USA lags behind EU, Brazil and China in banning harmful pesticides
phys.org
phys.org
https://g1.globo.com/economia/agronegocios/noticia/2019/05/2...
edit: also glyphosate is not a pesticide
And AFAICT, glyphosate doesn't pose a significant risk to humans in the amounts people would normally be exposed to. It's really quite harmless. However, it can become more harmful when mixed with other chemicals, but honestly, the other chemicals are probably more harmful than it.
https://organiccotton.org/oc/Cotton-general/Impact-of-cotton...
https://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/cotton_environmental...
This is utter nonsense. Glyphosate doesn't get "locked" into the body.
But when we fall behind Brazil and China, too, alarm bells should be ringing -- if they weren't, already, over US infant mortality soaring past that in dozens of other countries, or life expectancy reverting to a persistent downward trend.
You don't get declining life expectancy without really concerted mismanagement and corruption at the top.
I don't know about that. Is done all the time. Also, 'developing/developed' is a incredibly crude taxonomy with few useful contexts and a very fuzzy border.
Heck, what people regard as a country "doing well" is different between different countries and their cultures.
I don't know about that, slightly unrelated but I'm 4 times less likely to get murdered in China than in the USA.
The population seems to adhere to laws against harming fellow humans better than we do in the USA.
They will enforce pesticide bans, for example, on farmers they don’t like or where it is politically convenient to do so. Likewise, one can get away with murder if they are politically connected enough and in good grace (well, until the publicity gets bad and they become pariahs like Bo Xilai).
Video surveillance isn't launching everywhere, because of corrupcy.
And they don't care about foreigners ( with something happens). Chinese protects Chinese, no one else. They will also work with favors above law.
Whatever evidence you're using to support this assertion, I'm sure theres equal evidence from any other country.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2123499/chin...
People protesting police/army violence in USA share the same view of our state agents.
Western societies pride themselves as abiding by the rule of law, and it is an important ideal IMO, but the application in reality is more on a Bell curve.
I agree that the rule of law is a nice ideal, but there appears to be an emerging split between the effectiveness of rule of law systems and their proposed values.
The historical arguments were not just that the rule of law is ethical, but also that it is effective at delivering for its citizens. So when the OP points to murder rates or the article points to atrocious health standards that fall below even middle-income trap countries, then that doesn't exactly fill me with optimism.
If that's the definition then, um, yeah, I think "bell curve" is a very diplomatic term for the de facto reality in Western Nations. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the de facto reality in all nations, Western or not, falls well short of this rule of law ideal.
I've no evidence to support the following suspicion, but I think whenever humans are involved in a system, all of those well known human failings we have are going to manifest themselves in that system's output. I don't think there is a way around it actually.
In practice, there probably is no society governed by rule of law if equal treatment is going to be your measuring stick. I honestly don't think such a place exists.
Thing is, the current Chinese government sees “rule of law” completely undesirable as a concept, judiciary must acquiesce to the official class (which is synonymous with the party), whose opinion is the only one that matters.
Since we've gone down this rabbit-hole, doesn't that mean or infer that the states is no longer a "rule of law" country, since the current idyllic seems to be overturning laws - based purely on political alignment (e.g.: the "sudden rash" of states banning abortion because the end-goal is to overturn Roe v. Wade)?
I think the issue of enforcement should be separated to the issue of the spirit of the "rule of the law".
Anyone who spent more then 30 seconds observing motorists on a freeway highway will know that this sort of selective enforcement is not limited to China.
The context for Brazil is mostly that it is a democracy from 1888 til nowadays, but with a shadow institutional period from the 60´s to the mid-eighties.
So the country had to rebuild it´s own institutions from the eighties til now, to serve a democracy instead of serving the wills of a dictatorship.
Now, its in a point of testing its institutional maturity, and the rule of law, by the ongoing crackdown on corruption and organized crime. A lot of big political figures from all sides (and executives) are in jail right now, and theres a current crackdown going on in the organized crime front.
But the big test right now is the current Brazilian government with its backwards policy. Will the organized institutions from the society, and the other powers besides the executive able to make a stand against going backwards?
Theres a big test going on in Brazil right now, if 'we' are able to pass this dangerous phase and still have the democratic institutions and balances in one piece, than i guess it will probably move foward and get stronger with time.
In this sense also, the US was lucky to have England as a cultural parent, because England was/is great in making solid institutions. From government to the academy.
The colonization process of the countries colonized by the spanish and the portugueses, were mostly a vampire-like kind of relation. Where they took everything they could, leaving a trail of exploitation and slavery behind.
The portuguese colonizers even used to forbid Brazil of the colonial/empire era to have a University, which we only manage to create the first one here in the 20´s.
Anyway, i guess the answer to the rule of law, is both; is "good enough for most things", and "we are getting there". Not something to be proud of, not something very advanced, but not bad either..
In Brazil most federal inspection agencies are under funded and short on staff, limiting their operations. Offering bribe to inspection agents is also very common but risky since the government has been pushing a campaign and reforms against systemic corruption for the past few years.
It's real easy to ban things that make it easier to farm when you don't got much farming.
The US and Australia have the lowest agriculture tariffs of any major economies or groups such as the EU. Drastically lower in fact. Russia for example - a wheat juggernaut now - has agriculture tariffs over 3x that of the US.
