Justice systems send strong signals: don’t touch multinationals, Bayer and so on

In December 2022, a reader living in Wales drew attention to Reuters report that Bayer, France’s crop chemical and pharmaceutical group, has been ordered to pay miserly compensation of 11,135 euros (£9565) to a French farmer who inhaled fumes from a weedkiller, ending a 15-year legal battle.

Farmer Paul Francois had argued that the fumes he inhaled in 2004 from the weedkiller Lasso caused neurological problems, including memory loss, fainting and headaches. It was withdrawn from the French market in 2007, many years after it was banned in Canada, Belgium and the UK. 

Anti-pesticide groups supporting his campaign expressed disappointment over the sum: “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,” he told French public radio (France-Justice),

After a court ruled in 2019 that Monsanto, which had meanwhile become a subsidiary of Bayer, was liable for providing inadequate safety information on Lasso, France’s highest court in 2020 rejected a final company appeal, opening the way for another court to decide on damages.

Francois’ verdict: “This is a strong signal from our justice system in France: We don’t touch these multinationals.”

Two years later our reader in Wales has drawn attention to a Reuters article reporting that the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas ordered Bayer on Friday to pay $2.25 billion to John McKivison (right). The jury found that his non-Hodgkins lymphoma was the result of using Roundup for yard work at his house in Pennsylvania for a period of several years. 

The verdict includes $250 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages. Bayer disagreed with the jury’s adverse verdict and believes that they have strong arguments on appeal to get this verdict overturned and the unconstitutionally excessive damage award eliminated or reduced. The verdict comes after five other recent wins late last year by plaintiffs suing Bayer over Roundup but – as Bayer pointed out – some previous damages awards had been reduced by more than 90%.

Last year produced verdicts against the company totalling more than $2 billion. Bayer is appealing those verdicts, which include large punitive damages awards and are likely to be reduced because they exceed U.S. Supreme Court guidance.

Reader Richard Bruce recommends this detailed account:
Groundskeeper, 49, from Pennsylvania is awarded record $2.25BILLION after jury finds decades of using Roundup weed killer caused his blood cancer | Daily Mail Online

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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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Pakistan fends off cultivation of GM corn: Jan. – May 2019

 JANUARY

The News reported that the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (PARC) called a meeting of Variety Evaluation Committee (VAC) to seek approval for the commercial farming of genetically modified corn varieties developed by multinational seed companies.

The Federal Minister for National Food Security Sahibzada Mehboob Sultan asked for a cancellation of meeting, saying that this was due to the request of Faisalabad Agriculture University as its team was not ready to show up.

Some stakeholders in the seed business strongly opposed the introduction of genetically modified corn’s commercial cultivation for several reasons:

• it would increase the cost of farming for farmers due to high royalty fees,
• it would lead to contamination of local germplasm, particularly in maize, which is a wind pollinated crop,
• it would have an adverse effect on the investment in locally developed hybrid varieties and discourage local production and research and development in seed business and
• Pakistan would not be able to export GM products to a wide range of GM-free regions and countries.

They said Pakistan’s per hectare production of corn was already showing an upward trend and with five tons per hectare output of corn hybrids, Pakistan was already ahead of several countries that allowed genetically modified corn. “We are sufficiently meeting our needs of corn through local production and there is no need to experiment with genetically modified organisms, which have several proven issues,” sources said.

FEBRUARY

The Technology Times reported that Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT) – an alliance of small and landless farmers including women farmers – fully support the position of the Ministry of National Food Security & Research which has distanced itself from going ahead with approval of genetically modified maize in Pakistan by intervening to cancel the VAV meeting in January. PKMT reiterates their demand for a moratorium on genetically modified seeds and foods in the country as it violates farmers’ collective rights to seed.

They stress that the recent lawsuit against Monsanto won by a USA citizen suffering from cancer due to the company’s herbicide Roundup Ready clearly shows the critical health hazard to Pakistani famers who will be forced to use the herbicide along with GM seeds and add that in India, Monsanto’s Bt Cotton has failed drastically; and the story is no different in Pakistan.

For many years, they add, ‘the company’ (Monsanto?) has been lobbying for commercial use of GM maize; which – if approved – will cross-pollinate and rapidly destroy the local maize seed varieties.  Pakistan’s per hectare production of maize was already showing an upward trend that is already ahead of many countries that are using genetically modified maize.

The News reports that – despite strong opposition from farmers, local seed companies, officials and experts of agriculture – multinational companies have increased efforts to get genetically modified (GM) maize registered at the Variety Evaluation Committee (VEC) and start its production in the country.

