US farmer wins damages over Bayer AG, BASF herbicide

Yahoo – AFP, February 17, 2020

Farmer Bill Bader claimed the companies encouraged farmers to use the dicamba
weedkiller irresponsibly (AFP Photo/INA FASSBENDER)

Washington (AFP) - A US jury has awarded $265 million to a Missouri farmer who blamed herbicide from chemical giants Bayer AG and BASF for destroying his peach orchards, in a case set to bolster 140 other lawsuits.

Jurors in federal court in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, made the ruling on Saturday after peach farmer Bill Bader claimed the companies encouraged farmers to use the dicamba weedkiller irresponsibly.

Bloomberg News reported that the case was the first US trial over dicamba herbicide, which is alleged to have wrecked crops across America's Midwest by drifting onto plants that were unable to resist it.

Much like Roundup, another much-criticized herbicide marketed by Monsanto, dicamba has been on the market many years.

Use of the chemical jumped after Monsanto -- which was bought by Germany's Bayer in 2018 -- introduced seeds that can resist the weed-killer.

But the product has been blamed for polluting around four percent of US soybean fields in 2017. A common complaint is that the herbicide spreads to nearby areas.

The fight over dicamba comes in the wake of a case in which Bayer was ordered by a California jury to pay $290 million for failing to warn a dying groundskeeper that Roundup might cause cancer.

In January, reports suggested Bayer could stump up $10 billion in a settlement with tens of thousands of US plaintiffs suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

The cancer sufferers say they developed the disease after exposure to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup.

Bayer, which has argued that dicamba is safe for crops as long as users follow instructions, was reported to be planning to appeal Saturday's ruling, while BASF was not available for comment.

Monsanto pleads guilty to using banned pesticide on research crop

Yahoo – AFP, November 22, 2019

A picture taken on May 24, 2016 in Lillo near Antwerp shows the Monsanto logo on a
building at the firm Manufacturing Site and Operations Center. (AFP Photo/JOHN THYS)

Biotech giant Monsanto on Thursday agreed to plead guilty to illegally using a banned and highly toxic pesticide on research crops at one of its facilities on the Hawaiian island of Maui and to pay $10 million in fines.

The company admitted in court documents filed in US District Court in Honolulu that it sprayed the pesticide known as Penncap-M on corn seed and other crops at its Valley Farm facility in 2014, even though it knew the chemical had been banned by the Environmental Protection Agency the year before.

"The illegal conduct in this case posed a threat to the environment, surrounding communities and Monsanto workers," said Nick Hanna, the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, whose office handled the case. "Federal laws and regulations impose a clear duty on every user of regulated and dangerous chemicals to ensure the products are safely stored, transported and used."

The case against Monsanto was brought as the agriculture giant faced a slew of lawsuits arguing that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer.

Federal prosecutors had initially sought to file felony charges against the company for illegally spraying Penncap-M, a nerve agent. But they reportedly agreed to let the company plead to a lesser misdemeanor offense after Monsanto's lawyers intervened at the highest levels of the Department of Justice.

In its guilty plea, Monsanto admitted that after the 2014 spraying, it told employees to enter the sprayed fields a week later even though it knew the workers should have been kept from entering the area for 31 days.

The plea calls for Monsanto to pay a $6 million criminal fine and $4 million in community service payments to Hawaiian government entities.

Hanna's office said the government agreed to dismiss felony charges in two years if Monsanto abides by the plea agreement.

Singapore moves against Indonesian firms over haze

Yahoo – AFP, 26 Sep 2015

The Fullerton Hotel is blanketed in thick haze, in Singapore, on September 24,

2015 (AFP Photo/Roslan Rahman)

Singapore (AFP) - Singapore has launched legal action that could lead to massive fines against Indonesian companies blamed for farm and plantation fires spewing unhealthy levels of air pollution over the city-state.

Five Indonesian companies including multinational Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) have been served with legal notices, according to a Singapore government statement issued late Friday.

The move followed a bitter diplomatic spat over Indonesia's failure to stop a severe outbreak of smoky haze which has also affected Malaysia and persisted for years.

