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April 29, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

21:22

Pesticide Coated Seeds with Carey Gillam

Investigative reporter Carey Gillam discusses pesticide coated seeds with RFK Jr.

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	Hey, everybody.
	I'm really happy today to have one of my great friends, the long-term comrade in arms, Carrie Gillum, who is a veteran investigative journalist, one of the few left in the world, with more than 30 years of experience covering corporate news, including 17 years as a senior correspondent with Reuters.
	She is the author of Whitewash, the story of a weed killer, cancer, and corruption of scientists about Monsanto.
	The book won the coveted Rachel Carson Award for the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2018.
	Her second book, a narrative legal thriller titled The Monsanto Papers, was released March 2nd, 2021.
	She has also contributed chapters for a textbook about environmental journalism and a book about pesticide use in Africa.
	And she has a ton of other incredible qualifications.
	She writes regularly for The Guardian.
	Her work has additionally been published in the New York Times, The Huff Post, and many, many other outfits.
	Welcome to the show, Gary.
	Thanks.
	Thanks, Bobby.
	You and I always have a million things to talk about, but I really wanted to drill down today on neonicotinoids and the disappearance of bees, which is the insect This devastating collapse of the insect population, which is now saying 80% of winged insects have disappeared in the past 10 years.
	It's not a crisis that is covered on the front pages as it ought to be, but I find it so extraordinarily alarming.
	And it seems like the neonicotinoids are a primary culprit.
	Yeah, certainly.
	And I appreciate you, you know, wanting to talk about this topic.
	I've just come back in the last week or two from the Midwest, a story I'm researching actually in Nebraska that centers on a very large contamination event with neonicotinoids.
	This is important because it's really what's happening here.
	It's focusing the attention of regulators and consumers and a number of researchers from universities because they're very worried not only about pollinators, but about the human health impacts as well, something that has really not gotten a lot of attention.
	But yeah, these neonicotinoids and their neurotoxins, you know, they're essentially insecticides that are used in a whole variety of ways.
	But in large part is seed coatings, coatings on the seed that gets planted in the soil and gets absorbed in all aspects of the plant.
	And researchers have found that this is affecting pollinators, but it's also getting into drinking water supplies.
	And as it's used, it doesn't break down in the soil very easily.
	And so this is just accumulating and accumulating, and it is being found to harm pollinators, honeybees, but also other forms of wildlife.
	And unfortunately, we don't have really good regulation around this, around The treatment of this around the disposal of the seeds, which is what became the very large contamination event in Nebraska that we can talk about if you want to do that.
	And you're seeing, even as the science builds about the problems that this is bringing to our environment, you're seeing the EPA poised to announce, you know, an extension of the approvals for several of these neonicotinoids.
	The European Union has banned several of them.
	Canada is looking to restrict But our U.S. EPA just keeps these things out in the marketplace.
	Are there any countries in the world that just ban them outright?
	Yeah, I mean, several countries in, as I said, in the European Union have put in place bans on several of these types of chemicals, these neonicotinoids.
	Despite the bans, we've seen several emergency use authorizations, you know, if you will, in these countries that continue to allow them to be used despite the fact that they're legally banned.
	So the chemical companies that are involved, Syngenta, Bayer, ChemWars, you know, the former DuPont, Dow, are really pressuring regulators around the world because these are profitable products for them.
	And it's noteworthy.
	So they're used in agriculture quite a bit.
	On farmers, they coat seed corn, for instance.
	Almost 100% of the seed corn in the U.S. now planted comes with these neonicotinoids right on the seed.
	And you know, and what farmers say, what they tell me, and what they were saying again up in Nebraska when I was there just two weeks ago, they don't really have a choice.
	They can't hardly find seed anymore that isn't coated with these chemicals.
	Because the big chemical companies now are also the big seed companies, and they control the market to such a degree that farmers can't really escape these chemicals when they're planting conventional crops.
	So, you know, and that power and control of the marketplace certainly feeds into, I think, the reason we don't have a lot of good regulation around these neonicotinoids.
	And as you know, as you've written about it extensively, and I know, the The USDA and the agricultural regulators are captive agencies that are essentially just subsidiaries for these big chemical companies in the same way that the pharmaceutical companies run the public health regulatory agencies.
	Yeah, I mean, again, this is probably just another example, but we've seen that play out with a whole array of different chemicals, not just these neonicotinoids, but Yeah, I mean,
	these big companies spend a lot of money in Washington, D.C. lobbying officials, and they hold sway with the regulatory agencies.
	The pesticide chlorpyrifos is probably a really good example of Where you have this chemical, this is not a neonicotinoid, but it is an insecticide, chlorpyrifos, which was found to be so detrimental to children's brains, babies' brains, when they were exposed either through pregnancy of the mother or early in their childhood development.
	And it was found to be so dangerous that the EPA's own scientists internally said, we can't support this.
	There's no safe level in food or water.
	And other countries were looking to ban it.
	Federal courts were instructing the EPA to move on this.
