Pesticides in Paradise Birth Defects

Pesticides in paradise: Hawaii’s spike in birth defects puts focus on GM crops

Local doctors are in the eye of a storm swirling for the past three years over whether corn that’s been genetically modified to resist pesticides is a source of prosperity, as companies claim, or of birth defects and illnesses

Pediatrician Carla Nelson remembers catching sight of the unusually pale newborn, then hearing an abnormal heartbeat through the stethoscope and thinking that something was terribly wrong.

The baby was born minutes before with a severe heart malformation that would require complex surgery. What worried her as she waited for the ambulance plane to take the infant from Waimea, on the island of Kauai, to the main children’s hospital in Honolulu, on another Hawaiian island, was that it was the fourth one shehad seen in three years.

In all of Waimea, there have been at least nine in five years, she says, shaking her head. That’s more than 10 times the national rate, according to analysis by local doctors.

Nelson, a Californian, and other local doctors find themselves in the eye of a storm swirling for the past three years around the Hawaiian archipelago over whether a major cash crop on four of the six main islands, corn that’s been genetically modified to resist pesticides, is a source of prosperity, as the companies claim – or of birth defects and illnesses, as the doctors and many others suspect.

After four separate attempts to rein in the companies over the past two years all failed, an estimated 10,000 people marched on 9 August through Honolulu’s Waikiki tourist district. Some held signs like, “We Deserve the Right to Know: Stop Poisoning Paradise” and “Save Hawaii – Stop GMOs” (Genetically Modified Organisms), while others protested different issues.

Pesticides Legality Protested in Waimea Hawaii near schools and hospital.

“The turnout and the number of groups marching showed how many people are very frustrated with the situation,” says native Hawaiian activist Walter Ritte of the island of Molokai.

Waimea, a small town of low, pastel wood houses built in south-west Kauai for plantation workers in the 19th century, now sustains its economy mostly from a trickle of tourists on their way to a spectacular canyon. Perhaps 200 people work full-time for the four giant chemical companies that grow the corn – all of it exported – on some 12,000 acres leased mostly from the state.
In Kauai, chemical companies Dow, BASF, Syngenta and DuPont spray 17 times more pesticide per acre (mostly herbicides, along with insecticides and fungicides) than on ordinary cornfields in the US mainland, according to the most detailed study of the sector, by the Center for Food Safety.

That’s because they are precisely testing the strain’s resistance to herbicides that kill other plants. About a fourth of the total are called Restricted Use Pesticides because of their harmfulness. Just in Kauai, 18 tons – mostly atrazine, paraquat (both banned in Europe) and chlorpyrifos – were applied in 2012. The World Health Organization this year announced that glyphosate, sold as Roundup, the most common of the non-restricted herbicides, is “probably carcinogenic in humans”.

The cornfields lie above Waimea as the land, developed in the 1870s for the Kekaha Sugar Company plantation, slopes gently up toward arid, craggy hilltops. Most fields are reddish-brown and perfectly furrowed. Some parts are bright green: that’s when the corn is actually grown.

Both parts are sprayed frequently, sometimes every couple of days. Most of the fields lie fallow at any given time as they await the next crop, but they are still sprayed with pesticides to keep anything from growing. “To grow either seed crops or test crops, you need soil that’s essentially sterile,” says professor Hector Valenzuela of the University of Hawaii department of tropical plant and soil science.

When the spraying is underway and the wind blows downhill from the fields to the town – a time no spraying should occur – residents complain of stinging eyes, headaches and vomiting.

“Your eyes and lungs hurt, you feel dizzy and nauseous. It’s awful,” says middle school special education teacher Howard Hurst, who was present at two evacuations. “Here, 10% of the students get special-ed services, but the state average is 6.3%,” he says. “It’s hard to think the pesticides don’t play a role.”

At these times, many crowd the waiting rooms of the town’s main hospital, which was run until recently by Dow AgroSciences’ former chief lobbyist in Honolulu. It lies beside the middle school, both 1,700ft from Syngenta fields. The hospital, built by the old sugar plantation, has never studied the effects of the pesticides on its patients.

The chemical companies that grow the corn in land previously used for sugar refuse to disclose with any precision which chemicals they use, where and in what amounts, but they insist the pesticides are safe, and most state and local politicians concur. “The Hawai‘i legislature has never given the slightest indication that it intended to regulate genetically engineered crops,” wrote lawyer Paul Achitoff of Earthjustice in a recent court case.

As for the birth defects spike, “We have not seen any credible source of statistical health information to support the claims,” said Bennette Misalucha, executive director of Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, the chemical companies trade association, in a written statement distributed by a publicist. She declined to be interviewed.

