Mitchel Cohen, Coordinator
No Spray Coalition
https://www.NoSpray.org
info@NoSpray.org
The No Spray Coalition rejects President Trump's executive order declaring the production and use of glyphosate as “critical” to U.S. national security.
We join 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 (but not the only one) 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 the corporation had tried to keep secret, Kennedy wrote at the time “that 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 and suborning various perjuries from regulators and scientists who have all been lying in concert to American farmers, landscapers and consumers,” Kennedy continued. “It’s shocking no matter how jaded you are! These new revelations are commiserate with the documents that brought down big tobacco.”
Kennedy knows all-too-well 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.’”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the plaintiffs' lawyers who secured and read the release of those documents. Today, Kennedy unconscionably endorses Trump's multi-billion dollar gifts to Big Pharma and Big Agriculture. But at the time Kennedy blasted what today would become the Trump administration's position. Kennedy now plays an integral role in sanctifying Trump's executive order regarding glyphosate.
Kennedy was far from the only one organizing against Monsanto, of course. 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.”
Moreover, 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 pre-rolled oats as a drying agent were shocking enough. 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 heated global debate. And now 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 the government’s collusion with Monsanto infuriated the jury in the case of Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto. In the summer of 2018, it 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. The documents, which were obtained through court-ordered discovery in the litigation, are available as part of a long list of Roundup court-case 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, the kind of corruption that typifies the regulatory process that Kennedy had once strongly opposed.
Once again, the No Spray Coalition condemns the current acquiescence of the Secretary of Health and Human Services with the Trump administration's executive order portraying glyphosate 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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U.S. REPS THOMAS MASSIE & CHELLIE PINGREE SPONSOR BILL TO OVERTURN TRUMP EXECUTIVE ORDER PROTECTING GLYPHOSATE AND BAYER-MONSANTO Sign this petition to your U.S. Representative (written by GMO/Toxin Free USA) to pass HR 7601, the No Immunity for Glyphosate Act tinyurl.com/NoImmunityGlyphosate
In a betrayal of all Americans, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) titled “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides” on Wednesday, February 18, 2026, which instructed our federal government to protect and increase the local production of glyphosate-based herbicides, and provided Bayer-Monsanto a legal shield, immunity from pesticide-harm lawsuits. Thousands of you took part in actions that we launched the next day 1) demanding that Trump reverse his EO, and 2) urging Congress to use their authority to rescind the EO. Your voices were heard. Sign the petition to your U.S. Representative Donate to help us stop the madness A press release issued by Representatives Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Chellie Pingree (D-ME) announced a bipartisan, co-sponsored bill, HR 7601, the “No Immunity for Glyphosate Act.” The bill would rescind Trump’s EO. Specifically, HR 7601 will: Prohibit the use of federal funds to implement the Executive Order, preventing federal agencies from using appropriated funds to administer or enforce the directive; and Affirm that glyphosate manufacturers are not immune from civil liability, ensuring that manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers cannot claim immunity under the Defense Production Act, federal contractor defenses, or other federal authorities, while preserving the constitutional right of injured individuals to pursue claims under federal and state law. The bipartisan bill’s original co-sponsors also include Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA). Please take action now urging your Representative to co-sponsor and pass HR 7601. We cannot let the President’s egregious overreach stand. Taxpayer dollars must not be used to increase production of toxic, carcinogenic glyphosate-based herbicides in the United States. And Bayer should not be given immunity when its poison products cause harm. Send an email directly to your Rep with our form. You can use our pre-written comment text, but we encourage you to edit it to make it your own. Tell your Rep to pass HR7601 No Immunity for Glyphosate Act Donate to help stop Monsanto's glyphosate immunity Share the link with everyone you know who cares about their constitutional rights: tinyurl.com/NoImmunityGlyphosate
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SIDEBAR
Monsanto's genetically engineered seeds are frequenly sprayed with much greater doses of pesticides than non-GMO crops. Roundup herbicide is designed specifically to unlock the secrets engineered into its crops. As a consequence, Roundup saw sales of more than $4.7 billion in 2016, triple that of a few years earlier. In that same year, Monsanto raked in more than $12 billion in sales of its genetically engineered products.
Monsanto, in collusion with lawmakers throughout the country, pressured growers, landscapers, and municipalities to deny consumers the right to even know whether their food is genetically engineered. It has fought tooth and nail against attempts to require labeling of products containing genetically engineered ingredients. “The present-day chemical companies have manufactured a nano planet, a second unseen world. We can’t see it. We don’t notice it. But we notice the epidemic of cancer deaths. We notice our dying loved ones. We vaguely blame modern life. We continue to hesitate to defend ourselves against Monsanto and Bayer, Syngenta, Dow and DuPont, BASF, and the big Chinese outfits,” intones Rev. Billy Talen, exorcising the “Monsanto devil” at a performance with the Church of Stop Shopping outside Monsanto’s headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri.
“They are a vanishing act. Their chemicals enter the world as dark magic. The sprays and vapors and seed coatings vanish into the eco-systems, and into our bodies. Our regulators are corrupted, and we are left with the surgical strikes from Big Chem’s marketing departments, fake scientists, and bribed politicians.”
