Glyphosate: an increasingly unclear controversy

Glyphosate: an increasingly unclear controversy

 
Early March, in a long awaited opinion, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) said that available scientific evidence does not provide grounds to classify the controversial herbicide, glyphosate, as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or as toxic for reproduction. “On the major end-points that are under debate, carcinogenicity and toxicity for reproduction, there is a very clear conclusion from the Committee that the substance should not be classified accordingly and, therefore, I think that will have a major input in the decision-making done by the European Commission,” said Jack de Bruijn, director of risk management at ECHA. "This conclusion was based on both the human evidence and on the weight of the evidence of all the animal studies reviewed,” said Tim Bowmer, chair of the Committee for Risk Assessment (RAC).

ECHA said its remit was only to look at whether glyphosate had the potency to cause cancer – it did not look at the risk of exposure for humans, saying that this aspect is up to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to evaluate.
Last June, the European Commission said it would only extend the EU license for the weed-killer by 18 months, and would then look to renew it for longer or otherwise, pending the outcome of the ECHA safety assessment of the substance.
The EU executive will make a decision on whether to renew the license for the use of glyphosate as an active substance in herbicides later this year.
 
Other factors will no doubt play a role in the way that European authorities approach this issue: in an article dated 18 March, the French daily newspaper Le Monde revealed that internal memos of the Monsanto Company, which were recently declassified by the American federal justice system, indicate that leaders of the agrochemical firm were seriously concerned as early as 1999 about the mutagenic potential of glyphosate, the active ingredient in its flagship product, Roundup. This is the world’s most frequently used plant health molecule. Monsanto executives attempted to employ the services of an undisputed scientific authority in order to demonstrate to European regulators that glyphosate presents no genotoxicity risk.
For Monsanto, the issue is a crucial one: Roundup is the cornerstone of its economic model, based on sales linked to this herbicide and to the transgenic crops that are able to tolerate it.