by Carey Gillam
The Roundup Ready soybean was only the first herbicide-tolerant crop Monsanto would birth from its laboratories. By the year 2000, only four short years after the first biotech soybean was brought to market, and the year that Monsanto’s U.S. patent on glyphosate expired, Monsanto was also selling Roundup Ready corn, cotton, and canola, all genetically engineered to tolerate being sprayed with glyphosate-based herbicides. The company, which at that time was spending around $500 million annually on research and development, had also developed genetic alterations that created insect resistance in corn and cotton, and it was combining the traits into the same seeds.
Monsanto was soon rolling in riches, thanks to farmers’ reliance on Roundup and the other glyphosate herbicides Monsanto was selling for use with traditional crops, along with the booming demand for Roundup that accompanied the rollout of the company’s Roundup Ready crops. Total company sales were $5.5 billion in 2000, roughly half of which came from sales of Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicides. The company bragged to shareholders that it saw an 18 percent rise in the volume of the glyphosate products it was selling just from 1999 to 2000.6 And, it told them, the global market for glyphosate tripled between 1995, before glyphosate-tolerant GMO crops were introduced, and 2001. Monsanto controlled a dominant 80 percent “or above” of that global market for glyphosate. Executives explained that the gains were in part due to the growing number of acres planted around the world with its genetically altered glyphosate-tolerant crops, which at that time stood at about 118 million acres. “Roundup herbicide is key to our integrated strategy,” the company told investors.7
In addition to corn, soybeans, cotton, and canola, over the next few years Monsanto would expand its roster of Roundup Ready crops to include alfalfa, a type of hay eaten by livestock, and sugar beets, used widely to sweeten foods and beverages.
The herbicide-tolerant trait was spread throughout the seed market as Monsanto licensed its technology to over one hundred seed companies in the 1990s. By 2013, Monsanto’s genetic traits were embedded in more than 90 percent of the U.S. soybean crop and more than 80 percent of American corn.
To ensure that farmers kept using branded Roundup rather than generics on the glyphosate-tolerant crops after glyphosate’s patent expired, Monsanto tied a range of incentives and penalties to sales of its products. But the company was so aggressive in its dealings that many customers and competitors cried foul. Critics alleged that Monsanto gained a market monopoly by unfairly blocking rival herbicides from the market and limiting overall competition in violation of antitrust laws. In a class action lawsuit brought against Monsanto in August 2007, Texas Grain Storage, also known as West Chemical & Fertilizer, accused Monsanto of engaging in a “comprehensive anticompetitive scheme” to artificially inflate the prices of Roundup. Roundup held roughly 80 percent of the U.S. agricultural herbicide market at that time—in part, Texas Grain alleged, because the company penalized dealers and wholesalers who sold more than a limited amount of competing generic glyphosate herbicides.8 Monsanto already was a major supplier of glyphosate to other agrochemical companies, but the company limited the price and the amount that rivals could sell, the lawsuit claimed.
Texas Grain Storage, based in West Texas, was just a middleman, buying and storing Roundup in a stainless steel tank to resell to farmers. But the company said Monsanto kept an iron grip on its dealings, monitoring the level of Roundup that Texas Grain had in storage and requiring Texas Grain to alert Monsanto of all sales of competing glyphosate products.
Other lawsuits made similar accusations, including that Monsanto was using its market power to block rival seed developers from gaining wide distribution for their products, and exploiting that absence of competition by repeatedly raising prices for its specialty seeds. The allegations became part of an antitrust probe by the U.S. Department of Justice and several state attorneys general.9 Monsanto ultimately altered its contracts, and the allegations faded.
But other problems dogged Monsanto’s introduction of the Roundup Ready crops. Since GMOs were first introduced, regulators in the United States, Monsanto’s home base, had handled oversight of biotech crops through a three-pronged system of shared responsibilities by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the USDA, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Each agency looked at the crops through a different lens, and each ultimately came under withering criticism from both internal government audits and outside environmental and consumer advocates who accused regulators of giving Monsanto far too much leeway.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, in a November 2008 report cited several problems with biotech crop regulation. Among the many criticisms, auditors reported that regulators did little to determine whether the “spread of genetic traits is causing undesirable effects on the environment, non-GE segments of agriculture, or food safety.”10
Many complaints made their way to court. In some cases, the USDA was found to have acted illegally or carelessly in approving crops. In one notable case, a coalition of environmental groups, farmers, and consumers filed suit against the USDA in 2006 for approving Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa without doing the full environmental impact study required by law. The groups argued that the genetically altered alfalfa would likely cross-pollinate with nonmodified crops and contaminate conventional alfalfa supplies. Many overseas markets would not buy GMO alfalfa or other crops, and farmers stood to lose a lot of money in sales if their non-GMO crops were tainted.
Another big concern was the potential for overuse of Roundup herbicide and other pesticides, as farmers, environmentalists, and some government scientists were already starting to document the rise of “superweeds” that had become immune to routine spraying of glyphosate. As farmers struggled to contain the resistant weeds, they dumped more and more herbicides on their fields. This chemical treadmill was harming soil health and the safety of groundwater supplies, critics said.
