18th September, 2011

Many people living near the site of the BP oil spill have reported a long list of similar health problems.

Oil, tar balls, tar mats, and dead animals are still common sights along the Gulf of Mexico [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

Just weeks after BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, 2010, Fritzi Presley knew something was very wrong with her health.

The 57-year-old singer/songwriter from Long Beach, Mississippi began to feel sick, and went to her doctor.

“I began getting treatments for bronchitis, was put on several antibiotics and rescue inhalers, and even a breathing machine,” she told Al Jazeera. The smell of chemicals on the Mississippi coastline is present on many days when wind blows in from the Gulf.

Presley’s list of symptoms mirrors what many people living in the areas affected by BP’s oil spill have told Al Jazeera.

“I was having them then, and still have killer headaches. I’m experiencing memory loss, and when I had my blood tested for chemicals, they found m,p-Xylene, hexane, and ethylbenzene in my body.”

The 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf last year was the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, affecting people living near the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic dispersants, which are banned by many countries, including the UK. According to many scientists, these dispersants create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil.

Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist in New Iberia, Louisiana, has tested the blood of BP cleanup workers and residents.

“Ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene and hexane are volatile organic chemicals that are present in the BP crude oil,” Subra explained to Al Jazeera. “The acute impacts of these chemicals include nose and throat irritation, coughing, wheezing, lung irritation, dizziness, light-headedness, nausea and vomiting.”

Subra explained that exposure has been long enough to create long-term effects, such as “liver damage, kidney damage, and damage to the nervous system. So the presence of these chemicals in the blood indicates exposure”.

Testing by Subra has also revealed BP’s chemicals are present “in coastal soil sediment, wetlands, and in crab, oyster and mussel tissues”.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, and skin and eye contact. Symptoms of exposure include headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, genetic mutations, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiovascular damage. The chemicals can also cause birth defects, mutations, and cancer.

Joseph Yerkes, from Okaloosa Island, Florida, was in BP’s oil clean-up programme for more than two months, during which time he was exposed to oil and dispersants on a regular basis.

“My health worsened progressively,” Yerkes said. “Mid-September [2010] I caught a cold that worsened until I went to a doctor, who gave me two rounds of antibiotics for the pneumonia-like symptoms, and he did blood tests and found high levels of toxic substances in my blood that he told me came from the oil and dispersants.”

Since then, his life has been overrun with health problems and trying to get compensation from BP for his health costs and lost livelihood.

“They’ve [BP] not paid me a dime, and I’m scared,” Yerkes, whose lawyers were told by the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which was set up by BP to administer compensation payments, that his health claim was “compensable”. Yerkes added, “I’m moving out of my house into a one-bedroom apartment, and have sold just about everything I have. BP is starving us out.”

Yerkes has begun cutting out parts of the detoxification programme his doctor had prescribed for him because he can’t afford it. He then began getting sick again.

“If they [BP] don’t do what they agreed to do, I’m in trouble. “

- Joseph Yerkes 

“I don’t know what I’ll do now,” Yerkes added, “Because I’ve spent $50,000 on medical, treatments, supplements, and having to move from the Gulf. If they [BP] don’t do what they agreed to do, I’m in trouble.”

His memory loss has become so bad that Yerkes has tried to adjust his life around it by leaving himself notes. Some days, his body aches so much, and his nausea is so severe, he is unable to get out of bed.

“I consider myself a tough person, but this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through,” he said.

‘Dying from the inside out’ 

Presley lives three blocks from the coast with her daughter, 30-year-old Daisy Seal, who has also become extremely sick.

Both of them had their blood tested for the chemicals present in BP’s oil, and six out of the 10 chemicals tested for were present.

Daisy Seal has had skin rashes, respiratory problems, and two miscarriages, which she attributes to chemicals from BP’s oil and toxic dispersants [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

“I started having respiratory problems, a horrible skin rash, headaches, nosebleeds, low energy, and trouble sleeping,” Seal told Al Jazeera. “And I now feel like I’m dying from the inside out.”

Seal, who already has an eight-year-old son, has had two miscarriages in the last year.

