Earlier this year, a judge unsealed documents that were part of an ongoing lawsuit against Monsanto. Those documents raised questions about the collusion that the company is alleged to have engaged in. The documents, and other recent revelations, point to corruption, indicating that the EPA and Monsanto were well aware of health risks associated to Monsanto products, yet the company continued to sell them to the public anyways and downplay health risks.
Since those documents came to light, the EPA insists that they are now looking at the chemical formulation of Roundup and they might soon decide to turn away from endorsing it with their approval. Keep in mind that this chemical is still arguably one of the most prominently used chemical products that's out there today. It's become so prevalent that the majority of food on the market today, is being genetically engineered to withstand Roundup specifically, along with other glyphosate-based herbicides.
If the EPA does move to pull glyphosate from approval then that would be a huge blow to Monsanto.
Monsanto makes billions of dollars in revenue from Roundup and it's estimated that roughly 300 million pounds of glyphosate is applied across the US to American farms every year.
The documents that were revealed not long ago are a part of an ongoing lawsuit that Monsanto is involved in, one of many. And this lawsuit in particular involves a federal court challenging the conclusion about Roundup's main ingredient and whether or not it might cause negative health effects like promoting cancer.
Hundreds of lawsuits launched by victims who claim that they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma as a result of exposure to Monsanto's Roundup.
In those groundbreaking documents it was also revealed that Monsanto acted as its own safety reviewer by ghostwriting its own research, later attributing that to academic professionals; prompting many to now question their scientific claims about their products. Internal e-mails allegedly support the notion that Monsanto worked with a senior official at the EPA to try and silence a critical review of glyphosate. The inspector general for the EPA has responded to the crisis by launching an investigation, to find out whether or not one of their own did in fact collude with Monsanto.
And that hasn't been the only bad news for Monsanto lately. In other reports, it's also been revealed that Monsanto sold chemicals to the public for years that it knew had associated health risks. The details were released in what is being referred to as the Poison Papers Project, which is a project that sought to discover thousands of documents related to Monsanto's activities.
The report allegedly suggests that Monsanto actively endangered people and the environment by ignoring risks and selling banned pollutants that they knew could be harmful; chemicals that are referred to as PCBs. Monsanto is now being sued for clean-up costs for PCB chemicals in Washington and that could cost them billions of dollars.
Without surprise, Monsanto has refuted that allegation and denied that it engaged in any wrongdoing, though they haven't disputed the legitimacy of the documents that have been revealed. With Bayer expected to soon complete their multi-billion dollar takeover of Monsanto, these issues could pose come costly problems for them down the road. As if Monsanto wasn't already having a difficult enough time trying to market their GMO products and herbicides etc to the world, these documents allegedly detailing their shady business operations certainly don't bode well for consumer confidence.
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Sources:
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/324386-monsanto-and-the-epa-have-been-lying-to-us-for-years
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup-safety-lawsuit.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-09/monsanto-was-its-own-ghostwriter-for-some-safety-reviews
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/epa-inspector-general-probing-collusion-with-monsanto_us_59372108e4b0aba888b99dca
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/09/monsanto-continued-selling-pcbs-for-years-despite-knowing-health-risks-archives-reveal
https://usrtk.org/pesticides/mdl-monsanto-glyphosate-cancer-case-key-documents-analysis/
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/26/chemical-industry-herbicide-poison-papers/