TB always start with badgers? Why do they assume that badgers are a major part of the problem, when there is almost nil evidence that badgers are the cause of TB in cattle?

Dyer said he had only traced one experimental study in which badgers produced TB in cattle, and that took place in very unnatural and manufactured conditions.

This was not what the panel wanted to hear, and the reaction was defensive. But Dyer is correct. There is always this given in any discussion on bovine TB – that badgers are part of  ‘the problem’, when it appears that none of the governmental scientific community wants to seriously study the cattle-to-cattle problem.

But why this assumption – this bias? Where does it come from?

There is, unfortunately, a section of humanity that seeks thrills through blood-lust; that gets its pleasure, its ‘sport’, from killing animals, and in particular wild animals; and that thinks setting dogs onto a hounded, trapped and cornered animal which fights for its life and gets ripped to bloody pieces, is the best thrill ever.

Bear baiting only stopped in Britain because we had killed all our native bears and it became too expensive to import them. Bull baiting was finally outlawed but badgers continued to be persecuted. Over the centuries the population dropped – almost, in some areas, to extinction. They were gassed, poisoned, snared, trapped, baited and their setts were damaged and destroyed. Many farmers still regard them as dirty vermin that need to be cleared from the land.

Despite that, wildlife champions fought for their protection. But in 1971 something happened that took badgers back to square one. The first badger was found with bovine TB. A woman who had worked for a vet during the early 1970s said that she couldn’t understand why farmers were suddenly coming in with dead badgers and other wild animals, demanding that the vet tested them for bTB.

All the measures that had almost eradicated TB in our herds during the 1950s-60s had just been dropped and over the years incidents of bTB started to rise again. But now farmers had something to blame – the badgers themselves.

So the badger was not only a commonly persecuted animal, it was now a scapegoat for a problem that had arisen among cattle. And despite modern science and various studies, it is still the first thing mentioned in any discussion about bTB.

Consider the RBCT. The final report is titled:

Bovine TB: the Scientific Evidence

A Science Base for a Sustainable Policy to Control TB in Cattle

An Epidemiological Investigation into Bovine Tuberculosis

Then why is the whole exercise known as the Randomised Badger Culling Trials?

Professor Bourne makes the point that a lot of their work concerned cattle rather than badgers; that their conclusion was that ‘culling badgers would make no meaningful contribution to controlling TB in cattle’; and that cattle-based measures were the way to go. He supports ‘a determined focus’ on such measures. However, the only cattle-based measures he mentions are vaccination and risk-based trading.

When asked why scientists and the Government weren’t, for example, pushing for the enforcement of biosecurity measures on farms, his reply was: “It would cost the farmers too much.” But bTB is costing the farmers. Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to install measures that prevent cattle-to-cattle transmission, by far the greatest provable source of bTB in cattle?

It was Professor Woodroffe’s PowerPoint presentation on the perturbation of badgers that highlighted a problem with this whole debate.

The starting point is that culling a significant percentage of badgers will cause the remaining members of any sett/clan to flee their territory and integrate with other badger groups. However, Irish research has shown that the borders of sett territories can be fairly fluid, and that badgers visit other groups in order to mate. How else would they avoid inbreeding?  So ‘perturbation’ of some kind already exists among badgers.

The PowerPoint images Woodroffe uses make the assumption that the badgers which are fleeing their territories are, without exception, infected with TB. The next images go on to assume that the fleeing badger will infect all the badgers in the new group. It is this kind of thinking which allows a study headed by Woodroffe to find that only around 6% of infected cattle catch bTB from badgers, yet the badgers are then judged to be ultimately responsible for around half of cattle infection.

She has now produced another study in which they collared and tracked badgers’ interaction with cattle. Not surprisingly, they found that badgers tend to avoid close contact with cattle (already proven in the Irish study) and cattle also tend to avoid grazing near badger latrines, so there must be some other way that badgers infect cattle. And there is the bias.

