A trove of Monsanto’s internal records released on Tuesday raises serious concerns about company efforts to influence media reports and scientific research related to risks posed by is popular weedkiller, Roundup.
As the New York Times reported:
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The dozens of documents include text messages and emails among Monsanto employees discussing Roundup’s safety, as well as their communications with writers and researchers. They were released by one of the law firms representing a group of gardeners, farmers, and agricultural workers who are suing Monsanto over allegations that glyphosate, a key chemical in Roundup, caused them to develop cancer. These documents follow records released in March that, among other things, revealed company ties to an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), prompting an investigation into possible collusion between Monsanto and the EPA staffer.
“This is a look behind the curtain,” Brent Wisner, an attorney from the firm that released the documents, told journalist Carey Gillam, who is also the research director for U.S. Right to Know. “These 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.”
“This trove marks a turning point in Monsanto’s corporate life….We can now prove that all Monsanto’s claims about glyphosate’s safety were myths concocted by amoral propaganda and lobbying teams.”
—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attorney
“This trove marks a turning point in Monsanto’s corporate life,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., another attorney involved with the class action suit, told Gillam. “They show Monsanto executives colluding with corrupted EPA officials to manipulate and bury scientific data to kill studies when preliminary data threatened Monsanto’s commercial ambitions, bribing scientists and ghostwriting their publications, and purchasing peer review to conceal information about Roundup’s carcinogenicity, its toxicity, its rapid absorption by the human body, and its horrendous risks to public health and the environment….We can now prove that all Monsanto’s claims about glyphosate’s safety were myths concocted by amoral propaganda and lobbying teams.”
Glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. Although the popular weed-killer has been approved by U.S. regulators for decades, glyphosate is often condemned by environmentalists and food safety advocates, who worry about hormone disruption, and the contentious debate over whether glyphosate causes cancer—as well as its role in the “pesticide treadmill.” It was deemed a “probable human carcinogen” by the World Health Organization (WHO)in 2015, and in June California announced it would add glyphosate to the state’s list of known cancer-causing chemicals.
More than 700 pages of documents also reveal Monsanto’s efforts to discredit the WHO classification, which was issued by the agency’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). As Splinter reported:
The release of Monsanto’s “secret documents” was widely supported and circulated by environmentalists and food safety advocates online: