It is hard to imagine that a shortage of the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate aka Roundup, could be a national defence emergency, but here we are with Trump’s Executive Order (18 February, 2026): ‘Promoting the National Defence by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorous and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides’.
Like all things Trump, when you scratch the surface of his apparent concern for the nation’s capacity to feed and defend itself, what you find is a scheme that enables Bayer, the sole manufacturer of glyphosate in the USA, to continue its business shielded from any further legal accountability.
Unsurprisingly Bayer also owns and operates active elemental phosphorous mines in the US which is a critical mineral in defence supply chains and a precursor to making glyphosate.
The Executive Order invokes the cold war era ‘Defence Production Act’ and delegates the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of War, ‘…To determine the proper nationwide priorities… to ensure a continued and adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides’.
The noteworthy part is a handy clause that confers legal immunity on ‘domestic producers of elemental phosphorous and glyphosate-based herbicides’ and ensures ‘no person shall be held liable’ for ‘any act’ resulting from compliance with the Order.
Bayer, who bought Monsanto and its Roundup litigation nightmare in 2018 for $63bn, is currently being hammered over its failure to warn people that glyphosate might cause them cancer.
To date they have paid out US$10bn in settlements with a further US$7.25bn proposal made recently by Bayer and attorneys for cancer patients to resolve the tens of thousands of remaining US lawsuits. There are ongoing lawsuits in other nations too.
So burdened is Bayer by the consequences of their chemical product, last year they threatened to stop producing it altogether in the US and removed it from products used in the home and garden. They embarked on an aggressive lobbying campaign to curtail further litigation, throwing in a million-dollar donation for Donald Trump.
Bayer is once again appealing to the US Supreme Court, after a failed bid in 2022 to dismiss a $25m award to Edwin Hardeman, a Californian man with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which opened the floodgates to state-based litigation.
Bayer argues the federal EPA approval of glyphosate and its regulatory position that glyphosate is not carcinogenic, should bar state-level ‘failure-to-warn’ claims. The hearing is scheduled for late April, which is interesting timing given this Order.
Legal woes around glyphosate started in 2015 with the release of the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) scientific monograph on glyphosate which found it is a ‘probable carcinogen’ with ‘sufficient evidence’ that it causes cancer in experimental animals.
IARC also found ‘strong’ evidence that both glyphosate active ingredient and the formulated products are genotoxic, meaning it’s destructive to genetic material such as DNA and chromosomes, leading to mutations, which can lead to cancer and inherited birth defects.
At the time pesticide regulators, including the APVMA in Australia, scrambled to come to terms with the findings. A vicious campaign against the IARC ensued but they never resiled from their findings and defended all criticisms with evidence.
In late 2025 another bombshell hit. A foundational and frequently cited paper used to justify the safety of glyphosate was retracted from the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology due to ‘serious ethical concerns’. The retraction notice explains the original paper referenced unpublished studies and Monsanto had a secretive hand in sponsoring and writing the paper.
Concerns about the paper were first exposed in 2017 during legal action against Monsanto, but the journal suspiciously took another eight years to retract it. Meanwhile regulators continue to maintain glyphosate is ‘safe if used according to label directions’.
You might be wondering what national defence has to do with all this? Me too. The pesticide industry and the military industrial complex go back a long way, so the mind boggles.
Never forget, Bayer was part of the Nazi-era IG Farben conglomerate that made the gas that killed millions of people in concentration camps. It was the allied forces that broke up that conglomerate after winning the war, establishing Bayer as an independent company.
Remember the Vietnam War and Agent Orange, the herbicide defoliant that denuded entire jungles and is still causing deformities in babies born today? It was primarily manufactured by Dow Chemical Company and Monsanto, under contract to the US Department of Defence.
Given the fact the industrial agricultural sector is now totally hooked on glyphosate with the introduction of genetically-modified Roundup Ready crops, it’s no wonder any threat to its existence is framed as a threat to national food security, and national defence.
No regulator would dare to ban glyphosate-based herbicides at this point, which goes to show you just how far the sinister arm of the pesticide industry reaches.
Jo Immig is a former advisor to the NSW Legislative Council and coordinator of the National Toxics Network. She’s currently a freelance writer and researcher.
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