Woodroffe is reported as saying “There is strong evidence that badgers transmit bTB to cattle, as well as for cattle to cattle transmission and for livestock to give the disease to badgers.”  Again, badgers are put first as the cause of TB in cattle and where, might one ask is this ‘strong’ evidence?

Most wildlife people would agree with Woodroffe’s conclusion that the infection can lie in the ‘environment’, but talking about possibly infected badger urine and latrines while ignoring the many thousands of acres of pasture covered with cattle slurry every year from herds containing infected cattle, not to mention the possibly infected faeces from cattle grazing in fields, is scientific nonsense.

Whether cattle defecate or slurry is spread, earthworms rise to the surface to feast on the result.  During dry periods when the ground is hard and worms are not close to the surface, digging through cow pats is the badger’s best opportunity to access its favourite food.  The worms may carry the TB bacillus.  Or the badger may ingest some of an infected cow pat.  That is one sure way a badger can become infected.

But what about the cattle?  

They slobber and lick, and breathe heavily over their companions. They graze on grass that has been fertilised by spreading cattle slurry, and a walk over any field with cattle turned out in it will demonstrate how closely they graze to their own droppings.

They eat silage made from grass fertilised with slurry, and in her interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Woodroffe stressed how very long (“…weeks, even months…”) the TB bacillus can last in the environment. One of the ignored findings of the RBCT was that farms that made pasture silage showed a higher incidence of bTB.

Dominic Dyer welcomed the new research “as it adds more weight to previous research that proves cattle and badgers largely avoid each other.”  He outlined his summing-up of the research but said that the message being put out to the media yet again blamed the badgers. And he added: “I think this now largely comes down to the fact that leading scientists and academics in the field of bovine TB research do not want to admit they got it wrong and that badgers cannot easily pass TB to cattle.”

As he suggested at the Westminster meeting, the assumptions about badgers and bTB, like those fabled and non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction that led us to invade Iraq, have become an accepted ‘truth’ on which to build government policies. Defra always claims it is ‘using every tool in the box’ to defeat bovine TB, but badger culling is the only tool that hits the news.

No science properly addresses how badgers could really infect cattle, and science certainly has not produced the hard evidence to support what are at the moment only assumptions. Nor will scientists or Defra seriously address the various ways in which TB in cattle is not only constantly re-infecting the cattle, but is also infecting wildlife. For the sake of our farmers, their cattle and the wildlife, it really is time they did.

And for those of us trying to protect the badger and, incidentally, also wanting to see farms with healthy TB-free cattle, our lobbying must be directed at forcing the government into ending the badger culls and enforcing effective cattle-based measures.

Yes, it may cost the farmers but surely, dealing with bovine TB in their cattle in the current fashion is costing them and the country far more.

This Author:

Lesley Docksey is a freelance writer who writes for The Ecologist and other media on the badger cull and other environmental topics, and on political issues for UK and international websites.

Dominic Dyer’s book Badgered to Death (Canbury Press), tearing apart the case for blaming the badger for spreading TB to cattle, has now been published.

Monsanto may not be a household name in the UK but as one of the world’s leading seed and chemical companies, its activities affect us all.

Its best-selling weedkiller is made from a chemical called glyphosate that the World Health Organisation has found to probably cause cancer. Yet its use is now so widespread that traces are found in one out of every three loaves of bread in the UK.

That’s why earlier this year, in the lead up a EU decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, we mounted public pressure on decision makers through our Monsanto honest marketing campaign.

We sent out thousands of spoof labels to individuals which ended up on supermarket shelves across the UK telling the truth about Monsanto’s products and their corporate power. Our campaign was part of widespread opposition across Europe, which resulted in a rejection of the automatic 15-year relicense in the EU, as expected by Monsanto. Instead, glyphosate was only relicensed for 18 months pending further research.

Unbelievably, selling toxic chemicals to the mass market is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Monsanto’s appalling record. Monsanto is at the forefront of pushing a model of agriculture that takes control away from small-scale farmers as well as causes environmental damage. Monsanto maintains it market dominance by getting farmers hooked onto its expensive weedkillers and seeds that have be purchased every year from Monsanto.

