Tag: glyphosate

Biotech and Pesticide Corporations Are “Winning” Under Trump’s Second Administration

 On February 18, 2026, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) titled “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides.” The order invokes the Defense Production Act (DPA) and states that the production of glyphosate-based herbicides is essential to US national security.

The EO is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration that benefit the pesticide industry and the biotech companies producing genetically engineered (GE) food products.

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement—launched in part by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign—has shown divided reactions to Trump’s EO. Some view it as a betrayal of the movement’s goals, while others remain optimistic that the administration may still accomplish health-focused reforms.

The Executive Order notes that phosphorus is an important component for “defense supply chains” and is “crucial to military readiness and national defense.” It states:

“It is a key input in smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices and is a critical component for manufacturing the semiconductors that are central to numerous defense technologies, such as radar, solar cells, sensors, and optoelectronics.”

Beyond military applications, the EO also outlines the current need for phosphorus as a precursor to the production of glyphosate-based herbicides, which “play a critical role in maintaining America’s agricultural advantage” by allegedly allowing farmers to “efficiently and cost-effectively produce food and livestock feed.”

The order describes glyphosate-based herbicides as “the most widely used crop protection tools in United States agriculture” and “a cornerstone of this Nation’s agricultural productivity and rural economy.” It claims they allow farmers and ranchers to maintain high yields and low costs while keeping “healthy, affordable food options” accessible to American families.

The order claims that without access to glyphosate-based herbicides the agricultural productivity of the US would be jeopardized, leading to increased pressure on the domestic food system. “Ensuring an adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides is thus crucial to the national security and defense, including food-supply security, which is essential to protecting the health and safety of Americans,” the order says.

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‘We’ve Addicted Our Farmers’ to Glyphosate, RFK Jr. Tells Joe Rogan

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called glyphosate a “poison” embedded in America’s food supply, even as he backed President Donald Trump’s executive order expanding its domestic production.

Speaking Feb. 27 on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Kennedy emphasized his decades-long fight against pesticides. “Pesticides are poison. They’re designed to kill all life. It’s not a good thing to have in your food,” he said.

Yet he defended the president’s executive order as a national security measure.

Trump signed the order in February to boost U.S. production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and now faces tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging Roundup exposure caused cancer.

Hours after the order, Kennedy told The New York Times, “Donald Trump’s executive order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply.” Days later, Kennedy posted on X, explaining his position.

On Rogan’s show, Kennedy said industry reports show that 99% of U.S. glyphosate supplies come from China. U.S. Department of Defense officials warned that dependence poses “an extreme national security vulnerability,” he said. A supply disruption “could literally cut off our food supply overnight and cripple the country.”

“The president was dealing with national security,” Kennedy said.

The executive order also grants legal immunity to domestic manufacturers compelled under the Defense Production Act of 1950 to produce glyphosate-related products. The law allows the federal government to require companies to produce materials deemed necessary for national security.

Bayer is the only company manufacturing glyphosate in the U.S.

Kennedy criticized the liability protections. “It’s not something that I was particularly happy with. Let me put it that way mildly,” he said.

He warned that immunity “takes away all incentive for them to make the product safer.”

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Countries, States, and Provinces where Glyphosate has been Banned or Restricted

Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of countries, states, and provinces (or smaller jurisdictions) where glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) has been banned or significantly restricted as of now. This includes both national-level actions and subnational measures.

National-Level Bans or Major Restrictions

Countries that have fully banned or are phasing out glyphosate:

  • Sri Lanka
    • Introduced a nationwide ban in 2015; the ban was lifted and re-instituted at various points. As of now, use requires a permit.
  • Austria
    • Implemented a full ban in 2019.
  • Luxembourg
    • Enacted a full ban in 2020, though it was later challenged in court.
  • Vietnam
    • Banned glyphosate in 2019.
  • Mexico
    • Announced a phase-out with a target ban by January 31, 2024; some sources say it’s now officially banned.
  • Bhutan
    • Reported to have a full ban in place.
  • Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
    • Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates banned glyphosate starting around 2015–2016.
  • Bermuda
    • Blocked new imports in 2015 and banned concentrations above 2% in 2016.
  • St. Vincent and the Grenadines
    • Suspended imports of glyphosate-based herbicides.
  • Costa Rica
    • Banned glyphosate use in protected areas and government-owned land.
  • Malawi and Togo
    • Malawi suspended import permits (2019), and Togo prohibited import, marketing, and use.
  • France, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic
    • Enacted significant restrictions such as bans for amateur use, in public spaces, or as pre-harvest treatment. (Examples: France – banned in public green spaces; Belgium – banned for non-professional users; Czech Republic – tight restrictions; Denmark – banned post-emergent use; Italy – banned public area use and pre-harvest desiccation; Germany – set to fully ban by 2024).
  • Colombia
    • Ceased using glyphosate for aerial eradication of coca cultivation in 2015; later lifted.
  • Thailand
    • Initially decided to ban in 2019, but reversed the decision; instead, imposed restricted usage.
  • Canada
    • No national ban—but eight out of ten provinces have restrictions in public spaces; Quebec is attempting broader prohibitions; Vancouver banned glyphosate in public parks.

