Banning or reducing pesticide use? Companies lobby for incentives instead of legally binding measures

Bayer products have been the focus of four posts on this site and referred to in many others.  Like other pesticide manufacturers, it is stoutly resisting attempts to ban damaging products by hiring ‘influencers’ in France and other countries.

In the United States Bayer is facing thousands of cases claiming that Roundup’s active ingredient glyphosate caused cancer and other diseases and there are calls for a ban in Britain, the latest coming from Richard Bruce. who is working with his MP. 

In December 2022 a reader living in Wales drew attention to Reuters report that Bayer, France’s crop chemical and pharmaceutical group – after a 15-year legal battle – had been ordered to pay a ‘miserly’ compensation of 11,135 euros (£9565) to a French farmer who inhaled fumes from Bayer’s weedkiller Lasso, which caused neurological problems, including memory loss, fainting and headaches.

Francois’ verdict: Farmer Paul Francois (left) said “11,000 euros for so much sacrifice, 11,135 euros for 15 years of life put between brackets, of sleepless nights, I would perhaps have done better to use this time to play the lottery”.(France-Justice).This is a strong signal from our justice system in France: ‘We don’t touch these multinationals’.”

Vakita, an activist video-on-demand platform, reports that in 2021, a manufacturer of pesticides paid an Instagrammer with 700,000 followers to defend a herbicide, which the EU was threatening to ban due to its risk to wildlife and the environment.

A full data set of the evidence on this table is available on request from DeSmog. It can also be viewed in DeSmog’s Agribusiness database, which includes profiles of all the above listed companies.

Industry has lobbied hard to ensure these targets don’t become law

The Big Ag lobby in Brussels has repeatedly suggested that the EU should not focus on legally binding cuts in agrochemical use, and sought to replace the ambitious targets already agreed by the European Parliament with weaker alternatives.

While the industry states that it is not against the principle of setting targets, it has opposed them in practice, labelling EU targets in the “SUR” pesticides-reduction plan as “non-data based”, “unrealistic”, “pointless” and “counterproductive”.

In 2021, for example, farm lobby COPA-COGECA sent MEPs numerous industry-friendly amendments to the sustainable farming strategy – and suggested the removal of commitments that would make targets legally binding.

The message – which echoes positions often used by the fossil fuel lobby – is that EU policy should optimise incentives (see Discourses of climate delay, Cambridge journal opposite). As pesticide trade body CropLife Europe says: “let’s focus on transition, not just targets”. 

Meanwhile, as CPR reports, people will continue to suffer short-term health effects, including stinging eyes, rashes, blisters, nausea, dizziness , diarrhoea. Young children (EPA, p3), farm workers and pesticide applicators who  receive greater exposures are more vulnerable.

Chronic conditions due to pesticide exposure include cancers, birth defects, reproductive harm, immunotoxicity, neurological and developmental toxicity and disruption of the endocrine systemwhich are described on several US government websites (links above).

 

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Crop Life, funded by pesticide firms, lobbies against life-threatening government deregulation plans

Richard Bruce has written to Farming Today (30 Sept 2022) after hearing its report about the Government plans to revoke current pesticide legislation when it removes EU laws from the statute books. This will make our agricultural pesticide regulations even weaker that they are at present.

Former farm manager Richard, who was exposed to and poisoned by pesticides during the course of his work, writes that anyone who believes these regulations protect us is deluded; he has no confidence in the system at all – “Quite the opposite in fact”.

In March this year Corporate Europe and many other media outlets reported on a leaked document from Brussels-based pesticides lobby group CropLife Europe. Though it talks about backing the EU’s Green Deal, it is employing a wide variety of lobbying tactics to undermine ambitious, binding targets.

Corporate Europe uncovers the lobby strategies in a comprehensive report ‘A loud lobby for a silent spring: the pesticide industry’s toxic lobbying tactics against Farm to Fork’. This points out that leading members Bayer, BASF, Corteva and Syngenta are the world’s largest pesticide firms. Although competitors, they collaborate to intensify their efforts, driving and financing the lobbying activity of Crop Life.