“In ‘Generations at Risk’, medical doctor Ted Schettler and others warn that solvents can rapidly enter the human body,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist, and Exxon Valdez survivor, told Al Jazeera. “They evaporate in air and are easily inhaled, they penetrate skin easily, and they cross the placenta into fetuses. For example, 2-butoxyethanol [a chemical used in Corexit, an oil dispersant] is a human health hazard substance; it is a fetal toxin and it breaks down blood cells, causing blood and kidney disorders.”

“Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Ott continued. “Spill responders have told me that the hard rubber impellors in their engines and the soft rubber bushings on their outboard motor pumps are falling apart and need frequent replacement. Given this evidence, it should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known.”

Dr Rodney Soto, a medical doctor in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, has been testing and treating patients with high levels of oil-related chemicals in their blood streams.

These chemicals are commonly referred to as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).

VOCs released in BP’s oil disaster are toxic and have chronic health effects.

Dr Soto, who is Yerkes’ doctor, is finding high levels of toxic chemicals in every one of the patients he is testing.

“I’m regularly finding between five and seven VOCs in my patients,” Dr Soto told Al Jazeera. “These patients include people not directly involved in the oil clean-up, as well as residents that do not live right on the coast. These are clearly related to the oil disaster.”

While there are many examples of acute exposures, Dr Soto’s main concern is that most residents who are being exposed will only show symptoms later.

“I’m concerned with the illnesses like cancer and brain degeneration for the future,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is very important because a lot of the population down here may not have symptoms. But people are unaware they are ingesting chemicals that are certainly toxic to humans and have significant effect on the brain and hormonal systems.”

The toxic compounds in the oil and dispersants are liposoluble, meaning they have a high affinity for fat, said Dr Soto.

Dr Soto continued: “The human brain is 70 per cent fat. And these will similarly affect the immune cells, intestinal tract, breast, thyroid, prostate, glands, organs, and systems. This is also why this is so significant for children.”

Exceeding thresholds

In March the US National Institutes of Health launched a long-range health study of workers who helped clean up after BP’s oil disaster.

According to the NIH, 55,000 clean-up workers and volunteers in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida will be checked for health problems, and participants will be followed for up to 10 years.

The study is funded by NIH, which received a $10m “gift” from BP to run the study. BP claims not to be involved in the study, which will cost $34m over the next five years.

But the study focusses mainly on people who participated in the clean-up.

John Gooding, a resident of Pass Christian, Mississippi, began having health problems shortly after the oil spill started. He has become sicker with each passing month, and has moved inland in an effort to escape

Mississippi resident John Gooding moved away from the coast to minimise his exposure to toxic chemicals [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

continuing exposure to the chemicals.

“I can’t live at my home address anymore because it’s too close to the coast,” Gooding told Al Jazeera. “I’m hypersensitive to the pollution, and there is a constant steady chemical smell coming off the Gulf. Even both my dogs had seizures and died.”

Gooding suffers respiratory problems, seizures, and myriad other heath effects. He has filed a claim with BP in hopes of being compensated for his health problems, but it has been denied.

BP hired attorney Kenneth Feinberg and his Washington-based firm, Feinberg Rozen, to manage their compensation fund. BP has paid the firm $850,000 a month to administer the $20bn compensation fund for Gulf residents and fishermen affected by the disaster.

The fund was set up after negotiations between BP and the Obama administration, but over recent months there have been growing concerns among the Gulf Coast’s residents that Feinberg is limiting compensation funds to claimants in order to decrease BP’s liability.

Feinberg told citizen journalism group Bridge the Gulf that he will be calling on “independent experts” to review the validity of the approximately 30 health claims that are currently “in limbo”. Feinberg was unable to name the independent experts, and did not elaborate on the process used to pick them. 

In a previous interview, Feinberg said he had received approximately 200 health claims and denied them all for lack of documentation.

“As long as we have people making excuses for them [BP], they’ll continue to get away with it,” Gooding told Al Jazeera, while walking along a Mississippi beach covered in tar balls and dead birds.

Gooding is visibly sick, and chemicals that are used in oil dispersants have been found in his blood, but he won’t go to the doctor.

“I don’t want to put my family in debt, so I’m weighing my options,” he said, “I don’t have health insurance, but I do have life insurance.”

