EPA Petition: Glyphosate
Please sign and share this important petition to the EPA by September 14:
To the EPA Pesticide Division:
Moms Across America and our supporters: retail brands, pediatricians, scientists, physicians, health coaches, teachers, farmers, lawyers, and consumers, are requesting that you review the 67 studies that were not included in your review of glyphosate as a carcinogen that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed and revise your decision regarding the license of glyphosate. We request you also review the new studies connecting glyphosate to many reproductive and endocrine-disrupting issues. Hundreds of independent studies have shown that glyphosate is harmful in many ways, not only as a carcinogen. Glyphosate also has endocrine disrupting properties at very low levels and can cause neurological, nervous system, reproductive, sperm, liver, kidney, and organ damage as well as miscarriages.
There is no safe level of glyphosate in our food or livestock feed supply, and you are the only agency that has the authority to change the current reality: harmful levels of glyphosate contaminate school lunches, fast food, baby food, and gluten-free food. In the past, glyphosate has been detected in thousands of food samples and other substances, including oats, chickpeas, beans, wheat, soy, corn, orange juice, wine, beer, eggs, bread, snacks, cereals, honey, and even breastmilk, hospital gauze, feminine sanitary products, childhood vaccines, and sperm.
America has a physical, mental, and reproductive health crisis, and glyphosate is a significant contributing factor to all of these severely critical issues. Your agency must take action now to protect the health and future of our country.
We are asking you to:
- Review all of the studies the IARC reviewed and all new independent studies available today on glyphosate and all health effects.
- Revoke the license of glyphosate.
- Until the license is revoked, immediately disallow glyphosate from being used as a drying agent or pre-harvest weed killer on all agricultural crops. The EU has recently banned pre-harvest spray with glyphosate to minimize dietary exposure. We are asking you to do the same.
Thank you for taking action to protect the American public's health, not the corporations' profits.
We hope you appreciate that when you reflect on your legacy one day, it will be one of courage, commitment, and integrity.
Thank you.
Tell the EPA To Listen to the American People, not Chemical Corporations!
After Moms Across America filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the EPA for all communications between Bayer/Monsanto: memos, calls, emails, and meetings to the EPA regarding glyphosate between 2020 to the current time, we received a call back saying that the request was too large. They had "a few hundred thousand communications, and it would take them until 2024 to review" (redact) and return those documents to me. Might we please reduce the request?
A few HUNDRED THOUSAND communications just regarding glyphosate (one chemical!), just from Bayer (one company!) over two years? What could they possibly say about a chemical that is clearly unsafe? Apparently, a lot. If we assume only 200,000 communications, that means Bayer communicated with our US EPA 275 times a day!
The overwhelming number of communications shows us, the American people, the gravity of the influence the chemical corporations have over our regulatory agencies.
My response after legal counsel?
I told her that the volume of communication was exactly my concern - I believed the American public deserved to know just how much communication was and what was said. However, in consideration of timing, I will agree to narrow the request to communications, just to emails to the Pesticide Re-Registration Review Board and the Head of the EPA. And, I said, how about I make it easier for you - just send us the documents without redaction, don’t bother with that!
She balked but stated that they "have to review and redact CBI"- (Confidential Business Information) to protect the sensitive business information of the company. Then they have to go to the company and make sure they agree. I got heated. Do you know what is sensitive? My son’s health, after being exposed to glyphosate in his food. Do you know what I did not agree to? My son having the levels of glyphosate in his urine of a farmer - even though he has never touched a bottle of Roundup! Do you know what he has to live with every day while the chemical companies make profits off of poison? His whole body now has Ehler’s Danlos syndrome and Electromagnetic Sensitivity. He will likely not be able to go to college here in the USA because his immune system has been impacted by toxins like glyphosate, and he is now sensitive to wireless radiation! His whole life has been altered and affected and you are telling me you need to protect the company? When are you going to protect the people?
She explained that she is only doing her job blah blah blah...but I impressed upon her that she is there - on the INSIDE and she has a responsibility to speak up. She can speak to the Pesticide Review Board, to the Head of the EPA - she can say WE CAN DO BETTER. She has that opportunity. We are on the outside.