Richard Bruce asks: “How can we trust our regulatory system?”

It is influenced by an organisation which approves the chemicals, investigates incidents causing illnesses as a result of exposure to those chemicals and is responsible for enforcing the regulations and prosecuting those who act in breach of those regulations. It has a built-in incentive to protect itself.

Public Medicine (NIH) reports that the World Health Organisation’s Mortality Database estimates about 385 million cases of pesticide poisoning occur annually world-wide including around 11,000 fatalities – and, Richard comments, that does not include cases of long-term illnesses induced by the chemicals.

He warns against believing the claims that using pesticides according to the labels renders the poisons safe – it doesn’t. For many chemicals the available PPE is not as effective as it should be, which is why the HSE recently introduced tighter regulations over the fitting of masks.

 

 

 

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Gradual progress: legal restrictions increased on harmful herbicides and pesticides

A Godstone reader has drawn attention to an admirable organisation, Justice Pesticides which gathers information about pesticide-related legal disputes around the world in order to   establish a legal and scientific database to. help victims of these toxic products to obtain legal redress. Its latest news:

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU, below) has rejected Bayer’s appeal to cancel the EU Regulation No. 540/2011 with regard to the conditions for approval of three neonicotinoid active substances: clothianidin, thiamethoxam and imidacloprid, and banning the use and sale of seeds treated with pesticides containing these active substances.

According to the Court there is sufficient evidence regarding the harmful effects of these chemicals on pollinators to apply the precautionary principle.

The CJEU ruling notes the influence of the conclusions of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which show the harmfulness of these products. In case of uncertainty and doubt about the toxicity of a pesticide, the Commission is entitled to impose its ban.

There are alternative means to maintain the health of farms without harming pollinators

In its ruling the CJEU states that “in some Member States, agriculture has been able to function satisfactorily without the use of plant protection products containing the substances in question” and that “the Commission was aware of the active substances that could replace” neonicotinoids”.

Bayer has now announced that it will no longer sell glyphosate-based herbicides to US gardeners from 2023

Over the years this site has posted eight articles about Bayer’s glyphosate formulations and at last, in order to avoid further costly litigation battles over their weedkiller Roundup,  on July 29^th its website announced: “The company and its partners will replace its glyphosate-based products in the U.S. residential Lawn & Garden market with new formulations that rely on alternative active ingredients beginning in 2023, subject to a timely review by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state counterparts. This move is being made exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns”.

The vast majority of legal claims have been made by Lawn & Garden market users suffering from cancer.

Many cities, counties, states and countries throughout the world have taken steps to restrict or ban glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer.– see the list here.

Bayer’s glyphosate formulations, however, will still be sold to American farmers.

 

 

 

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Austrian ban on glyphosate delayed due to a procedural error

 Richard Bruce draws attention to disappointing news from Austria.

In July last year, EuroNews reported that lawmakers in Austria’s lower house had voted to ban the herbicide glyphosate from 2020.

The motion, proposed by the Social Democratic (SPO) party, planned a complete ban of glyphosate products as a “precautionary” measure. “The scientific evidence of the plant poison’s carcinogenic effect is increasing. It is our responsibility to ban this poison from our environment,” the SPO leader, Pamela Rendi-Wagner, said in a statement.

A large majority in the Austrian parliament and public (according to poll results) support banning the chemical because of fears it causes cancer and Austria devotes more of its farmland to organic agriculture than any other EU member state

In June, the Wall Street Journal published an undertaking by Bayer AG, that it would pay up to $10.9 billion to settle tens of thousands of lawsuits with U.S. plaintiffs alleging the company’s Roundup herbicide causes cancer

Law firm Baum Hedlund notes that the ban was scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020, but the country’s caretaker leader, Chancellor Brigitte Bierlein (below left), a career judge who must sign bills for them to become law, refused to do this.