The judge in the case, Charles R. Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, agreed with plaintiffs that the law had been broken, and he banned further planting of the GMO alfalfa until the government did a more thorough evaluation. An appeals court upheld the ban. The government essentially dropped out of the case and set about trying to do the analysis the court had found lacking. But Monsanto intervened and succeeded in getting the case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2010.11 The high court found in Monsanto’s favor in a 7–1 decision. The majority did not disagree that the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) had failed to follow the law by neglecting to conduct a full environmental impact study. But, the justices said, the lower court had overstepped in banning further planting of the alfalfa until the environmental impact analysis was completed.
In a sharp dissent, Justice John P. Stevens was harshly critical of the majority’s decision to side with Monsanto and lift the ban on the new crop, stating the “environmental threat is novel.” In conclusion, he stated:
Confronted with those disconcerting submissions, with APHIS’s unlawful deregulation decision, with a group of farmers who had staked their livelihoods on APHIS’s decision, and with a federal statute that prizes informed decisionmaking on matters that seriously affect the environment, the court did the best it could. In my view, the District Court was well within its discretion to order the remedy that the Court now reverses. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.12
In a similar case,13 District Judge Jeffrey S. White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in 2009 that the USDA violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it approved Monsanto’s genetically engineered sugar beets, saying the agency failed to adequately assess the impact the crops would have on the environment. The judge found that Roundup Ready sugar beets “may significantly affect the environment” and encouraged growers to “take all efforts, going forward, to use conventional seed.” In an August 2010 ruling, the judge formally revoke
d approval of the sugar beets and criticized the USDA for “not taking this process seriously.”14 After a legal scuffle over whether or not already planted seedlings would need to be pulled from farm fields, the USDA, under pressure from Monsanto, declared that it would partially deregulate the GMO sugar beets to allow for some production as it prepared the environmental impact statement it was supposed to have prepared years earlier. That final report was published in June 2012, and sugar beets were allowed back on the market.15 More than 1 million acres of sugar beets are cultivated each year in the United States, and most of this acreage is now planted with the glyphosate-tolerant type.
While these cases dealt mainly with the government’s lack of oversight, the complaints foreshadowed a barrage of threats to people and the environment as glyphosate use soared. In 1991, roughly 18.7 million pounds of glyphosate was used on crops in the United States, government figures show. By 2001, the chemical bath had reached roughly 100 million pounds, and by 2015, it had climbed to 286 million pounds. No herbicide has come remotely close to such intensive and widespread use.
More than half of the glyphosate used worldwide—an estimated 56 percent—was sprayed on genetically altered crops by 2015. Oddly, or perhaps suspiciously, the USDA’s public reporting of herbicide and other pesticide use on U.S. farms ended in 2008, and it was left primarily to academic researchers and analysts with the U.S. Department of the Interior to try to keep track of the spread of the chemicals.16
“Monsanto was blowing smoke at EPA in claiming that herbicide use would go down,” said Charles Benbrook, an agricultural industry consultant who holds a doctorate in agricultural economics and is a former director of the National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Agriculture. “Their claim was just laughable.”17
Even more of the weed killer would likely be drenching U.S. farm fields had Monsanto succeeded with its plans to push an herbicide-tolerant trait into another key crop: wheat, a staple in food products around the globe. Monsanto developed Roundup Ready wheat—in a type called hard red spring wheat, which is typically used to make bread flour—in the early 2000s and sought mightily to bring it to market. But buyers in many foreign countries threatened to stop purchasing wheat from the United States if any biotech wheat was mixed into the market.
“In our opinion, it is unacceptable that a fine commodity is genetically modified just for the purpose of making it herbicide resistant, this does not offer a single advantage to the world,” wrote Jef Smidts, a director of a large Belgium-based buyer of U.S. wheat that operated mills across northern Europe, in a 2001 memo to American wheat industry leaders. “Monsanto’s marketing research … is a joke. GMO wheat for sure will be a market destructor.”18
American farmers who feared losing export markets also pushed back against Monsanto. The opposition became so fierce that in 2004, Monsanto ended efforts to commercialize the GMO wheat, though the company said in 2014 it still hoped to bring a GMO wheat to market someday.
Even without the genetic modification, Monsanto still encouraged farmers to spray glyphosate directly on wheat and on a number of other crops that are not genetically altered. The trick, Monsanto told farmers, was to apply the herbicide just days before the crops were to be harvested. Marketing materials put out by the company guide farmers in preharvest treatments of the chemical on not only wheat but also milling oats, barley, peas, lentils, dry beans, and other crops. The idea is both to limit the growth of weeds after the field is harvested and, in some cases, to dry out the crops so they mature more uniformly, which makes harvesting more efficient for farmers. Monsanto recommends that farmers use glyphosate in various ways in conjunction with the production of more than one hundred food crops, according to the EPA.