Nelson, the pediatrician, points out that American Academy of Pediatrics’ report, Pesticide Exposure in Children, found “an association between pesticides and adverse birth outcomes, including physical birth defects”. Noting that local schools have been evacuated twice and children sent to hospital because of pesticide drift, Nelson says doctors need prior disclosure of sprayings: “It’s hard to treat a child when you don’t know which chemical he’s been exposed to.”

Her concerns and those of most of her colleagues have grown as the chemical companies doubled to 25,000 acres in a decade the area in Hawaii they devote to growing new varieties of herbicide-resistant corn.

Today, about 90% of industrial GMO corn grown in the US was originally developed in Hawaii, with the island of Kauai hosting the biggest area. The balmy weather yields three crops a year instead of one, allowing the companies to bring a new strain to market in a third of the time.

Once it’s ready, the same fields are used to raise seed corn, which is sent to contract farms on the mainland. It is their output, called by critics a pesticide delivery system, that is sold to the US farmers, along with the pesticides manufactured by the breeder that each strain has been modified to tolerate.

Corn’s uses are as industrial as its cultivation: less than 1% is eaten. About 40% is turned into ethanol for cars, 36% becomes cattle feed, 10% is used by the food industry and the rest is exported.

At a Starbucks just outside Honolulu, Sidney Johnson, a pediatric surgeon at the Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children who oversees all children born in Hawaii with major birth defects and operates on many, says he’s been thinking about pesticides a lot lately. The reason: he’s noticed that the number of babies born here with their abdominal organs outside, a rare condition known as gastroschisis, has grown from three a year in the 1980s to about a dozen now.

“We have cleanest water and air in the world,” he says. So he’s working with a medical student on a study of his hospital’s records to determine whether the parents of the gastroschisis infants were living near fields that were being sprayed around the time of conception and early pregnancy. He plans to extend the study to parents of babies suffering from heart defects.

“You kind of wonder why this wasn’t done before,” he says. “Data from other states show there might be a link, and Hawaii might be the best place to prove it.”

Unbeknownst to Johnson, another two physicians have been heading in the same direction, but with some constraints. They’re members of a state-county commission appointed this year to “determine if there are human harms coming from these pesticides”, as its chairman, a professional facilitator named Peter Adler, tells a meeting of angry local residents in Waimea earlier this month. Several express skepticism that the panel is anything but another exercise in obfuscation.

The panel of nine part-time volunteers also includes two scientists from the chemical companies and several of their critics. “We just want to gather information and make some recommendations,” Adler tells the crowd of about 60 people. “We won’t be doing any original research.”

But one of the two doctors, a retired pediatrician named Lee Evslin, plans to do just that. “I want see if any health trends stand out among people that might have been exposed to pesticides,” he says in an interview. “It won’t be a full epidemiological study, but it will probably be more complete than anything that’s been done before.”

The panel itself, called the Joint Fact-Finding Study Group on Genetically Modified Crops and Pesticides on Kauaʻi, is the only achievement of three years of failed attempts to force the companies to disclose in advance what they spray and to create buffer zones – which they do in 11 other states, where food crops receive much less pesticides per acre.

The pushback from the expansion of the GMO acreage first emerged when Gary Hooser of Kauai, a former state senate majority leader who failed in a bid for lieutenant governor in 2010, ran for his old seat on the Kauai County council in 2012.

“Everywhere I went, people were concerned about GMOs and pesticides. They were saying, ‘Gary, we gotta do something’,” he recounts over coffee at the trendy Ha Coffee Bar in Lihue, the island’s capital. “Some were worried about the GMO process itself and others by the threats of the pesticides, and it became one of the dominant political issues.”

Protest against dumping toxin on Hawaii farms

Once elected, Hooser, who has a ruddy complexion, piercing blue eyes and arrived in Hawaii as a teenager from California, approached the companies for information about exactly what they were spraying and in what amounts. He was rebuffed.

In the process of what he called “doing my homework”, he discovered that the companies, unlike regular farmers, were operating under a decades-old Environmental Protection Agency permit to discharge toxic chemicals in water that had been grandfathered from the days of the sugar plantation, when the amounts and toxicities of pesticides were much lower. The state has asked for a federal exemption for the companies so they can avoid modern standards of compliance.

He also found that the companies, unlike regular farmers, don’t pay the 4% state excise tax. Some weren’t even asked to pay property taxes, worth $125,000 a year. After pressure from Hooser and the county tax office, the companies paid two years’ worth of back taxes.

