Articles

When Monsanto announced its plans to introduce a new strain of herbicide-resistant soybean seeds and cotton seeds and a new type of herbicide to accompany them, the company promised that its next generation of products would give farmers better control of weeds, “especially tough-to-manage and glyphosate-resistant weeds,” or the so-called Superweeds resistant to Monsanto’s current Roundup herbicide.

Superweeds, likely caused by the heavy use of weed-killing herbicides, have created major headaches for farmers, but agriculture companies like Monsanto insist that spraying a different type of herbicide is the answer.

Monsanto’s next generation of seeds would be resistant not just to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s current Roundup weedkiller, but also the chemical dicamba, a potent ingredient to be used in the Roundup Ready 2 Xtend formula.

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“Dicamba is highly drift-prone,” meaning that Dicamba has a tendency to evaporate in the days or weeks following its application and travel to other crops, wrote Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with the Pesticide Action Network. When Dicamba drifts onto other plants, the results can be disastrous, she and others argued. “Dicamba is extremely toxic to virtually all broadleaf plants,” or plants that are not grasses, Ishii-Eiteman wrote online.