This Weed Killer Is Wreaking Havoc on America’s Crops

When farmer Darvin Bentlage surveyed his southwestern Missouri soybean fields in August, he knew something was amiss in one of them. “I’ve been looking at soybeans for about 60 years, and these didn’t look right,” he says. The plants’ leaves had shriveled upward, taking the shape of little cups: a telltale sign they’d been exposed to dicamba—a potent herbicide that Bentlage does not use. It had wafted onto his farm from his neighbors’ fields.

Farmers Say Monsanto’s Pesticide Drifted From Nearby Farms and Killed Their Crops. Now They Need Monsanto Seeds to Fix Them.

To hear Monsanto tell it, the rollout of its latest genetically modified soybean offering went without a hitch. The novel soybeans, engineered to withstand two different herbicides, debuted in 2016. Just a year later,  they were planted on 20 million acres —representing nearly a quarter of the total US crop.

In its latest quarterly profit report, released Wednesday, the company hailed that rapid uptake as a “record” adoption rate for one if its new products. And that’s not all. “The vast majority of U.S. growers are reporting tremendous success” with a newly formulated herbicide designed to be used on the soybeans, the company declared.

How Monsanto Is Devastating Thousands of Farms Across 20 States

Bill Bader is Missouri’s largest peach grower, supplying produce to retailers throughout the mid-South. But the last two years have found him struggling to save his farm. Thousands of his trees have defoliated limbs and walnut-size peaches not worth the picking, with 30,000 trees irreparably damaged.

Bader is not alone. Over 2,200 other farmers growing soybeans, tomatoes, melons, grapes and other crops across 20 states have reported crop damage on more than three million acres, slashing harvests by a third or more. Losses are estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. 

The Legacy of Monsanto's PCBs: Oozing Pus, Birth Defects and Immune Problems

The people of New Bedford, Massachusetts, have always been tough. When New Bedford was the whaling capital of the world, seven men would hop into a 25-foot rowboat to chase -- and harpoon up close -- furious 50-foot whales weighing 85 tons. After petroleum replaced whale oil around 1900, New Bedford workers then kept 70 textile mills humming day and night. After textiles moved away, from the 1940s onward New Bedford supplied the world with electric gear. But when those factories began to close in the 1960s, they left behind some awful secrets -- 572 chemically poisoned plots of land within the city's 24 square miles, including land where unsuspecting townspeople built two public schools. In the early 1980s, local people learned that their prized harbor -- all 18,000 acres of it, including its bounty of fish and lobsters -- had been rendered dangerously toxic by factory wastes. In 1983, New Bedford Harbor, the mouth of the Acushnet River, was declared a Superfund site, heavily contaminated with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). This small city reeled. To many, the combination of unemployment and toxic waste seemed insurmountable.

Monsanto's Evil Twin: Disturbing Facts About the Fertilizer Industry

What do you know about the worldwide chemical fertilizer industry? If you're like most people, not much.

There's plenty of press coverage and consumer awareness when it comes to genetically engineered food and crops, and the environmental hazards of pesticides and animal drugs. But the fertilizer industry? Not so much -- even though it's the largest segment of corporate agribusiness ($175 billion in annual sales), and a major destructive force in polluting the environment, disrupting the climate, and damaging public health.

Monsanto's Willing Executioners

Is Monsanto "evil"?

Just pop that question into Google and you'll find out quickly why Monsanto ranks near the top of every "most hated company" list. And ask any news editor ... the name "Monsanto" is guaranteed clickbait that reels in readers by the bushel.

It's probably why you are reading this right now.

Portland Is Suing Monsanto Over Toxic Chemical Pollution

Monsanto may have stopped developing Polychlorinated Biphenyls — typically known as PCBs — nearly four decades ago, but on the West Coast, lawsuits associated with this toxic group of chemicals keep mounting against the agrochemical giant.

On Wednesday, the Portland City Council voted to sue the Monsanto Company in federal court. Once Portland files the suit, it will become the seventh city to go after Monsanto over the toxic chemicals it produced, Portland City Attorney Tracy Reeve told ThinkProgress.

Monsanto's Pesticide Is Top Suspect Behind Mysterious Kidney Disease

For several years now, a mysterious kidney disease epidemic has been underway in several parts of the global South. The victims are young, male outdoor workers - far from the usual demographic of older patients with sedentary lifestyles and a history of diabetes or high blood pressure. In Central America, thousands of young men who work in the sugar cane plantations have died of failing kidneys; in Sri Lanka and parts of rural India, it is rice farmers who are similarly afflicted. Although the "mystery disease" has garnered medical attention - at first as an anomaly, but increasingly as an inexplicable mass killer - for over 20 years now, the causes remain unknown. In fact, the disease goes by the moniker "chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology" (CKDu) to distinguish it from the ordinary form, CKD.

Monsanto and Syngenta Tighten Stranglehold on Global Food Supply

There is a corporate monster in the making. If allowed to emerge, it will gain near complete control of one of the most vital elements to human survival: our global food supply. This monster - a conglomeration of two corporate entities, Monsanto and Syngenta - must be stopped for the sake of the planet and future generations.

The companies that would make up this monster conglomeration both want complete control of our food. They envision a world completely inundated with their "patented" genetically modified seeds and saturated in their environmentally destructive chemicals. They seek to put all of their critics and those deemed "in the way" in prison or leave them financially ruined. They threaten to subvert the democratic process with their "bought" legislators, who are strategically placed inside virtually every facet of the governmental apparatus. And they do all of this while wrapped in the rhetoric of superheroes, sustainability and stewardship.