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Trump Directs USDA to Make More Glyphosate, Signals Liability Protection for Pesticide Makers

President Donald Trump late Wednesday signed an executive order intended to boost domestic production of glyphosate.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in June 2018, is facing tens of thousands of lawsuits from people alleging Roundup caused them to develop cancer.

Trump’s order also grants legal immunity to domestic manufacturers of products containing glyphosate when manufacturers are ordered, under the Defense Production Act of 1950, to produce the products.

The Defense Production Act is used in national emergencies to compel the production of materials or supplies necessary for national security.

Bayer is the only company producing glyphosate in the U.S. However, U.S. farmers also import the chemical from China, Reuters reported.

The executive order also applies to elemental phosphorus, used in weapons production, electronics and batteries. Elemental phosphorus is also used to make glyphosate.

Trump said elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides are scarce materials critical to national defense, and that inadequate domestic production poses an imminent threat to military readiness and food security.

“Glyphosate-based herbicides are a cornerstone of this Nation’s agricultural productivity and rural economy,” he said.

The order directs U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to create rules for increasing the supply of phosphorus and glyphosate.

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U.S. Military Meals Contain Toxic Cocktail of Glyphosate, Veterinary Drugs and Heavy Metals

Independent laboratory testing commissioned by Moms Across America, with the support of Children’s Health Defense Military Chapter and Centner Academy, revealed Wednesday that U.S. military food, including Meals, Ready to Eat (MREs) and other rationed and cafeteria items are contaminated with a mixture of toxic pesticides, banned veterinary drugs, beta-agonists and steroids used widely in U.S. beef and pork production for growth promotion, heavy metals and glyphosate at levels that pose serious threats to human health.

Each year, more than 1.5 billion U.S. military meals and 37 million Meals, Ready-to-Eat (MREs) are served to active-duty service members, making the U.S. military one of the most powerful purchasers and influencers in both the U.S. and global food supply.

The health, readiness and security of U.S. troops depend on these meals to support physical performance, cognitive function and long-term well-being.

The U.S. military seems to be lagging behind in the area of clean and safe food, as in 2014, the Chinese army ordered all military supply stations to only allow the purchase of non-genetically modified organism (GMO) grain and food oil due to health safety concerns over GMOs and their associated pesticides, which have now been shown to be contaminating U.S. military food supplies.

“We applaud President Trump’s commitment to increasing the budget of the military to ensure Americans are safe and creating the most powerful military in the world,” said Zen Honeycutt, founding executive director of Moms Across America.

“As our nation’s Commander in Chief, we call on him to be a true hero by ensuring our global power by providing the safest and healthiest meals of any military in the world. We are calling for American troops to have American food — regeneratively raised, organic meat and non-toxic, organic and nutrient-dense produce,” Honeycutt concluded.

The independent laboratory testing included 40 samples in total, with 16 samples from six military base cafeterias and 24 MREs being tested for toxic chemicals and nutrients. The samples contained ingredients such as wheat, GMO corn, GMO soy and meat.

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Supreme Court Poised to Grant Chemical Warfare Immunity: How Glyphosate Legal Shield Would Poison American Justice

Introduction: The Supreme Court’s Glyphosate Gamble: Corporate Immunity Over Human Life

The U.S. Supreme Court has stepped onto a dangerous precipice, agreeing to hear a case that could grant chemical manufacturers a staggering new power: blanket immunity from lawsuits for poisoning the American people. Agro-chemical giant Bayer, owner of Monsanto, is appealing a $1.25 million Missouri jury verdict, arguing that because federal regulators claim its flagship weedkiller Roundup is safe, the company should be shielded from all state-level failure-to-warn lawsuits brought by cancer victims. A ruling in Bayer’s favor would dismantle legal recourse for thousands of citizens and establish a perilous precedent where captured federal agencies, not independent science or juries, dictate corporate accountability for public harm. This case represents nothing less than a corporate coup against the constitutional right to a trial by jury, placing profits above the sanctity of human life.