“We were recently in DC with those people protesting the Tar Sands pipeline,” he said. “I was telling those people living near the proposed pipeline, ‘We are your future, because when you have oil spills, this is what your life is going to look like.’”

Dispersants will continue to be used

The US Coast Guard held an Area Contingency Plan meeting in Biloxi, Mississippi on September 7 to discuss the lessons of the BP disaster.

Oil and sheen on a beach in Mississippi, September 2011 [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

Al Jazeera asked Coast Guard Captain John Rose, a sector commander, what has changed regarding the Coast Guard’s dispersant use policy since April 20, 2010.

“We were pre-authorised to use it before, but now we have to get permission from the higher-ups. But it is still in the plan for how we will respond to oil spills in the future,” he said.

During the meeting, Captain Rose continuously referred to the use of dispersants as a “scientific tool” that is “effective in keeping oil from reaching beaches and wildlife”.

Charles Taylor, a resident of nearby Bay St Louis, stood up and announced, “I’ve had bloody diarrhoea nonstop for 45 days, I’m anemic and dehydrated. I’ve had VOC tests done and have ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene, and methelpentates in my blood”.

None of the Coast Guard personnel would address Taylor’s concerns, saying that the purpose of the meeting was not to discuss BP.

Taylor asked Captain Rose and the other Coast Guard personnel on the panel, “How much money has BP given you folks? Because it appears to us, who are having health problems, you are being silenced from addressing the dispersant and health issues”.

Inadequate compensation

Untold numbers of Gulf Coast residents continue to struggle with health issues and lack of adequate compensation from BP.

Joseph Yerkes is concerned about his future. ”I’m financially destroyed, and my health is bad,” he said. “I’m having to cut off parts of my treatment because I can’t afford it all, and I’m just trying to survive.”

“I’m one step away from being homeless, and not being able to support my daughter and myself,” Yerkes added.

Follow Dahr Jamail on Twitter: @DahrJamail

See a photo gallery of the current oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico.

takeactionunite:

Ah, I frequently see so many posts on tumblr bashing Nike. Well, here’s your chance to actually do something. 

Did you know that 30 billion tonnes of wastewater are dumped into the Yangtze river every year and that Shanghai’s 20 million residents are dependent on the Yangtze for clean drinking water? 

Nike is the first company to publicly take up the Detox Challenge, claiming it aspires to the same goal of a toxic-free future. The question now is, who will be first amongst Nike, Adidas and other would-be champions to turn these words into action. 

Sign the petition to tell Nike and Adidas to Detox!

As much as 70 percent of China’s rivers, lakes and reservoirs are affected by water pollution, and the clothing industry is making it worse by pouring hazardous chemicals into the mix. 

(…)

These corporations, if they were individual human beings, would be locked up for life. Instead, they continue raking in the big bucks. Human rights abuses, murder, war, eco disasters, and animal exploitation keep these evil companies raking in the green. Prepare to be disgusted.

I don’t think the list is in any particular order. Even if you don’t agree with all of them (eg. the cigarette company) most of them are legit horrible. I’m posting a summary but I recommend reading the full article: http://brainz.org/15-deadliest-us-corporations/

