Monsanto’s quest to keep its controversial weedkiller Roundup on the European market faces another challenge.
The European Commission is pushing for France — which plans to phase out Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, domestically — to take over from Germany as the lead country responsible for assessing the herbicide’s safety.
The Commission’s plan, laid out in a document obtained by POLITICO, would mean that French food safety authorities would be put in charge of determining whether the weedkiller is safe for use in Europe’s agriculture sector. Their assessment would then have important influence over whether the EU decides to continue to allow glyphosate on the European market.
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The main accusation against Germany’s food safety agency is that in its positive assessment of glyphosate, it copied dozens of pages directly from an assessment carried out by the Glyphosate Task Force, a group of 22 companies financing safety studies into the herbicide. Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment has said it “vigorously rejects” all such allegations…
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On [July 20th] the Commission will ask member countries to discuss and potentially vote on the transfer of responsibility from Germany to France at a meeting of the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed.
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The big question now is whether France could…give more weight to…the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, which stands out among global food safety authorities for its 2015 conclusion that glyphosate “is probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Read full, original article: Brussels moves goalposts on glyphosate
