Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup is the most heavily used weed-killer in history and together with Monsanto’s genetically modified patented seeds could be responsible for a looming worldwide public health threat and an environmental disaster. Common Dreams reports: Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, is now the most heavily used week killer ever and its use has exploded in the past decade, a new report finds, a fact that may portend “a host of adverse environmental and public health consequences.” The new paper on the global use of the herbicide comes less than a year after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Since its introduction in 1974, 18.9 billion pounds of glyphosate have been used globally, author Charles Benbrook writes in the paper, but 74 percent of all glyphosate sprayed on crops has happened in just the last decade. In fact, since the introduction of “Roundup Ready” crops—those engineered to be resistant to the herbicide—in 1996, there’s been close to a 15-fold increase in the use of glyphosate globally. In the United States, there’s been a 20-fold increase, from 12.5 million pounds in 1995 to 250 million pounds in [...]