Roundup, and another pesticide, 2,4-D, have been deployed by the United States and other governments since the mid-1970s to defoliate entire forests, eradicate unwanted plants, facilitate extraction of minerals, and clear land for monocropped and pesticide-saturated export crops. In the country of Colombia, where people indigenous to the coca-growing areas have for millennia harvested coca plants as part of their culture and local economy, the U.S. government’s “war on drugs” has funded and U.S. citizens have piloted airplanes spraying massive amounts of glyphosate over the tens of thousands of acres of coca fields, part of the U.S. government’s “Plan Colombia.”
In Argentina, the same toxic brew is sprayed over miles of monocropped genetically modified soy.
The Parks Department in New York City also applies Roundup and other herbicides in public parks and sidewalks for “cosmetic reasons.” Under the spell of TV images of grassy suburban homes and Monsanto’s propaganda depicting what a happy lawn looks like, homeowners spray Roundup and 2,4-D on their lawns and gardens to kill what they deem unsightly weeds, like dandelions and crabgrass.
Neil Gentzlinger, writing in t he New York Times Book Review, points to the power of the industry’s advertising even among intelligent people who care about their children’s health and the environment: “Plenty of lawn-obsessed people read the paper, have college degrees, support the Nature Conservancy; they cannot possibly think the chemicals they dump on their grass are good for their children or wildlife or groundwater, yet they dump them anyway.”
A tiny dose of just ten micrograms of glyphosate is all that it takes to shrivel and kill a plant that has not been engineered to withstand it or has not yet grown resistant to it. The proliferation of weeds could be controlled through a variety of methods, including permaculture, crop rotation, horticulture, interspersed rows of complementary plants, friendly insects, and organic (though labor-intensive) means. But with monocropping, companion plants that repel weeds and insect “pests” are eliminated, prompting
resistance to pesticides among such “pests.” Thus, heavier and more frequent doses of pesticides are required, and we become trapped on the chemical treadmill. As a result, Monsanto is currently championing another herbicide, dicamba, because many “weeds” have grown resistant to Roundup. The company is now engineering a new wave of crops to be resistant to dicamba, in much the same way as it engineered and marketed Roundup-Ready Soy and Corn.
By 1999, agribusiness corporations (85 percent) and homeowners (15 percent) were together dumping more than 556 million pounds of toxic herbicides on U.S. farmlands each year, which often ended up in drinking water, where they exceeded federal safety levels. By 2011, total pesticide volume applied in the United States rose to 1.1 billion pounds annually.
According to the direct action group Greenpeace, which in 1997 published an early assessment of Roundup, glyphosate is one of the world’s most toxic herbicides, belonging to a family of chemicals known as organophosphates. Glyphosate can be more damaging to wild flora than many other herbicides. Aerial spraying with glyphosate, writes Greenpeace, has been detected drifting for two thousand five hundred feet beyond its intended target area, and ground spraying has been shown to damage sensitive plants up to three hundred feet away from the field sprayed.
Roundup is also deadly to fish, earthworms, insects (including those beneficial to protecting crops), birds, some mammals, and tadpoles and frogs.
To respond to some of Monsanto's misrepresentation, Roundup does not attack a plant just through glyphosate. Additional extremely toxic compounds are built into Roundup and other herbicides. “In particular most contain surfactants known as polyoxyethyleneamines (POEA). Some of these are much more toxic than glyphosate,” and can account for many of the worker-reported health effects. They are serious irritants of the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. In addition, POEAs “are contaminated with dioxane (not dioxin), which is a suspected carcinogen.”
Greenpeace’s 1997 Glyphosate Fact Sheet was followed by several additional critical reports. In July 2000, Organic Gardening reported that glyphosate “made bean plants more susceptible to disease, and reduce[d] the growth of beneficial soil-dwelling mycorrhizal fungi. In rabbits exposed to glyphosate, sperm production was diminished by 50%,” and the herbicide has been shown to cause genetic damage to the livers and kidneys of mice.
In fact, a U.S. Geological Survey concluded that a large percentage of waterways and streams throughout the United States, including those in urban and non-farming areas, are flooded with environmentally destructive chemicals that have severe impacts on animal and aquatic life. And a 2005 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that even those living in
urban and non-farming areas in the United States now carry in their bodies dangerously high levels of pesticides and pesticide residues.
Neither the corporations nor the agencies assigned to regulate the toxic onslaught have been required to demonstrate glyphosate’s safety. The U.S. government failed to require the pesticide industry to use the “precautionary principle” throughout Roundup’s approval process, which would require corporations to submit proof that the chemicals to be released into the environment are safe for humans and animal lifeindividually and in conjunction with other chemicalsbefore allowing the pesticides to be approved. In this case, as in others, government agencies actually promoted the herbicide throughout the approval process. As a result, the companies are manufacturing new and dangerous synthetic chemicals to kill “weeds” and “pests,” substituting them for the existing pesticides as they are banned.
Given this ongoing cycle, not only do grassroots activists need to rethink strategies for ending the widespread use of toxic pesticides altogether, but condemn the current acquiescence of the Secretary of Health and Human Services with the Trump administration's executive order categorizing glyphosate as essential to U.S. Security interests.
