Trump’s Attempt to Control the World Supply of Monsanto’s Glyphosate, and Robert Kennedy’s Duplicitous Role

The No Spray Coalition against pesticides has issued a very strong statement rejecting President Trump’s recent executive order, which declared the production and use of glyphosate as “critical” to U.S. national security.

In 2007, the Coalition won its lawsuit against New York City’s spraying of Malathion to kill mosquitoes said to be the carriers of West Nile Virus. The City had applied massive doses of the pesticide.The settlement agreement raised the issue and stipulated a program limiting the dangers of glyphosate, which led to new regulations limiting the application of such chemicals in the environment.

And last month the grassroots healthy alternatives-to-pesticides coalition joined with GMO/Toxin Free USA, which authored the petition below; Beyond Pesticides; Organic Consumers Association; Greenpeace; Environmental Working Group; Center for Biological Diversity; and a slew of environmental and health organizations which have been fighting against the production and use of glyphosate for decades.

Glyphosate is the main ingredient in the Monsanto company’s herbicide, Roundup.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.–who today heads the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services–was at one time a strong voice opposing FDA approval of glyphosate and other chemicals dumped into the environment. In fact, celebrating a major judicial decision six years ago where the Court ordered the Monsanto company to release tens of thousands of pages of documents it had tried to keep secret, Kennedy wrote at the time, “all Monsanto’s claims about glyphosate’s safety were myths concocted by amoral propaganda and lobbying teams.”

“Monsanto has been spinning its lethal yarn to everybody for years,” Kennedy continued, “and suborning various perjuries from regulators and scientists who have all been lying in concert to American farmers, landscapers and consumers.”

“These new revelations are commiserate with the documents that brought down big tobacco.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who secured the release of those documents. He is well aware of messages in Monsanto’s internal documents indicting the corporation–now owned by Bayer – for suppressing the corporation’s own scientists who questioned the safety claims Monsanto was making, but who were either obstructed or ignored. In one email, reports EcoWatch, Monsanto scientist Donna Farmer writes, “you cannot say that Roundup is not a carcinogen . . . we have not done the necessary testing on the [entire composite] formulation to make that statement. The testing on the formulations are not anywhere near the level of the active ingredient.”

And yet, today, Kennedy unconscionably and publicly endorses Trump’s multi-billion dollar gifts to Monsanto, Big Pharma and Big Agriculture. Kennedy now plays an integral role in sanctifying Trump’s executive order regarding glyphosate.

The Bioscience Resource Project, which publishes groundbreaking and topical analyses of the science underlying food and agriculture systems in the peer-reviewed academic literature, quoted from the NY Times, “The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics.”

They “indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.”

The documents show that both industry and regulators “understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press.”

Dr. Jonathan Latham, executive director of the BioScience Research Project, explains:

These documents ordered released by the Court are part of a tremendous trove of previously hidden chemical regulatory activity and chemical safety. What is most striking about them is their heavy focus on the activities of regulators. Time and time again regulators went to the extreme lengths of setting up secret committees, deceiving the media and the public, and covering up evidence of human exposure and human harm. These secret activities extended and increased human exposure to chemicals they knew to be toxic.

Revelations in 2016 about the spraying of glyphosate by the Quaker Oats Company on its rolled oats as a drying agent were shocking. Then came the discovery that 90 percent of the samples tested of “socially responsible” Ben & Jerry’s ice cream contained glyphosate and, shortly after, findings of glyphosate in leading orange juice brands provided impetus for a heated global debate. New findings reveal that children’s vaccines, as well as popular brands of wine and beer are contaminated with the cancer-causing pesticide.

A report by Carey Gillam, widely disseminated by EcoWatch, claimed that Monsanto intentionally suppressed information about the potential dangers of its Roundup herbicide and relied on corrupt U.S. regulators to cover it up.

The evidence of governmental collusion with Monsanto infuriated the jury in the case of Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto. In the summer of 2018, the jury voted unanimously to award Johnson, a school groundskeeper and plaintiff, a quarter of a billion dollars, much of it as part of punitive damages against the company.