We are not communicating with the EPA 275 times a day.
But we can do better too. Will you speak up today and tell the EPA they need to listen to the American people and DO THEIR JOB - protect us and revoke the license of glyphosate?
Please speak up with us today - for all the children, bees, wildlife, marine life, pets, and humans on the planet that deserve a safe environment.
Thank you
Dear Michael Regan and EPA Pesticide Re-Registration Review Board,
I am appalled to learn through a Moms Across America FOIA that the chemical company Bayer has communicated a few hundred thousand times to the EPA about glyphosate over the past two years. This overwhelming amount of communication is undue influence, potentially even harassment, and is in excess. This amount of influence from private industry is pressuring the EPA to take Bayer’s desires, their profits more heavily into consideration than the desires and safety of the American people.
I am writing to request that you listen to the American people.
We have been asking you for years to stop allowing the spraying of glyphosate before harvest for any reason, as a weed killer or drying agent, specifically on food and feed crops.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of individual Americans and supporters of Moms Across America, Organic Consumers Association, Beyond Pesticides, Friends of the Earth, Center for Food Safety, Pesticide Action Network, Children’s Health Defense, and many more have asked you to revoke the license of glyphosate completely.
Glyphosate has been shown to be a carcinogen, and endocrine disruptor, causing liver and kidney disease at very low levels of exposure, to androgenize baby girls and damage the sperm of males.
Your failure to listen to us and protect the American people is killing us, our pets, soil quality, wildlife, and marine life.
You can right this wrong.
You can revoke the license of glyphosate.
Now.
Signed,
Your bosses,
The American Tax Payer
Glyphosate, Monsanto/Bayer, and the Countdown to Human Extinction
It has been over two years since Moms Across America’s last meeting with the EPA Pesticide Review Board regarding glyphosate in 2019 and seven years since our testing showed glyphosate in our tap water, children's urine, breastmilk, food, wine, beer, and orange juice samples. Although moving at a painstakingly slow, red tape snail’s pace, we were glad to see the EPA's review on glyphosate and endangered species a year ago. Common sense and science suggest that finding that 93% of endangered species and 97% of their critical habitats are harmed by exposure to glyphosate herbicides is reason enough to revoke glyphosate’s license immediately, but no.
We demand action now. Click HERE to tell the EPA to do their job!
Read moreFive Reasons to Revoke the License of Glyphosate Now
If you have heard it from us once, you have heard it a thousand times. But it bears repeating because the EPA has still not done its job and banned glyphosate.
The science to support that ban keeps on coming.
In the past few months, more and more data is accumulating, showing that glyphosate herbicides, otherwise known as Roundup or Ranger Pro and 700+ other brands, must be removed from the shelves, banned from aerial spraying, and restricted from agriculture use immediately. Here are five more reasons why.
Read moreRoundup is Not Just a Carcinogenic Herbicide. It's a Bee Killing Pesticide Too.
A new study released April 6, 2021, in the Journal of Applied Ecology reveals that Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world, and the focus of recent lawsuits regarding non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, is not just a weedkiller but a bee killer as well.
This study is monumental because the decline of bee populations has been drastically declining since Roundup was introduced to agriculture, landscaping, and backyard gardening in the late 1970s. In the US, the number of honey-bee colonies dropped from 6 million in 1947 to just 2.5 million in 2014. In 2015, Monsanto made nearly $4.76 billion in sales and $1.9 billion in gross profits from herbicide products, mostly Roundup.
Read moreTake Action! Our Best Chance to Ban Glyphosate
The EPA has admitted that glyphosate herbicides (also known as Roundup or Ranger Pro by Monsanto/Bayer) harm 93% of endangered species. This is an excellent reason for the EPA to deny the license of glyphosate. However, they claim that only landscaping use (20 million pounds of glyphosate a year) is the only method of use that is causing harm, NOT agriculture use ( 280 million pounds). This is outrageous! We have a huge problem with this- do you?