Francois Murphy, reporting for Reuters explains that the chancellor said, in a letter  posted online by the government’s spokesman, that the bill could not come into force because the European Commission was not properly notified under a process aimed at giving it and member states time to react: “Such a notification of a bill – required by European Union law and specified (in the bill) as a condition for it to take effect – was, however, not carried out properly”.

A number of European member states have partially banned glyphosate — a pesticide first marketed by Monsanto as Roundup — as concerns have been growing about the potential effect the herbicide could have on human health since a 2015 report by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer which classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans“.

Despite their members’ feelings, the EU renewed its approval of glyphosate in 2017 until the end of 2022 and gave France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden the task of assessing the herbicide for further use within the bloc.

 

 

 

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Pesticide use: the tide appears to be turning

Bayer, the German company which bought the US agrochemical firm Monsanto, acquired its lucrative portfolio of pesticides and genetically modified seeds – and more than 13,000 pending cases relating to glyphosate sold under the brand name Roundup. At its annual meeting in Bonn last month, in an unprecedented revolt, more than 55% of shareholders declared they had no confidence in management. The ongoing fall in its share prices has accelerated. (Reuters 14.5.19).

Prof. Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser to the UK government points out that regulators around the world have falsely assumed it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes, that other research in 2017 showed farmers could slash their pesticide use without losses and quoted a UNGA report denouncing the “myth” that pesticides are necessary to feed the world.

Recent reports in the BMJ, the International Journal of Epidemiology and the European Food Safety Authority, add weight to Professor Boyd’s stance

• Prenatal and infant exposure to ambient pesticides and autism spectrum disorder in children: population based case-control study, BMJ, 20 March 2019 (open access) notes that common pesticides have been previously shown to cause neurodevelopmental impairment in experimental research and environmental exposures during early brain development are suspected to increase risk of autism spectrum disorders in children. The study’s findings suggest that an offspring’s risk of autism spectrum disorder increases following prenatal exposure to ambient pesticides (including glyphosate, chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and permethrin) within 2000 m of their mother’s residence during pregnancy, compared with offspring of women from the same agricultural region without such exposure. Infant exposure could further increase risks for autism spectrum disorder with comorbid intellectual disability.

• In February, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) published a new scientific analysis of glyphosate (PDF) (right), the active ingredient in Monsanto-owned Bayer’s Roundup, the world’s most popular weedkiller. They concluded that evidence supports a “compelling link” between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a type of blood cancer.
• Glyphosate exposure increases cancer risk up to 41% according to a study published in the IInternational Journal of Epidemiology (March). Observations in this analysis of >300 000 farmers and agricultural workers from France, Norway, and the USA, included elevations in risks of non-Hodgkin lymphoid malignancies (NHL) overall in association with the organophosphate insecticide terbufos, of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma (CLL/SLL) with the pyrethroid insecticide deltamethrin and of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) with the organophosphorus herbicide glyphosate.

• More transparency sought: an EU court ruled on 7 March that the EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA) should publicise studies about Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller. The General Court’s statement said that it annulled decisions by the EU food watch agency “refusing access to the toxicity and carcinogenicity studies on the active substance glyphosate”.

• On March 29th – after safety officials reported human health and environmental concerns – EU states voted for a ban of chlorothalonil, a fungicide, after a review by the European Food Safety Authority was unable to exclude the possibility its breakdown products, cause damage to DNA. EFSA also said “a high risk to amphibians and fish was identified for all representative uses”. Recent research further identified chlorothalonil and other fungicides as the strongest factor linked to steep declines in bumblebees.

Reuters reports that a California jury found on Monday that Monsanto’s Roundup likely caused a couple’s cancer and awarded them a staggering $2.055 billion in damages, in a third consecutive Roundup trial loss for the Bayer-owned unit. In one trial last August, a US court in California awarded damages and costs against Monsanto to 46-year-old park worker Dewayne Johnson, who was diagnosed with cancer after using the chemical.