The Glyphosate Deception: A Chemical Assault on Human Health

At the heart of this legal battle is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the most heavily used herbicide in the world, with approximately 300 million pounds applied annually in the United States alone. For decades, Monsanto marketed Roundup as safe for humans and animals, a claim now exposed as a profound deception by a mountain of independent research.

Despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) repeated assertions that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic,” science tells a horrifically different story. A major 2025 international carcinogenicity study found that low doses of glyphosate-based herbicides cause multiple types of cancer in rats, with tumors appearing in blood, skin, liver, and other organs even at levels regulators consider safe. This research adds to a substantial body of evidence linking glyphosate exposure to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other chronic diseases in humans. As investigative journalist Carey Gillam notes in her book, the truth about such public health dangers often only emerges through “lawyers, lawsuits, journalists, and the occasional whistleblower” when regulators fail. The EPA’s fraudulent safety claims stand in direct contradiction to this independent science, blessing a chemical poison while natural, non-toxic agricultural solutions are suppressed and ignored.

Corporate Capture: How Regulatory Agencies Betray the Public Trust

Bayer’s legal strategy hinges on a doctrine known as federal preemption, which posits that federal regulatory approval should override state-level consumer protection laws and common-law tort claims. This argument reveals the deep and dangerous corruption of federal health agencies, which now serve as puppets for the very industries they are supposed to regulate.

This phenomenon, known as regulatory capture, is systemic. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explains in his work on corporate influence, agencies like the FDA become “sock puppets” for Big Pharma and chemical interests, with a significant portion of their budgets coming from the companies they oversee. The glyphosate case is a textbook example. The EPA has consistently parroted the industry line on glyphosate’s safety, ignoring robust independent evidence of carcinogenicity. This betrayal was further underscored when the Trump administration’s Solicitor General, in a December legal brief, urged the Supreme Court to take Bayer’s side, arguing that a manufacturer “should not be left subject to 50 different labeling regimes.

This move represents a blatant political manipulation of the justice system to insulate a powerful corporation from accountability. If the Court rules for Bayer, it would effectively nullify state-level consumer protections and constitutional rights, centralizing power in the hands of a corrupted federal bureaucracy. As a NaturalNews.com report on the case warns, this gambit “silences victims and overrides the rule of law,” completing the transformation of public health agencies into immunity-granting enablers of corporate malfeasance.

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Top US court to review suit against German chemicals giant

The US Supreme Court will hear an appeal by German chemical company Bayer on a Roundup-related case in which a man was awarded $1.25 million, claiming the herbicide gave him blood cancer.

The court made the announcement regarding Monsanto Co. v. Durnell in a statement on Friday, with a verdict expected by July. Bayer is currently facing thousands of similar lawsuits.

Roundup originally belonged to the now-defunct American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto, which was purchased by Bayer in 2018.

At the heart of the case is whether Bayer and other manufacturers should be held liable if they comply with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rulings on product warnings, while still running afoul of state laws requiring warnings on goods that may be carcinogenic.

Bayer argues that the EPA has determined that glyphosate, the main component of the controversial herbicide, is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, and approved Roundup labels without cancer warnings.

In a statement on Friday, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said that “it is time for the US legal system to establish that companies should not be punished under state laws for complying with federal warning label requirements.”

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Journal Retracts ‘Ghost Written’ Monsanto Study Claiming Glyphosate Is Safe

Over the past year massive scandals involving academic research have come under the microscope, after dedicated researchers uncovered rigged studies that made it through peer-review with flying colors, and are now being retracted. 

On Friday, the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology journal announced that it has retracted a review, safety evaluation, and risk assessment of the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, after it emerged that Monsanto was heavily involved in its production. 

“This decision has been made after careful consideration of the COPE guidelines and thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding the authorship and content of this article and in light of no response having been provided to address the findings,” the journal said in a statement. 

“Litigation in the United States revealed correspondence from Monsanto suggesting that the authors of the article were not solely responsible for writing its content,” and contributions by Monsanto employees were not disclosed, including in the acknowledgements section of the review. 

