Here is the presentation by The Risk Monger on his blog:
“It is a bit long but answers, very clearly and patiently, every question anyone with concerns about the continued use of this herbicide might have. If you are a journalist, please read this. If you are a policy-maker, please read this. If you are going to share an anti-GMO or anti-conventional farming meme, please read this. If you are going to the Monsanto Tribunal next month, … please learn to read!”
Worth reading.

Her 17 questions:

1. Does glyphosate cause cancer?
2. Could glyphosate have other health effects? What about the surfactants in RoundUp, or glyphosate breakdown products?
3. What about studies claiming glyphosate causes celiac disease, autism, obesity etc? A look at Seneff et co.
4. Does glyphosate harm our gut bacteria?
5. Could glyphosate be another case like DDT or Thalidomide – should we apply the precautionary principle? The important difference between persistent and non-persistent pesticides
6. Is glyphosate an especially dangerous pesticide?
7. Is there glyphosate in the air and rainwater?
8. Is there glyphosate in urine?
9. What about breastmilk?
10. Should we worry about glyphosate in wine?
11. Is wheat toxic because of glyphosate?
12. Are crops drenched in glyphosate?
13. Does glyphosate use enable bad farming practices?
14. What about resistance and superweeds?
15. Does glyphosate interfere with soil organisms or nutrient availability?
16. Does glyphosate harm Monarch butterflies or bees?
17. Can glyphosate research be trusted? What about conflicts of interest?

To go further:
““There’s No Such Thing as a Chemical-Free Lunch””
« Références sur résidus et sécurité des aliments »
« Les idées reçues : la tasse de café »

[1] Acronyme évitant de donner son nom barbare : 2,4-dihydroxy-7-méthoxy-1,4-benzoxazine-3-one

Barfblog, a reference blog in food safety, publishes a good written summary.
It concludes “That’s where his idea for Todd Talks comes in. “Do you love science in all its complexity but wish it could be a little less complex and a lot less scientific?” asks an announcer. “Introducing Todd Talks, where the format of Ted Talks meets the intellectual rigor of morning news shows.”
Highlights of the hilarious talks include warnings about chocolate — “Mmm. It will kill you,” says one pseudo scientist — and some intriguing if not alarming findings on alcohol — “And in my research I found out, red wine makes babies 20 percent more sociable,” explains another.”

It’s based on a scientific article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where “a group of scientists explore how exactly caterpillars drove plants to make chemicals that humans find tasty”.

“It happened through what’s called an evolutionary arms race, explains Chris Pires, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Missouri and one of the lead authors of the study. This works a lot like a military arms race — repeated escalations to have better weapons or defenses — but on an epic timescale. In this case, the opposing armies are caterpillars of the cabbage butterfly and plants in the order Brassicales, which today includes cabbage, horseradish, kale and mustard.”  This arms race has lasted 90 millions years.

The arms race isn’t a new story. It was described as an example of coevolution. This research precise the timing and the mecanism of this co-evolution.

The arms used by Brassicales are “glucosinolates”, a mix of chemicals. “Glucosinolates have at least two sensory properties: burn and bitter”. “”Most bugs don’t like it. It’s toxic. it turns their guts inside out.”

“We humans happen to find glucosinolates delicious. These chemicals — there are hundreds — impart unique smells and flavors to the plants that contain them. Many glucosinolates are in the cruciferous vegetables that evolved from those ancient cabbage plants when the family tree expanded.”

NPR concludes : « “Why do you think plants have spices or any flavor at all? It’s not for us,” says Pires. “They have a function. All these flavors are evolution.” »

In  “Misconceptions about the cancer“, Bruce Ames, US researcher, explains “The amounts of synthetic pesticide residues in plant foods, for example, are tiny compared to the amount of
natural “pesticides” produced by plants themselves. Of all dietary pesticides that humans eat, 99.99% are natural: these are chemicals produced by plants to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other animal predators. Each plant produces a different array of such chemicals. On average, Americans ingest roughly 5,000 to 10,000 different natural pesticides and their breakdown products. Americans eat about 1,500 mg of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than they consume of synthetic pesticide residues”

To go further in French:
« De la belle pédagogie « Co-évolution des plantes et des pathogènes : le modèle en zig-zag » (Vegenov) »

Papillon sur fleur de crucifère (Photo : Tom Blackwell sur Flickr)

One important point in this article is how W Saletan argues that every judgment about agricultural practices should be made case by case, without preconceived ideas. For example, about RR GMOs, he writes : “The more you learn about herbicide resistance, the more you come to understand how complicated the truth about GMOs is. First you discover that they aren’t evil. Then you learn that they aren’t perfectly innocent. Then you realize that nothing is perfectly innocent. Pesticide vs. pesticide, technology vs. technology, risk vs. risk—it’s all relative. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives. The least you can do is look past a three-letter label.”