But there’s still way to go; Monsanto – apparently undaunted – offers another  product, said to have less damage potential

Monsanto is reformulating its dicamba pesticide which tended to drift and earlier damaged millions of acres of crops and wild trees in 2017.

Farmers in 25 states had submitted more than 2,700 claims to state agricultural agencies that year and it was banned in the state of Arkansas last year, where almost 900,000 acres of crop damage (above) were reported. Monsanto unsuccessfully sued the state in an effort to stop the ban.

A lower volatility formulation, M1768, ‘a product with less potential to volatilize and move off the target area’ has been approved by the EPA for use until 2020 – on corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans and other crops – though it has not been evaluated by experts independent of Monsanto. It was obliged by the American government’s Environmental Protection Agency to agree to registration and labelling changes for the 2018 growing season, including making these products restricted-use and requiring record-keeping and additional measures to prevent spray drift.

 

 

 

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Russia is winning the battle for the health of the people and the environment.

Ellen Brown, president of the Public Banking Institute, (UC, Berkeley & UC, Los Angeles School of Law) reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has banned GMOs and has set out to make Russia the world’s leading supplier of organic food.

Russian families are showing what can be done with permaculture methods on simple garden plots. In 2011, 40% of Russia’s food was grown on dachas (cottage gardens or allotments), predominantly organically. Dacha gardens produced more than 80% of the country’s fruit and berries, more than 66% of the vegetables, almost 80% of the potatoes and nearly 50% of the nation’s milk, much of it consumed raw. Russian author Vladimir Megre comments:

Russian gardeners demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world—and you do not need any GMOs, industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s got enough food to eat.

Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year—so in the US, for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the US is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens—and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry.

In the end, the Green Revolution engineered by Kissinger to control markets and ensure U.S. economic dominance may be our nemesis. While the U.S. struggles to maintain its hegemony by economic coercion and military force,

In the U.S., only about 0.6 percent of the total agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. Most farmland is soaked in pesticides and herbicides. But the need for these toxic chemicals is a myth. In an October 2017 article in The Guardian, columnist George Monbiot cited studies showing that reducing the use of neonicotinoid pesticides actually increases production, because the pesticides harm or kill the pollinators on which crops depend. Rather than an international trade agreement that would enable giant transnational corporations to dictate to governments, he argues that we need a global treaty to regulate pesticides and require environmental impact assessments for farming. He writes:

Farmers and governments have been comprehensively conned by the global pesticide industry. It has ensured its products should not be properly regulated or even, in real-world conditions, properly assessed. … The profits of these companies depend on ecocide. Do we allow them to hold the world to ransom, or do we acknowledge that the survival of the living world is more important than returns to their shareholders?

President Trump has boasted of winning awards for environmental protection. If he is sincere about championing the environment, he needs to block the merger of Bayer and Monsanto, two agribusiness giants bent on destroying the ecosystem for private profit.

 

 

 

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FT: Syngenta and Bayer funded a $3m field study – but dismissed its conclusions

The un-named author of a recent FT View opens by reminding readers of many factors often cited by scientists that may be behind the decline in bee populations across Europe and the US: habitat loss, disease and nutritional stress.

There are an estimated 3tn honey bees across the world. With their wild relatives they have been providing an essential service to mankind for millions of years.

The role that certain pesticides play in their decline has been fiercely disputed by environmentalists, farmers and industry lobbyists. In an earlier FT article Chloe Cornish recalls that previous studies indicated that neonicotinoids do harm bees, but were criticised because they were laboratory-based and did not replicate complex real world conditions.

. It was conducted over a year at 33 sites across the UK, Hungary and Germany, over an area spanning 2,000 hectares. It concludes that neonicotinoids — a widely used group of pesticides applied to seeds before planting — can indeed damage the ability of bees to establish new populations.

The $3m field study was joint funded by the chemical companies Syngenta and Bayer companies which produce most of these pesticides, and The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology’s contributed £400,000.

