Revealed: Monsanto predicted its crop system would damage US farms

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/monsanto-crop-system-damage-us-farms-documents

by Carey Gillam
Mon 30 Mar 2020 05.15 EDT

The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms, internal documents seen by the Guardian show.

Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.

The documents, some of which date back more than a decade, also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.

And in some of the internal emails, employees appear to joke about sharing “voodoo science” and hoping to stay “out of jail”.

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Just as Monsanto has done in the Roundup litigation, Monsanto and BASF sought to keep most of the discovery documents they turned over in the dicamba litigation designated confidential. Roughly 180 have been unsealed and were cited at the Bader trial.
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“The documents are the worst that I’ve ever seen for any case that I’ve worked on,” said lawyer Angie Splittgerber, a former tobacco industry defense attorney who works with Randles in the firm Randles & Splittgerber. “So many of them put things in writing that were just horrifying.”

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A series of emails show efforts by Monsanto to block some independent testing by academics of the company’s new dicamba herbicides, in part for fear outside tests would disrupt the company’s efforts to gain product approval from the EPA.

The agency was aware of the volatility concerns and Monsanto was seeking to convince the EPA that the concerns were unfounded.

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Because of farmer concerns that dicamba drift would contaminate fruits and vegetable plots, the internal documents show that Monsanto and BASF devised a plan to ask the EPA to allow certain amounts of dicamba residues to be considered legal in crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, grapes and other foods expected to be accidentally exposed to dicamba spray.

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“It’s a huge problem,” said Kansas organic farmer Jack Geiger, who said his wheat, corn and soybean farm has been hit multiple times by dicamba drift. “Dicamba is going to make Roundup look like a tea party.”

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