APP, part of Indonesia's Sinar Mas conglomerate, is one of the world's largest pulp and paper groups and publicly upholds "sustainability" and forest conservation as core principles. Its products include stationery and toilet paper.

APP was asked by Singapore's National Environment Agency to supply information on its subsidiaries operating in Singapore and Indonesia, as well as measures taken by its suppliers in Indonesia to put out fires in their concessions.

The group, which has paper mills in Indonesia and China, did not immediately reply when asked by AFP for comment.

Under a 2014 law called the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act, Singapore can impose a fine of Sg$100,000 ($70,000) for each day that a local or foreign company contributes to unhealthy levels of haze pollution in Singapore, subject to a maximum total of Sg$2.0 million.

Singapore is located near Indonesia's vast Sumatra island, where fires have traditionally been set off by farmers and plantations to clear land for cultivation.

Four other Indonesian companies -- Rimba Hutani Mas, Sebangun Bumi Andalas Wood Industries, Bumi Sriwijaya Sentosa and Wachyuni Mandira -- have been told to take measures to extinguish fires on their land, refrain from starting new ones, and submit action plans to prevent future fires.

Sinar Mas is also involved in palm oil production, an industry widely blamed for forest fires in Indonesia.

In its statement issued Friday, the Singapore government said it was "examining how to apply more economic pressure against errant companies," including a review of its own procurement policies.

A soldier inspects a peatland forest on fire in Kampar district, Riau province, 
on Indonesia's Sumatra island, on August 7, 2015 (AFP Photo/Alfachrozie)

Singapore's Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Vivian Balakrishnan said the haze problem has lasted "for far too long".

"This is not a natural disaster. Haze is a man-made problem that should not be tolerated. It has caused major impact on the health, society and economy of our region," he said in the statement.

Singapore declared emergency shutdowns of elementary and high schools on Friday after the air pollutant index hit "hazardous" levels.

It eased to "moderate" levels on Saturday but a shift in wind direction can quickly change the situation.

The current haze outbreak is the worst since mid-2013. The recurring crisis grips Southeast Asia nearly every year during the dry season.

Singapore officials have reacted with outrage to Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla's comments that Indonesia's neighbours should be grateful for good air quality most of the year, and that Jakarta need not apologise for the crisis.

Indonesia has previously said that Singapore-based companies were among those responsible for the blazes.

About 3,000 troops and police have been sent to Sumatra to fight the fires, with Indonesian authorities saying last week that it would take a month to bring them under control.

14 year old girl picks fight with bully TV host - and WINS!

14 year old Rachel Parent debates Kevin O'Leary on the issue of Genetically Modified Food. Rachel's website: http://www.gmo-news.com/

Canadian Biotechnology Action Network: www.cban.ca petition for mandatory GMO food labelling: http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Brin

Rachel Parent

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Over $30M spent last year on lobbying to keep GMOs hidden in foods

NaturalNews, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, June 27, 2013

                              

(NaturalNews) Guess who spends the most money lobbying on agricultural lobbying? If you answered, "Monsanto," you're correct. Most of their efforts, of course, are focused on lobbying for GMOs -- to keep them legal and keep them hidden in foods.

Do you know how much money Monsanto spent on lobbying in 2012?

The answer is nearly $6 million!

And in a close second, the American Farm Bureau spent $5.7 million on lobbying in 2012.

The Natural News infographic shown below reveals even more details about who's spending the most money lobbying for GMOs and other conventional agriculture "favors" from Washington.

In 2012 alone, companies spent over $30 million "influencing" Congress on agricultural issues, including making sure they didn't pass legislation that would label GMOs or outlaw them altogether. Is it any wonder that the United States of America is one of the very last nations in the world to either ban GMOs outright or require their labeling on foods?

As the second infographic below shows, 64 countries require GMO labeling.

And so far, fifty percent of U.S. states have introduced GMO labeling bills of one kind or another. So the states want it, but the federal government keeps blocking it.

Why is the USA the big holdout on honest food labeling? Could it be because the biotech industry keeps paying off all the politicians?

