Activist and trial lawyer attacks on herbicides imperil US and global health and nutrition  

President Trump recently signed an Executive Order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure increased domestic supplies of elemental phosphorus – a critical component of glyphosate-based herbicides that are vital for America’s non-organic crop productivity, and thus national security.  

The EO has rekindled anti-pesticide activism and public concern about glyphosate, which used to be the primary ingredient in Roundup for home use but was changed following numerous class action lawsuits. It’s also created internal conflicts within the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, because the President and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are asking MAHA to defend a chemical that it had previously battled as carcinogenic.

Glyphosate herbicides are extensively used with corn, soybean and cotton crops – and less so with sugar beets, alfalfa, wheat, oats, barley, canola, and some fruits and vegetables, utilizing “Roundup Ready” crop variants that are immune to the highly efficient herbicide. Up to 90% of soybean and corn acreage is treated to manage weeds, thereby increasing crop yields remarkably in recent decades.

Right now, there is only one domestic phosphorus producer, and herbicide manufacturers rely heavily on imports. That has become a major national security concern due to the dominance some countries have exerted over many metals, minerals and products – and often contentious global politics that can lead to threatened or actual import restrictions or bans.

Glyphosate has become controversial mostly because of longstanding activist opposition, advertisements seeking “cancer victims” who “may have been exposed” to the chemical, and class-action lawsuits that employ highly questionable (verging on fraudulent) “science” to impugn the chemical and persuade sympathetic but scientifically uninformed juries to deliver billion-dollar “jackpot justice”........

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