Not only is this costly for cash-strapped subsistence farmers, but it’s unnecessary. Scientific evidence shows that organic, non-chemical methods are effective for growing healthy food as well as better for the environment. Being able to keep, save and exchange a wide range of seeds also helps maintain biodiversity, assists with climate adaptation and supports resilience in farming.

Putting Monsanto in the dock

It’s for these reasons that civil society groups from around the world are holding an international ‘people’s tribunal’ to hold Monsanto to account for its impacts on communities and the environment.

Additional ‘crimes’ being put before this people’s tribunal include Monsanto’s history of producing toxic chemicals for warfare, its well-documented manipulation of scientific evidence, misleading and dishonest marketing campaigns and underhand lobbying efforts to promote its products.

The Tribunal will be held at The Hague and conducted by legal professionals and practicing judges. It will consider whether Monsanto is guilty of the following:

• Violating the right to a healthy environment; the right to food; the right to health and academic freedom. These rights are enshrined in legal texts such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
• Complicity in war crimes for supplying herbicides to the US military for Operation ‘Ranch Hand’ during the Vietnam War (see photo). This will be considered under the Rome Statute, which allows the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction to try alleged perpetrators of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.
• Committing ecocide – this concept, which is gaining currency in international law, is understood as “causing serious damage or destroying the environment so as to significantly and durably alter the global commons or ecosystem services upon which certain human groups rely.” The Tribunal will also examine whether the Rome Statute should include this crime.

Despite the legal frameworks being used in the Tribunal, the outcomes will not be legally binding as there is currently no mechanism to bring criminal charges against a company like Monsanto. Instead, the significance of the Tribunal will be largely symbolic in order to demonstrate how a corporation could be brought to account.

A UN treaty on business and human rights?

The arguments brought against Monsanto will demonstrate the problems of corporate-controlled agriculture, which will apply to other agribusinesses too. The Tribunal’s work will also give victims and their legal counsel the arguments and legal ground for further lawsuits against Monsanto within their national jurisdictions. Experts and witnesses from around the world will come to the Tribunal to give testimony and Monsanto has been invited to give its defence.

Corporate power and the pursuit of profit at the expense of human rights, environmental protection and democratic processes lies at the heart of many of the social and economic injustices that the world faces today. Efforts to constrain this power have been given a fresh impetus through a UN initiative to set up an international, legally binding mechanism to regulate corporations.

A UN treaty on business and human rights could enforce minimum standards for corporations to abide by and failure to do could lead to legal action. The potential for curbing corporate power would be huge but it would also take many years to achieve.

In the meantime, the Monsanto Tribunal will not only expose the consequences of Monsanto’s activities on livelihoods, health, human rights and the environment, but will also demonstrate to the world what could happen if citizens were able to hold corporations accountable.

Heidi Chow works on Global Justice Now‘s agribusiness campaign to challenge the corporate take-over of Africa’s food systems as well as supporting the global movement for food sovereignty. Heidi has previously campaigned on issues such as food speculation, Europe’s bilateral trade deals, the World Trade Organisation and stopping RBS’s unethical investments.

Monsanto Tribunal: The trial will take place in The Hague beginning on 16th August 2016. More information.

Events: Global Justice Now will be bringing one of the witnesses to the UK for a speaker tour in five locations (London, Edinburgh, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds) alongside a photo exhibition showing the impacts of corporate agriculture on communities in October (dates to be confirmed). This will give audiences in the UK an opportunity to hear some of charges against Monsanto, first-hand.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.

On 12 July, there was an anti-badger culling event, to launch the Badger Mosaic outside the Houses of Parliament. Team Badger, a large coalition of national, local and grass roots animal and wildlife welfare organisations, was urging the government to abandon the roll out of new badger culling areas, indeed to abandon the culling policy altogether.

Following this, a meeting took place inside Parliament. MPs, journalists and members of various animal-related organisations gathered to hear presentations from three ‘badger experts’, Professors John Bourne, Ranald Munro and Rosie Woodroffe.