1. Chevron : (then Texaco) discharged 18 billion gallons of toxic water into the rain forests of Ecuador without any remediation, destroying the livelihoods of local farmers and sickening indigenous populations. Chevron was responsible for the death of several Nigerians who protested the company’s polluting, exploiting presence in the Nigerian Delta. Chevron paid the local militia, known for its human rights abuses, to squash the protests, and even supplied them with choppers and boats. The military opened fire on the protesters, then burned their villages to the ground.  
2. DeBeers : was knowingly funding violent guerrilla movements in Angola, Sierra Nevada, and the Congo with its diamond purchases. In Botswana, DeBeers has been blamed for the “clearing” of land to be mined for diamonds — including the forcible removal of indigenous peoples who had lived there for thousands of years. The government allegedly cut off the tribe’s water supplies, threatened, tortured and even hanged resisters.
3. Tyson : Even if you don’t care about the horrendous animal abuse that has been documented in Tyson’s factory farms, you have to flinch at Tyson’s appalling environmental abuses and workers’ rights violation- Tyson has allowed e coli tainted beef to enter the food supply. A recent study showed that Tyson’s chickens were the most salmonella-and-campylobactor filled poultry of all the major suppliers and has even been accused of human trafficking to supply themselves with cheap labor.  
4. Smith & Wesson : In a study of the top ten guns involved in crime in the U.S., the first was the Smith & Wesson .38 Special.
5. Phillip Morris : is the largest manufacturer of cigarettes in the U.S.
6. Haliburton : is a huge “oilfield services” company, profited big time from the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq when Cheney called in his boys to quell burning oil wells — and to “help” the Iraq oil ministry pump and distribute oil. Haliburton has also been implicated in countless oil spills, including the BP disaster of 2010. 
7. Coca Cola : corporation has wrought devastation in India, where its factories use up to one million liters of water per day, leaving tens of thousands of nearby residents dry during the drought months. Then the factories dispose of the wastewater improperly, contaminating whatever water is left.  A lawsuit in 2001 accused Coca Cola of hiring paramilitaries in Columbia which suppressed unionization in the cola plant there through intimidation, torture and murder.
8. Pfizer : the largest pharmaceutical corporation in the U.S., pleaded guilty in 2009 to the largest health care fraud in U.S. history. Pfizer decided to use Nigerian children as guinea pigs. In 1996, Pfizer traveled to Kano, Nigeria to try out an experimental antibiotic on third-world diseases such as measles, cholera, and bacterial meningitis. They gave trovafloxacin to approximately 200 children. Dozens of them died in the experiment, while many others developed mental and physical deformities. According to the EPA, Pfizer can also proudly claim to be among the top ten companies in America causing the most air pollution.
9. ExxonMobil : is perhaps best known for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill which resulted in 11 million gallons of oil contaminating Prince William Sound. But they have also been responsible for a huge oil spill in Brooklyn and for aiding in the decline of Russia’s critically endangered grey whale because of drilling in its habitat. The Political Economy Research Institute ranks ExxonMobil sixth among corporations emitting airborne pollutants in the United States.
10. Caterpillar : supplies the Israeli army with bulldozers which are used to demolish Palestinian homes — sometimes with the people still inside. In 2003 a Caterpillar bulldozer ran over and killed Rachel Corrie, an American protesting in Gaza who stood in front of the tractor to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home.
11. Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Baily : “The Cruelest Show on Earth” is famous for its abuse of wild animals.
12. Monsanto : Monsanto’s list of evils includes creating the “terminator” seed which creates plants which never fruit or flower so that farmers must purchase them anew yearly, lobbying to have “hormone-free” labels removed from the labels of milk and infant milk replacer (through bovine growth hormone is believed to be a cancer-accelerator) as well as a wide range of environmental and human health violations associated with use of Monsanto’s poisons — most notably “Agent Orange.”
13. Nestle : crimes against man and nature include massive deforestation in Borneo — the habitat of the critically endangered orangutan — to grow palm oil, and buying milk from farms illegally-seized by a despot in Zimbabwe. Nestle attracted worldwide boycott efforts for urging mothers in third-world countries to use their infant milk replacer instead of breastfeeding, without warning them of the possible negative effects. Supposedly, Nestle hired women to dress as nurses to hand out free infant formula, which was frequently mixed with contaminated water, or the children starved when the formula ran out and their mothers could not afford more and their breast milk had already dried up from disuse.
14. British Petroleum : Who can forget 2010’s oil rig explosion in the Gulf Coast which killed 11 workers and thousands of birds, sea turtles, dolphins and other animals, effectively destroying the fishing and tourism industry in the region? This was not BP’s first crime against nature. In fact, between January 1997 and March 1998, BP was responsible for a whopping 104 oil spills.
15. Dyncorp : is best known for its brutality in impoverished countries, for trafficking in child sex slaves, for slaughtering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for training rebels in Haiti. This privatized military company is often hired by the U.S. government to protect American interests overseas — and so the government can claim no responsibility for Dyncorp’s actions. 

So yeah.

anticapitalist:

Name: Hugh Grant

Address: 4 Hortense Pl Saint Louis, MO 63108-1208  

Phone Number: ???

