There are six corporations that control the pesticide market, namely: Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto, Dow, BASF, and Dupont – four of which you would recall from our previous discussions. But, we have to talk about these corporations in light of the pesticide problem, particularly by considering how the use of pesticides made by these companies is harming the health of children, leading to a rise in child cancers and AUTISM.
THE HARMS OF CHEMICAL PESTICIDES ON CHILDREN
So, every day, children are exposed to up to 130 chemical pollutants from pesticides. All around the world, scientists and doctors are raising the alarm, linking an increase in child cancers, birth defects and even the explosion of AUTISM with exposure to chemicals in pesticides.
For instance, in France, children breathe a pesticide classified as “probable carcinogenic”. Distributed all over the world, it’s one of Bayer’s best-sellers. Well, a Martin Boudot and his team of reporters took some samples of dozens of children’s hair and went to the annual shareholder’s meeting of Bayer in Germany to confront the corporations on its own principles.
In Hawaii, politics and citizens battle with the pesticides industry. Hawaii has become an open-air laboratory where corporations test their future plants and seeds. But it also experienced an explosion in birth defects on the island, while residents voted against the massive use of pesticides in the fields close to schools and hospitals. BUT… then the pesticide industry sued them to enable the use of pesticides to continue!
In our initial discussion on the pesticide expose, we made reference to Pete Daniel and his argument on government failure to protect human health and wildlife from the dangers of pesticides. But, when you then look at the various cases of how the pesticide industry has been allowed to harm children (as we have today, and through this documentary excerpt), while the surge in child cancers and AUTISM are made to seem mysterious, you understand the gravity of the failures of governments to fulfil their duty to protect. Worse of all is that children are often the first victims of this failure.
Excerpt from Starting Point
Written By Lindokuhle Mabaso