Currently, thousands of people are suing Monsanto, alleging that Roundup caused them or their family members to become ill with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Bayer and Monsanto are setting aside $7.2 billion to settle those lawsuits — an inappropriately small amount given the large size of individual victories over the company, awarded by juries. The documents are now available as part of a long list of Roundup court documents compiled by the consumer group U.S. Right to Know.

Attorney Brent Wisner was stunned at the revelations found in the documents. “This is a look behind the curtain,” he said. “These [documents] show that Monsanto has deliberately been stopping studies that look bad for them, ghostwriting literature and engaging in a whole host of corporate malfeasance. They [Monsanto] have been telling everybody that these products are safe because regulators have said they are safe, but it turns out that Monsanto has been in bed with U.S. regulators while misleading European regulators.”

In other words, this is precisely the kind of corruption that typifies the regulatory process that Kennedy had once strongly opposed and had sworn to uproot.

* * *

Complicating the Executive Order (and perhap the hidden rationale behind it) is the Trump administration’s (including Robert Kennedy’s) protection in the same Order of another Monsanto/Bayer war product: white phosphorus.

Michael Hansen, the stellar Consumers Union scientist, writes: First, as the beginning of the EO notes, “Elemental phosphorus is … crucial to military readiness and national defense. It is a key component in smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices …”

The reference to “smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices” points to white phosphorus munitions. White phosphorus, Hansen continues, is not banned internationally because it has legitimate uses, such as for smoke screens and illumination. However, Article 2 of Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, concerning incendiary weapons, bans the use of white phosphorus incendiary weapons, particularly in civilian areas. Thus, there is a legal grey area here.

Three companies in the US are associated with making, storing and exporting white phosphorus munitions: Pine Bluff Arsenal, Monsanto/Bayer, and ICL Group. Pine Bluff Arsenal (PBA), opened in 1941 and owned and operated by the US, had a mission to supply chemical weapons for use in WWII. PBA is the only place in the Northern Hemisphere that currently fills white phosphorus munitions. Monsanto–which has a long history of working with the US Defense Department (such as with Operation Ranch Hand in Vietnam)–is the only US manufacturer responsible for white phosphorus production in the U.S. and has been supplying PBA with the product for decades

Finally, the third company involved is ICL Group (previously known as Israel Chemical Ltd), which has a US chemical manufacturing plant in St. Louis, MO and works closely with Monsanto/Bayer. ICL Group’s parent company, located in Israel, is a minerals company that, among other things, mines phosphates in the Negev desert and sells fertilizers. It’s thought that ICL Group U.S. might provide Monsanto/Bayer with the phosphates used in white phosphorus production.

Right after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Human Rights Watch documented the use of white phosphorus munitions in Gaza and Lebanon. At the same time, Amnesty International documented that Israel used white phosphorus munitions from the Pine Bluff Arsenal. In early November 2023, the Middle East Monitor documented that the IDF dropped white phosphorus munitions on the UNRWA school in a Gaza refugee camp.

So, the whole EO is economically beneficial to Monsanto/Bayer, by helping them produce and sell more GBHs, potentially providing immunity from present lawsuits, and securing more white phosphorus for a potential war with Iran.

The timing of this EO is a bit suspicious to me. If the main reason was to help Monsanto with GBH liability, why now and not 6 months ago or one year ago?

Bottom line: since virtually all the white phosphorus munitions in the developed world are packaged at PBA, with Monsanto/Bayer being the sole US manufacturer of white phosphorus, and with documented use of white phosphorus munitions from PBA being used in the Middle East in the last couple of years and with the present saber rattling about a potential war with Iran (which would conceivably involve greater demand/use of white phosphorus), this PBA-Monsanto/Bayer-ICL Group connection should be looked at more closely. [extended analysis and quote pertaining to white phosphorus is from Michael Hansen, Ph.D., Senior Scientist Advocacy of Consumer Reports.]

To reiterate, the No Spray Coalition condemns the current acquiescence of Robert Kennedy, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, with the Trump administration’s executive order portraying glyphosate and white phosphorus as essential to U.S. Security interests, and thus rationalizing the U.S. government’s protecting and ramping up of production of toxic pesticides.

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