	The Obama administration said, OK, we're going to ban this from agricultural use.
	It had already been banned from household use since the year 2000.
	But we got a new administration.
	Trump administration came in.
	Dow Chemical gave a million dollars to the inaugural fund for Trump and sat down with the Trump EPA. And that ban vanished.
	So that is such a good example of what we see over and over and over again about how powerful companies with money and influence really control the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be protecting the public.
	The same thing happened to me with the Vaccine Safety Commission.
	President Trump asked me to run a Vaccine Safety Commission.
	I would make sure that we had proper science to make sure that vaccines were actually safe and effective, meaning placebo-controlled studies.
	And the word got out that I had been appointed, and Pfizer gave President Trump a million dollars, the same as Dow did, for his inaugural fund.
	And he brought in two people who were handpicked by Pfizer to run HHS, Scott Copley, and Alex Azar.
	Insiders from the industry report of directors of Pfizer and these other companies, and they immediately killed the Vaccine Safety Commission.
	So is Washington, D.C. is a swamp?
	These big chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies, big ag, the oil industry, the alligators, and we're the food.
	Our children are the food.
	Tell us about what happened in Nebraska.
	Yeah, I mean, this is just such a Tragic, just terrible situation, but it really is emblematic of the, you know, destructive things that can happen when you have such a lack of regulation.
	So you had this ethanol plant up in this little community outside Omaha in eastern Nebraska, rural part of the state, this ethanol plant, and they were making, of course, biofuel, but they came up with this really, you know, interesting, unusual strategy That they would use these neonic-treated, these pesticide-treated seeds in their production process for their biofuel.
	And they could get these very cheaply by inviting companies like Bayer and Syngenta and others to dump their unsold, unwanted excess stocks of seed, take them over to the ethanol plant.
	The ethanol plant will use them Bayer and Syngenta no longer have to worry about what to do with these toxic pesticide-laden seeds.
	They don't have to figure out how to dispose of them in an environmentally safe way.
	It's legally toxic waste under red crime and make us a thousand dollars a drum.
	Disposing them in a controlled landfill and if they can dump them into a, we see this all the time, where these dirty industries are disposing of their worst products.
	That's what fluoride is.
	Fluoride is a highly toxic byproduct of the oil refining process, and the oil refiners didn't want to pay to dispose of it, so they persuaded the regulatory agencies to put it in America's water.
	And it's the same thing.
	So what happened here is, yeah, so this generated millions of Gallons of wastewater that was containing levels of neonicotinoids that were many thousands of times higher than what the EPA said was safe.
	And wet cake, another byproduct of this waste, which again had these insanely high levels of these toxic chemicals in it.
	And this company Then they have all this wastewater and these waste piles and they're trying to figure out what to do with it and they start trying to spread some of it on farm fields in the area.
	Meanwhile, people are getting sick, animals are getting sick, honeybee colonies are dying, there's this terrible stench in the area.
	So it took actually years of regulators ignoring consumer complaints really and And really allowing this company to violate all sorts of environmental laws.
	But finally, a year ago, they couldn't go on any longer and they cracked down.
	They shut down the plant.
	And now you have this massive cleanup that's going on or trying to get underway.
	And the companies, Bayer and Syngenta and others, are in there trying to mount a cleanup, but not really sure what to do and how to do it.
	They've capped the 16 acres of toxic wet cake with what they call a posi shell, which is used at Superfund sites.
	It's like a mixture of fiber and clay and cement that they drop from helicopters over this huge landscape to try to contain the toxic waste.
	But what's happening is the water, the wastewater is already into the water table.
	It's already killed off, you know, they have fish that have died and And the frogs are gone and the toads and the bees have died.
	And researchers are now trying to launch a big epidemiology study to monitor people and gather blood and urine and see what levels of contaminants they have in them and then track them to see if they have health impacts down the road.
	And they're running into problems getting funding.
	The legislature doesn't seem to want to fund that kind of work, but this is a really important story.
	About what happens when you Pay attention and you don't properly regulate these harmful chemicals.
	It requires this kind of cognitive dissonance that I always marvel at.
	The hypnotic ability that these companies have to convince us that it's okay to put neurotoxins on our food.
	Because the way that these chemicals kill insects is by destroying their nervous system.
	Their nerve cells, their neuronal cells, are the same material as ours are.
	Yeah.
	And so why do they think that these are going to be so lethal to insects and frogs and bees, and yet they're safe for human beings?
	Of course, there's no testing that shows they're safe.
	And we've seen this steady decline in neurological health among Americans.
	We've seen IQ loss after steadily gaining IQ every decade since 1900.
	We know in the last We've seen an explosion of neurodevelopmental disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, sleeping disorders, narcolepsy, ASD, autism, and nobody's connecting the dots.
	It's really pretty extraordinary.
	You're right.
	Exactly right.
	And one of the points that's been made to me repeatedly and was again in the situation with Nebraska by the scientists there was Is that our regulator, we talk about one chemical or one class of chemical and what does this do, you know,