The result is that glyphosate frequently has been used in various stages in the production of everything from alfalfa to oranges, avocados to apples, grapes to grapefruit. Even U.S.-grown almonds, a common snack for health-conscious people, are treated annually on average with an estimated 2.1 million pounds of glyphosate. Likewise, producers of cherries use an estimated 200,000 pounds of the pesticide annually, according to the EPA’s analysis. About 3.2 million pounds are used annually for production of oranges; 1.5 million pounds for grapes; 600,000 pounds for walnuts; 400,000 pounds for pecans; 200,000 pounds for lemons; 100,000 pounds for oats; and 80,000 pounds for avocados.19
Still, the largest quantities of glyphosate by far are used on corn and soybeans. The USDA calculated that on average between 2004 and 2013, about 101 million pounds of glyphosate was used each year on U.S. soybean fields alone. Corn crops were sprayed with about 63.5 million pounds. Both estimates were up from a prior analysis that ran through 2011, which pegged average annual soybean use at 86.4 million pounds and corn at 54.6 million pounds.20
It’s not clear just how much glyphosate residue remains in your salad, sandwich, or snack, largely because regulators have elected for years not to look for glyphosate residues when they do annual testing of pesticide residues in food.
For Mark Nelson, who applies glyphosate routinely to his crops, questions about glyphosate’s safety are worrisome, but he is not ready to accept the warnings about cancer. Still, he tries to take every precaution, riding in a tractor with a charcoal-filtered cab and donning safety gear to try to avoid contact with the chemical. “We’re careful out here,” he said.
Standing in his cornfield on a hot August afternoon, Nelson said he knows the end is coming for glyphosate. Even putting aside the health concerns, weed resistance alone has made this once beloved farm aid less and less effective as the years pass. The rewards will soon no longer be worth the risk. “It’s just not working like it used to,” Nelson said. “I think eventually it’s going to go away.”
CHAPTER 4
Weed Killer for Breakfast
For many people, a toasted bagel topped with honey might sound like a healthy breakfast choice. Others might prefer a bowl of oatmeal, cornflakes, or a hot plate of scrambled eggs. Few would likely welcome a dose of weed killer that has been linked to cancer in their morning meal. Yet that is exactly what private laboratory tests in the United States started showing with alarming frequency in 2014: residues of the world’s most widely used herbicide were making their way into American meals.
Testing since then, by both private and public researchers, has shown glyphosate residues not only in bagels, honey, and oatmeal but also in a wide array of products that commonly line grocery store shelves, including flour, eggs, cookies, cereal and cereal bars, soy sauce, beer, and infant formula. Indeed, glyphosate residues are so pervasive that they’ve been found in human urine. Livestock are also consuming these residues in grains used to make their feed, including corn, soy, alfalfa, and wheat. Glyphosate residues have been detected in bread samples in the United Kingdom for years,1 as well as in shipments of wheat leaving the United States for overseas markets.2 “Americans are consuming glyphosate in common foods on a daily basis,” the Alliance for Natural Health said in its April 2016 report, which revealed glyphosate residues detected in eggs and coffee creamer, bagels and oatmeal.3
In January 2015, an advocacy group called GMO Free USA said tests it ordered showed that Kellogg’s Froot Loops cereal contained trace amounts of glyphosate. The group blamed Kellogg Company for “feeding children unlabeled GMOs and toxic herbicides” and called for a boycott of Kellogg.4 The group also said testing showed glyphosate in PepsiCo, Inc.’s Frito-Lay SunChips snacks. The food manufacturers responded by echoing Monsanto Company’s assurances, saying that pesticide residues in food are common and that any glyphosate residues are not at unsafe levels.
Researchers from Abraxis, LLC, a Pennsylvania-based scientific diagnostics company, worked with Boston University on their own testing and reported in 2014 that they found glyphosate residues in 41 of 69 honey samples and in 10 of 28 samples of soy sauce purchased from U.S. grocery store shelves.5
One lab, Microbe Inotech Laboratories, was used by several concerned companies and groups for early rounds of
glyphosate testing, in part because it was founded by a former Monsanto microbiologist, Bruce Hemming, who had a stellar reputation. Microbe Inotech was small, but it had received government grants to conduct food microbiological research. Moreover, Hemming was a career scientist and entrepreneur as well as a former church missionary with twenty-eight grandchildren, and he had a deep passion for using his scientific skills to help people. Hemming started his lab in 1991, offering microbial and biochemical analyses to a range of companies that wanted tests run on their consumer and industrial products. He was surprised when the interest in glyphosate testing emerged in 2014 and was soon very surprised by the results found in his laboratory, which he operates a mere four miles from Monsanto’s massive corporate headquarters in a St. Louis suburb. Hemming knew from his work at Monsanto that glyphosate was not supposed to accumulate in the human body, but his lab detected glyphosate in breast milk samples and a range of other substances submitted for analysis. The shock quickly wore off as Hemming’s lab became one of only a few in the United States juggling an influx of testing requests from food companies, public and private researchers, and consumer organizations, all trying to determine how much, if any, glyphosate was present in food, water, and bodily fluids.6 Hemming’s reputation and that of his lab came under sharp criticism, however, by Monsanto and others who said the methodology and results were seriously flawed. Hemming’s lab was using a method known as an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), which the lab said was validated. But critics claimed ELISA was too likely to produce false results to be considered definitive proof of anything.