Standing With Rosa: Why Morgan Griffith Should Cosponsor Rosa DeLauro's Bill

One of those "eco" organizations sent me a petition, then claimed the petition couldn't be sent because I don't display live contact information online. (Shouldn't the Internet be required to block numbers from street addresses? If they're not registered with a business, I think that should definitely be required.) Just to protect my own copyrighted material, here's what I wrote on the petition. Gentle Readers, please feel free to paste the text below into your word processing software, fill in your own U.S. Representative's name (duh) and key facts from your own journey toward greater Glyphosate Awareness, and send it. Bonus points if you take the time to print it out on paper, hand-write your name and address and a personal note if you know your Representative personally, put it in an envelope, and mail it.

"
Dear Congressman Griffith,

As you know, I’m alarmed by the lack of regulation of glyphosate, a pesticide that can cause cancer and is sickening a lot of your faithful constituents here in the Ninth District--even though some are bitterly clinging to their poison and indignantly denying that their chronic medical conditions flare when they spray!  To address this issue, I urge you to cosponsor the “Keep Food Safe from Glyphosate Act of 2019” introduced by Congresswoman DeLauro.

Glyphosate is toxic for human health and the environment. In early 2015 The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) — the cancer evaluation arm of the World Health Organization — convened a meeting of 17 scientific experts from 11 countries to review the cancer data regarding glyphosate. The IARC experts unanimously voted to classify glyphosate as a probable (Group 2A) human carcinogen.  In 2017, California listed glyphosate as a chemical known to cause cancer.  The EPA calculated that 1-to-2-year-old children are likely to have the highest exposure to glyphosate.

Right now, over 11,200 people with cancer are suing Monsanto. They allege that their exposure to Roundup®—a glyphosate pesticide product— is to blame. Just this past month, a federal jury found Monsanto’s Roundup® to be a “substantial factor” in causing Edwin Hardeman’s cancer and demanded that Monsanto pay him $80 million dollars in damages.

Glyphosate is used in over 750 herbicide products and applied to fields in the U.S. at over 250 million pounds annually. Apart from significant risks to human health, the U.S. Geological Survey routinely finds glyphosate in U.S. waterways. Ecological data also indicates that glyphosate and glyphosate-formulated products are toxic to aquatic organisms and are extremely lethal to amphibians. Independent studies have found concentrations of glyphosate in human urine and breast milk. Recent studies even indicate glyphosate has the potential to be even more harmful in combination with other chemicals.

In the past 19 years, glyphosate use in U.S. agriculture has increased 20-fold. Glyphosate’s long term impacts are just starting to be apparent with monarch decline serving as just one example.  Glyphosate is widely used among the monarch’s migration route — virtually wiping out milkweed, the only food young monarchs eat. A recent report found monarch butterflies would need a 5-fold increase to recover from the risk of quasi-extinction.

Monsanto’s glyphosate is harming our environment and the very ecosystems we depend on for sustainable food and farming systems, it’s harming our health and could be showing up on our plates at unsafe levels. In fact, numerous tests have revealed glyphosate residues on cereal, granola bars and other foods that kids and families typically eat at levels that are higher than some scientists consider protective of children’s health with an adequate margin of safety.

In addition, I’m concerned that our federal government has even gone as far as to try to cover up residues of glyphosate in our food. Leaked FDA documents show that FDA officials found trace amounts of glyphosate on nearly every food that it tested. The lab that found over-tolerance levels on corn and some trace amounts of glyphosate on oats and honey was suspended and re-assigned to another project. All the while, these important results were omitted from the FDA’s official assessment scheduled to be published later this year.

We need action now. I urge you to cosponsor the “Keep Food Safe from Glyphosate Act of 2019,” which would increase USDA testing for glyphosate especially for kid-friendly foods, create a permanent tolerance level of 0.1ppm—the lowest level of residue exposure recommended by the EPA—for oats (a food commonly ingested by children) and prevent its continuous widespread usage by changing glyphosate labels to include that “it is unlawful to apply this product prior to the harvest of oats.”

Actually, it should be unlawful to apply glyphosate after any food crop is visible above the soil, and especially in the presence of Ninth District agricultural specialties like tomatoes, strawberries, and apples.

Sincerely,
Priscilla King
VA, 24251
"

For those who care about such things, Rosa DeLauro is a Democrat from Connecticut. So? Let that be a challenge to Southern Republicans to get tighter regulations on this poison!