Dive Brief:
- Monsanto Deltapine's new Xtend Flex trait for cotton has received USDA approval. Cotton farmers will be able to use the trait in the 2015 growing season, but they will not be able to spray the crops with the new dicamba herbicide formulations the company wanted to sell to farmers using the trait, as those have not yet been approved by the EPA.
- The World Health Organization has conducted research showing that Monsanto Co.'s leading weed-killer Roundup, also known as glyphosate, can probably be linked to carcinogenic effects.
- According to Bloomberg, nearly $16 billion of Monsanto's annual sales relate to glyphosate products.
Dive Insight:
If research linking glyphosate to cancer continues to be replicated, this may not bode well for Monsanto. In addition to comprising a significant portion of the company's annual sales, most of the crops the company has engineered have been modified to be grown with glyphosate. Monsanto is fighting back against the WHO's research claims, saying that the organization didn't take into account new data and that this research is dissimilar from other tests done by the U.S., European Union, and other countries.