If you care about safe food, make time to connect with the International Monsanto Tribunal this weekend. Then, read about Monsanto’s lobbying and consider how your food is affected by Roundup, the most commonly sold pesticide in the world.

There’s a line up of hard hitting and heart breaking testimony scheduled for the International Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague, October 14th to 16th. When better to expose the lobbying strategies and tools of Monsanto and friends than during this Tribunal timed to coincide with World Food Day?

The organizers of the Monsanto Tribunal will be live streaming this historic event — 30 witnesses and legal experts, from five continents, will testify in The Hague before five international judges. These witnesses will tell the judges, and the world, how Monsanto has ruined their health, their communities, their livelihoods.

Citizens’ tribunals have a long history of drawing widespread attention to corporate corruption, and of ultimately leading to criminal trials. Courts in countries all over the world need to hold Monsanto accountable for its crimes.

The Monsanto Tribunal is already very present in the social media, and you could help to make it even better. Like it on Facebook and share the posts, follow on Twitter and tweet and retweet, especially on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Watch the website and Facebook page for the link to livestreaming.

Timed to coincide with the Monsanto Tribunal, a new guide to Monsanto’s key lobbying strategies and tools has just been released by Corporate Europe Observatory.

LOBBYING: AN ATTACK ON US, OUR PLANET AND DEMOCRACY exposes the limitless resources Monsanto and like-minded corporations have to buy political power through lobbying. Not only are they represented by numerous lobbying associations at every level from local to global, they also have an army of hired-gun lobbyists, fund scientists to act as their mouthpiece, and participate in ‘greenwashing’ projects.

The report covers roughly three fields of industry lobbying: directly targeting decision-makers; PR and propaganda; and undermining science. Broadly three types of actors exist: those giving the orders, those following them, and those who are accomplices to these attempts.

If your appetite is whetted to learn about how Monsanto products affect YOU, take the time to read the two-part article by Dr. R. Warren Bell BA MDCM CCFP FCFP(LM) and Past Founding President of the Canadian Associations of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). Published by the National Observer this past summer, the articles make the case that Roundup, the herbicide whose active ingredient is glyphosate – currently the most widely sold pesticide in the world – has just been put on life support.

In case you don’t get to reading the articles right away – here’s Dr. Bell’s short commentary on Roundup:

Glyphosate is sprayed heavily on “Roundup Ready” crops, which comprise 90% of all GMO food crops. But as [another FB correspondent] points out, it is also used very widely to “dessicate” conventional crops — sprayed on them about 3 weeks before harvest, to push them towards ripening as they are being poisoned to death — the last attempt by the plant to send its DNA to future generations — which, as a byproduct, synchronizes ripening and thus increases crop yields. So ALL food grown conventionally, i.e. with synthetic chemical inputs, is heavily contaminated with glyphosate. And don’t be fooled by industry claims that the amounts of glyphosate are too small to have any health impacts! Human hormones exert their effects in our bodies in infinitesimal amounts — one part per billion or trillion, far less than the amounts of glyphosate left in foods, which while small, are often more than 1000 times greater (one part per million, or mg/kg).

Monsanto (along with other agrichemical companies) has made huge amounts of money by playing on the fact that the science behind human metabolism is not widely understood, even among regulators who bear the responsibility for controlling the release of chemicals like glyphosate. Without a shred of exaggeration, it can be said that all of us are guinea pigs in Monsanto’s (and others) incredibly lucrative gamble with the future health of humankind.

So are you mad about being Monsanto’s guinea pig?
Vote on whether you think we should ban Roundup in Canada through our poll below: