The EU’s reauthorisation of controversial weedkiller glyphosate has stalled under political pressure from member states. But is the chemical hazardous to our health? Today, Euranet Plus is publishing the first part of an investigation into glyphosate – focusing on human exposure.

“Frankly speaking, who would have bet one cent on a glyphosate ban?” said Yannick Jadot, a Green Member of the European Parliament (MEP), during the most recent plenary session in Strasbourg.

His comments echo the views of most people close to the negotiations, who were pretty sure that the renewal of the authorisation of glyphosate, the most-used herbicide in the world, would pass easily.

But it was not the case. For the third time in a row, European member states’ experts gathered in the Standing Committee for Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (PAFF Committee) couldn’t reach a qualified majority on the European Commission’s proposal to extend for 18 months the authorisation of the controversial weed killer.

Bien évidemment la France ne changera pas d'avis sur le glyphosate et ne votera pas la proposition de Bruxelles. #santé et environnement. — Ségolène Royal (@RoyalSegolene) June 1, 2016

@RoyalSegolene "on dit" que la France s'est abstenue sur la réautorisation du glyphosate ajd'hui. Vous confirmez? pic.twitter.com/NfM627rr4v — Michèle Rivasi (@MicheleRivasi) June 6, 2016

Twenty countries voted in favour, while France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Austria, Luxembourg and Italy abstained. Malta was the only member state to vote against.

“Various products that contain glyphosate are very important for agriculture,” explained Vents Ezers, who represents Latvia at the PAFF Committee, and who voted for the renewal.

“They are being widely used by farmers to prepare the fields and also later to combat weeds. Therefore, these kind of products have a very wide range of use. Thus, such a ban would not be beneficial for farmers, including in Latvia.”

But is the EU really on the cusp of banning glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s flagship pesticide, Roundup?

“A few months ago, the member states and the European Commission thought it would be easy to reauthorise glyphosate. We’ve proved it was wrong,” explained Green MEP Michèle Rivasi.

However, the European Commission did make an effort to convince member states to extend the authorisation of the weed killer. A first proposal for a 15-year reauthorisation was rejected in March. Two months later, a nine-year proposal was also unsuccessful.

Then, on May 30, EU Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis told Euranet Plus that his last proposal is “to extend for 18 months the process of use of glyphosate until the European Chemical Agency (ECHA) will take a final decision about the carcinogenicity of glyphosate”.

While it clearly proposes a shorter time frame, the new proposal does not ban private use and leaves it up to member states to ensure the “sustainable use” of the chemical.

“In our recommendation we propose to member states to provide better regulation and restrict the use of glyphosate in school grounds and public gardens,” Andriukaitis said.

“Failure to re-approve glyphosate would have significant negative repercussions for the competitiveness of European agriculture” Graeme Taylor, ECPA

It should not come as a big surprise that Graeme Taylor, Director of Public Affairs of the European Crop Protection Association (ECPA), was not enthusiastic about the latest Commission proposal.

“This ‘no opinion’ from the committee is hugely disappointing,” he said.

The ECPA represents the interests of the main pesticides producers, such as Bayer Crop Science, Monsanto, BASF, Dow AgroSciences, Syngenta, Adama and Dupont, and has a lobbying budget of between 100,000 and 200,000 euros a year, according to the EU transparency register. But these “estimated costs” on the transparency register are only a part of the ECPA’s total budget.

“We share the sentiment voiced by Commissioner Andriukaitis when he said our decisions should remain based on science, not on political convenience […] Failure to reapprove glyphosate would have significant negative repercussions for the competitiveness of European agriculture, the environment, and the ability of farmers to produce safe and affordable food,” added Taylor.

Failure to renew the authorisation before the deadline at the end of June would also lead to Roundup and other glyphosate-based pesticides being removed from EU shelves within six months.

“Further delays in this process represent a significant deviation from the EU regulatory framework and set a concerning precedent for other active substances. Regulatory decisions should be based on the best available science,” stated Monsanto’s vice-president of Global Regulatory Affairs, Philip Miller.

Juncker is not happy

This sudden increase in political awareness has put member states and the Commission under huge pressure, particularly from the European Parliament, where Green MEPs have even had their urine tested for glyphosate levels.

Mon urine contient du #glyphosate à hauteur de 19 fois la norme sur l'eau, sans que j'en boive à table #RTLMatin https://t.co/zqx1Oldjht — Yannick Jadot (@yjadot) May 18, 2016

Just as the controversy over GMOs plagued the Barroso Commission, President Jean-Claude Juncker’s team has come to see glyphosate as a new thorn in its side.

Sources close to the matter confirmed that President Juncker would like to reform the system of expert committees, which take important decisions for more than 500 million EU citizens behind closed doors.

Moreover, Commissioner Andriukaitis repeated his appeal to member states to assume their responsibility and “not to hide behind the Commission”.

The EU executive has denounced the “double game” and according to Agence Europe, German, French and Italian ministers “have informed the Commission that it can move forward, despite their abstentions”.

Presented outcome MS vote on #glyphosate to College, next vote in appeal 23/06. Call MS to be consistent & don't hide behind @EU_Commission — Vytenis Andriukaitis (@V_Andriukaitis) June 7, 2016

Agence Europe also reported that the presidents of Copa-Cogeca, the federation of European farmers and cooperatives, wrote to Juncker, calling on him to renew the approval of glyphosate.

The letter says that glyphosate is authorised for a wide range of uses and is sold at a cost-effective price. “There is no single alternative that meets all of these criteria,” said Martin Merrild and Thomas Magnusson, the presidents of Copa and Cogeca, respectively.

“I think we have to look at the fact that farmers don’t use pesticides for no reason,” explained Graeme Taylor.

“Farmers have to pay to use pesticides and there is a fundamentally important reason that they use them – and that is to ensure they have an adequate use of crops to feed not just the European population but also the world population.”

It’s in the air

But the real issue is public health. Whether or not glyphosate is necessary to feed the planet, the question remains: is glyphosate hazardous to human health?

And as always, the answer is complicated.

On the one hand, EU law is quite clear. EU regulation 1107/2009 “concerning the placing of plant protection products on the market” – in other words, pesticides – is underpinned by “the precautionary principle” to ensure that active products placed on the market “do not adversely affect human or animal health or the environment”.

The precautionary principle is at the core of the EU pesticides legislation: if a product is hazardous then it has to be banned, no matter how small the risk of exposure is.

When it comes to glyphosate, the risk of exposure might not be negligible, according to a study published in 2014 (Swanson et al) on the increase of chronic diseases in the United States. The study found that “because glyphosate is in air, water and food, humans are likely to be accumulating it in low doses over time”.

“We have to realise that we are putting this in an open space, where it leaks it out, it goes to the water, it goes to the other environments,” explained Angeliki Lyssimachou, toxicologist at the NGO, Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe.

“The other thing is that you are exposed unwillingly, it’s not your choice. You are not deciding to take this like a medicine, or it’s not like smoking – that’s your choice to smoke. It’s something that you are going to be exposed to anyways.”

The current EU Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) is 0.5 mg of glyphosate per kilogram of body weight per day. In the US it is 1.75 mg. But last February, a “consensus statement” by a group of scientists concluded that the “regulatory estimate of tolerable daily intakes for glyphosate in the US and EU are based on outdated science.”

During a conference organized by MEP Pavel Poc (Socialists and Democrats) at the European Parliament in Brussels in March, Andre Leu, president of IFOAM-Organics International, said that glyphosate might also be dangerous at very low levels of exposure.

According to Leu, it causes human hormone-dependent breast cancer cells to proliferate at a concentration of parts per trillion. “To better understand, it means that if you have a 10 km-long train, it represents one wagon,” Leu said.

A handful of papers, particularly a meta-analysis by Chinasi and Leon, conclude that there is an association between pesticide exposure and a growth in Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL) cases, a type of blood cancer.

“The incidence of NHL has doubled in the US between 1975 and 2006,” said Andre Leu in Brussels. During the same conference, Euros Jones from the ECPA denied any sort of cancer increase among farmers, adding that “farmers have a lower cancer level than a normal population”.

“This is false, this is misrepresentation of data,” said Kate Buyton from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), adding that the US set up a nationwide Agricultural Health Study because of “farmers who were sick without knowing why”.

“Glyphosate may, in fact, be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.” Samsel and Seneff, 2013

Reading too many scientific studies can transform your peaceful life into a paranoid nightmare. The world you considered safe might alter significantly after reading a few papers, for instance the Swanson et al study or a 2013 paper by Samsel and Seneff, ‘Pathways to modern diseases’.

The Samsel and Seneff paper aims to demonstrate how glyphosate’s adverse effects might explain a “great number of diseases in our modern industrialised world”.

Among the mentioned pathologies: obesity, depression, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, infertility, developmental malformations and cancer.

“It is imperative […] to take immediate action […] to drastically curtail the use of glyphosate in agriculture,” the Samsel and Seneff study recommended. “Glyphosate […] may in fact be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.”

On top of that, glyphosate might also be an endocrine disruptor, which interferes with the human hormone system and can cause cancers or birth defects.

French professor Gilles-Eric Séralini has published different studies on the matter, stating in one paper that “these herbicides mixtures also present endocrine disruptor effect on human cells at doses far below agricultural dilution and toxic levels”.

79 percent of Germans show glyphosate residues

But is glyphosate really responsible for all these diseases?

“Recent scare-mongering and promotion of misinformation and unsubstantiated claims has hampered the ability to have an informed debate,” said the Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), a consortium of companies campaigning to renew glyphosate’s EU licence.

In a paper last year, the GTF put clearly into question the validity of the studies which claim that glyphosate may be the cause of many modern diseases. “The authors (Swans et al, Samsel and Seneff) have put forth a series of highly elaborate hypotheses regarding causation in the absence of observable associations,” GTF wrote.

“Correlation is not causation, but with such a level of correlation that would be stupid not to assess,” added Andre Leu in front of the European Parliament.

Three months ago, a report presented at the Heinrich Böll-Stiftung in Berlin concluded that a large majority of Germans displayed levels of glyphosate residue in their urine that were higher than the legal limit for drinking water.

“The glyphosate concentration in urine of 79 percent of subjects was 5 to 42 times above the maximum residue level in drinking water,” the study said.

Men were significantly more exposed than women, while those aged 70+ were less affected than others.

But the most shocking finding was that children up to nine years of age were the most contaminated, followed by 10 to 19-years-olds.

MEP Pavel Poc pointed to the evidence presented on page after page of the German study, in figures and graphs. Staring at a patch of grey sky through the window of his Brussels office, he nodded and said:

“I’m scared because our kids are the most stricken.”

Author: Jean Michel Bos, Euranet Plus News Agency

Further image credit: (middle 1) Vytenis Andriukaitis on next steps in the Glyphosate authorisation procedure on June 1, 2016 / ec.europa.eu

End of part 1/3 of the dossier

‘Glyphosate, the most-hated herbicide’

This article is part of a dossier in three parts.

Read the second and third parts.