Share and enjoy these powerful infographics, all created by the Natural News art department:

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GM food off the menu in Parliament's restaurants despite ministers telling the public to drop their opposition

Millions march against GM crops

Organisers celebrate huge global turnout and say they will continue until Monsanto and other GM manufacturers listen

guardian.co.uk, Associated Press, Sunday 26 May 2013

Protesters make their point to Monsanto in Los Angeles, California,
May 25, 2013. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Organisers say that two million people marched in protest against seed giant Monsanto in hundreds of rallies across the US and in more than 50 other countries on Saturday.

"March Against Monsanto" protesters say they wanted to call attention to the dangers posed by genetically modified food and the food giants that produce it. Founder and organiser Tami Canal said protests were held in 436 cities across 52 countries.

Genetically modified plants are grown from seeds that are engineered to resist insecticides and herbicides, add nutritional benefits, or otherwise improve crop yields and increase the global food supply. Most corn, soybean and cotton crops grown in the United States today have been genetically modified. But some say genetically modified organisms can lead to serious health conditions and harm the environment.

The use of GMOs has been a growing issue of contention in recent years, with health advocates pushing for mandatory labelling of genetically modified products even though the federal government and many scientists say the technology is safe.

The "March Against Monsanto" movement began just a few months ago, when Canal created a Facebook page on 28 February calling for a rally against the company's practices. "If I had gotten 3,000 people to join me, I would have considered that a success," she said Saturday. Instead, she said, two million responded to her message.

Together with Seattle blogger and activist Emilie Rensink and Nick Bernabe of Anti-Media.org, Canal worked with A Revolt.org digital anarchy to promote international awareness of the event. She called the turnout "incredible" and credited social media for being a vehicle for furthering opportunities for activism.

Despite the size of the gatherings, Canal said she was grateful that the marches were uniformly peaceful and that no arrests had been reported.

"It was empowering and inspiring to see so many people, from different walks of life, put aside their differences and come together today," she said. The group plans to harness the success of the event to continue its anti-GMO cause.

"We will continue until Monsanto complies with consumer demand. They are poisoning our children, poisoning our planet," she said. "If we don't act, who's going to?"

Monsanto, based in St Louis, said on Saturday that it respects people's rights to express their opinions, but maintained that its seeds improve agriculture by helping farmers produce more from their land while conserving resources such as water and energy.

The US Food and Drug Administration does not require genetically modified foods to carry a label, but organic food companies and some consumer groups have intensified their push for labels, arguing that the modified seeds are floating from field to field and contaminating traditional crops. The groups have been bolstered by a growing network of consumers who are wary of processed and modified foods.

The Senate this week overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would allow states to require the labelling of genetically modified foods.

The Biotechnology Industry Organisation, a lobbying group that represents Monsanto, DuPont & Co and other makers of genetically modified seeds, has said that it supports voluntary labelling for people who seek out such products. But it says that mandatory labelling would only mislead or confuse consumers into thinking products weren't safe, even though the FDA has said there is no difference between GMO and organic, non-GMO foods.

However, state legislatures in Vermont and Connecticut moved ahead this month with votes to make food companies declare genetically modified ingredients on their packages. And supermarket retailer Whole Foods Markets Inc has said that all products in its North American stores containing genetically modified ingredients will be labeled as such by 2018.

Whole Foods says there is growing demand for products that don't use GMOs, with sales of products with a "Non-GMO" verification label spiking between 15% and 30%.

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Seeds Of Death - Full Movie

Published on May 24, 2013

In preparation of the global March Against Monsanto, you are invited to watch our award-winning documentary Seeds of Death free.

http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/

The leaders of Big Agriculture--Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta--are determined that world's populations remain ignorant about the serious health and environmental risks of genetically modified crops and industrial agriculture. Deep layers of deception and corruption underlie both the science favoring GMOs and the corporations and governments supporting them.

This award-winning documentary, Seeds of Death, exposes the lies about GMOs and pulls back the curtains to witness our planet's future if Big Agriculture's new green revolution becomes our dominant food supply.