So with the backing of three other members of the seven-member Kauai council, he drafted a law requiring the companies to disclose yearly what they had grown and where, and to announce in advance which pesticides they proposed to spray, where and when. The law initially also imposed a moratorium on the chemical companies expanding their acreage while their environmental impact was assessed.

After a series of hearings packed by company employees and their families wearing blue and opponents wearing red, the bill was watered down by eliminating the moratorium and reducing the scope of the environmental study. The ordinance then passed, but the companies sued in federal court, where a judge ruled that the state’s law on pesticides precluded the counties from regulating them. After the ruling, the state and the county created the joint fact-finding panel officially committed to conducting no new research.

Hooser is confident the ruling will be overturned on appeal: the Hawaii constitution “specifically requires” the state and the counties to protect the communities and their environment.

In his appeal, Achitoff of Earthjustice argued that Hawaii’s general pesticide law does not “demonstrate that the legislature intended to force the county to sit and watch while its schoolchildren are being sent to the hospital so long as state agencies do not remedy the problem.”

In the Big Island, which is called Hawaii and hosts no GMO corn, a similar process unfolded later in 2013: the county council passed a law that effectively banned the chemical companies from moving in, and it was struck down in federal court for the same reasons. A ban on genetically modified taro, a food root deemed sacred in Hawaiian mythology, was allowed to stand.

In Maui County, which includes the islands of Maui and Molokai, both with large GMO corn fields, a group of residents calling themselves the Shaka Movement sidestepped the company-friendly council and launched a ballot initiative that called for a moratorium on all GMO farming until a full environmental impact statement is completed there.

The companies, primarily Monsanto, spent $7.2m on the campaign ($327.95 per “no” vote, reported to be the most expensive political campaign in Hawaii history) and still lost.

Again, they sued in federal court, and, a judge found that the Maui County initiative was preempted by federal law. Those rulings are also being appealed.

In the state legislature in Honolulu, Senator Josh Green, a Democrat who then chaired the health committee, earlier this year attempted a fourth effort at curbing the pesticide spraying.

In the legislature, he said, it’s an open secret that most heads of the agriculture committee have had “a closer relationship with the agro-chemical companies than with the environmental groups”.

Green, an emergency room doctor who was raised in Pennsylvania, drafted legislation to mandate some prior disclosure and some buffer zones. “I thought that was a reasonable compromise,” he says. Still, he also drafted a weaker bill as a failsafe. “If even that one doesn’t pass, it’s going to be obvious that the state doesn’t have the political will to stand up to the chemical companies,” he said in a phone interview at the time. “That would be terrible.”

The chairman of the senate agricultural committee, Cliff Tsuji, didn’t even bring the weaker bill to a vote, even though Hawaii’s governor had pledged to sign any bill that created buffer zones.

Asked by email what he would do now, Green replied with a quip: “Drink scotch.”

This report was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Link to doctors’ letters to government.

Weed Resistance Spreading on Farms

Aug. 03-2015- MOORHEAD, Minn. —

Weed Resistance in Spreading on Farms from AgWeek

Tom Peters is often asked if he “works with weed resistance.”

“I say, no I do not: I work with weeds management,” says Peters, a sugar beet agronomist with University of Minnesota and North Dakota State University extension services, based in Fargo.

“It’s maybe a play on words, but weed resistance implies that we’ve had a failure, we’re in a defensive posture, and we’re backpedaling in order to salvage our crop,” he says.

“Weeds management, to me, implies that I’m in charge,” he adds, leaning a bit into the word. “I have a strategy, and I’m implementing the strategy, and that strategy is changing as I collect more data. It’s subtle, but for me it’s a more optimistic viewpoint of looking at weeds.”

Peters, who grew up on a Sauk Centre, Minn., dairy farm, got his doctorate from North Dakota State University in 1990. From then until 2014, he worked with Monsanto Co., where he was a program lead and agronomist, contributing to development and safety assessments of traits in crops developed through biotechnology, including Roundup ready sugar beets.

He started his extension position in February 2014, and says he appreciates the closer contact with growers.

With sugar beets, he faces one of the region’s most challenging weed management problems, “or opportunities,” he is quick to add.

The 60-mile jump

Peters says waterhemp is the No. 1 weed challenge for beet growers, ahead of common ragweed, giant ragweed and even kochia.

In the mid-2000s, the waterhemp weed became more prevalent in the sugar beet growing region — especially the herbicide-resistant biotypes. Even a few untreated weeds in a field can lead to major infestations within a couple of years.

Iowa State University scientists say the weed has flourished with adoption of reduced tillage, increased dependence on glyphosate (Roundup), and reductions in cultivation for weed management. The weed is aided by increased temperatures and soil moisture, according to the ISU website.

