A forceful argument for an agricultural regulatory environment that puts public interest above corporate profits.
Uncovering corporate malfeasance at “perhaps the world’s best-known agricultural powerhouse.”
Former Reuters senior correspondent Gillam shows how Monsanto has suppressed indications that its popular weed killer Roundup, “the most widely used herbicide in the world,” has been found to trigger endocrine disruptions “linked to some cancers, birth defects, and developmental problems in children.” Two decades ago, the author was covering finance and real estate when she was switched to the agriculture beat. She admits to being disappointed at first, even though the choices farmers make amount to “billions of dollars in combined sales of seeds and herbicide” for corporations like Monsanto, which also markets genetically modified seeds able to withstand glyphosate, the major chemical component in Roundup. In the author’s well-informed opinion, Monsanto has hit upon a brilliant marketing strategy in showing how farmers can kill weeds without endangering the survival of their genetically modified crops. The widespread use of Roundup on farms, golf courses, and lawns reaches into every corner of our lives, and this is reflected in Monsanto’s balance sheet. However, as Gillam notes, the human health costs have yet to be determined. The Environmental Protection Agency has set the level of legally allowed residues higher than those considered acceptable in any other country, and it has failed to mandate across-the-board testing for residues on food. For example, tests of some “organic” honey revealed toxin levels five times the legal limit allowed by the European Union. As the author relates, some studies have concluded that the evidence of glyphosate’s toxicity is mixed regarding humans but definitive with animals. In this hard-hitting, eye-opening narrative, Gillam calls for widespread reform of the American regulatory system, which would mandate that the Department of Agriculture conduct routine tests of food products for glyphosate residues and release the results for public scrutiny.
A forceful argument for an agricultural regulatory environment that puts public interest above corporate profits.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61091-832-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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