A Question and Answer fact sheet deconstructing Monsanto's GM claims and Big Agriculture's propaganda to accompany the film is available online.

Protesters make their point to Monsanto in Los Angeles, California,

May 25, 2013. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

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Former MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan quits TV to run organic hydroponic farm

The Raw Story, David Ferguson, March 20, 2013

Former MSNBC host and author of the book Greedy Bastards Dylan Ratigan has announced that after leaving his show in June of 2012, he has re-launched his life as an organic, hydroponic farmer. In an open letter on his website DylanRatigan.com, Ratigan proclaimed that his life changed direction when he found himself burnt out by “hollow political debates” and “in search of meaning and purpose in my work and life.”

Ratigan said that it was meeting a Marine combat veteran war protester and his wife who appeared on “The Dylan Ratigan Show” in June that inspired him. The couple explained to him a technique for hydroponic farming that reportedly uses 90 percent less water than a conventional farm, but produces three times as much food.

“It was a business that promised to cure food deserts – areas where access to fresh and healthy food is limited – while having the potential to create jobs for thousands of combat veterans, each of whom was the beneficiary of $1 million in military training while on active duty,” wrote Ratigan Wednesday.

“Since I left MSNBC and dylanratigan.com last June, I first started working with these inspiring visionary veterans on the phone, and then in person to expand their dream and help turn it into a reality,” he continued. “The process alone has restored meaning and purpose in my life, my health and spirit have taken on a renewed vitality and, because of my time with you, I have had the opportunity and privilege to literally put my money where my mouth is.”

Ratigan has relocated from New York City to San Diego County, California, where he is working with Colin and Karen Archipley at their hydroponic organic farm, “Archi’s Acres” full-time. He and the project’s other backers see the program as a means of providing sustainable food crops in the U.S. while offering job opportunities to veterans.

Ratigan will appear Thursday, March 21 on ABC’s “The Chew” and on Friday, March 22 on MSNBC’s “Martin Bashir” to discuss the project and share his recipe for a delicious organic kale salad.

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(Matthew channelled by Suzanne Ward, June 3, 2012)

“….   22. Beyond those myriad personal situations, beyond the civilian casualties in war zones, and beyond the financial burdens to the peoples whose nations are at war is the global emotional impact. It can be said that the condition coined post traumatic stress disorder is endemic to Earth. No one is immune to this battle energy that permeates your world, no one can escape the ravages that centuries of bloodshed have inured generation after generation to accept as humankind’s nature and lot in life. Yet, the fear of dying is just as pervasive, and that sets up a paradox that minds have to come to terms with. …" 

Inside Malaysia's Shadow State

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Monsanto demands $1 billion in court

RT.com, 01 August, 2012

REUTERS / Henry Romero

Four weeks into a trial between two titans of the biotech industry, Monsanto Co. claimed on Tuesday that its biggest competitor, DuPont, owes them $1 billion for infringing on their patent for herbicide-tolerant lab-made crops.

Monsanto insisted this week that rival company DuPont owes them $1 billion for producing genetically modified crops that were designed to withstand the herbicide Roundup, a technology for which the leading biotech corporation has a patent for. Monsanto’s accusations are based on hundreds of lines of DuPont-made soybean crops that combined the patented Roundup Ready trait with their own herbicide immunity called GAT. Although DuPont claims that their products performed better than Monsanto’s crops by combining technologies from both companies, Monsanto maintains that DuPont infringed on their copyright going back several years and should now compensate them to the tune of $1 billion.

DuPont has filed a counterclaim in response under the argument that Monsanto deceived the US government in getting patent approval for their Roundup Ready crops. Attorneys for DuPont say that Monsanto was not clear with the US Patent and Trademark Office about what genes used in their Roundup Ready crops actually helped organisms fight off herbicides, allowing them wide breadth to thwart similar attempts at the technology from its competitors.

“It was intentional because Monsanto didn’t want people to know what was inside the bag, what was inside the seed,” Leora Ben-Ami, a DuPont lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis, told the court on July 10, Bloomberg News reports. “Monsanto didn’t want people to know how the seed was made.”

