By Eric Rempel
Roundup truly is a remarkable chemical. Sprayed onto growing plant material, it will kill the entire plant, roots and all. Many farmers find it hard to conceive of how they could produce our food without Roundup. Home owners too find it invaluable as they grow their lawns, flowers and vegetables. Its usefulness in killing unwanted plants is unsurpassed, and as a bonus it is considered to be extremely safe with respect to human health. I well remember my introduction to Roundup in a university class in the mid 1960s. The instructor said one could drink a litre of the chemical and there would be no negative effect on the body. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has not yet identified any reason for us to be concerned about Roundup in our food.
The contribution Roundup has made to crop production has been significant. Years after Roundup was introduced as a chemical that killed all plant life, a gene for Roundup resistance was discovered, and this made Roundup even more useful. Through genetic modification, farmers now have access to Roundup resistant canola, soybean, corn, and a host of other crops.
But now red flags with respect to Roundup use are beginning to emerge. I find two questions with respect to Roundup troubling. The first is whether, when we first begin to use a chemical in our food production, do we really know what to look for in terms of unwanted side effect. There may be an unwanted side-effect where we have not even been looking. For example, we look for side effects in human health, but the negative effect occurs in the effect on the soil. Secondly, I have a concern with the “break-down” of Roundup. When I first learned about and used Roundup, I was told it quickly broke down on contact with soil. The implication was clear: Roundup disappeared soon after it was applied to a field. I have since become much more sceptical of any claims that any chemical “disappears.” No doubt a chemical breaks down, but inevitably, always there is a break-down product. In the case of Roundup, its primary breakdown product is AMPA. So how much do we know about AMPA and its long term effect?
If Roundup is applied to a field several times a year, year after year (as is common now), for say 50 years, what effect does that have on that field? And suppose we were to find, after 50 years, that it has a negative effect, how long would it take for that field to return to a normal, pre-Roundup state, were we to stop applying Roundup? We don't know! Until 50 years have passed, we can't know.
But we are beginning to discover some trends. Persistent use of Roundup does have a negative effect on soil biota, most notably the organisms that convert unavailable phosphorous to plant available phosphate. This is serious.
This is serious because phosphorous is essential to plant life. The conventional response to phosphate deficiency in the soil is to apply chemical phosphate fertilizer. But where does that chemical phosphate come from? Phosphate is mined in only a few places on earth, all are far from here, and supplies there are dwindling.
If a soil loses its capacity to convert phosphorous, and if rock phosphate becomes increasingly hard to get, what then?
There are alternatives to chemical farming, but if we continue with business as usual, we won't learn much about them.