Roundup wasn't a bad herbicide to choose, and still isn't. Given your choice of compounds, it has quite low environmental persistence and toxicity relative. J

Roundup wasn't a bad herbicide to choose, and still isn't. Given your choice of compounds, it has quite low environmental persistence and toxicity relative. Just thinking about it, you'd want it to affect a metabolic pathway that's not present in other taxa, or at least animals, so the Shikimic Acid pathway fits the bill. You also want something that degrades rapidly so that it doesn't accumulate in the environment. Now, there are a lot of people arguing that glyphosate doesn't degrade quickly enough, and that's fair, but it's still pretty good as far as these things go. Finally, you need to have a resistance gene to use in the first place, which glyphosate had. So, assuming an input-intensive monoculture, glyphosate is easily a lesser of evils. The argument then becomes that it enables a broken system of monoculture, which is a quite a different issue than what most argue. As for the other arguments, the IP issue is a longstanding one, nothing new to GMOs. Plant patents are one of only 4 types issued in the US; it goes way back. Since the advent of hybrid crops, everyone farming has been at the mercy of the companies with the best inbreds. The 'bug' issue isn't that compelling, either; we've been testing and vetting new hybrids for decades, and the risks are very similar. Biology is often 'fuzzy', but when it gets down to it, you can see what pathways are effected, look at metabolites, etc. It's quite easy to look at two similar things and see exactly how they differ.