Is Monsanto’s Roundup (Glyphosate) the New Agent Orange?

Monsanto has been linked to the poison game for a long time. All the propaganda in the world can’t erase the fact that they first poisoned thousands of Vietnamese, Thai, and Koreans as well as countless American soldiers with Agent Orange, who only now receive compensation for the effects of Monsanto’s bio-warfare decades later. The proof is finally so pervasive that the company can no longer just sweep away evidence of their evil-doing.

“From 1962 to 1971, the U.S. Air Force sprayed nearly 19 million gallons of herbicides in Vietnam, of which at least 11 million gallons was Agent Orange, in a military project called Operation Ranch Hand.” – Veterans and Agent Orange: Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam

The legacy of Agent Orange and Monsanto’s attempt to defoliate the hiding places of the Viet Cong is still apparent in modern Vietnam, but how those chemicals are being used now, in the aftermath of war, should be even more chilling to the observant individual.

During the Vietnam War, Agent Orange chemicals were sprayed primarily from C-123 twin-engine aircraft carriers. This was called Operation Ranch Hand. The total number of gallons of herbicide sprayed are in the millions.

One of the primary chemicals used in Agent Orange, named so because the canisters they were transported in were painted with bright orange stripes, is 2,4-D, but other chemicals were also contained within those canisters.

Aside from hundreds of thousands of birth defects reported by the Vietnamese from the spraying of these chemicals, war veterans began to notice health problems that they attributed to exposure to Agent Orange. It took nearly 20 years after the Vietnam War ended for Congress to inquire about the ramifications of using these chemicals in Vietnam, and the health damage suffered by Vietnam Vets.

According to Casarett and Doull’s Toxicology, 1996 edition:

“TCDD (dioxin) has been shown to be extremely toxic to a number of animal species. Mortality does not occur immediately. It appears that the animals’ environment suddenly becomes toxic to them.”

Related: Is Monsanto’s Glyphosate the New Agent Orange?

This is likely why many Vets did not see symptoms from Agent Orange exposure until many years after the fact. Eventually, Congress asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to perform an in-depth study on these chemicals, and they did find them highly toxic. But at what cost to veterans who showed adverse health symptoms earlier?

Moreover, the US military, who commissioned Monsanto and Dow, among other chemical companies to create Agent Orange, knew it was highly toxic.

Dr. James Clary, a scientist at the Chemical Weapons Branch, Eglin Air Force Base, who designed the herbicide spray tank and wrote a 1979 report on Operation Ranch Hand told Senator Daschle in 1988, said:

“When we (military scientists) initiated the herbicide program in the1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the ‘military’ formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the ‘civilian’ version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the ‘enemy,’ none of us were overly concerned. We never considered a scenario in which our own personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide.”~ Quoted by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, 1990

GMOs Not Used as Food, but as Bioweapons?

The world population is now “the enemy.” From Dicamba to 2,4-D to glyphosate, the chemicals being used on our crops are being consumed in mass. Some claim it’s actually part of an over-arching plan to ‘control the population.’

On the surface, it looks as though these companies are greed-motivated, which they are, but the truth of their great chemical dreams is more subverting.

Case in point: many GM companies work with and through AGRA, which is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to feed the starving African children. You may have noticed that many GM foods are sent to Africa and other poor nations as part of “aid” packages.

Nevermind that these very same multinational companies have scoured these countries for every natural resource they have and could solve simple diseases with a two cent vitamin, not by creating things like genetically modified ‘Golden Rice’ to prevent malnourished children who go blind (or so they claim). Instead, these companies focus on switching out heirloom, viable seed with GM seed.

For example, when asked how AGRA gets “improved seeds” (that’s what they call GM seed) to farmers, they say:

“There are three ways. AGRA makes grants to farmer organizations, public breeding institutes, and private start-up seed companies. Farmer organizations and public breeding institutes mainly produce cuttings of vegetatively propagated crops like sweet potato and cassava. For these crops, once farmers have the improved varieties, they can replant it for many years. But for seed crops, such as maize and sorghum, the best method for getting fresh, certified seed to farmers is via locally owned and managed seed companies.”

AGRA fails to mention that companies like Monsanto have infiltrated or have fully taken over “locally owned and managed seed companies” all over the world.