Routt County Property Assessor ID: R8172419 and PIN:280403065  

Email: hughgrant@monsanto.com  

Domain IP: 164.144.247.18  

Email Host IP: 68.232.130.211 and 68.232.135.185  

Relatives: Janice Grant, Frazer Grant

LMAO >:] Let’s bug the fuck out of him (Y)

Dear ———,

The Sacred Headwaters is the source of three of North America’s most important Salmon-bearing rivers. These rivers also feed critical populations of moose, bears, and caribou. Now, Royal Dutch Shell is on its way in to put all that at risk.

Tell Shell to pack up their gear and get out of the Sacred Headwaters. »

Shell wants to use ‘fracking’ to extract natural gas. It’s a process so risky that some residents in Alberta and Colorado have actually been able to light their tap water on fire after fracking projects contaminated nearby water tables.

Shell has built three drilling wells, and they plan to build 4,000 more! This is a risk that is not worth taking, for the health of communities that live downstream, and our delicate salmon populations.

Now is the time. We can put pressure on Shell until they realize they are not welcome. Tell them to “Get the Shell Out” of the Sacred Headwaters.

Thank you for taking action!

Emily L.
Care2 Campaign Team

Extremely worth a read (I know its long -_-) at the very least, read the bold
But really, I fucking hate Monsanto (besides just the documentary Food Inc, there are other documentaries on how the GM (genetically modified) seeds are actually bad for your health: just search “Monsanto corn” or “Monsanto GM food”)

intotheordinary:

I don’t appreciate the savior complex vis-a-vis the focus on Prince Charles, but this is an important issue that definitely deserves more attention, and not only because it reveals the exploitative nature of the IMF.

Text from the article:

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father’s body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low. 

Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.

Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years’ earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out. 

There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on - they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless - as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting. 

Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end. 

As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. ‘He was a loving and caring man,’ she said, weeping quietly.

‘But he couldn’t take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.’ 

Shankara’s crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story.

But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops. 

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts - and no income.

So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.

The crisis, branded the ‘GM Genocide’ by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a ‘global moral question’ - and the time had come to end its unstoppable march. 

Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by condemning ‘the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming… from the failure of many GM crop varieties’. 

Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.

The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace ‘the future’ and follow suit. 

So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the ‘suicide belt’ in Maharashtra state.

What I found was deeply disturbing - and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature. 

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.

Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops. 

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.

Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll. 

But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.

Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.

She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. ‘He cries when he thinks of his mother,’ said the dead woman’s aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.

Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.

The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds. 

But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were ‘magic seeds’ - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects. 

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks. 

The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations. 

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution. 

But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers’ lives have slid back into the dark ages. 

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many famers have found there is a terrible price to be paid.

Far from being ‘magic seeds’, GM pest-proof ‘breeds’ of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite. 

Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.

With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off. 

Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis. 

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own. 

As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death. 

Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children. 

As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a geneticallymodified plant created by Monsanto. 

‘We are ruined now,’ said the dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’ 

Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. ‘He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,’ she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her home to pay their respects. ‘He was dead by the time they got to hospital.’ 

Asked if the dead man was a ‘drunkard’ or suffered from other ‘social problems’, as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. ‘No! No!’ one of the dead man’s brothers exclaimed. ‘Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes. 

‘He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.’ 

Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a ‘factor in this tragedy’. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life. 

Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds  -  no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics. 

During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three ‘independent’ surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more expensive - and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.

(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is ‘only double’ the price of ‘official’ non-GM seed - but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by ‘unscrupulous’ merchants, who often also sell ‘fake’ GM seeds which are prone to disease.) 

With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. ‘We just want to escape from our problems,’ one said. ‘We just want help to stop any more of us dying.’

Prince Charles is so distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he is setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM. 

India’s farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant costs of GM seeds. 

This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. ‘I told him that we can survive,’ his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. ‘I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.’ 

But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children’s schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country. 

Cruelly, it’s the young who are suffering most from the ‘GM Genocide’  -  the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these ‘magic seeds’. 

Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html#ixzz1N9r5VJUd

What you have to understand is that these people are POOR, they live in small villages and they live off their crops, most of them are uneducated: something like this is basically the end of their lives and its fucking sick that big American corporations can just go exploit these people’s (not really avoidable) ignorance and ruin so many fucking lives. Yay, capitalism-

but the health industry liked radiaction and chemotherapy better because it makes them more fucking money

envirolutionary:

This will have extreme detrimental effects on the world’s water supply. No only that it will provide an incentive for nestle to buy more water pumping permits and increase the problem of water conservation in state and local governmental bodies. There has to be a way to stop this. 

