By Stephanie Seneff

What is glyphosate?

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, an herbicide first introduced by Monsanto to control weeds in food crops in the mid-seventies. Roundup is the most widely used herbicide in modern agriculture, due to its perceived low toxicity to humans. Its use has more than quadrupled between 1995 and 2010. To make it easier for farmers to apply this herbicide, Genetically modified crops that are resistant to glyphosate, the so-called Roundup–Ready crops, were introduced in the late nineties so that glyphosate could be sprayed indiscriminately on the field to kill the weeds without killing the crops. These were wildly successful: today, well over 90% of the corn, soy, sugar beets, and canola grown in North America are Roundup-Ready.

Is Glyphosate Safe?

Monsanto assures the public that glyphosate is safe for humans, because it kills the weeds by inhibiting the first enzyme in the Shikimate Pathway, a pathway that human cells do not have…