When asked if resource-poor farmers can really afford to purchase new seed every year, the AGRA website offers this missive:

“Yes. In fact, we are finding that seed companies regularly sell out of their stocks every year, and still cannot keep up with demand. Selling seed in small packages and making it available at the village level has greatly increased farmer adoption of improved seed. Mobile money has likewise boosted sales of seed in remote villages. AGRA also works with farmer organizations that offer group buying opportunities, as well as access to credit. What we are increasingly seeing is that, by adopting improved seed, farmers are becoming more prosperous and more able to purchase additional seed, as well as other inputs.”

Again, no mention of farmer suicides all over India due to seed monopolies and herbicide use that forces a farmer (ironically, the ones who grow food) to starve to death because GM seeds aren’t as viable as GM companies promised they would be. Now, even US farmers who want to grow organic crops are facing bankruptcy.

All these GM crops and the chemicals that go with them are warfare. Clear and simple. Does the military machine ask for America’s permission when they decide to invade a foreign country? No.

Add to these unsavory facts, the observance that the FDA and USDA have continually turned a blind eye when it has come to protecting the food supply.

Is Glyphosate the New Agent Orange?

Are we eating America’s left-over chemical warfare to be used as agricultural poison on our food supply?

Glyphosate residue is now in almost every food we eat, from packaged foods sold in the grocery store to eggs and even meat and poultry because the animals that were fed GM Bt corn and soy were eating traces of toxic chemicals.

Furthermore, 2,4-D resistant crops were just given a rubber stamp, even though the public strongly opposed them.

While it was our own government who did the spraying, they colluded with Monsanto, one of the nine government contractors who made the toxic combination of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which came to be called Agent Orange.

Many people don’t know this, but after decades of research proving that Agent Orange is lethal and tens of millions of dollars paid to victims in settlements – it is still being used in many Asian countries.

The company has switched to using it’s best-selling herbicide Roundup predominately now, yet another innocent product constructed of toxic chemicals.

Roundup “kills weeds because glyphosate (a salt compound) inhibits enzyme pathways, preventing plants from synthesizing amino acids necessary for growth. It basically stops plants from eating, so they die.”

It is probable that Monsanto and other companies who use this substance under other names besides Roundup are now dumping more than 300 million pounds of this toxic poison into our soil annually. It’s use has at least tripled since 1990.

Read: Stopping Resurgence of Agent Orange in Food Supply

This calls into question some of the arguments posted by anti-labeling and pro-GMO propagandists who say that “the science isn’t conclusive that GMO herbicides are dangerous.”

This is why countless people continue to rail against Monsanto. It’s why Monsanto and others spend millions of dollars illegally to try to defeat GMO labeling bills.

The truth is that Roundup, in the form of glyphosate, is just another product of the military industrial complex, and an evolution of Agent Orange.

As unsuspecting consumers we eat other chemicals as well.

Another clue for this chemical warfare can be found in the products made by food companies like Heinz, Knorr, SlimFast, and Best Foods, just to name a few.

Stanley Monteith, an expert on world food supply, points to the huge amounts of man-made chemicals in the food on our local grocery-store shelves, naming aspartame as an example. Dr. Monteith explains:

“Aspartame is a chemical made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. And it breaks down into formaldehyde, eventually into wood alcohol. It produces all sorts of problems, mental problems, and it impacts on literally every organ in the body. They know this, there are extensive animal studies that show this, and it never should’ve been put into our food.”

Chemical additives like sodium fluoride also cause health issues. Despite official research showing that fluoride is toxic, even coming from Harvard, multinational companies and governments continue to put it in our water supplies.

“‘At the end of the Second World War, the United States Government sent Charles Eliot Perkins, a research worker in chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology, to take charge of the vast Farben chemical plants in Germany.

‘While there he was told by German chemists of a scheme which had been worked out by them during the war and adopted by the German General Staff.

‘This was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water. In this scheme, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place.”

When you add up the chemicals of Monsanto, other biotech companies, food companies, and toxic industrial waste products purposely put in our water, along with toxic drugs and ‘medical’ treatments that kill us instead of cure us, what are we left to believe?

Monsanto’s legacy was not left in Vietnam.