The litany

The main charges against Monsanto are about : its origins, the invention of the Agent Orange, the Terminator gene, the ubiquitous presence of Roundup (active substance = Glyphosate), its purported control of global agriculture and food, the prosecution of growers, the suicide of Indian farmers , ….
But moreover, Monsanto is now perceived as the evil in person, and quite “seriously” in a certain way.
Even singers play the game. Neil Young is about to launch his last album entitled “The Monsanto Years”
Kolibri, a French rapper has published on line a demoniac looking clip (version française, English version).

The facts

All these charges have in common to be a tricky mix of truths and lies, of facts and fantasms, of plausible and pure fiction.

Monsanto has ended to answer these attacks on its site on a factual basis, whatever is our opinion on the company or the wording of these answers. Read  here and here
For example, Monsanto explains they did not invent the Agent Orange. But “The U.S. government ordered Monsanto, along with 9 other companies, to make Agent Orange for U.S. military use during the Vietnam War. The former Monsanto Co. stopped making it in 1969 18, more than 40 years ago”

Stopping the demonization

But factual answers are not enough. Especially, when they are coming from the evil in person…
More and more scientists, farmers, bloggers, and medias, without any link with Monsanto, begin to answer on a more general way.
Franklin Veaux, a US blogger, has published a sarcastic article about the Monsanto’s size : “ExxonMobil makes more than 26 times more money than Monsanto, and has a higher net profit margin, too. Combined, the country’s top 5 oil companies have a gross revenue exceeding $1.3 trillion, more than 87 times Monsanto’s revenue, and yet…they still can’t get the world’s scientists to say global warming isn’t a thing”. Ok Monsanto is not a small company, but conspiracy theories about Monsanto are completely stupid and awful

On Quora, an Internet site for collaborative blogs, in an article answering the question “Is Monsanto evil?” (in English), Dan Holliday, analyses the attacks against Monsanto as a need of building myths, in a quasi-religious way.
Monsanto is the rallying cry for a bunch of idealist, zealots who depend on that mantra in exactly the same way religious zealots shill the holiness of their deity or theological cause.  It 100% mimics the techniques of the anti-vaxers as well.  They employ the exact same techniques: slogans, unsubstantiated assertions, straw man arguments, anecdotal evidence…
“I love Monsanto” is a provocative entitled, sarcastic and funny video, published by the video-bloggeur Cult of Dusty. He attacks the myth “Monsanto is evil”  in a kind of a joking “nerd and anger mood”, but with factual and substantiated arguments.

You may watch, also, Tyler Cowen, economist, in a TED Conference. He tells us to be very cautious with “stories”. The reality is always more complex than stories about “good and bad”

Conclusion

The strenght of the demonsrators against Monanto is their story, the “plot”, the good versus the bad. But it is also their weakness because it is absolutely wrong.

Farmers have no specific interest in protecting nor supporting Monsanto. But farmers have to advocate a modern farming and an agronomy based on science. The best way to grow more with less, and with less impact on environment.

The demonization of Monsanto is dangerous because it’s in fact the demonization of the whole modern agriculture. This demonization would lead to a dead-lock and an economic, agricultural, environmental, human and intellectual regression. A clash of civilisation is beginning.

Not to be missed.

“For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible.”

« The sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed. So their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale.».

In the good old times, food was unsafe, humdrum, and time consuming. And “If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. (…) Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty delivered to us by (ironically) the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor; and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.”

Our point of view : There is a widely spread misunderstanding about fruit and vegetables. With romantic eyes, People see them as “natural”

But, in fact, if they can provide vitamines, frshness, diveristy, tastes, …it is indeed because they modern, and in a certain way “industrial”: they are the result of a long genetic selection, of science based agricultural practices. And modern techniques improve their shelf life.

It is this contradiction, very well explained in this article, that our society have to deal with.

As a result of the emotive language often used in conjunction with “chemicals”, a series of myths have emerged. Myths that Sense about Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry are debunking with the publication of Making Sense of Chemical Stories. Here are five of the worst offenders:

1. You can lead a chemical-free life

2. Man-made chemicals are dangerous

3. Synthetic chemicals cause cancer

4. Chemical exposure is a ticking time-bomb

5. We are subjects in an unregulated, uncontrolled experiment

5. We are subjects in an unregulated, uncontrolled experiment

His main and most detailed arguments in his article are about the history of acute toxicity of pesticides, compared to natural common substances, and the history of the uses of pesticides.

Definitely, nowadays, pesticides are “much safer than what they were a few decades ago, and much safer than most people imagine”.

It’s worth reading the full article.