By creating plants resistant to herbicides, farmers are able to harvest an abundance of laboratory-produced seeds and douse their fields in chemicals, killing off weeds while at the same time sparing their money crops. Outside of the industry, though, opponents claim that the chemicals used in the herbicides are being used ad nauseam and consumers are being put to risk.

Analyst Chris Shaw of New York’s Monness Crespi Hardt & Co. tells Bloomberg that he thinks DuPont’s counterclaim will fail in court, and that both companies will likely settle out of court.

“They’re going to reach some mutually beneficial agreement even if one loses the trial,” Shaw says. “Ultimately both need each other, given the market share.”

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Monsanto sued for underpaying workers

RT.com, 23 July, 2012

Screenshot from monsanto.com

It’s back to court for biotech giants Monsanto. This time America’s largest agriculture corporation is being sued by a group of farmers who say they were promised free housing but instead were charged thousands and poisoned by pesticides.

Seven migrant workers from the state of Texas are suing Monsanto after they say the massive biotech corporation failed to keep their promise. The plaintiffs argue that they were promised free housing and kitchen access for their families in exchange for working on a hybrid corn seed project in the state of Indiana, but instead were milked out of their money and exposed to dangerous chemicals.

Jose Cardenas, the lead plaintiff in the case, is going after Monsanto and its recruiter, Milo Inc., as well as that company’s president. Cardenas insists that Milo Inc. promised the plaintiffs $80 for each acre the farmers detasseled and would be additionally compensated with housing arrangements. According to his complaint, however, the pay that was signed over was less than minimum wage when divided among the crew members.

Courthouse News Service reports that money problems weren’t all the farmers were poised with.

"The motel housing did not comply with substantive federal and state safety and health standards applicable to agricultural labor housing,” the complaint reads.Additionally, instead of complimentary accommodations they were forced to spend $300 per room while on the job.

And the kitchen? “[T]he kitchen facility provided by the defendants – a school bus in which about three to four stoves and two refrigerators had been installed – was substandard."

"Two or more of the working plaintiffs suffered illness or injuries from suspected pesticide exposure while working for defendants,” the farmers add.

Attorney Kathryn Blair Craddock with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid is representing the group of seven workers whom are seeking damages under the Agricultural Worker Protection Act, as well as unpaid wages as promised through the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Agriculturalists across America have previously tried to take Monsanto to court over charges stemming from their lab-made corn GMOs, but that case was a bit different. Over 2,000 farmers have petitioned the US government to more thoroughly investigate the impact a genetically modified corn crop from Monsanto will have on the country. As RT reported before, the biotech company wants to plant a corn variant across America’s Midwest that will be resistant to a powerful pesticide produced with 2,4-D, the same compound crucial to the make-up of the notorious Vietnam War-era killer Agent Orange. If approved, the new corn will be able to thrive as farmers douse their fields in the chemical, killing off unwanted weeds in the process while at the same time subjecting Americans to a pesticide linked to causing cancer.

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Brazil biofuel: Shell axes plan for 'illegal' sugar cane

BBC News, 13 June 2012

Related Stories 

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Guarani tribes in western Brazil complain
 of persecution at the hands of sugar cane
farmers

A biofuels company set up in Brazil by oil giant Shell has signed a landmark agreement giving up plans to buy sugar cane grown on indigenous lands.

The company, Raizen, was sourcing some of the raw material for ethanol from farmers who encroached on the lands of the Guarani tribe in Mato Grosso state.

The deal comes after months of pressure by the Brazilian authorities and indigenous tribes.

The leader of the Guarani tribe, Nisio Gomes, was shot dead last year.

Gomes, 59, was killed in front of his community in the town of Amambai, near Paraguay border.

Indigenous leaders and pressure group Survival International have welcomed the agreement signed by Raizen, but warned that the tribe's future continued to be threatened by illegal logging and farming on their ancestral lands.

Valdelice Veron, an indigenous Guarani in Mato Grosso do Sul state, says their rivers have been polluted by pesticides.

"We will be able to drink water from our land again. We will be able to start afresh," she told Survival International.

