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.

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.