Professor Bourne was the Chairman of the Independent Scientific Group in charge of the well-known Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT).

Professor Munro chaired the Independent Expert Panel that was given the task of deciding whether the 2013 pilot badger culls in Somerset and Gloucester were safe, humane and effective.

Professor Woodroffe was an assistant on the RBCT and has since done other badger and bovine TB-related studies.

Following their individual presentations, Dominic Dyer, CEO of the Badger Trust, posed a challenging question: Why, he asked, does any scientific debate or study about bovine TB always start with badgers? Why do they assume that badgers are a major part of the problem, when there is almost nil evidence that badgers are the cause of TB in cattle?

Dyer said he had only traced one experimental study in which badgers produced TB in cattle, and that took place in very unnatural and manufactured conditions.

This was not what the panel wanted to hear, and the reaction was defensive. But Dyer is correct. There is always this given in any discussion on bovine TB – that badgers are part of  ‘the problem’, when it appears that none of the governmental scientific community wants to seriously study the cattle-to-cattle problem.

But why this assumption – this bias? Where does it come from?

There is, unfortunately, a section of humanity that seeks thrills through blood-lust; that gets its pleasure, its ‘sport’, from killing animals, and in particular wild animals; and that thinks setting dogs onto a hounded, trapped and cornered animal which fights for its life and gets ripped to bloody pieces, is the best thrill ever.

Bear baiting only stopped in Britain because we had killed all our native bears and it became too expensive to import them. Bull baiting was finally outlawed but badgers continued to be persecuted. Over the centuries the population dropped – almost, in some areas, to extinction. They were gassed, poisoned, snared, trapped, baited and their setts were damaged and destroyed. Many farmers still regard them as dirty vermin that need to be cleared from the land.

Despite that, wildlife champions fought for their protection. But in 1971 something happened that took badgers back to square one. The first badger was found with bovine TB. A woman who had worked for a vet during the early 1970s said that she couldn’t understand why farmers were suddenly coming in with dead badgers and other wild animals, demanding that the vet tested them for bTB.

All the measures that had almost eradicated TB in our herds during the 1950s-60s had just been dropped and over the years incidents of bTB started to rise again. But now farmers had something to blame – the badgers themselves.

So the badger was not only a commonly persecuted animal, it was now a scapegoat for a problem that had arisen among cattle. And despite modern science and various studies, it is still the first thing mentioned in any discussion about bTB.

Consider the RBCT. The final report is titled:

Bovine TB: the Scientific Evidence

A Science Base for a Sustainable Policy to Control TB in Cattle

An Epidemiological Investigation into Bovine Tuberculosis

Then why is the whole exercise known as the Randomised Badger Culling Trials?

Professor Bourne makes the point that a lot of their work concerned cattle rather than badgers; that their conclusion was that ‘culling badgers would make no meaningful contribution to controlling TB in cattle’; and that cattle-based measures were the way to go. He supports ‘a determined focus’ on such measures. However, the only cattle-based measures he mentions are vaccination and risk-based trading.

When asked why scientists and the Government weren’t, for example, pushing for the enforcement of biosecurity measures on farms, his reply was: “It would cost the farmers too much.” But bTB is costing the farmers. Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to install measures that prevent cattle-to-cattle transmission, by far the greatest provable source of bTB in cattle?

It was Professor Woodroffe’s PowerPoint presentation on the perturbation of badgers that highlighted a problem with this whole debate.

The starting point is that culling a significant percentage of badgers will cause the remaining members of any sett/clan to flee their territory and integrate with other badger groups. However, Irish research has shown that the borders of sett territories can be fairly fluid, and that badgers visit other groups in order to mate. How else would they avoid inbreeding?  So ‘perturbation’ of some kind already exists among badgers.

The PowerPoint images Woodroffe uses make the assumption that the badgers which are fleeing their territories are, without exception, infected with TB. The next images go on to assume that the fleeing badger will infect all the badgers in the new group. It is this kind of thinking which allows a study headed by Woodroffe to find that only around 6% of infected cattle catch bTB from badgers, yet the badgers are then judged to be ultimately responsible for around half of cattle infection.

