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roundup
The Truth About Roundup Herbicide
For decades Roundup has been sold as an effective herbicide, one that was safe for humans and the environment. It isn't.
Mar 01, 2026
Mark Twain supposedly once said, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story," but there is a difference between a good story told in fun and a story (supposedly backed by independent scientific research) that people are led to believe because, well, science is supposed to be true. And so we come to the story of Roundup, the herbicide developed by Monsanto that swept the world because it worked and was the “safe” alternative to widely used weedkillers like Dicamba and 2,4-D,—it was said to be safer than table salt!
Roundup was developed in the 1970s as a non-selective herbicide, meaning it would kill almost any growing plant it touched. It was an effective burn-down herbicide farmers could apply prior to planting, and it assured an almost weed-free field at the beginning of the growing season. Roundup could be used in non-agricultural situations as well, to kill weeds and grass growing in sidewalk and patio cracks, around buildings, etc, but care was needed because, as noted, it was non-target and could kill whatever plant it touched.
For farmers, it worked well, except while it did kill growing weeds, buried weed seeds were not harmed, so a weed-free field at planting time did not ensure a weed-free field throughout the growing season. Weeds would continue to sprout, and more herbicide applications would be needed during the growing season.
Then Monsanto developed their big fix released in 1996, genetically engineered (GE) soybeans resistant to Roundup, followed by GE versions of other commodity crops: corn, cotton, sugar beet, and canola. Over-the-top spraying of these GE crops would kill everything but the crop, and Roundup became one of the most widely used herbicides in the world and GE crops came to dominate world commodity crop production.
Companies like Bayer have to protect their product and their profit even if they have to tell a few lies to do so.
While Monsanto sold Roundup with the slogan, “One spray is all you’ll ever need,” in time, it became clear that some weeds were developing resistance to Roundup and farmers were right back where they started, looking for herbicides that worked consistently. More genetic modifications were made to commodity crops making them resistant to other herbicides, like Dicamba and 2,4-D, the herbicides Roundup was supposed to have replaced. These multiple GE or “stacked” crops could be sprayed with a cocktail of herbicides, hopefully ensuring weed-free fields for the entire growing season.
Farmers are using more herbicide, even on the GE crops, and costs for GE seed have risen much faster than non-GE seed. Of course, the motive was never to reduce the farmer’s production costs or agricultural herbicide use but to increase it—that's where the profit is.
For farmers who didn’t jump on the GE bandwagon, finding non-GE seed is often difficult. Even more onerous, some farmers have found it necessary to plant GE seed as a preventative measure because non-GE crops can be damaged by chemical drift from neighboring GE fields.
So much for effectiveness, what about the safety of Roundup? In 2000 a study was published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology that deemed the active ingredient in Roundup (glyphosate) was safe and not a human health risk. Since then, that study has been cited consistently as proof of Roundup’s safety. Numerous other studies have shown that glyphosate could cause cancer and that the inert ingredients that are part of the patented Roundup formulation increase the toxicity of glyphosate. Further, the practice of using Roundup as a desiccant on small grain crops (oats, wheat, and barley) prior to harvest puts Roundup directly on grain that enters the human food chain.
Since acquiring Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has paid out about $11 billion to settle almost 100,000 cancer-related lawsuits with approximately 61,000 still pending. In December of 2025 another blow to the claimed safety of Roundup came when the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology journal withdrew the 2000 article that had touted Roundup’s safety. While the study claimed to be independent and peer reviewed, it has come to light that Monsanto's scientists played a significant role in conceiving and writing the article. Oops.
For decades Roundup has been sold as an effective herbicide, one that was safe for humans and the environment, and without which “consequences would be dire.” Companies like Bayer have to protect their product and their profit even if they have to tell a few lies to do so. They claim to produce safe products that help farmers thrive—real independent research refutes that. Bayer and the agribusiness industry may be thriving, but farmers are not and in these times, too few people seem to care that lies are accepted as truth.
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Journal Finally Retracts Roundup Cancer Study Reliant on Monsanto Research and Ghostwriting
"Now that much of the research finding glyphosate poses no cancer risk has been undermined, it is especially outrageous that the Trump administration is seeking to bolster Bayer's case," said one campaigner.
Dec 03, 2025
Just two days after President Donald Trump's administration sided with the maker of glyphosate-based Roundup over cancer victims in a US Supreme Court case, the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology retracted a landmark 25-year-old study on the pesticide's supposed safety, citing various ethical concerns involving Monsanto.
Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, maintains that the weedkiller can be used safely and is not carcinogenic. However, the company faces thousands of lawsuits from people who developed cancer after exposure to its glyphosate products. The retraction stems from the US litigation, which in 2017 revealed Monsanto correspondence about the study.