The findings add to an accumulating body of scientific research suggesting that “neonics” are a big contributor to the problem. They have played a part both in the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, in which commercial bees suddenly and mysteriously die off, and also in the tragic decline of wild bee populations in Europe and the US.

Facing denial in the face of this growing evidence lead authors Richard Pywell (right) and Richard Shore (left) told reporters in London that they were braced for hostility, acknowledging that this was a contentious area. Bayer and Syngenta have dismissed the report’s conclusions as simplistic and inconsistent— reminding the writer of the tactics once used by tobacco companies to fend off health-related regulation.

The implications are grim. Bees and other pollinators play a role in the production of about a third of the food eaten. Without them, basics such as coffee, chocolate and almost every fruit and vegetable would become scarce at best.

Neonicotinoids may not be solely responsible for the bee crisis. But of the many stresses contributing to declining populations, pesticide use is the easiest to control. A hungry and sick bee is more likely to die if it is also poisoned. The scientific findings point to the need for action.

EU regulators decided the link was worrying enough to place restrictions on the use of clothianidin, thiamethoxam and another neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, in 2013. This moratorium comes up for debate again later this year – meanwhile regulators are re-evaluating the three and will present their findings in November. FT View ends:

“On the latest evidence, the partial ban should be extended. The danger, of course, is that farmers will resort to using something with equally nefarious effects — the western world’s record for regulating pesticides is terrible.

”It is time that changed. It is time to look after bees as well as they look after us”.

 

 

 

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Spotlight on Bayer-Monsanto neonicotinoid field trials

Farming Today (23.9.16) seems to be unaware of the content of the neonicotinoids research studies obtained by Greenpeace after a freedom of information request to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Bayer intends to make these public at the International Congress of Entomology next week.

This is not good news for Bayer, debt-laden since its takeover of Monsanto and reported to have seen its shares ‘drifting downwards’.

Reports in the Guardian and EurActiv inform readers that the research studies, conducted by Syngenta and Bayer on their neonicotinoid insecticides, showed that Syngenta’s thiamethoxam and Bayer’s clothianidin seriously harmed colonies at high doses, but found no significant effects below concentrations of 50 parts per billion (ppb) and 40ppb respectively.

Bees and other insects vital for pollinating three-quarters of the world’s food crops, have been in significant decline, due – it is thought -to the loss of flower-rich habitats, disease and the use of pesticides.

Consider the cumulative effect of neonic residues ingested from planting dust, water and treated seeds

However researchers note that pollinators in real environments are continually exposed to cocktails of many pesticides, rather than single chemicals for relatively short periods. As Matt Shardlow, chief executive of conservation charity Buglife, said:

“These studies may not show an impact on honeybee health [at low levels], but then the studies are not realistic. The bees were not exposed to the neonics that we know are in planting dust, water drunk by bees and wildflowers, wherever neonics are used as seed treatments. This secret evidence highlights the profound weakness of regulatory tests.”

Professor Dave Goulson explained, on Farming Today, that there were 20,000 species of bees and that neonics are neurotoxins that harm bumble bees, wild solitary bees and all insects. He added that there are a huge number of studies indicating the damage done and only a few that find them safe.

He reminds us on his blog that a recent Swedish study, published in the most prestigious scientific journal in the world (Nature), showed huge impacts of neonics on bumblebees and solitary bees when the chemicals were used by farmers ‘as directed on the label’ and adds a warning:

“Remember that, 50 years ago, the agrochemical industry assured us the DDT was safe, until it turned out that it wasn’t. Later, they told us that organophosphates were fine, except they weren’t. Do you believe them this time? I don’t”.

 

 

 

Rebrand Monsanto? Will the 99% be fooled?

The FT reports that Bayer, which has made a bid to take over Monsanto, has a relatively squeaky-clean brand, with ‘lots of positive connotations’. This, despite the company being rocked by scandal in 2001 when its cholesterol drug Lipobay was found to have serious side-effects and its production of a neonicotinoid insecticide which may have contributed to the decline in the bee population.

