By Katherine Paul
"Someday we shall look back on this dark
era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed
that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?" —Dr. Jane Goodall
Two
new reports published in recent weeks add to the already large and
convincing body of evidence, accumulated over more than half a century,
that agricultural pesticides and other toxic chemicals are poisoning us.
Both reports issue scathing indictments of U.S. and global regulatory systems that collude with chemical companies to hide the truth from the public, while they fill their coffers with ill-gotten profits.
According to the World Health Organization, whose report
focused on a range of environmental risks, the cost of a polluted
environment adds up to the deaths of 1.7 million children every year.
A report
by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, presented to the United
Nations Human Rights Council, focused more narrowly on agricultural
chemicals. The UN report states unequivocally that the storyline
perpetuated by companies like Monsanto—the one that says we need pesticides to feed the world—is a myth. And a catastrophic one at that.
The
fact that both these reports made headlines, in mainstream outlets like
the Washington Post and the Guardian, is on one hand, good news. On the
other, it's a sad and discouraging commentary on our inability to
control corporate greed.