While Bayer told the New Lede's Carey Gillam that Monsanto's role in the 2000 study was adequately disclosed, the journal's editor-in-chief, Martin van den Berg, does not agree. He wrote in an explanation for the retraction that "the apparent contributions of Monsanto employees as cowriters to this article were not explicitly mentioned as such in the acknowledgments section."
"This article has been widely regarded as a hallmark paper in the discourse surrounding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate and Roundup," he highlighted. "However, the lack of clarity regarding which parts of the article were authored by Monsanto employees creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn."
Of the study's three named authors—Gary M. Williams, Ian Munro, and Robert Kroes—only Williams is still alive. Van den Berg wrote that he reached out seeking an "explanation for the various concerns," but "did not receive any response."
The paper is reliant on company research. As van den Berg detailed, "the article's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto," and "the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the time of writing their review in 1999."
"Further correspondence with Monsanto disclosed during litigation indicates that the authors may have received financial compensation from Monsanto for their work on this article, which was not disclosed as such in this publication," he noted.
"The paper had a significant impact on regulatory decision-making regarding glyphosate and Roundup for decades," he continued. "Given its status as a cornerstone in the assessment of glyphosate's safety, it is imperative that the integrity of this review article and its conclusions are not compromised. The concerns specified here necessitate this retraction to preserve the scientific integrity of the journal."
It took years, but finally that Roundup paper ghost-written by Monsanto has been retracted. The whole episode is indicative of a terrible rot that is active in corners of scientific publishing.www.lemonde.fr/en/environme...
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— Joe Rojas-Burke (@rojasburke.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Michael Hansen, senior scientist of advocacy at Consumer Reports, emphasized the years between the retraction and the release of documents exposing Monsanto's role in the study. "What took them so long to retract it?" he asked Stacy Malkan of US Right to Know. "The retraction should have happened right after the documents came out."
Van den Berg, who has been in his role since 2019, told Malkan and Le Monde's Stéphane Foucart that he began reviewing the paper after a September article from Alexander Kaurov of New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University.
Kaurov and Oreskes' article in the journal Environmental Science and Policy begins by stressing that "corporate ghostwriting is a form of scientific fraud" and goes on to examine the paper's influence—or as they put it, "how corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse."
The Netherlands-based van den Berg said that "it simply never ended [up] on my desk being at first primarily a US situation with litigation. The paper of Oreskes triggered it this summer and these authors made an official request and complaint."
He also told Malkan that "if you have more papers regarding Roundup published in RTP with possible problems, let me know."
Although Bayer on Wednesday pointed to the thousands of other studies on glyphosate and "the consensus among regulatory bodies worldwide," the retraction could affect both regulations and ongoing litigation. As Gillam reported:
Brent Wisner, one of the lead lawyers in the Roundup litigation and a key player in getting the internal documents revealed to the public, said the retraction was "a long time coming."
Wisner said the Williams, Kroes, and Munro study was the "quintessential example of how companies like Monsanto could fundamentally undermine the peer-review process through ghostwriting, cherry-picking unpublished studies, and biased interpretations."
"Faced with undisputed evidence concerning how this study was manufactured and then used, for over two decades, to protect glyphosate sales, the editor-in-chief... did the right thing," Wisner said. "While the damage done to the scientific discourse—and the people who were harmed by glyphosate—cannot be undone, it helps rejuvenate some confidence in the otherwise broken peer-review process that corporations have taken advantage of for decades. This garbage ghostwritten study finally got the fate it deserved. Hopefully, journals will now be more vigilant in protecting the impartiality of science on which so many people depend."
Le Monde's Foucart noted Wednesday that the retracted study "is cited around 40 times in the 2015 European expert report that led to the herbicide's reauthorization in 2017."
In the United States, Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity—who has been highly critical of the Trump administration's various decisions favoring the pesticide industry that contradict its so-called Make America Healthy Again promises—urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take action in response to the retraction.
"The pesticide industry's decades of efforts to hijack the science and manipulate it to boost its profits is finally being exposed," he said in a statement. "The EPA must take immediate action to reassess its finding that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. That means rather than relying on Monsanto's confidential research of its own product, the agency needs to follow the gold standard of independent science established by the World Health Organization in its finding that glyphosate probably causes cancer."
He also pointed to the Monday briefing in which US Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the country's top court to hear a challenge to a verdict that awarded $1.25 million to a man who claimed Roundup caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
"Now that much of the research finding glyphosate poses no cancer risk has been undermined, it is especially outrageous that the Trump administration is seeking to bolster Bayer's case," Donley said. "Trump promised the American public his administration would protect Americans from dangerous chemicals and pesticides, but now it's throwing its full weight behind Bayer's desire to deny cancer victims their day in court. This is a massive betrayal of the public and an unabashed prioritization of corporate wealth over public health, plain and simple."