Booming demand

Raizen was established in 2010 as a multi-billion joint venture of Shell and Brazilian ethanol company Cosan to produce ethanol from sugar cane.

The company says it produces 2.2 billion litres of ethanol every year, for export and to supply the Brazilian market, where most a great deal of the cars run both on petrol and biofuel.

Shell's move came under renewed pressure after the killing of Nisio Gomes.

In the deal signed with Brazilian indigenous agency Funai, Raizen says it will not source sugar cane from any land declared by the Ministry of Justice as belonging to indigenous tribes.

The agreement comes into force in November.

The Guarani are Brazil's largest indigenous minority, with around 46,000 members living in seven states.

Many others live in neighbouring Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.

The group suffers from a severe shortage of land in Brazil, which has worsened as a boom in agriculture has led farmers and ranchers to extend their holdings.

Indigenous activists say farmers in Mato Grosso do Sul frequently use violence and threats to force them off their ancestral territory, and that the local authorities do little to protect them.

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Why our food is making us fat

We are, on average, 3st heavier than we were in the 60s. And not because we're eating more or exercising less – we just unwittingly became sugar addicts

guardian.co.uk, Jacques Peretti, Monday 11 June 2012

Who is responsible for making us fat? Photograph: Pat Doyle/Corbis

Up a rickety staircase at the Newarke Houses Museum in Leicester, England hangs a portrait of Britain's first obese man, painted in 1806. Daniel Lambert weighed 53st (335kg) and was considered a medical oddity. Too heavy to work, Lambert came up with an ingenious idea: he would charge people a shilling to see him. Lambert made a fortune, and his portrait shows him at the end of his life: affluent and respected – a celebrated son of Leicester.

Two hundred years on, I'm in a bariatric ambulance (an alternative term for obese, favoured by the medical world because it's less shaming to patients) investigating why the UK is in the midst of an obesity crisis. The crew pick up a dozen Daniel Lamberts every week. Fifty-three stone is nothing special, it's at the lower end of the weight spectrum, with only the 80st patients worthy of mention when a shift finishes. The specially designed ambulance carries an array of bariatric gizmos including a "spatula" to help with people who have fallen out of bed or, on a recent occasion, an obese man jammed between the two walls in his hallway. As well as the ambulance, there's a convoy of support vehicles including a winch to lift patients onto a reinforced stretcher. In extreme cases, the cost of removing a patient to hospital can be up to £100,000, as seen in the recent case of 63st teenager Georgia Davis.

But these people are not where the heartland of the obesity crisis lies. On average, in the UK, we are all – every man, woman and child – three stone heavier than we were in the mid-60s. We haven't noticed it happening, but this glacial shift has been mapped by bigger car seats, swimming cubicles, XL trousers dropped to L (L dropped to M). An elasticated nation with an ever-expanding sense of normality.

Why are we so fat? We have not become greedier as a race. We are not, contrary to popular wisdom, less active – a 12-year study, which began in 2000 at Plymouth hospital, measured children's physical activity and found it the same as 50 years ago. But something has changed: and that something is very simple. It's the food we eat. More specifically, the sheer amount of sugar in that food, sugar we're often unaware of.

The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race.

Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production, and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market. One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money.

By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general public were clueless that these changes were taking place.

There was one product in particular that it had a dramatic effect on – soft drinks. Hank Cardello, the former head of marketing at Coca-Cola, tells me that in 1984, Coke in the US swapped from sugar to HFCS (In the UK, it continued to use sugar). As a market leader, Coke's decision sent a message of endorsement to the rest of the industry, which quickly followed suit. There was "no downside" to HFCS, Cardello says. It was two-thirds the price of sugar, and even the risk of messing with the taste was a risk worth taking when you looked at the margin, especially as there were no apparent health risks. At that time, "obesity wasn't even on the radar" says Cardello.