MARCH

In order to create awareness among journalists about science-related communication, the Lahore chapter of Pakistan Biotechnology Information Center and The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) organised a one-day workshop at the Forman Christian College University (FCCU) Lahore on March 3, 2019.

Pakistan Today reports that, during the workshop, Malaysian Biotechnology Information Center (MABIC) Executive Director Dr Mahaletchumy Arujanan gave a brief presentation on biotechnology, Genetic Modification (GM) Technology and the industrial challenges.

FCCU Dean of Postgraduate studies Dr Kauser A Malik told the audience of science writers and journalists that they could play an important role in informing the public about scientific and technological developments by bridging the gap between the common person and scientist, ensuring the ‘formulation of appropriate government policies conducive to the development of science in the country’.

APRIL

Business Recorder published an interview in two parts with a team from CropLife Pakistan Association, an association of multi-national biotech firms working on seed technology in the country, currently advocating the introduction of Genetically Modified seeds, specifically GM maize. Part 1 – focussing on developing an understanding of the science behind GMOs – may be read here. A few days later the second part was published, focussing on the environmental safety and regulatory aspects.

MAY

Representatives of seed companies warned that Pakistan will not be able to export its products to many regions and countries in Europe and Africa. A case in point follows:

Bulgaria, which told the European Union in 2015 that it was to ban the cultivation of crops with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), attended the second meeting of Pakistan-Bulgaria Inter-Ministerial Commission. On Monday 20^th May, the Bulgarian Minister for Economy, Liliya Ivanove Ivanove, stated that Bulgaria is looking forward to extensive cooperation in the field of agriculture including sustainable imports of cotton and rice from Pakistan.

But USDA is undeterred: Dawn reports that the Foreign Agricultural Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) said future collaborative projects between the US and Pakistan include using American GM soybean feed in poultry, fish farming and dairy industries, introducing genetically-engineered maize and working with various government departments to develop uniform food safety standards.

 

 

 

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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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Monsanto update

A Moseley reader draws attention to this Guardian article:

Opens:  

Monsanto has long worked to “bully scientists” and suppress evidence of the cancer risks of its popular weedkiller, a lawyer argued on Monday in a landmark lawsuit against the global chemical corporation.

“Monsanto has specifically gone out of its way to bully … and to fight independent researchers,” said the attorney Brent Wisner, who presented internal Monsanto emails that he said showed how the agrochemical company rejected critical research and expert warnings over the years while pursuing and helping to write favorable analyses of their products. “They fought science.”

Wisner, who spoke inside a crowded San Francisco courtroom, is representing DeWayne Johnson, known also as Lee, a California man whose cancer has spread through his body. The father of three and former school groundskeeper, who doctors say may have just months to live, is the first person to take Monsanto to trial over allegations that the chemical sold under the Roundup brand is linked to cancer. Thousands have made similar legal claims across the US  . . .

 

 

 

 

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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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British MSM fails to report escalating GM problems: ‘superworms’ & ‘superweeds’

Earlier this year America’s St Louis Dispatch reported on a growing sense of unease “spreading across the Great Plains about the cornstalk-sized superweeds infesting more than 100 million acres”.

Nathan Donley recalls: “For years Monsanto officials had assured farmers that weeds would never develop resistance to the company’s flagship herbicide, glyphosate, so farmers were urged to apply it liberally year after year because “dead weeds don’t produce seeds.” And apply it they did, with annual U.S. glyphosate use soaring to over 300 million pounds — an escalation that quickly accelerated the evolution of glyphosate-resistant superweeds that can grow an inch a day to heights of 10 feet and break farm equipment”.

Now major herbicide producers are offering a familiar-sounding “solution”: ‘use more’.

Four years after its release in 2002 with much fanfare, Bt cotton became susceptible to the bollworm. Today Devinder Sharma reports that India’s failing genetically modified Bt cotton crop, designed to guard against the bollworm pest, has increasingly been unable to resist it. Farmers have been forced to use deadly cocktails of pesticides to curb the insect menace. 

A reader wonders how soon the bollworm will become a ‘superworm’ resistant to pesticide ‘cocktails’.

Sharma adds: “News has come in of 50 farm workers succumbing to suspected pesticides poisoning; at least 25 lost their eyesight and another 800 admitted to various hospitals in Maharashtra. Another 6 deaths and hospitalisation of a few hundred more have been reported from Tamil Nadu’s cotton belt – Perambalur, Ariyalur and Salem.

