Monsanto has become a global powerhouse capable of twisting entire governments according to its will. As a result, the company has saturated the global environment with its toxic chemicals, largely through questionable if not outright immoral and illegal means. Carey Gillam, an investigative journalist, dives deep into the backstory of Monsanto and the catastrophic consequences of their influence on the global culture in her book, “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science.”

“I’ve been a journalist my whole adult life, more than 25 years,” Gillam says. Most of her career was spent as a reporter with Reuters, a highly respected global news organization. In the 1990s, she was assigned to move to Kansas and  tasked with reporting on issues concerning food and food production.

“I came to Kansas City and immediately started digging in and trying to learn everything about Monsanto, which had then just introduced genetically engineered (GE) crops,” she says. “I thought genetic engineering sounded cool … I used Roundup; it worked great … I came with no preconceived biases.

As a reporter, you really learn to set aside any bias because it’s not fair and it’s not the way that you accurately learn about and report information. The book is really the culmination of 20 years of being heavily involved in this world and spending a lot of time with Monsanto, and with Dow, DuPont and farmers.

Glyphosate — Roundup — is sort of the vehicle for my book. Monsanto and the story of how they pushed this weed killer to become the most widely used in the world … [was] strategically by design … The point I hope this book makes is that glyphosate and Monsanto are really the poster children for a much larger problem — a corporate push for pesticide dependence …”

Glyphosate — The Most Widely Used Pesticide on Earth 

Glyphosate is registered in 130 countries and its use has gone up exponentially since the introduction of glyphosate-resistant GE crops. Farmers now apply nearly 5 billion pounds (over 2 billion kilograms) of glyphosate to farm crops each year, worldwide.1 Approximately 300 million pounds are applied on U.S. farmland.

Needless to say, pesticide exposure has also exponentially increased. Urine output of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, shot up by more than 1,200 percent between 1993 and 2016.2 Gillam’s book reveals how GE crops were the true catalyst for this tremendous surge in glyphosate use, since they were in fact designed to encourage farmers’ use of this chemical.

“It’s been a brilliant move by Monsanto,” she says. “We’ve gone from about 40 million pounds a year in North America to about 300 million pounds a year. It’s used on … about 70 different commonly consumed food crops. Everything from avocados and almonds to cherries.” Indeed, just because a food is not genetically engineered does not mean it’s pesticide free.

“Monsanto also was smart enough to market it to farmers [of] wheat, oats and barley … to be sprayed directly on the crops shortly before harvest. When the grain is mature, they say the farmers can then go ahead and spray it directly on the crops. The crops will then dry out and … the farmers can harvest the crop in a more even and consistent way.

[This] might be good for farmers, it might be good for sales — for glyphosate producers — but it leaves a lot of glyphosate residue in the finished foods.

We have documented glyphosate residues in oatmeal, baby oatmeal that you’re serving your kids, and in wheat and bread products. Glyphosate has even been found in honey — organic honey even, which is more [due to the] function of bees … than it is pesticide application. Again, it’s pervasive in our food, our water, our soil, our air and our own bodies,” Gillam says.

Glyphosate Is a Potent Toxin 

Glyphosate is the main ingredient in Roundup, but while toxic in and of itself, Roundup as a formulation is even more harmful. Some believe it’s significantly more toxic, as certain surfactants allow glyphosate to be more effectively absorbed. Additionally, the “gly” in glyphosate stands for glycine, a very common amino acid your body uses to make proteins.

As a result, your body can substitute glyphosate for glycine, which results in damaged proteins being produced. Glyphosate also affects the shikimate pathway and destroys your microbiome, thanks to its antibiotic activity.

Roundup has also been linked to certain cancers. In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), reclassified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen” (Class 2A),3 based on “limited evidence” showing the weed killer can cause Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and lung cancer in humans, along with “convincing evidence” linking it to cancer in animals.

“Monsanto flipped out as you might imagine, and has been campaigning to discredit IARC ever since. [But] documents show … they knew ahead of time … [and expected] IARC [would] find it to be either probably or possibly carcinogenic. They anticipated this and internally said they were vulnerable with the epidemiology and the toxicology, because they have also seen the body of scientific evidence grow showing problems with glyphosate.

But yet to the world they have publicly made it appear as though they’re shocked; they’re outraged. [They’re saying,] ‘How could IARC find [glyphosate] to be a carcinogen? [They’re telling people] that’s crazy and [that] these IARC scientists have a political agenda and they’re using junk science!’ [This is how Monsanto] set up organizations and different methods to try to discredit IARC. They’ve gone after IARC scientists.

They really have been on a mission for these past two-and-a-half years to get that classification basically cast aside, and they now are pushing Republicans in Congress to strip funding from IARC … [R]ather than actually looking at the science, listening to the experts, being concerned about how to possibly mitigate exposure to humans and the risk to humans … they’re trying to discredit these scientists and twist the truth.”

This is a classic strategy. The same thing happened in the tobacco industry, and is also happening in the telecommunication and pharmaceutical industries. By discrediting objective scientists who have integrity to report the truth, they delay the inevitable collapse of their business. Confusion and doubt alone are enough to maintain their business as usual.

“All the different strategies they’ve employed to suppress science, to harass scientists, to discredit individuals, to control regulators and influence regulators, to ghostwrite and manipulate the scientific content — when you put that altogether, it’s a really alarming story of how we the public and our policymakers are being misled and put in danger … over the long term by this [chemical] industry corruption,” Gillam says.