But another health issue was on the radar: heart disease, and in the mid-70s, a fierce debate was raging behind the closed doors of academia over what was causing it. An American nutritionist called Ancel Keys blamed fat, while a British researcher at the University of London Professor John Yudkin, blamed sugar. But Yudkin's work was rubbished by what many believe, including Professor Robert Lustig, one of the world's leading endocrinologists, was a concerted campaign to discredit Yudkin. Much of the criticism came from fellow academics, whose research was aligning far more closely with the direction the food industry was intending to take. Yudkin's colleague at the time, Dr Richard Bruckdorfer at UCL says: "There was a huge lobby from [the food] industry, particularly from the sugar industry, and Yudkin complained bitterly that they were subverting some of his ideas." Yudkin was, Lustig says simply, "thrown under the bus", because there was a huge financial gain to be made by fingering fat, not sugar, as the culprit of heart disease.

The food industry had its eyes on the creation of a new genre of food, something they knew the public would embrace with huge enthusiasm, believing it to be better for their health – "low fat". It promised an immense business opportunity forged from the potential disaster of heart disease. But, says Lustig, there was a problem. "When you take the fat out of a recipe, food tastes like cardboard, and you need to replace it with something – that something being sugar."

Overnight, new products arrived on the shelves that seemed too good to be true. Low-fat yoghurts, spreads, even desserts and biscuits. All with the fat taken out, and replaced with sugar. Britain was one of the most enthusiastic adopters of what food writer Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, calls "the low-fat dogma", with sales rocketing.

By the mid-80s, health experts such as Professor Philip James, a world-renowned British scientist who was one of the first to identify obesity as an issue, were noticing that people were getting fatter and no one could explain why. The food industry was keen to point out that individuals must be responsible for their own calorie consumption, but even those who exercised and ate low-fat products were gaining weight. In 1966 the proportion of people with a BMI of over 30 (classified as obese) was just 1.2% for men and 1.8% for women. By 1989 the figures had risen to 10.6% for men and 14.0% for women. And no one was joining the dots between HFCS and fat.

Moreover, there was something else going on. The more sugar we ate, the more we wanted, and the hungrier we became. At New York University, Professor Anthony Sclafani, a nutritionist studying appetite and weight gain, noticed something strange about his lab rats. When they ate rat food, they put on weight normally. But when they ate processed food from a supermarket, they ballooned in a matter of days. Their appetite for sugary foods was insatiable: they just carried on eating.

According to Professor Jean-Marc Schwarz of San Francisco hospital, who is currently studying the precise way in which the major organs of the body metabolise sugar, this momentum creates "a tsunami" of sugar. The effect this has on different organs in the body is only now being understood by scientists. Around the liver, it coalesces as fat, leading to diseases such as type-2 diabetes. Other studies have found that sugar may even coat semen and result in obese men becoming less fertile. One researcher told me that, ultimately, perhaps nothing needs to be done about obesity, as obese people will wipe themselves out.

The organ of most interest, however, is the gut. According to Schwarz and Sclafani, the gut is a highly complex nervous system. It is the body's "second brain", and this second brain becomes conditioned to wanting more sugar, sending messages back to the brain that are impossible to fight.

The Sugar Association is keen to point out that sugar intake alone "is not linked to any lifestyle disease". But evidence to the contrary appears to be emerging. In February, Lustig, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis of the University of California wrote an opinion article for the journal Nature citing the growing body of scientific evidence showing that fructose can trigger processes that lead to liver toxicity and a host of other chronic diseases, and in March, the New York Times reported a study that had been published in the journal Circulation, which found that men who drank sweetened beverages most often were 20% more likely to have had a heart attack than those who drank the least. David Kessler, the former head of the US government's most powerful food agency, the FDA, and the person responsible for introducing warnings on cigarette packets in the early 90s, believes that sugar, through its metabolisation by the gut and hence the brain, is extremely addictive, just like cigarettes or alcohol. He believes that sugar is hedonic – eating it is "highly pleasurable. It gives you this momentary bliss. When you're eating food that is highly hedonic, it sort of takes over your brain."

In London, Dr Tony Goldstone is mapping out the specific parts of the brain that are stimulated by this process. According to Goldstone, one of the by-products of obesity is that a hormone called leptin ceases to work properly. Normally, leptin is produced by the body to tell you that you are full. However, in obese people, it becomes severely depleted, and it is thought that a high intake of sugar is a key reason. When the leptin doesn't work, your body simply doesn't realise you should stop eating.

