Calling Out The Anti-Science Denialists

The future of Hawaii agriculture hangs in the balance this legislative session.  Having lost in the courts the battle over whether county governments even have the jurisdiction to regulate genetically modified crops, anti-science advocates have moved to state government, hoping there to revive the “genetic modification (sic)” Salem Witch Trials. These people oppose genetics, the science.Now, with the sugar industry gone and Hawaii’s largest agricultural activity, the corn seed industry, shrinking from the recent global commodity price collapse, anti-science advocates seek its annihilation and that of all modern agriculture. Since they can’t deny that transgenic modification yielded their diabetes medicine, a vaccine for Ebola, revival of Hawaii’s papaya industry, a 90 percent reduction in U.S. corn insecticide use since the 1990s, and not a single instance of adverse human health or environmental harm documented in the peer-reviewed, scientific literature, ever, they have to just wing it. They need a new object for their obsession: pesticides.This year’s legislation to regulate already regulated pesticides originates in the findings of a Joint Fact Finding report by a group on Kauai from which all of the scientists resigned. The JFF report hysterically rehashed old rumors to insinuate, without evidence, imaginary health problems irresponsibly attributed to Kauai farming companies, winning the Pulitzer Prize for bogacity in 2016.The JFF ignored a Hawaii Tumor Registry report prepared for the Hawaii Department of Health concluding that “there is no evidence of higher incidence of cancer on the island of Kauai overall or for specific geographic regions of the island, as compared to the state of Hawaii.”Read the science. Even the JFF confirmed absence of evidence of any causal link between restricted use pesticides and human health. Fear-mongering is not science.