Pesticide and GMO Misinformation Debunks Tim Caulfield

When it comes to the critical issues of pesticides and GMO's, Canadians need to scrutinize their 'scientific icons.'

It's important to debunk misinformation. I am in complete agreement. 

So last year why did we assign Timothy Caulfield to the Order of Canada for his supposed work in this regard? Why do we hold him up as a scientific expert?  

If you look at his twitter feed, he happily shares talking points from the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP), what an award-winning Le Monde investigation calls a “well-known propaganda website” that is “fed by PR people linked to the pesticides and biotechnology industries.”

Their website, which received one fifth of its budget from pesticide giant Bayer in 2022, has an entire page dedicated to Tim Caulfield articles.

But the support is mutual.

I counted 26 times that Mr. Caulfield shared GLP posts on X, including an unauthored GLP article called a “Deep dive into the science and history of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkiller” back in 2019. He called it a “a solid review of much of the controversy.”

This review smears the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), using a discredited Reuters article to do so.  The IARC, of course, is the international gold standard of cancer research. It found that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.

But Mr. Caulfield’s “solid” industry-produced article disagrees. It claims a 2017 Agricultural Health Study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute shows no link to cancer. Caulfield had posted this study previously, highlighting a quote that “no association was apparent.” 

However, this study has a major flaw; 37% of the people in the baseline study did not respond to the follow-up questionnaire, a shortcoming that a University of Washington biostatistician wrote would “meaningfully attenuate the cancer risk estimates of this study.”

Did Mr. Caulfield go out of his way to correct or acknowledge this shortcoming?

To the contrary, two weeks after the above letter was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, he doubled down, claiming “glyphosate isn’t giving you cancer,” quoting an article that relies on the same flawed AHS study.

When Tim Caulfield asks, “is misinformation killing us,” is he talking about this kind of misinformation?

While quick to attack the organic food industry, you won’t see Mr. Caulfield debunking pesticide safety claims. He continues to do the opposite. When the excellent Canadian Jennifer Baichwal documentary “Into the Weeds” was released last year, since reviewed in the NY Times, showing the scientific manipulation and misinformation that went into the approval of glyphosate at the highest regulatory levels, Mr. Caulfield never said a word.

As someone who has engaged in this debate, and who supposedly cares about the integrity of science, he should have.

Nor will you find Mr. Caulfield faulting vast landscapes of GMO crops, almost 100% of which in Canada are for herbicide resistance (some GM sweet corn is grown that is insect resistant). This technology is critical to enabling direct application of broad-spectrum herbicides that is impacting biodiversity on a massive scale.

Not according to Mr. Caulfield.  He claims these Roundup-Ready GMO landscapes are responsible for “decreased pesticide use,” with “no adverse impact on biodiversity or interbreeding.”

The actual report he is quoting, written by the National Academy of Sciences, a US-government and industry-funded organization, does not support his bold claims.

The evidence that weed biodiversity survives on GMO fields sprayed with broad-spectrum herbicides is unclear and likely includes evidence of glyphosate-resistant weeds, an indictment of GMO crops that will likely be addressed in the future with novel GMO’s resistant to additional herbicides.

This is not a vindication.

Then, mere pages later, it acknowledges the “possibility” that the rampant increase of herbicide resistant crops is behind massive declines in milkweeds, a group of plants critical to a wide array of pollinators, of which monarch butterflies are the most famous. This impact on biodiversity is widely acknowledged, a reality the Globe and Mail admits in an opinion piece even the GLP shared, likely because the unrealistic solution, the distribution of GMO herbicide resistant milkweeds across the continent, would be in alignment with biotech and pesticide interests.

As for reductions in pesticides upon GMO adoption, the report summary admits these trends “have not generally been sustained.” Nor does the report accept that volume is the appropriate measure. GMO’s may simply allow more harmful or effective broad-spectrum products, like dicamba, a volatile herbicide that is contaminating vast regions across the Midwest, to replace higher volumes of lower-impact herbicides.

So why would Caulfield authoritatively conclude this report says “decreased pesticide use” when it says those decreases “have not generally been sustained”?

And in any case, in Canada, pesticide use has not declined whatsoever since the widespread adoption of GMO crops. A 35-year University of Saskatchewan survey found massive increases in pesticides across Canada based on agricultural census data, an increase “likely due to the development and widespread adoption of herbicide-tolerant varieties of genetically modified crops,” the exact opposite of what Mr. Caulfield and similar GMO and pesticide proponents repeatedly claim.

Did Tim Caulfield hype up this study?

No he did not.

The bulk of Tim Caulfield’s reputation is built on going after silly health fads with the goal of shoring up public trust in “science”.  

But when it comes down to the critical questions of the role misinformation plays in the vast contamination of our landscapes and foods with pesticides, and how powerful industries have corrupted key Canadian institutions like the Pesticide Regulatory Management Authority at Health Canada, Caulfield plays defence.  

He either remains silent or he becomes a willing accessory to the misinformation that protects that corruption, repeatedly sharing GLP content and repeating flawed claims to support GMO technology and glyphosate, despite the problematic evidence to the contrary.

And that’s a disgrace to science and the Order of Canada.