Scant oversight, corporate secrecy preceded U.S. weed killer crisis
Source: Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - As the U.S. growing season entered its peak this summer, farmers began posting startling pictures on social media: fields of beans, peach orchards and vegetable gardens withering away.
The photographs served as early warnings of a crisis that has damaged millions of acres of farmland. New versions of the herbicide dicamba developed by Monsanto and BASF, according to farmers, have drifted across fields to crops unable to withstand it, a charge authorities are investigating.
As the crisis intensifies, new details provided to Reuters by independent researchers and regulators, and previously unreported testimony by a company employee, demonstrate the unusual way Monsanto introduced its product. The approach, in which Monsanto prevented key independent testing of its product, went unchallenged by the Environmental Protection Agency and nearly every state regulator.
Typically, when a company develops a new agricultural product, it commissions its own tests and shares the results and data with regulators. It also provides product samples to universities for additional scrutiny. Regulators and university researchers then work together to determine the safety of the product.
In this case, Monsanto denied requests by university researchers to study its XtendiMax with VaporGrip for volatility - a measure of its tendency to vaporize and drift across fields.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pesticides-dicamba-insight-idUSKBN1AP0DN?il=0
Another heartwarming story of 'Better Living Through Monsanto Chemicals'
= new reply since forum marked as read
Reduce your consumption of anything that's not USDA Organic or Non-GMO.
I look at that stuff as poison, laced with chemicals and biological DNA that's unnatural.
I'll take spots on my apples. Give me the birds and the bees, please.