She has now produced another study in which they collared and tracked badgers’ interaction with cattle. Not surprisingly, they found that badgers tend to avoid close contact with cattle (already proven in the Irish study) and cattle also tend to avoid grazing near badger latrines, so there must be some other way that badgers infect cattle. And there is the bias.

Woodroffe is reported as saying “There is strong evidence that badgers transmit bTB to cattle, as well as for cattle to cattle transmission and for livestock to give the disease to badgers.”  Again, badgers are put first as the cause of TB in cattle and where, might one ask is this ‘strong’ evidence?

Most wildlife people would agree with Woodroffe’s conclusion that the infection can lie in the ‘environment’, but talking about possibly infected badger urine and latrines while ignoring the many thousands of acres of pasture covered with cattle slurry every year from herds containing infected cattle, not to mention the possibly infected faeces from cattle grazing in fields, is scientific nonsense.

Whether cattle defecate or slurry is spread, earthworms rise to the surface to feast on the result.  During dry periods when the ground is hard and worms are not close to the surface, digging through cow pats is the badger’s best opportunity to access its favourite food.  The worms may carry the TB bacillus.  Or the badger may ingest some of an infected cow pat.  That is one sure way a badger can become infected.

But what about the cattle?  

They slobber and lick, and breathe heavily over their companions. They graze on grass that has been fertilised by spreading cattle slurry, and a walk over any field with cattle turned out in it will demonstrate how closely they graze to their own droppings.

They eat silage made from grass fertilised with slurry, and in her interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Woodroffe stressed how very long (“…weeks, even months…”) the TB bacillus can last in the environment. One of the ignored findings of the RBCT was that farms that made pasture silage showed a higher incidence of bTB.

Dominic Dyer welcomed the new research “as it adds more weight to previous research that proves cattle and badgers largely avoid each other.”  He outlined his summing-up of the research but said that the message being put out to the media yet again blamed the badgers. And he added: “I think this now largely comes down to the fact that leading scientists and academics in the field of bovine TB research do not want to admit they got it wrong and that badgers cannot easily pass TB to cattle.”

As he suggested at the Westminster meeting, the assumptions about badgers and bTB, like those fabled and non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction that led us to invade Iraq, have become an accepted ‘truth’ on which to build government policies. Defra always claims it is ‘using every tool in the box’ to defeat bovine TB, but badger culling is the only tool that hits the news.

No science properly addresses how badgers could really infect cattle, and science certainly has not produced the hard evidence to support what are at the moment only assumptions. Nor will scientists or Defra seriously address the various ways in which TB in cattle is not only constantly re-infecting the cattle, but is also infecting wildlife. For the sake of our farmers, their cattle and the wildlife, it really is time they did.

And for those of us trying to protect the badger and, incidentally, also wanting to see farms with healthy TB-free cattle, our lobbying must be directed at forcing the government into ending the badger culls and enforcing effective cattle-based measures.

Yes, it may cost the farmers but surely, dealing with bovine TB in their cattle in the current fashion is costing them and the country far more.

This Author:

Lesley Docksey is a freelance writer who writes for The Ecologist and other media on the badger cull and other environmental topics, and on political issues for UK and international websites.

Dominic Dyer’s book Badgered to Death (Canbury Press), tearing apart the case for blaming the badger for spreading TB to cattle, has now been published.

Monsanto may not be a household name in the UK but as one of the world’s leading seed and chemical companies, its activities affect us all.

Its best-selling weedkiller is made from a chemical called glyphosate that the World Health Organisation has found to probably cause cancer. Yet its use is now so widespread that traces are found in one out of every three loaves of bread in the UK.

That’s why earlier this year, in the lead up a EU decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, we mounted public pressure on decision makers through our Monsanto honest marketing campaign.

