EU opinion divided on weedkiller licence
The European Parliament yesterday called for glyphosate to be banned by 2022 due to fears its use in food production could be a cause of cancer in humans.
Activists yesterday handed the EU a petition signed by more than 1.3 million people supporting such a ban. Environmental group Greenpeace is among the strongest critics of weedkiller usage in European agriculture.
However, at a public hearing on ‘The Monsanto Papers and Glyphosate’, Mairead McGuinness, first vice-president of the European Parliament, said that she accepts the guidance of scientific studies conducted by the EU agencies EFSA and ECHA stating that glyphosate is not a carcinogen.
Furthermore, she warned that banning the insecticide could have huge impacts for tillage production. She said no alternative treatment has been found, for instance, for the control in barley of the grain aphid and the rose cherry aphid.
“We risk downgrading our regulatory system, denying farmers an important production tool and unnecessarily causing fears among citizens about products which have helped to produce food in abundance in the EU,” said Ms McGuinness, urging the EU not to ignore the research it has funded on the subject.
She said that there is one area of concern that regulators do need to address, namely co-formulants used with glyphosate.
“The European Parliament’s glyphosate resolution supported the withdrawing of products containing a formulation of POE – tallowamine and glyphosate because of real concerns about its safety,” she said. “If EFSA, ECHA, and the environment protection agencies of Japan, Canada and Australia have all concluded that glyphosate is not a carcinogen, yet there are claims to the contrary, then policy makers (who are not toxicologists) are left with a stark choice to rely on the scientific expertise of the agencies we know and fund or ignore them.”
IFA president, Joe Healy, said the failure of MEPs to support peer-reviewed scientific studies represented a lack of political leadership within the EU. He said the case being made against herbicide usage has been driven by populism rather than science.
“Glyphosate is an important agricultural, horticultural and amenity herbicide. It is used to minimise weed infestation from economically important crops. It has been used to excellent effect in Irish and European farming for almost 40 years,” said Mr Healy.
“The herbicide is an integral part of the modern farming practice in both tillage and grassland production. It is a key arable crop management tool that allows farmers to produce an abundance of safe, affordable, quality food. Its judicious use allows us to adopt minimum tillage practices, thus preventing soil erosion and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the sector”.
