First the Bees, Now the Butterflies: Monsanto’s Round-Up to Blame for Monarch Decline

“We have this smoking gun,” Oberhauser said. “This is the only thing that we’ve actually been able to correlate with decreasing monarch numbers.”

Soon there will be essentially no monarchs on cropland in the corn belt, according to some estimates. Already, Iowa farmland has lost more than 98 percent of the milkweed that was once there, according to Iowa State University biologist John Pleasants, who worked with Oberhauser. He’s seen firsthand the transformation as he has studied cornfields during the past decade and a half. Before Roundup, patches of milkweed grew among the corn and along the edges of fields. After the herbicide—nothing but corn. (source)

Despite claims that genetic modification technology would require less chemicals, research published in Environmental Sciences Europe covered the 16-year period between 1996 and 2011 and revealed that the planting of herbicide-resistant crops actually led to a 527 million pound increase in herbicide use in the U.S. over those years. Pesticide use increased overall by 7%. The result of widespread GMO crops has been the rise of superbugs and superweeds, not the use of less chemicals.

Over 100 million pounds of glyphosate are sprayed on crops and lawns in this country each year. A plethora of studies also show that glyphosate is toxic to humans as well; everything from infertility to birth defects to neurotixicity to allergies and auto-immune disorders have been attributed via research to the widespread use of this chemical over the last two decades.

Research has also recently exposed the fact that the supposedly “inert” ingredients in Round Up are also cytotoxic. One, a surfactant called POE-15, was actually found to be 100 times more toxic than glyphosate itself.

By the way, the acceptable levels of this stuff were formulated based upon the “active ingredient” glyphosate alone, not the inert ingredients…

But I guess we should all just walk around scratching our heads and wondering why the environment is being destroyed. Hey, I know, let’s continue to blame it on this false claim that we all must “feed the world” GMOs and not on Big Business’ need to make bank.

Oh, and in the meantime, the so-called Environmental Protection Agency can just grant Monsanto petitions to raise the allowable limits of glyphosate residues in food and animal feed, so things will just continue to get worse. Great idea, EPA. Great idea. Way to protect economic interests above any level of common sense and actual protection of the environment.