Selling water on exchanges in the same way other commodities are traded could help solve a shortage of the world’s most precious raw material likely to hit long before oil runs dry, the chairman of Nestle said on Tuesday.

“I am not against the idea,” Peter Brabeck, chairman of the world’s largest food group, told Reuters when asked about the idea of exchange-based water trade.

The first place to consider it should be Alberta province , he said, where competition could be particularly fierce between farmers needing water for crops, and oil companies needing water to exploit oil sands, which require far more water than other kinds of oil deposit.

“We are actively dealing with the government of Alberta to think about a water exchange,” Brabeck said.

As a first step, he added, Alberta had separated land rights and water rights, so owning land did not automatically give rights to water that ran through it.

Alberta I’m sorry but that was one of the biggest mistakes you could have ever made. Now who does nestle go through, not only that they don’t have to pay taxes on groundwater. Oh this is infuriating.

He also cited the ancient example of the Gulf state of Oman, which had a water exchange system dating back thousands of years and noted how the strong rally in oil, which climbed to more than $127 a barrel for Brent crude in April and was above $117 on Tuesday on international futures markets, could erode demand.

“You see what happens when demand is growing. The market reacts and people start to use oil in a more efficient way,” he said.

“One thing that does not move at all is the price of water.”

The non-executive chairman refused to comment specifically on the current rally across commodities, including cocoa and coffee, as well as oil, used in huge quantities by Nestle. He said he could not comment on “operational issues.”

WATER, ENERGY, FOOD FOR BILLIONS

Brabeck answered questions before and after a speech to a mainly academic audience in Geneva in which he addressed the challenges of providing water, energy and food for a world population, which is expected to head to 10 billion, according to a U.N. report last week.

He echoed comments made at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, saying biofuels should not be allowed to devour the precious resources available.

“One of the first decisions we should be taking is no food for fuel,” he said, adding even second generation biofuels, which use non-food raw materials, were not the answer.

He argued the second generation would never be able to produce the amounts of biomass required by ambitious government targets to increase the amount of biofuel in the energy mix.

In Davos he said “no food for fuel” was a solution to food price inflation and he reiterated on Tuesday that escalating commodity prices were the root cause of unrest that has racked North Africa and the Middle East.

Water is arguably more precious than fuel, so are we going to have a no water for fuel policy? Where oil companies cannot use water in drilling practices, no of course not, because oil is not a “biofuel” and it’s lobby has enough money to buy off all the worlds politicians and then some. 

“The Arab spring was really started when the governments had to increase the price of food. The political side came afterwards. It came because people were pushed backwards into extreme poverty,” he said.

Spread the world- we will not stand for a tradable water market, where the price of water is able to fluctuate due to demand. If this is the case, it is a horrific solution to the overpopulation problem… people will die off in some regions if they are unable to buy water at the market price plus interest. Something must be done. Spread the word.
NO WATER FOR FUEL— WE WONT STAND FOR A TRADABLE WATER MARKET

Nestle your going down…You were already on my list there is no stopping it now. I was all about compromise, but you have made it impossible to reason with your actions. Go ahead make your money, but when people die so does the market…

BOYCOTT NESTLE! 

Nestle;

Endangering lives of babies to sell their stupid milk formula = Check

Supporting Israeli crimes = Check

Profitizing what should be an essential human right (clean water) = In Progress

Boycott Nestle, seriously people, this compay is fucked-

Ikea presses sofas with weights like a gazillion times so that they’re sure they’re durable and BMW spends forever on each car with each part and test drives and redesigns untill its perfect but when it comes to pharmaceutical companies they’re all “not sure” about the exact side-effects and which sicknesses their products are actually usefull for and whether or not the specific drug has “clear advantages over others in the market” or they can’t tell you if its safe for kids because “not enough research has been done in that area” Yeah so just pop a few pills and hope its fucking worth it. Good to know society has its priorities straight; sofa comfort > medicinal safety