Peters says the southern Red River Valley represented an imaginary northernmost line of glyphosate-resistant waterhemp infestation in 2014. In 2015, that line seems to have migrated all the way up to Highway 2 in Grand Forks, N.D.

“Sixty miles in one year, can you imagine that?” Peters says.

Jeff Stachler, Peters’ predecessor and now the Auglaize County Extension Service agent for Ohio State University in Wapakoneta, agrees that waterhemp is a major threat, especially because of the acres it covers, and because it moves quickly.

Stachler wonders if the waterhemp was that far north earlier — perhaps hiding in soybeans — but went unnoticed until this year.

“If you’re using glyphosate alone, you’re going to find out what’s out there,” Stachler says. “You’re doing the maximum selection with glyphosate in beets.”

Four main threats

To Peters, waterhemp is a threat because of its psychology and its biology.

The first problem appears right away.

“Waterhemp, at first, doesn’t intimidate anybody; it’s a thin, slender plant — you might almost say an elegant plant in the field,” he says.

Second, it is a prolific seed producer.

“That’s when it gets you,” he says. “It gets you in the third year by mass. One plant can produce up to 1 million seeds and in recent years the weed has emerged as a threat to soybean production across the nation.”

Third, the plant doesn’t go dormant in the summer like most weed threats, Peters says.

“Every time we get rain — and there’s waterhemp seed in the soil — we have an opportunity of a flush of weeds to occur,” Peters says. “Most of our common weeds go dormant when soil temperatures get high.”

And fourth, from a reproductive standpoint, there are male plants and female plants. With all of the seeds and without the dormancy, an infinite amount of contact occurs between males and females.

“In a sense, we’re making a tremendous amount of diversity (within waterhemp) because different plants are cross-pollinating,” he says. “That’s adding to the resistance concerns or the unique biotypes concerns.”

Different approaches

Stachler approached American Crystal Sugar Co. for a piece of land to dedicate to waterhemp research and started the plot there in 2012.

Known for his zeal for the resistance problem, he noticed the resistance on American Crystal’s land, just east of the company’s research center and its Moorhead sugar beet processing plant.

He thinks resistant kochia is a bigger problem because it is more difficult to stop in sugar beets.

Peters, who inherited the research sites, differs in style, but he largely follows Stachler’s research model, he says.

“I think Jeff had great foresight to establish the concept and approach,” he says.

In 2013, Stachler helped locate a second, replicated plot near Herman, Minn., nearly 85 miles south in Grant County, Minn. Peters tries to work in two distinct environments, and the sites complement each other, with the combination of the same weed in different environments. The crop is generally a bit more advanced at the southern location.

Peters is studying waterhemp control in four blocks — sugar beets, small grains, corn and soybeans.

“I’m interested in soil-applied herbicides,” he says.

They can be applied pre-emergent (right after planting) or applied in the lay-by concept, where the sugar beets are emerged to the two- to four-leaf stage and the weeds have not yet emerged. The predominant weeds in the test plots are two broad-leaf weeds — common lambsquarters and waterhemp.

Lambsquarters is always taller because it emerges earlier, in April. Waterhemp, an annual weed in the pigweed family, emerges toward the end of May and early June, so is shorter, but the density can suffocate the trial.

Crop safety first

From the get-go, Peters knows any chemical solution for beets first must demonstrate crop safety.

Peters thinks beet farmers likely will need pre-emergence herbicides to handle waterhemp. The likeliest help is metolachlor with the product names such as Dual, Magnum, Cinch and other generics. Metolachlor has a history of injuring beets when applied at high rates and under certain environmental conditions, Peters says.

“I’m looking at metolachlor, but not as a stand-alone concept,” he says. ” I’m looking at it at very low rates, as a way to buy time until farmers can get to their post-emergence (herbicide) program, or their lay-by program.”

The experiment compares various regimens: no herbicide; Roundup-ready varieties followed by glyphosate, or Roundup; various soil-applied herbicides (including metolachlor); metolachlor, followed by lay-by applications of various other herbicides.

In 2014, sugar beets were planted late. April brought a lot of rain and most farmers planted in May. The metolachlor strategy at low rates worked pretty well, Peters says.

But in 2015, because beets were planted in early April, so the metolachlor strategy didn’t work as well.

“The herbicide rate I used wasn’t adequate for season-long weed control,” he says.

Peters says, the lesson is the lay-by strategy — the concept of using soil-applied herbicides after the sugar beets have emerged — might be the best for crop safety and effectiveness.