We sent out thousands of spoof labels to individuals which ended up on supermarket shelves across the UK telling the truth about Monsanto’s products and their corporate power. Our campaign was part of widespread opposition across Europe, which resulted in a rejection of the automatic 15-year relicense in the EU, as expected by Monsanto. Instead, glyphosate was only relicensed for 18 months pending further research.

Unbelievably, selling toxic chemicals to the mass market is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Monsanto’s appalling record. Monsanto is at the forefront of pushing a model of agriculture that takes control away from small-scale farmers as well as causes environmental damage. Monsanto maintains it market dominance by getting farmers hooked onto its expensive weedkillers and seeds that have be purchased every year from Monsanto.

Not only is this costly for cash-strapped subsistence farmers, but it’s unnecessary. Scientific evidence shows that organic, non-chemical methods are effective for growing healthy food as well as better for the environment. Being able to keep, save and exchange a wide range of seeds also helps maintain biodiversity, assists with climate adaptation and supports resilience in farming.

Putting Monsanto in the dock

It’s for these reasons that civil society groups from around the world are holding an international ‘people’s tribunal’ to hold Monsanto to account for its impacts on communities and the environment.

Additional ‘crimes’ being put before this people’s tribunal include Monsanto’s history of producing toxic chemicals for warfare, its well-documented manipulation of scientific evidence, misleading and dishonest marketing campaigns and underhand lobbying efforts to promote its products.

The Tribunal will be held at The Hague and conducted by legal professionals and practicing judges. It will consider whether Monsanto is guilty of the following:

• Violating the right to a healthy environment; the right to food; the right to health and academic freedom. These rights are enshrined in legal texts such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
• Complicity in war crimes for supplying herbicides to the US military for Operation ‘Ranch Hand’ during the Vietnam War (see photo). This will be considered under the Rome Statute, which allows the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction to try alleged perpetrators of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.
• Committing ecocide – this concept, which is gaining currency in international law, is understood as “causing serious damage or destroying the environment so as to significantly and durably alter the global commons or ecosystem services upon which certain human groups rely.” The Tribunal will also examine whether the Rome Statute should include this crime.

Despite the legal frameworks being used in the Tribunal, the outcomes will not be legally binding as there is currently no mechanism to bring criminal charges against a company like Monsanto. Instead, the significance of the Tribunal will be largely symbolic in order to demonstrate how a corporation could be brought to account.

A UN treaty on business and human rights?

The arguments brought against Monsanto will demonstrate the problems of corporate-controlled agriculture, which will apply to other agribusinesses too. The Tribunal’s work will also give victims and their legal counsel the arguments and legal ground for further lawsuits against Monsanto within their national jurisdictions. Experts and witnesses from around the world will come to the Tribunal to give testimony and Monsanto has been invited to give its defence.

Corporate power and the pursuit of profit at the expense of human rights, environmental protection and democratic processes lies at the heart of many of the social and economic injustices that the world faces today. Efforts to constrain this power have been given a fresh impetus through a UN initiative to set up an international, legally binding mechanism to regulate corporations.

A UN treaty on business and human rights could enforce minimum standards for corporations to abide by and failure to do could lead to legal action. The potential for curbing corporate power would be huge but it would also take many years to achieve.

In the meantime, the Monsanto Tribunal will not only expose the consequences of Monsanto’s activities on livelihoods, health, human rights and the environment, but will also demonstrate to the world what could happen if citizens were able to hold corporations accountable.

Heidi Chow works on Global Justice Now‘s agribusiness campaign to challenge the corporate take-over of Africa’s food systems as well as supporting the global movement for food sovereignty. Heidi has previously campaigned on issues such as food speculation, Europe’s bilateral trade deals, the World Trade Organisation and stopping RBS’s unethical investments.

Monsanto Tribunal: The trial will take place in The Hague beginning on 16th August 2016. More information.

Events: Global Justice Now will be bringing one of the witnesses to the UK for a speaker tour in five locations (London, Edinburgh, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds) alongside a photo exhibition showing the impacts of corporate agriculture on communities in October (dates to be confirmed). This will give audiences in the UK an opportunity to hear some of charges against Monsanto, first-hand.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.