	in this particular situation, but we often fail to consider the big picture that we're exposed not to just this particular neonicotinoid or this particular herbicide, but we're exposed now on a regular basis through our diet and the air and Occupational exposures, the food we eat, everything.
	We're exposed to a whole array of these chemicals.
	And what is the synergistic impact on our health on the long term?
	Not only our neurological health, but our reproductive health, right?
	And cancer and other forms of disease and illness.
	You know, we really are just living in this pervasive, toxic soup of chemical exposure.
	And our regulators don't seem to want to try to look at that bigger picture.
	And I know you do that a lot in your work, but it is something that scientists are wrestling with and trying to get the funding for.
	You know, for the situation in Nebraska, in the Midwest, they're finding not only the chemicals themselves, the actual neonicotinoids, but they're finding the breakdown products of those.
	And so where is the research on Those exposures, right?
	So they really hope to learn a lot from this situation.
	But as I said, they are stymied for funding.
	They've been turned down by many foundations.
	They're being told this work is really sort of anti-business.
	Why do they want to look so deeply into the impacts of these agricultural chemicals?
	Yeah, they're having a hard time.
	Meanwhile, NIH has a $42 billion annual budget that is supposed to use funding exactly this kind of science, the science that tells us what is causing the chronic disease epidemic.
	NIAID, Tony Fauci's agency has a $7.6 billion annual budget.
	And they will not spend any money funding these scientists.
	They only fund science that pushes the corporate paradigm, corporate profit-taking, And they will not do science that threatens corporate hegemony over American democracy, over American health, the commoditization of our children, our landscapes, and every living thing.
	I want to ask you something that people, I think, will be really curious about.
	What keeps you going?
	You're really a unique person.
	You're one of the last investigative journalists that is still out there.
	You have been relentless.
	You have been hammered by industry, by the media in this country, and you've lost jobs.
	You have the talent to be a host of any national television news.
	You have every gift that a journalist could have, and you've decided to Relinquish all that.
	And you live, you know, you're a corn-fed girl from Kansas.
	You're living and you're still there.
	And you could be in any of these major media markets.
	Talk a little bit about that and about what's happened, how they punished you.
	Sure.
	Thank you for that.
	Yeah.
	So I've been covering the agrochemical industry since 1998.
	And early on, I worked for Reuters, you know, and did get offered...
	Several years into that, positions in much bigger cities and promotions and to move into bigger roles, as you said.
	But I really was committed, became very committed to staying here in the Midwest and covering Monsanto and Dow and DuPont and Syngenta and the chemical industry and the impacts on human and environmental health.
	It did become very difficult because as I became more knowledgeable and dug deeper into the industry and did investigative work, wrote my book, they did come after me.
	I mean, Monsanto, it's been documented, papers that came out for litigation you were involved in and others, internal issues.
	Memos and emails and communications about, you know, how to discredit me, funding secret third parties and groups to attack my character and my credibility and to try to smear my book, my first book, Whitewash.
	They did come after me, you know.
	They still come after me.
	Thankfully, The Guardian sees through all of that.
	Other outlets that I've written for have been attacked pretty much anywhere I speak.
	They get pressured and harassed not to have me speak.
	But I just, I figure the more somebody protests, you know, the closer you are to the truth, right?
	They wouldn't be coming after me so hard if I wasn't hidden close to home.
	I've got kids.
	Maybe one day I'll have grandkids.
	I want a better world for them.
	My father was an environmentalist after he retired as an engineer.
	He became an advocate for the environment through his church and he formed a group called the Sustainable Sanctuary and feels that it is all of us.
	We are all obligated.
	To try to make the world better for the next generation.
	And so this is, you know, we all have to do it in different ways, but this is how I do it.
	I just want to bring facts to light and help people understand and maybe help people, you know, make better choices and maybe reform regulatory policy so we're all healthier at some point.
	Right?
	I don't know.
	It's a hard road.
	You are luminous inside and out, and you're just a beautiful, beautiful soul, and I admire you so much, Gary, for the way that you've lived your life.
	The choices you made, you're an incredible mother and wife, but you're doing a public service that takes a tremendous amount of courage, and I want to thank you for that.
	And for all the support you've given our work over the many, many years, you're really an incredible ally.
	We all love you.
	Will you tell our listeners how they can read your material and how they can support you?
	Sure.
	No, thank you so much.
	So Carrie Gillum, no one ever spells it right, but it's C-A-R-E-Y-G-I-L-L-A-M. I have a website.
	I'm on Twitter.
	Come find me on Twitter.
	You can Google Guardian and Carrie Gillum and see my articles there.
	And I'm also super excited to announce we're launching a news outlet called The New Lead.
	L-E-D-E with backing from the Environmental Working Group to really try to provide a home for deep environmental journalism that matters.
	And so I'll be launching that with EWG and hope that you, Bobby, will share some of those stories on your website.
	And, you know, we can just all continue to do our parts, right, to bring truth to light and create a healthier future, hopefully.
	Thank you, Kerry Gillum.
	And if you want to see the film of this podcast, go to CHD's website, CHD The Defender.
	And Kerry, thank you so much for everything that you do.

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