“I’m really interested in a very low rate of metolachlor, soil-applied, pre-emergence, right after planting, and then followed by lay-by of Outlook, Warrant, or even more metolachlor again.”

Peters underlines that glyphosate remains an important place in a sugar beet weed management strategy.

“Roundup still controls a lot of weeds and I can see it in my plots, but for tough weeds — weeds like waterhemp — we need other programs, other strategies and we need to implement them in a timely fashion.”

Farmers Dump GMO Crops

Aug. 09- 2015 article reprinted here Farmers and GMO crops

Five years ago, Dan Beyers took his farm in a new direction. Or, rather, back in an old direction.

The Pana, Ill.-area farmer had been using corn and soybean seeds genetically modified to work with glyphosate — the generic name for Monsanto’s signature Roundup herbicide. But he reached a point at which he said it no longer made sense from a dollars standpoint.

So he turned his back on GMO crops.

“As they added more traits, we didn’t really see a yield advantage. And every time they added a trait, they added cost,” said Beyers, who also worries that GMO seeds could be damaging his soil.

Clearly the world of farming is still dominated by seeds that have been genetically altered to help them deal with drought, insects and weeds. But there’s anecdotal evidence suggesting that more farmers are considering the path Beyers has chosen.

Several factors are in play, including the premium prices that non-GMO crops — particularly soybeans — can fetch at the market. But also there is growing concern about the decreasing effectiveness of glyphosate, with farmers increasingly running into weeds that have developed resistance to the herbicide that revolutionized modern farming.

“Roundup isn’t cleaning up the fields the way it used to,” Beyers said.

Regardless, GMO seeds are in no danger of being pushed out of the market, with recent acreage surveys by the U.S. Department of Agriculture showing they account for more than 92 percent of our corn and soybeans. And there are new seed-herbicide combinations — using Dicamba and 2,4-D — on the way to help farmers deal with the weakening powers of glyphosate.

“There’s very little change for the country as a whole,” said Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri.

Monsanto, based in Creve Coeur, agrees.

The company’s large seed portfolio is dominated by GMOs, but it does produce a range of conventional corn, soybean and cotton seeds. They represent a small percentage of the company’s U.S. sales, and there has been no spike in demand, a spokeswoman said.

“Most farmers look to Monsanto for the innovation and trait packages we offer,” spokeswoman Danielle Stuart said in an email.

Yet companies such as eMerge, an Iowa-based firm specializing in non-GMO seeds, say they’ve experienced modest increases in demand for their products, particularly with market prices for soybeans and corn falling rapidly in the wake of consecutive bumper harvests.

“With the price of grain dropping, guys are looking for more economic seeds to plant,” said Johnny Millwood, a district sales manager for the Midwest-focused company, which was founded in 2009.

Conventional seeds certainly cost less, lacking the need to recoup the large research and development costs behind their genetically altered counterparts. A bag of non-GMO soybeans — which covers roughly one acre — costs about $20 less than a similar bag of seeds designed to work with glyphosate, Millwood said.

But those non-GMO crops also are more valuable when it’s time to sell.

While corn draws an anemic 25 cents extra per bushel, food-grade soybeans are commanding an extra $2 per bushel.

That’s driven largely by overseas markets, with countries including Japan and South Korea providing steady demand for non-GMO soybeans, said Kellee James, chief executive of Mercaris, a market data service for non-GMO and organic commodities.

But ongoing debates over GMO labeling suggest there could soon be greater domestic demand for non-GMO grains.

“What’s driving this cycle is the consumer’s desire for more information about their food,” James said. “I don’t think that’s going away.”

The premium prices, however, do come with their own set of problems.

One of the bigger tasks facing conventional farmers is the need to keep that grain separate after it’s harvested. Only small amounts of GMO contamination (generally less than 1 percent) are allowed.

It’s particularly challenging for farmers growing both GMO and non-GMO crops. They have to take greater care in cleaning equipment and storage facilities when moving between the two types of crops.

“It does involve a little bit more effort and more cost,” said Nathan Fields, director of biotechnology for the National Corn Growers Association.

There is also the matter of operating in a world in which almost everyone around you is using glyphosate.

It’s a situation that Mike York has been dealing with for years on the land he works southeast of Mt. Vernon, Ill.

He used to lose plants along the edges of his fields after neighbors sprayed their crops on adjacent land. And there was an incident a few years back when a mix-up resulted in a sprayer’s covering one of York’s smaller fields with glyphosate, wiping out much of the crop.

But these days, neighbors have become more careful when spraying near his fields.

“As a matter of fact, a farmer just called yesterday to ask if I was still doing non-GMO,” York said.

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