Pink bollworm resurgence has been so severe that there are reports of farmers unable to harvest even a kilo of cotton and being forced to uproot or burn the standing crop in several parts of the country. In Maharashtra alone:

• more than 80,000 farmers, up to Nov 30, have applied for crop compensation.
• The bollworm has destroyed nearly 50% of the standing crop in Maharashtra, the country’s biggest cotton grower
• and another 20% in Madhya Pradesh.
• It has caused extensive damage in Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Gujarat.
• Only about 100 of the 150 cotton ginning mills in Maharashtra are in operation and they are working at 50% capacity.
• Reuters reports that cotton exports this year will be one-fifth less, coming down to 6 million bales against the earlier estimate of 7.5 million bales. 

A senior agricultural scientist once told Sharma: “In the early 1960s, only six to seven major pests were worrying the cotton farmer. The farmer today is battling against some 70 major pests on cotton.” The greater the attack of insect pests, the more is the use and abuse of potent chemicals. His advice: 

• instead of introducing a third generation of Bollgard-III varieties, and compounding the existing crisis, the focus of agricultural research should shift to alternative methods.
• Agricultural universities should be directed to stop any further research on GM cotton
• and the focus shifted to use of bio-control and integrated pest management techniques that use pesticides sparingly – and as a last resort.

Sharma adds persuasively that already Burkina Faso has shown a remarkable jump of 20% in cotton productivity after phasing out Bt cotton. Turkey also has shown excellent results with IPM techniques; rejecting GM cotton, and restricting the use of chemical pesticides, Turkey has doubled its cotton yields.  

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More information:

Published here: बीटी कॉटन के चक्रव्यूह से बाहर आना होगा Dainik Bhaskar. Dec 9, 2017 https://www.bhaskar.com/news/ABH-LCL-bt-cotton-has-to-come-out-of-the-maze-5765023-PHO.html – and in English by the author at Ground Reality: http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/when-dreaded-pink-boll-worm-strikes-back.html 

Integrated Pest Management for Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture in Asia and Africa

Integrated pest management of protected vegetable cultivation in Turkey

 

 

 

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Encouraging lack of enthusiasm for GM technology at China’s national congress

Those who totally oppose all GM adoption in China because of concerns about the damage caused by the herbicides and pesticides used with the crops and a loose coalition of left-wingers, environmentalists and retired officials will be encouraged by the lack of enthusiasm for GM technology at this week’s national congress of China’s Communist Party.

Lucy Hornby in Beijing, writing in the FT, says that Mr Xi has ‘historically fudged’ his position on GM — urging advocates to be “bold in research, careful in promotion”.

Ms Hornby notes that the coalition had written letters to the top leadership last year opposing ChemChina’s purchase of Swiss seeds and agrochemicals group Syngenta. Reuters put the number of signatories at 400.

Currently – despite US Dow Chemicals’ persistent and energetic lobbying – only GM papaya is planted on a small scale in China, due to domestic fears that foreign GM technology poses a security threat. In addition, at present (June 17^th report) GM cotton is grown in China and GM animal feed is imported. Very few genetically modified foods are allowed on the market in China and labelling GM foods is strictly enforced there.

The safety of GMOs is widely debated in China through traditional media and the emerging online social media, where the public expresses deep concerns about the safety of GMO foods.

In 2015, there was a report of a conference on “GMOs and National Security” in Beijing, where scholars warned that the issues relating to GMOs were not just about science or technology, but also about food security, ecological security, and even national security.

A study of a GM grain carried out in China in 2012 caused great concern to the public; a US researcher and her team were accused of feeding Chinese children a GM grain, golden rice, and measuring the effects without telling their parents.

Chinese researchers are vying to promote new plant strains they have developed, while not revealing whether they are genetically modified or developed using traditional breeding practices. Many are grown in demonstration fields but have not been commercialised.

Frank Ning is the head of ChemChina’s rival Sinochem, which markets some Monsanto products. He said that the future direction of Chinese agriculture is the gradual improvement of seed quality and more targeted application of fertiliser and pesticides, which are big sources of soil and water pollution in China:

“Sinochem has transformed. We used to be just a sales operation: selling seeds, selling fertiliser. Now we are a modern agricultural platform: service oriented, promoting better seeds and teaching people to use less fertiliser.”

So far, so good.

 

 

 

 

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Taxpayers unwittingly fund GM trials as the prospect of leaving wiser European counsellors looms

Will agri-business ultimately be allowed to charge ahead, imposing genetically modified food on an unwilling public?