The journal also said that the authors may have been paid by Monsanto – which was also not disclosed. 

The Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology had been frequently cited in defending glyphosate, an ingredient in Roundup, including citations on Wikipedia, researchers said in a paper published in September. Since 2017, multiple juries have concluded that Roundup exposure has resulted in non-Hodgkin lymphoma in people. Bayer took over legal cases involving the matter after it purchased Monsanto in 2018, including a case that may be adjudicated by the Supreme Court. -Epoch Times

Meanwhile the study’s lead author, Gary Williams – a former pathologist at New York Medical College, is MIA, according to an Epoch Times inquiry. 

An internal email from February 2015 presented as evidence in a 2017 court case revealed that Monsanto employees worked with the authors of the review, with one employee writing that it would be expensive to involve experts from all major areas in a review – and would be cheaper to simply involve certain experts and “we ghost-write” other sections. 

“We would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak. Recall that is how we handled Williams Kroes & Munro, 2000,” the employee wrote. 

So of course, the journal retracts the dodgy study almost 10 years later – even as other journals – including Critical Reviews in Toxicology, attached expressions of concern co-authored by Williams because they said they authors didn’t disclose the involvement of Monsanto employees and contractors in authoring their research.

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Georgia Governor Signs Bill Granting Immunity for Harms Caused by Pesticides and Fertilizers

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed SB144 into law, which has also been referred to as an immunity bill for agrochemical businesses that sell pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. The bill states, “a manufacturer cannot be held liable for failing to warn consumers of health risks above those required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.” The Georgia legislature passed the bill and was awaiting Kemp’s signature, which he finalized on Monday.

Georgia became the second state in the nation to provide manufacturer immunity for harm caused by pesticides after North Dakota signed a similar bill into law last month. Bayer has been handling tens of thousands of lawsuits related to cancer allegedly caused by Roundup, a product that Bayer owns after the agrochemical corporation purchased Monsanto in 2018. In April, The HighWire reported about Bayer’s recent court loss in which the company is required to pay over $2 billion for causing a man’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but the high payout amount is expected to be appealed. This case was conducted in a Georgia courtroom.

The EPA is still awaiting a court decision regarding its most recent evaluation of glyphosate’s effect on human health. The EPA currently states, “No risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate.” The EPA website also states, “No evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans.”

Meanwhile, the passage of SB144 in Georgia means a farmer cannot sue Bayer for harms allegedly caused by Roundup because the product contains the label required by the EPA. The label states, “Keep Out of Reach of Children CAUTION See [back/ side] [panel/ booklet/ label] for [additional] first aid and precautionary statements. Alternative Text: [See container label for [complete] use directions, first aid and precautionary statements.]”

Bayer issued a statement applauding the Governor for signing the legislation. The statement said, “The signing of SB 144 by Governor Kemp demonstrates that Georgia stands with its farmers, who work tirelessly to produce safe and affordable food for communities throughout the state. We thank Governor Kemp and the legislators, farmers and ag groups that supported this important piece of legislation.”

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Women Exposed to Glyphosate at Higher Risk of Infertility

Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, disrupts female hormones and damages the ovaries and uterus in ways that can make it more difficult for women to get pregnant, according to a new review of human and animal research.

The study, published in Reproductive Sciences on March 21, also found that glyphosate may be tied to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis, due to its endocrine-disrupting capabilities and reproductive toxicity.

PCOS is a hormonal disorder that affects the ovaries, fertility and periods, among other symptoms. Endometriosis is an often painful condition when tissue similar to the uterine lining (endometrial tissue) grows outside the uterus. Both conditions are among the leading causes of infertility.

“Collectively, these findings raise concerns about potential associations between [glyphosate-based herbicide] exposure and female reproductive system diseases, including PCOS, endometriosis, and subfertility/infertility,” the researchers say.

The study highlights growing concerns about the long-term health effects of glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH), such as Roundup. Glyphosate use rose sharply in recent decades, with around 240 million pounds sprayed annually on U.S. farms.

People are exposed to glyphosate through skin contact, ingestion in food or water and inhalation of airborne particles. Studies have detected glyphosate and its breakdown product (aminomethylphosphonic acid, or AMPA) in blood, breast milk and urine.

A 2022 survey found glyphosate in more than 80% of urine samples from U.S. adults and children.

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