USA - Monsanto’s glyphosate, aka Roundup, is the most heavily used agricultural chemical in history, with some 3.5 billion plus gallons of the herbicide being used in the Unites States alone since its introduction in 1974. Worldwide use of glyphosate is rising fast, in spite of very legitimate concerns that the chemical is causing widespread health problems including liver disease and even cancer in humans.
Contamination in rural areas in Argentina have caused serious public health issues, and the chemical is reported to be found in many products in our food supply, including many common children’s cereals, and even in breastfeeding mother’s milk, although this last claim is vehemently denied by Monsanto.
While Monsanto claims that glyphosate has a specific half-life which would render it inactive by the time it leached from farmland to oceans via rivers and run-off, and that once diluted in the ocean its effectiveness as a killer of phytoplankton would be minimized, the fact remains that with such incredibly high usage of the chemical worldwide, claiming it only negatively affects the intended targets in farmland is absurd.