Did you know that how our democracy is designed such that when you, the citizen, have a grievance with a government policy, it is your elected official’s job to address it with the government? They work for you. You elect them to be your megaphone to the lawmakers, your liaison to the federal regulatory agencies.
Do you have a grievance with the most widely used herbicide in the world, glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup, being sprayed on our food?
Do you have a grievance with this known carcinogen, endocrine disruptor, and neurotoxin that causes liver disease and multiple generations of reproductive harm being found in our breastmilk, baby food, tap water, wine, beer, orange juice, and thousands of foods?
Do you have a grievance with this herbicide damaging gut bacteria, weakening our immune systems, leaving us more vulnerable to severe COVID symptoms and prolonged shutdowns?
Read moreEPIC EPA FAIL
The EPA's finding that glyphosate exposure does not cause any health risks is a blatant act of reckless endangerment to public health. Americans should be outraged, not just because our EPA is not protecting us, but because our government is allowing the collapse of democracy by pandering to corporate greed.
Summary
- The EPA assessed risks to humans from exposure to glyphosate from all registered uses and all routes of exposure and did not identify any risks of concern, including cancer.
- The EPA did not review any cumulative health impacts of glyphosate.
- The EPA did reduce the list of crop types with allowable levels of glyphosate residues from 160 to 15, however the crops removed likely did not utilize glyphosate, and the list is not complete.
- The EPA still has not responded to the EWG et al petition about discontinuing the use of glyphosate on oats and wheat as a desiccant or made a determination on residue levels.
- The EPA will do further assessments on the impact of glyphosate on bees and endangered species due to the Center for Biological Diversity mitigation.
- The EPA is limiting the amount of glyphosate used per acre, by category of use, in order to prevent further weed resistance.
- The EPA is requiring additional labeling for aquatic use which warns of fish kill from the lack of oxygen from dead water vegetation (note: not from glyphosate).
- A final decision will be made after a decision about the desiccation of wheat and oats, endangered species review, and an assessment of endocrine disruption. Decisions could be in 2020 for some and August 2021 for others.
Mom Receives Glyphosate Task Force Studies on Glyphosate Submitted to the EPA
Six months ago today, June 1, a few days after we met with the EPA, I requested per my right as a US citizen, by way of the Freedom of Information Act, to receive copies of all of the documents submitted to the EPA regarding glyphosate. Never in my life did I imagine I would be asking for potentially thousands of pages of scientific studies about a toxic chemical. I loved science when I was in sixth grade, and even imagined being one someday. However I did not think I was good at math, all the rote learning without understanding was more condescending than the looks my math teacher gave me, so I dismissed the possibility of being a scientist and headed down a more artistic path as a designer.
Read moreProposed Collateral Damage of Glyphosate
Moms Across America Meeting with the EPA to Recall Roundup and STOP Toxic Chemical Cocktails on our Food
Presented to the EPA May 27th, 2014 on Rachel Carson's Birthday, author of "Silent Spring"
When a chemical does not do what the manufacturer's says it will do, for instance, it is discovered it kills birds, the EPA will, instead of recalling it, assess whether the "benefit outweighs the cost." And they "often finds that it does." Meaning, there is an acceptable level of harm and death. We wonder what is the acceptable level of harm and death of our children in correlation with the use of Glyphosate?
How much Collateral Damage must we Mother's be expected to withstand?
Do the corporations profits outweigh the cost?
Collateral Damage: Statistics of the Proposed Impact of Pesticides on Our Food by Moms Across America
Studies show glyphosate destroys gut bacteria. Illnesses today associated with the gut bacteria being damaged:
- 150 children die each year from peanut/food allergies =3000.Food allergies have increased 400% =6.7 million since GMOs and pesticides have been allowed on our food. Intolerances=24.7 million. Study from the Journal of Pediatrics shows colitis has tripled in just 10 years.
