{"id":152732,"date":"2015-10-27T14:28:31","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T08:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=152732"},"modified":"2015-10-31T15:34:23","modified_gmt":"2015-10-31T10:04:23","slug":"public-fears-about-modern-agriculture-pesticides-the-emergence-of-the-two-tier-food-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/public-fears-about-modern-agriculture-pesticides-the-emergence-of-the-two-tier-food-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Fears About Modern Agriculture, Pesticides & The Emergence Of The Two-Tier Food Market"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Chandre Dharmawardana<\/span><\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Prof.<\/a>

Prof. Chandre Dharmawardana<\/p><\/div>\n

The fear that what you eat is \u201cpoisoned\u201d and it is not good for you have produced a two-tier market with the top tier, made up of \u201corganic foods\u201d catering to the rich, while the ordinary people have to eat the food from the large warehouse sales centers, US examples being Costco and Wall-mart. The clout of the rich social segment is such that its campaign is likely to endanger the food market of the poor, especially in developing countries where safe pesticides and fertilizers have been banned by frightened politicians who are faced with various illnesses whose origins are often ill-understood, and hence simply blamed on \u201cpoisoned farming\u201d. In Canada, a small group of people from Sri Lanka were trying to sell their “traditional rice” packets, and also collect money for their NGO, claiming that normal Sri Lankan rice is contaminated with arsenic (although there is no evidence to support such a claim).<\/p>\n

Dr. Mercola’s writings<\/strong><\/p>\n

I decided to write this some what general article after reading some of Dr. Mercola’s write ups on GMOs and Glyphosate. Dr. Mercola is known to have glibly swallowed the \u201carticle\u201d by Anthony Samsel and Dr. Stephanie Seneff, published<\/span><\/a> in the pay-and-publish anything (PPA) \u201cjournal\u201d named \u201cEntropy\u201d where the authors had presented pure speculations as \u201cresearch\u201d. The present article can be taken as a companion to my article about Glyphosate and its alleged capacity to cause Kidney disease that I put out as a response to Dr. Jeff Ritterman’s article<\/span><\/a> on the mis-named \u201ctruthout.com\u201d publication claiming that a group of Californian scientists have provided credible evidence that glyphosate causes kidney disease. Ritterman based himself on a speculative article published in another PPA journal, where the lead author was not Californian, but Dr Jayasumana of Sri Lanka. An account of these \u201cpredatory\u201d for-profit PPA journals which are not peer-reviewed, and not run by learned societies, and live only on the internet<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Recently, when the WHO classified Glyphosate (in the same class as cell-phone radiation) as an agent that can \u201cprobably\u201d cause cancer, there has been a flurry of public activity, with internet writers like Dr. Mercola cashing in on public apprehensions. An excellent, valid scientific discussion of all this can be fond in a TV-Ontario discussion which involved some of the leading researchers working on the toxicity of Glyphosate.<\/p>\n