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Absolutely stunning blockbuster on how Monsanto (now @Bayer) and BASF's boldly schemed to sell a product they KNEW would lead to widespread pesticide drift over tens of millions of acres of land. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/state-and-regional/buy-it-or-else-inside-monsanto-and-basf-s-moves-to-force-dicamba-on-farmers/article_002f5e83-004d-52de-a686-eef5cb108192.html?utm_medium=email&mc_cid=e026837c09&mc_eid=1ef5fc394d
According to this piece, citing internal documents, they explicitly used dicamba's tendency to volatilize and harm neighbors crops as a linchpin for marketing dicamba-tolerant soybeans & cotton.
The strategy was obvious, and structured like a mob protection racket. I wrote about it at the time. "Nice little soybean crop you have there; be a shame if something bad happened to it." https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/01/dicamba-monsanto-herbicide-neighbor-farms-soybeans/
But the boldness with which they pursued it is 
. Bayer has agreed to pay farmers $400 million to settle past dicamba damage. But the racket is ongoing. After a federal judge banned this use of dicamba this summer, the Trump EPA reinstated it, with a supposed drift fix.
. Bayer has agreed to pay farmers $400 million to settle past dicamba damage. But the racket is ongoing. After a federal judge banned this use of dicamba this summer, the Trump EPA reinstated it, with a supposed drift fix.
Bob Hartzler, an eminent Iowa State University weed expert (and very early whistleblower on Monsanto's false claim that glyphosate resistance would *never* be a problem) told me this: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/as-election-day-nears-trumps-epa-chief-gives-georgia-cotton-farmers-the-gift-of-a-nasty-pesticide/
In other words, in 2021, farmers throughout the soybean/ cotton belt will be spraying a toxic chemical that will very likely be vaporizing and traveling far from targeted fields. Kicker: exposure to the stuff appears to heighten risk of liver cancers. https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ije/dyaa066/5827818?redirectedFrom=fulltext
This is something the Biden EPA will have to deal with immediately. I think there should be a Congressional investigation about how this jaw-dropping corporate scandal played out in full sight of US regulators. Let's not forget it was the Obama-Biden EPA that initially ...
... approved these products, despite widespread knowledge about their volatility and despite having extremely limited data from the companies about their allegedly—it turns out, not at all—"low volatility" formulations.