- Hospital records show a 79% increase in diagnosis of children with Crohn’s disease in the past 10 years since the majority of pesticides have been introduced.- Stephanie Seneff MIT scientist
- Damaged gut means inability to produce tryptophan which equals and inability to produce serotonin, which regulates insulin. Diabetes =25.8 million people in 2011 alone.
- It also means without seratonin and melatonin, insomnia, depression, mental illness and acts of violence ensue. America now has a school shooting every other day, hurting hundreds and traumatizing millions.
Studies show glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor .
5.The United States is #1 for infant death on day one in the industrialized world. 50% more children die in America on their fist day of life than all of the industrialized world combined. – Seneff. This correlates with Pig Farmer's finding of miscarriages, birth defects and infant loss in their GMO/Glyphosate fed sows who had a 30% loss.
6.The USA has a 30% failure to conceive rate in young couples, the highest in recorded history. – The Sierra Club
= 2 million babies lost each year
Studies show a gut brain connection. Studies also show that glyphosate breaks down the blood brain barrier, allowing toxins into the brain. This may very well account for why doctors did not see a “flood of children with autism,” despite mercury being in vaccines since 1929, until the late 1990’s when GMOs and glyphosate were allowed into our food.
7. Twenty years from now, 1 out of 2 of our children will be diagnosed with Autism if we continue at the current rate.- Seneff = 27.1 million ( cost today =avg 60K p/family/yr = 1.6 trillion dollars)
Regarding children with autism: using US Population stats:
73.7 million children 2012 = 837,500 children with autism ( 1 out of 88 2 years ago)
74. 3 millon USA children 2014 =1,092,647 children with autism ( 1 out of 68 today)
=increase of 255,146, in two years, = 127,573 children per year = 349 children diagnosed per day = 43 children per doctor’s office hour =every 1.2 minutes a child is diagnosed with Autism in America (during doctor's business hours.)
349 children per day = $20 million,940 thousand in additional cost to the American families PER DAY. This equals a 764.3 million per year in cost to American families financially.
This does not include the devastation on the fabric of our society, the cost to public schools ( 50% of federal budget is spent on Special Ed), the impact on divorce due to stress, and the increased loss of IQ and talent which could be contributing to the success of America.
8.Since GMOs/Glyphosate was put in our food our collective IQ has dropped 7 points resulting in, instead of 6 million mentally damaged, we now have 9 million. And million fewer gifted and talented.
We would say the matter is urgent. These are the cost for autism alone.
Each day is critical for the future of America.
9.Alzheimer’s increase- 5 million currently, every 67 seconds someone dies of Alzheimer’s
Studies show glyphosate is a chelator, which deprives any living thing it comes in contact with, of its vital nutrients, vitamins and mineral. Vitamin deficiency is a consistent occurrence in all patients with cancer:
10.Cancer is the number one killer of children in America today.- The President's Council on Cancer = 8750.
More children die every year of cancer than died in 9/11.
11. One out of two males (69.5 million) and one out of three females (47.8 million) are expected to get cancer in America today. -Robyn O’Brien. =117.8 million adults with cancer
12. One out of two of our children have some form of chronic Illness in America today. – Beth Lambert “The Compromised Generation” =37 million children
= Nearly 200 million of chronically sick children and adults with cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s alone.
We assert that the cost of the use of glyphosate does not outweigh the benefit.
The Worst News a Mother Could Hear
Dear Friends
The last week or two were weeks of what looked like insurmountably bad news. Daunting. Unbelievable and disheartening.
1) The EPA RAISED the glyphosate levels to unbelievable amounts. We know now that breast cancer cells proliferated upon the introduction of only parts per TRILLION of glyphosate ( see our blog "Proof of GMO Harm"). We know that the chemicals in Agent Orange caused hundreds of thousands of birth defects and deaths. And yet the EPA has granted Monsanto's and Syngenta's requests to raised the levels of these and other chemicals by double, triple, quadruple and higher amounts in the part per million. For example: 2-4 D and other chemicals have been increased in the feed crops that the animals we eat , eat: barley hay from 1.4 to 30 ppm and aspirated grains from 30 to 108 ppm.
