The European Chemicals Agency’s Risk Assessment Committee (RAC) has reaffirmed, for the third time in nine years, that glyphosate does not warrant a carcinogen classification, even after reviewing new tumor data, as Food Safety Magazine’s Bailee Henderson reports. The September 8, 2026 decision upholds RAC’s 2022 hazard assessment and a 2023 EU risk review that found no critical health concerns tied to the world’s most widely used herbicide.
The committee weighed fresh findings from the Ramazzini Institute’s 2025 Global Glyphosate Study, which dosed thousands of rats with glyphosate in utero and over 104 weeks of life, reporting significant increases in several tumor types, including leukemia, at or below the EU’s official safety thresholds. Even so, RAC concluded the study “does not change the conclusions of glyphosate’s hazard assessment, in particular its former 2022 decision that the substance does not warrant a classification for carcinogenicity.”
The lone holdout remains the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, which labeled glyphosate a “probable carcinogen” in 2015 using a hazard-based method critics say ignores real-world exposure. Every agency that has weighed the actual evidence since — ECHA three times over, plus EFSA and roughly 20 other regulators worldwide — has reached the same verdict: glyphosate is safe as used.