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Trump DOJ Sides With Roundup Manufacturer Over Cancer Victims in Supreme Court Case
An attorney at Food & Water Watch said the DOJ sent a "clear message... to sick Americans harmed by toxic pesticides: Trump has Bayer’s back, not theirs."
Dec 02, 2025
The Trump administration is pushing for the US Supreme Court to shield the manufacturer of Roundup from thousands of state lawsuits alleging that its widely used herbicide product causes cancer.
On Monday, US Solicitor General D. John Sauer recommended that the high court agree to hear a challenge to a Missouri jury's verdict in 2023 that awarded $1.25 million to a man named John Durnell, who claimed that the product caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Bayer, the agribusiness giant that purchased the manufacturer of Roundup, the agribusiness giant Monsanto, in 2018, immediately challenged the verdict.
In 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, as "probably carcinogenic to humans" based on "limited evidence."
That evidence became less limited in 2019, when a prominent meta-analysis by a team of environmental health researchers found that people exposed to glyphosate at the highest levels had a 41% higher risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma than those who weren't.
There are nearly 4,500 Roundup claims currently pending in federal court, and at least 24 cases have gone to trial since October 2023. They make up just a fraction of the more than 170,000 claims filed.
According to Bloomberg, Bayer has already been forced to pay out more than $10 billion in verdicts and settlements over the product, which has caused a massive drain on the company's stock price.
In what it said was an effort to “manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns,” Bayer removed glyphosate-based herbicides from the residential market in 2023, switching to formulas that “rely on alternative active ingredients.”
That didn't stop the lawsuits from coming. Durnell's victory was the first successful case brought against Bayer outside California, the only state that labels the product as carcinogenic. That in Missouri opened the floodgates in other states, and plaintiffs subsequently won sizable payouts in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
But now the Trump administration is trying to help the company skirt further accountability. Sauer, who is tasked with arguing for the government in nearly every Supreme Court case, filed a 24-page brief stating that there is a lack of clarity on whether states have the authority to determine whether Bayer and Monsanto violated the law by failing to warn customers about potential cancer risks from Roundup.
Bayer argues that these cases are preempted by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which forbids states from enacting labeling requirements more stringent than those recommended by the federal government.
Sauer agreed with Bayer, stating in the brief that the US Environmental Protection Agency "has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings."
In 2016 and again in 2020, the EPA indeed classified glyphosate as "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans" following agency assessments. However, in 2022, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals voided this assessment, finding that the agency applied “inconsistent reasoning” in its review of the science.
Among the justifications for the ruling were that the EPA relied heavily on unpublished, non-peer-reviewed studies submitted to regulators by Monsanto and other companies that manufacture glyphosate. The agency also largely disregarded findings from animal studies included by the IARC, which showed a strong link between glyphosate and cancer.
"The World Health Organization has recognized glyphosate as a probable carcinogen while the EPA continues to twist itself into pretzels to come to the opposite conclusion," Lori Ann Burd, a staff attorney and director of the Center for Biological Diversity's environmental health program, told Common Dreams.
Notably, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built his national profile campaigning against the dangers of pesticides and railing against regulatory capture by big business.
Kennedy served as an attorney for Dewayne Johnson, the first plaintiff to win damages against Monsanto in 2018, where a jury determined that Roundup had contributed to his cancer.
"If my life were a Superman comic, Monsanto would be my Lex Luthor," Kennedy said in a 2020 Facebook post. "I've seen this company as the enemy of every admirable American value."
During Kennedy's 2024 presidential run, he pledged to "ban the worst agricultural chemicals already banned in other countries."
But after he was sworn in as President Donald Trump's HHS Secretary, he began to sing a different tune. As Investigate Midwest noted, his "Make America Healthy Again" commission's introductory report made no mention of glyphosate.
Meanwhile, he reassured the pesticide industry that it had nothing to worry about: "There’s a million farmers who rely on glyphosate. 100% of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model," he said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
The Trump EPA has deregulated toxic chemicals across the board over the past year. It rolled back protections against per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often referred to as "forever chemicals," in drinking water, which have many documented health risks. It has also declined to ban the widely used insecticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders in children.
Elizabeth Kucinich, the former director of policy at the Center for Food Safety, described the US Department of Justice's effort to shield Bayer as another "betrayal of MAHA health promises." Her husband, the two-time Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, worked as the campaign manager for RFK Jr.'s 2024 presidential bid.
“This is regulatory capture, not public protection,” she said. “This action shields chemical manufacturers from accountability by elevating a captured federal regulatory process over the lived harm of real people. That is anti-life, and it is exactly what millions of MAHA voters believed they were voting against.”
Food & Water Watch staff attorney Dani Replogle said the DOJ filing "encourages the Supreme Court to slam judiciary doors in the faces of cancer patients across the country."
"No political posturing can undo the clear message this brief sends to sick Americans harmed by toxic pesticides," she continued. "Trump has Bayer’s back, not theirs."
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