Having your own food supply is far more important then having a free agricultural market. Also, it's not like the US is not guilty of this either, just look at it's massive corn subsidies.
The current government, not so much. The president has appointed a Minister of Agriculture that is known as the "Poison Muse". We shall see how that goes but there's a tendency of conflating liberalism with not having any rules that is getting scary with the current administration (e.g. taxes are the system crushing entrepreneurs, traffic laws are a "fee industry", everybody should have a gun, etc)
Don’t wake me up please.
[1] Assessment of Glyphosate Induced Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance of Pathologies and Sperm Epimutations: Generational Toxicology. (2019)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31011160
> The transgenerational pathologies observed include prostate disease, obesity, kidney disease, ovarian disease, and parturition (birth) abnormalities. Epigenetic analysis of the F1, F2 and F3 generation sperm identified differential DNA methylation regions (DMRs). A number of DMR associated genes were identified and previously shown to be involved in pathologies. Therefore, we propose glyphosate can induce the transgenerational inheritance of disease and germline (e.g. sperm) epimutations. Observations suggest the generational toxicology of glyphosate needs to be considered in the disease etiology of future generations.
[2] Environmental toxicant induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of ovarian pathology and granulosa cell epigenome and transcriptome alterations: ancestral origins of polycystic ovarian syndrome and primary ovarian insuffiency. (2018)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30207508
[3] The epigenetic impacts of endocrine disruptors on female reproduction across generations. (2019)
Meanwhile, I nevertheless advocate buying Organic. Use a warm solution of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) in which to dissolve fruits like apples and others for 12-15 minutes. It helps dissolve a fair portion of the pesticides, but is not a substitute for buying Organic. Refer to https://suppversity.blogspot.com/2017/10/nahco3-aka-baking-s...
This is patently false. Natural pesticides and herbicides are almost always more toxic to humans than synthetic pestices and herbicides, in large part because minimizing human toxicity is one of the goals in the chemical research programs.
No one has been able to demonstrate health effects due to pesticide residue. Even studies purporting to show health effects for glyphosate do so at concentrations associated with handling the chemical in bulk, not at concentrations associated with consumption of residue.
Do more well-accepted organic pesticides have these kinds of problems with bulk handling? Because otherwise I feel like this should be reason enough to avoid it.
Does it sound more organic if I call it ‘Bordeaux Mixture’ (before pointing at the all the people that died of copper poisoning)?
Say you have a fungus that eats at your corn, maybe there is another one that just eats that fungus but leaves the corn alone. Or maybe you have some insect that eats your wheat, and some naturally occurring compound exists that is bad for the exoskeleton of that insect; put compound (found naturally or replicated synthetically) on the wheat, insects will be sad/dead/gone, there ya go, organic pesticide.
Those natural, or, organic pesticides usually evolved with some specific target in mind, while man-made pesticides are more like chemo therapy: kill as much as possible without killing the produce we want. This has the downside that killing as much as possible actually kills things we don't want killed.
Obviously, and sarcasm apart, the difference is nuanced. Organic Farming revolves around what is apparently natural, and in practice there is just a list farmers must respect.
I've been paraphrasing myself a lot these days, only to avoid saying the same thing many times. But in my humble opinion as a farmer, Organic Farming is a secular kosher for urban people. It has nothing to do with better farming practices, and everything to do with a sense of control over purity - purity in terms of what is closer to the urban conception of what constitutes True Nature.
Better farming practices involves the rational use of pesticides, synthetic or otherwise, used only as a last resort and having always in mind the effects to Nature (soil, water and wildlife) and human beings (farmers and consumers). In Europe all of these considerations are contemplated under an official standard called Integrated Farming - Organic Farming's big sister, as I call it.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/03/20/far-more-toxic...
[0]https://scholar.google.pl/scholar?hl=pl&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=glyph...
That's not terribly bad. There are also communities of organic farmers working on methods to improve yields without pesticides. There is a lot still to be learned (and re-learned) about crop cycling, for example. Other ideas are mixed fields with different crops, new tilling protocols etc.
Some pesticides are also legal under different certification schemes. Sulfur, for example, is the most used pesticide in the EU. Pyrethroid is allowed under some schemes, and it's actually a drug approved for human use (lice), and therefore (and because it's rather old) thought to be safe at the far lower doses one is exposed to via the food chain.
The chart https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pflanzenschutzmittel#/media/Da... is also rather interesting, in that it shows highly diverging use of pesticides and fertilizers across EU countries. There is no definitive pattern here, with Sweden and the Netherlands as the extremes on opposite sides, two countries that are rather similar both in economics as well as climate. Spain/Italy/Portugal might be high because they have much larger shares of multi-year crops such as wine and olive trees, while yearly crops such as corn and wheat are less susceptible because the diseases die with the plants every year. OTOH, at least olives aren't fertilized I believe.
What's also interesting is the positive correlation between pesticide use and fertilizer use. I expected the opposite, i. e. farmers compensating for expected losses to disease with increased fertilizer and vice versa. This not happening may point at a cultural issue at play here, with some farmers choosing these tools excessively, or maybe a lack of knowledge of alternatives.