Leptin raises a big question: did the food industry knowingly create foods that were addictive, that would make you feel as though you were never satisfied and always wanted more? Kessler is cautious in his response: "Did they understand the neuroscience? No. But they learned experientially what worked." This is highly controversial. If it could be proved that at that some point the food industry became aware of the long-term, detrimental effects their products were having on the public, and continued to develop and sell them, the scandal would rival that of what happened to the tobacco industry.

The food industry's defence has always been that the science doesn't prove its culpability. Susan Neely, president of the American Beverage Association, a lobby group for the soft-drinks industry, says: "there's a lot of work to try to establish causality, and I don't know that I've seen any study that does that." But it looks as though things might be changing. According to Professor Kelly Brownell at Yale University, one of the world's foremost experts on obesity and its causes, the science will soon be irrefutable and we may then be just a few years away from the first successful lawsuit.

The relationship between the food industry and the scientists conducting research into obesity is also complicated by the issue of funding. There is not a great deal of money set aside for this work and so the food industry has become a vital source of income. But this means that the very same science going into combating obesity could also be used to hone the products that are making us obese. Many of the scientists I spoke to are wary about going on the record because they fear their funding will be taken away if they speak out.

The relationship between government and the food industry is also far from straightforward. Health secretary Andrew Lansley worked, until 2009, as a non-executive director of Profero, a marketing agency whose clients have included Pizza Hut, Mars and PepsiCo. In opposition, Lansley asked public health expert Professor Simon Capewell to contribute to future policy on obesity. Capewell was amazed at the degree to which the food industry was also being consulted: the equivalent, he says, "of putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank". Lansley has made no secret of his work for Profero, and denies a conflict of interest, saying that he did not work directly with the company's clients. And the government argues, not unreasonably, that it's essential to have the industry on board to get anything done. But the relationships are not always kept at arms length. Professor James was part of a WHO committee to recommend global limits on sugar in 1990. As the report was being drafted, something extraordinary happened: the US secretary of state for health Tommy Thompson flew to Geneva to lobby on behalf of the sugar industry. "Those recommendations were never made," says James.

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg is currently planning to reduce soft drink super-sizing while last week, a former executive at Coca-Cola Todd Putman spoke publicly about the need for soft drink companies to move their focus to "healthy products". But it's not going to be easy to bring about change. A previous attempt to bring in a soda tax was stopped by intense lobbying on Capitol Hill. The soft-drinks industry paid for a new ward at Philadelphia Children's Hospital, and the tax went away. It was a children's obesity ward.

Why has Kessler, when he has had such success with his warnings on cigarette packets, not done the same thing for processed foods high in sugar? Because, he tells me, when the warnings came in on cigarettes, the game was already up in the west for the tobacco industry. Their new markets were the far east, India and China. It was no concession at all. The food industry is a different matter. For one thing, the food lobby is more powerful than the tobacco lobby. The industry is tied into a complex matrix of other interests: drugs, chemicals, even dieting products. The panoply of satellite industries that make money from obesity means the food industry's relationship to obesity is an incredibly complex one.

Anne Milton, the minister for public health, tells me that legislation against the food industry isn't being ruled out, because of the escalating costs to the NHS. Previous governments have always taken the route of partnership. Why? Because the food industry provides hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in revenue. It is immensely powerful, and any politician who takes it on does so at their peril. "Let's get one thing straight," Milton tells me, however. "I am not scared of the food industry."

And I believe her, because now, there is something far bigger to be frightened of. Eventually, the point will be reached when the cost to the NHS of obesity, which is now £5bn a year, outweighs the revenue from the UK snacks and confectionery market, which is currently approximately £8bn a year. Then the solution to obesity will become very simple.

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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg with Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor
 for health, with sodas and the corresponding amount of sugar they contain
at City Hall in New York, on May 30, 2012. Photographer: Chang W. Lee/
The New York Times via Redux