Yesterday Farming Today, whose sylvan banners (one example above) indicate a preference for traditional farming whilst the actual programmes often court the worst establishment proposals, reported that a new GM wheat trial has been planted at the Rothamstead research centre in Hertfordshire.

It was advocated – yet again – as needed to feed the world’s poor. Hunger is due to the poor lacking land to produce food or money to buy it. Will Monsanto etc be giving food free of charge?

Last November, Clive Cookson, FT Science Editor, had reported on this plan to grow a crop of wheat that has been genetically modified in the spring of 2017 at Rothamsted, alongside non-GM wheat of the same Cadenza variety, as a control.

The work is publicly funded through a £696,000 grant from the government’s UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and $294,000 from the US Department of Agriculture. Other partners include the universities of Lancaster and Illinois.

This is Rothamsted research centre, one of the country’s largest agricultural research stations.

Cookson adds that when the crop is harvested at the end of the summer, the researchers will discover whether genetic modification raises the yield in the field by as much as it did in trials carried out so far under glass. Rothamsted hopes this will work better than its last GM field trial of wheat genetically modified to repel aphids by giving off an alarming scent which worked well in the greenhouse but in a field trial it failed to show any crop protection benefits over conventional wheat. Malcolm Hawkesford, head of plant biology and crop science at Rothamsted, said the negative outcome showed how important it is to carry out field trials to confirm laboratory studies.

Earlier in March, news was received that the Organic Research Centre joined 32 other organisations in a letter to DEFRA which asked that the application from the Sainsbury Laboratory to release genetically modified (GM) and possibly blight-resistant potatoes be refused.

The tubers produced by the transgenic plants released will not be used for animal feed and will be destroyed following harvest, according to a government website.

Potato blight can be combated through conventional breeding and cultural methods

The letter, co-ordinated by GM Freeze, sets out the reasons why they believe that this trial should not go ahead, including the charge that the applicant has neglected to consider a number of serious and complex hazards, that the trial represents a significant risk and will not benefit society, that genetic modification is not necessary for blight resistance and that there is no market for GM potatoes.

 

 

 

 

Crunch time: will fears of legal action by Monsanto sway the final vote on licensing glyphosate – a ‘probable’ carcinogen?

The FT reports that leading EU member states on Monday refused to extend a licence for glyphosate, the world’s most common herbicide. If there is no decision by the end of the month, glyphosate will lose its licence, raising the prospect of legal action by the industry.

The commission had intended to try to relicense glyphosate for 15 years, but the latest proposal was for a licence of only 12 to 18 months, while more research is conducted. This option has been rejected as Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Austria and Portugal and Luxembourg all abstained, meaning the necessary qualified majority could not be reached. Malta voted against.

Bart Staes, a Belgian MEP from the Green Party, warned the commission not to approve glyphosate unilaterally through a so-called “appeals committee”: “Such a move would raise major democratic concerns about the EU’s decision-making process”. More handsomely, the Guardian adds more from Staes:

“We applaud those EU governments who are sticking to their guns and refusing to authorise this controversial toxic herbicide. There are clear concerns about the health risks with glyphosate, both as regards it being a carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor. Moreover, glyphosate’s devastating impact on biodiversity should have already led to its ban”.

Glyphosate is the basis for Monsanto’s topselling weedkiller RoundUp, described in its annual report as “a sustainable source” of cash and profit. Last year more than 80% of Monsanto’s sales were in the Americas and under 13% in Europe.

Last month a report from the WHO and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation concluded that the chemical was “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk” through diet, but the WHO’s cancer agency last year had concluded that the product was “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

Prime movers in opposing the use of glyphosate are Sweden, the Netherlands and France – and over 1.5 million EU citizens who petitioned the parliament to ban it.

The German Social democrat environment minister Barbara Hendricks welcomed the decision in Brussels, saying: “Many member states would like the question of cancer risks to be clarified before glyphosate can again be spread on our fields.” But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc, which wants the chemical to remain in use, is frustrated. Peter Liese, a CDU member of the European Parliament, said Berlin must battle for the continued use of glyphosate, albeit under “strict conditions”.

The glyphosate task force, a consortium of companies including Monsanto, complained: “It is clear that certain member states are no longer basing their positions on scientific evidence, which is meant to be the guiding principle of the process”.

US officials said that they are “extremely concerned” about the EU’s action and accuse Brussels of failing to rely on “sound science”. EU officials respond that their “precautionary principle” of regulation in cases of doubt offers greater public protection.