GLYPHOSATE--DIGGING DEEPER
I'm flying overnight to Poland to do several two-day masterclasses for farmers there. I'm excited to see what a difference it will be from my last visit to Israel, where farm policy mirrors America. In Poland, farmers can sell raw milk and glyphosate is prohibited.
The comments from my yesterday post deserve some further nuance. For brevity, I work hard at keeping these posts short enough to read in less than 5 minutes, which sometimes works against a broader and perhaps fairer discussion of a topic.
For the record, I'm deeply grateful for RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement and am glad to be a part of it, albeit peripherally. But few things frustrate us more than hypocrisy. Tell me you don't know. Or tell me you can't do anything. Or tell me you can't fix everything at once. Goodness, I can handle telling me you made a mistake. Most of us are pretty forgiving when someone admits a mistake. I've certainly made plenty.
But don't double down on an inaccurate narrative, especially when it's diametrically opposed to your stated beliefs. I have not seen a scintilla of evidence that glyphosate was in imminent threat of being pulled from the market. So Sri Lanka is not a fair comparison. I can even agree that an overnight elimination of glyphosate would not be good policy. But nobody has proved or even shown a likelihood that it faced sudden and irrevocable lack of availability. That's a completely contrived fear and forces us to ask why this executive order?
Some think it was a Trump deal with Bayer, which produces nearly 40 pharmaceutical medications, most of which are sold in America at many times the price they're available in other countries. If Americans fear drug prices far more than glyphosate, which is probably the case, is it possible that to curry votes in the midterm Trump offered national security for glyphosate to Bayer if it would in turn dial down its prices to the American market? Cheaper drugs in exchange for glyphosate protection. Good deal.
The frustration of this whole episode is that fact-checking the narrative (99 percent of glyphosate comes from China), adding up the numbers (roughly half the corn and soybeans it's used on are either not consumed in America or not used for feed or food), and looking at alternatives (like perennial prairie polycultures under livestock intensive management) all oppose the justification and fear engendered in the EO. Sorry, that's a long sentence reminiscent of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, but if you'll take a breath partway through, you can make it in two breaths if you read fast.
Putting myself in RFK Jr.'s shoes, I can imagine that Trump demanded his unconditional endorsement or resign. Faced with that ultimatum, I might say "wow, we've got a lot of great momentum going at MAHA; we're really climbing a mountain here and making progress; yes, this is a bit of a hill, but it's the political cost of keeping MAHA on track and climbing the real mountain ahead of us." That very well may be the fact, but I would hope I would give real time caveats rather than an unconditional endorsement and then having to invest myself in political triage for the next weeks. Ain't worth it.
Realize, too, that the core of the Republican base in the Senate all hails from Big Ag states: Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, etc. That makes the Republican party completely beholden to Bayer and friends. We're seeing that over and over again, with the $12 billion soybean bailout for sure. The truth is that farmers have become little more than welfare dependents, like a bunch of irresponsible addicts. What a shame.
If Trump had done nothing, glyphosate would have continued being available. There is plenty of it. Nobody was threatening to discontinue it.
So why this sudden, unprecedented selection for a particular brand? I'm at a loss. Does it add up to you?
