Article Image

IPFS News Link • Agriculture

Meet Monsanto's Other Herbicide Problem...

• http://www.zerohedge.com, by Tyler Durden

Earlier this year we wrote about a series of court documents that were unsealed and seemingly revealed a startling effort on the part of both Monsanto and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to work in concert to kill and/or discredit independent, albeit inconvenient, cancer research conducted by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) related to their key herbicidal product, RoundUp.  The efforts to kill the research came even as Monsanto's own lead toxicologist, Donna Farmer, admitted that she "cannot say that Roundup does not cause cancer" because "[w]e [Monsanto] have not done the carcinogenicity studies with Roundup" (see: Monsanto Colluded With EPA, Was Unable To Prove Roundup Does Not Cause Cancer, Unsealed Court Docs Reveal).

But, as Reuters points out today, RoundUp isn't the only Monsanto herbicide causing outrage in the ag community these days as state regulators all across the country say they're being flooded with reports from farmers that Dicamba, Monsanto's other herbicide, is increasingly becoming airborne and killing crops far away from the fields where they were actually applied.

U.S. farmers have overwhelmed state governments with thousands of complaints about crop damage linked to new versions of weed killers, threatening future sales by manufacturers Monsanto Co (MON.N) and BASF SE (BASFn.DE).

Monsanto is banking on weed killers using a chemical known as dicamba - and seeds engineered to resist it - to dominate soybean production in the United States, the world's second-largest exporter.


AzureStandard