In the Public Interest: Monsanto and Its Promoters vs. Freedom of Information

Next year, the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) will celebrate its 50th anniversary as one of the finest laws our Congress has ever passed. It is a vital investigative tool for exposing government and corporate wrongdoing.

The FOIA was championed by Congressman John E. Moss (D-CA), who strove to “guarantee the right of every citizen to know the facts of his Government.” Moss, with whom I worked closely as an outside citizen advocate, said that “without the fullest possible access to Government information, it is impossible to gain the knowledge necessary to discharge the responsibilities of citizenship.”

These Emails Show Monsanto Leaning on Professors to Fight the GMO PR War

For a blockbuster recent piece, the New York Times' Eric Lipton got a first look at a massive cache of private emails between prominent public university scientists and GMO industry executives and flacks. The emails came to light through a barrage of controversial Freedom of Information Act requests by U.S. Right to Know, which is funded by the scrappy, anti-corporate Organic Consumers Association.

New Monsanto Spray Kills Bugs by Messing With Their Genes

In a fascinating long piece in MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado examines the genetically modified seed industry's latest blockbuster app in development—one that has nothing to do with seeds. Instead, it involves the industry's other bread-and-butter product: pesticide sprays. But we're not talking about the poisonous chemicals you convinced your dad to stop dousing the lawn with. The novel sprays in question are powered by a genetic technology called RNA interference, which promises to kill specific insects and weeds by silencing genes crucial to their survival, while leaving nontarget species unscathed.

El Salvador Farmers Successfully Defy Monsanto

The perils of ingesting food that has any contact with a Monsanto-produced product are in the news on nearly a weekly basis.

As Dr. Jeff Ritterman has documented, Monstanto's herbicide, Roundup, has been linked to a fatal kidney disease epidemic, and has also been repeatedly linked to cancer.

Recently, a senior research scientist at MIT predicted that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, will cause half of all children to have autism by 2025.

How Monsanto's Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

Ask an agribusiness exec about sustainable agriculture, and you'll likely get an earful about something called "precision agriculture." What is it? According to Yara, the fertilizer giant, it's technology that "enables farmers to add the specific nutrients needed for their crop, in exactly the right amount, at the right time."

That is to say, instead of using intuition and experience to decide how much fertilizer or pesticides to apply, farmers rely on sensors, satellite data, and the Internet of Things to make such choices. In addition to selling farmers agrichemicals, Yara also sells a "knowledge platform, supported by tools for precision farming," including "an online service providing advice on the physical mixing characteristics of Yara's foliar products with agrochemicals."

Monsanto Is Using Big Data to Take Over the World

You probably know Monsanto as the world's leading producer of genetically engineered seeds—a global agribusiness giant whose critics accuse it of everything from boosting our reliance on pesticides to driving Indian farmers to suicide.

But that's actually just the latest in a long series of evolving corporate identities. When the company was founded in 1901 by a St. Louis pharmacist, its initial product was artificial sweetener. Over the next few decades Monsanto expanded into industrial chemicals, releasing its first agricultural herbicide, 2,4-D, in 1945. In the '50s it produced laundry detergent, the infamous insecticide DDT, and chemical components for nuclear bombs. In the '60s it churned out Agent Orange for the Vietnam War. In the '70s it became one of the largest producers of LED lights.

Maui's GMO Ban Blocked By Federal Judge

HONOLULU (AP) — A federal judge says Maui County may not implement a new law banning the cultivation of genetically modified organisms until he can consider arguments in a lawsuit against the measure.

Judge Barry Kurren said Friday that both sides have agreed to delay the date the law goes into effect.

Monsanto, the TPP and Global Food Dominance

“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.  ”Control food and you control the people.”

Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.

Washington State Vote to Label GM Food Defeated By Corporations’ "Sophisticated Propaganda Machine"

As a measure to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods fails to pass in Washington state, we speak to one of its major supporters, David Bronner, the grandson of Dr. Bronner who founded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, who spent $2.3 million on the "Yes on 522" campaign, but was outspent 3-to-1 by opponents. The campaign against Initiative 522 drew millions of dollars from major corporations and out-of-state organizations who spent more than $22 million to defeat it, including Monsanto, which donated more than $5 million, and DuPont, which gave almost $4 million. Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Nestle dedicated more than $1.5 million each. This comes as a recent New York Times poll found 93 percent of Americans want labels on food containing GM ingredients. Sixty-four countries require it. Bronner notes votes are still being counted and the measure is not yet officially defeated, and says similar measures are pending in Connecticut and Maine.

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Source: democracynow.org
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Executive at Monsanto Wins Global Food Honor

When it comes to agriculture, the World Food Prize is the equivalent of the Oscars.

This year, the prestigious award went the mastermind behind Monsanto’s big move into genetically modified crops. In foodie terms, that is like a commercial blockbuster winning best picture rather than an independent, artsy film.

Started in 1987, the prize aims to recognize people who improve the “quality, quantity or availability” of food in the world. The founder of the award, Norman E. Borlaug, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 as the father of the Green Revolution, which vastly increased grain output.

Debbie Stabenow Pledges To Oppose Monsanto Protection Act Extension Without Full Debate

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee, pledged to oppose the extension of the so-called the Monsanto Protection Act, a victory for advocates who have been pressing for its repeal.

Stabenow made her pledge in a conversation with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who has been pushing the Senate to vote on an amendment to the farm bill that would repeal the provision. That vote was blocked by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and on Thursday morning the Senate voted to end debate and move to final passage.