Glyphosate levels were increasd in Sunflower seeds to 85 ppm, Tea 5 ppm, Beans 5 ppm, Quinoa 5 ppm, Bananas .2 ppm, Sugar Beets 25 ppm, Dry Peas 8ppm, Pork 5 ppm etc.
Image from Occupy EPA
2) Moms Across America Zen Honeycutt was able to interview Anthony Samsel and found out that 160 of our foods are contaminated with glyphosate. See the full list here.
3) Birth defects in babies are a reported 4-8 X higher down stream from three orchard areas in Washington State that use heavy glyphosate sprays. See article here.
4) TPP: Many of us found out that an international trade agreement called TPP ( Trans Pacific Partnership) that could threaten everything we are working for by fast tracking ( and keeping secret) trade agreements between nations that could eliminate GMO labeling, allow corporation to sue countries for blocking sales of GMOs and force more sales of GMOs. Go to www.flushtheTPP.org to find out more and support the cause by hosting a Meet the Congress! event on MAA website.
We believe that some of the worst news a mother could hear is that the food we eat is causing harm to our family and the toxins in our environment that have been deemed safe by our own EPA are causing birth defects. On top of it our own government appointed officials may take away our rights to be able to choose our food and protect our families from these toxins. This is unacceptable.
But there MUST be Good news right?
Of course there is! Moms and our fantastic supporters are an undauntable bunch!
1) The biggest good news is that we are now creating PARTNERSHIPS between organizations that will expand and support all of our intentions nationally and around the globe. Moms Across Africa, Moms Across Canada and Moms Across Ireland have Facebook pages and we are working on developing an international coalition! We are connecting with several other orgs and will announce partnerships soon!
2) Moms Across America's Kathleen Hallal spoke at the Justice Begins with Seeds Conference in Washington State last weekend and I spoke in my CT home town in front of 62 people, 20 teens from FRESH, a gardening program, who are out to transform the food industry! We are continuing the global movement for Moms, who buy 85% of the food, and supporters to be the ones to make a change in our health and freedom.
3) 14 year old Rachel Parent from Canada went on national TV and stood her ground debating Kevin O'Leary. Click here for the link. Inspiring! If she can speak up, we all can too!!
4) Kauai Hawaii and NY made giant steps forward in labeling GMOs and eliminating toxins from our environment and bodies.
5) Moms Across America is just getting started! Our next endeavors are:
GMO Free Shopping Day! Sept 7, 2013 GMO Free Moms and YOU Moms Across America supporters are the perfect candidates to host a GMO Free Shopping coaching session at your local grocery store! More info on www.gmofreemoms.org. Please post any and all of your events on www.momsacrossamerica.com so your local supporters can find you!
World Food Day Oct 16, 2013 Moms Across America GMO FREE SCHOOLS Educational Outreach. Gather a group of Moms to hand out flyers at drop off or pick up and educate your entire school about how they can make GMO free lunches! Flyers coming soon. Post your event soon!
RECALL ROUND UP: Date: ASAP- Glyphosate information door hangers to distribute in neighborhoods.
GMO Free DINING : Date: ASAP- Flyers to give to restaurants to encourage them to go GMO Free. Chef Patrick Stark supporting us with great tips!
We are disturbed by the bad news...but the good news is you.
Moms Across America is an international coalition of unstoppable moms and we have tremendous reach and power because we buy 85% of the food. It's up to us Mommas and our tremendous supporters.
The Good news are our Dads. The good news is our Teens. The good news is our kids, doctors, nurses and politicians who supports this effort. The good news is that we are not alone and we are growing!
We are continually and deeply inspired by the people like you who know this situation is daunting and huge and yet KEEP GOING ANYWAY.
Thank you for being unstoppable!
Zen Honeycutt
Kathleen Hallal and the MAAM Team
P.S. We need your help. We need professionals..a non profit developer, social media gurus, graphic designers, writers, researchers and media support. Please also donate and encourage your favorite organizations to donate and support the Moms who buy 85% of the food to go GMO free and Organic and eliminate toxins from our food supply. Every dollar helps!