“Its oldest brand is aspirin, after all,” says Torben Bo Hansen, head of Philipp und Keuntje, a German advertising agency, adding “But for large parts of the population Monsanto is evil personified.”

In another FT article, Dirk Zimmermann explains: “Bayer is by no means an exemplary company. After all, their business model is the same as Monsanto’s — they also sell genetically modified seeds that are resistant to the herbicides they produce. None of this is compatible with the idea of sustainable agriculture, or at least our understanding of it.”

Monsanto is opposed because of its leadership in producing and promoting genetically modified organisms – Germany is one ‘no-go’ area where 1m hectares of land are farmed organically. Countries producing GM crops are shown below (in dark blue):

Monsanto is also widely associated with the production and promotion of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which the World Health Organisation said last year was probably carcinogenic. The EU is currently debating whether to relicence glyphosate, with many European governments opposed.

Countries banning or labelling GMOs (compiled by Canadian campaigner)

“One option for Bayer would be to drop the Monsanto name if the transaction went through”. Is rebranding the answer?

The Brand Failures blogspot recalls that when massive amounts of radioactive material were released from the UK’s Windscale atomic works in 1957, following a serious fire, the local community in Cumbria were understandably terrified about the health implications of uncontained radiation. Rather than close the plant down, the government believed the best way to put distance between the disaster and the nuclear plant as a whole was to change the name, from Windscale to Sellafield.

“The potential is definitely there for Bayer’s brand to suffer in a takeover,” adds Hansen. “One option for Bayer would be to drop the Monsanto name if the transaction went through, to prevent that “negative sentiment carrying over to the new company” said Jeffrey Stafford, analyst at Morningstar (investment management).

But as Brand Failures records, in many cases, including Windscale/Sellafield and the Post Office/Consignia, the 99% are no longer so easy to fool.

 

 

 

 

Are wealthy corporates gaining ground with government and farming media?

The Institute of Grocery Distribution has been tracking shoppers’ attitudes to GM foods since the 1990s and revisited the topic last year  (May 2012).

Like the Farmers Guardian, the Scottish Farmer is giving prominent coverage to GM–friendly articles, covering Mark Lynas’ change of mind this week and returning to the May IGD report, asking: Are consumers calming down?

In fact, as the report finds, attitudes have remained fairly constant over the past decade. Though somewhat masked by more favourable answers to minor questions about awareness – which will reinforce the corporate-political persuasion that the ‘stupid’ populace needs even more ‘education’ – the main facts reported in the Scottish Farmer are that in spring 2012:

• 51% of shoppers said in effect – don’t know
• 13% were strongly opposed
• 3% were strongly in favour

Were they being economical with the truth? See the chart from the IGD website:

And why don’t they ask how many would buy the stuff? I guess because they don’t want to hear the answer.

This fear is also behind the time and money spent by the GM industry world-wide to resist labelling, succeeding in California recently, despite nationwide polls indicating a politically bipartisan vote of over 90% in favour of labelling genetically modified food.

The content and stance of the BBC’s Farming Today and the Farmers Guardian has overwhelmingly changed for the worse over the years and the writer did not renew her FG subscription this year. See its tone in 2002:

Labelling GM foods (Farmers Guardian 10.5.02)

The EU is proposing to amend a directive which would make it compulsory to label all food containing GM ingredients or derivatives. It has also applied an informal moratorium on approvals for GM food crops.

Now the US is preparing to demand that the WTO overturns the proposed amendment and is threatening a trade war if Brussels does not back down.

Countries including China, Croatia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and New Zealand have sought to implement restrictions on GM imports or introduce compulsory labelling. In each case they have backed down after the USA threatened action at the WTO.

As Tom Macmillan said at the Oxford Farming Conference: the promotion of GM technology is not driven by any desire to feed the world’s poor or improve the natural environment but by Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer’s desire for ever-increasing profit.