Washington, D.C. — This week, the U.S. Dept. of Justice released its final judgement approving the megamerger between Bayer CropScience and the Monsanto Company. The merger, which joins the world's largest seed company (Monsanto) and second-leading pesticide firm (Bayer), follows other major consolidation actions in the increasingly united seed and pesticide sectors: ChemChina's acquisition of Swiss pesticide multinational Syngenta; and the combination of Dow and DuPont's agricultural operations.

The merger creates a megacorporation that's well-positioned to tighten the dangerous linkages between seeds and pesticides (including herbicides) in two major ways.

Seeds + Herbicides: Spray, Baby, Spray! Monsanto has used genetic engineering to generate crops that can survive direct application of the herbicides it also sells. Weed-killers that once had to be applied sparingly, to avoid injuring the crop, can now be sprayed with abandon through much of the growing season.

These herbicide-resistant GMOs have had disastrous consequences. The first generation of Roundup Ready crops led to massive use of the herbicide glyphosate, which the world's cancer authorities have deemed "probably carcinogenic to humans." Glyphosate usage also generated an epidemic of glyphosate-resistant weeds that have spurred more spraying of other herbicides. Monsanto's second-generation GMOs are sprayed with dicamba, an herbicide which has drifted rampantly over the past two years, injuring millions of acres of crops, as well as trees, gardens and shrubs. Dicamba's suppression or outright killing of flowering plants has put further pressure on pollinators, which require nectar and pollen to survive, and is already driving beekeepers out of business.

Bayer has a few herbicide-resistant crops of its own, and more importantly a large suite of herbicides. The merged firm will likely continue to churn out more GMOs immune to ever more herbicides, regardless of the cost to farmers, the public, or the environment.

Seeds + Insecticides: Till Death Do Them Partâ?¦ Bayer is the world's leading producer of a class of highly toxic insecticides known as neonicotinoids, also known as "neonics". They're coated on the seeds of most major field crops â?? corn, soybeans, cotton and canola â?? and diffuse throughout the tissues of the growing seedling. This marriage of seeds and insecticides is big trouble, because neonics are incredibly toxic to bees and implicated as one factor in the decline of pollinators around the world. And they kill other beneficial insects as well. Slugs that have been made toxic by consuming neonic-treated seedlings poison ground beetles that try to eat them!

To make matters worse, objective research shows that neonics provide little or no benefit in terms of yield, so it's not clear what they're doing on the seed at all. Just as momentum is building to restrict these toxic insecticides to protect pollinators, or at least give farmers the choice of untreated seed, a merged Monsanto-Bayer will have every incentive to expand their use to all of Monsanto's seeds. How many beneficial insects must die before this toxic union of seeds + neonics is broken up?

But Bayer may have gotten more than it bargained for by merging with Monsanto. Dicamba drift has caused so much damage in the last two years that farmers have banded together to file several class action lawsuits against Monsanto to recoup their losses. Thousands of cancer victims have also sued Monsanto over its glyphosate herbicide, Roundup, alleging that exposure to Roundup was responsible for their non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). In August 2018, a California jury found in favor of a school groundskeeper who regularly used Roundup and has a terminal case of NHL. The jury unanimously found that Monsanto had failed to warn of the cancer-causing dangers of its brand-name Roundup herbicides and related products, and awarded the groundskeeper $289 million in damages, which was later reduced to $78 million. Several similar lawsuits are scheduled for 2019.

To prevent the new Bayer from becoming the only seed source, Center for Food Safety launched a free online tool where users can easily exchange seeds with each other. Visit the Global Seed Network at http://www.GlobalSeedNetwork.org to learn more.