Remember when we warned you that Americans are at greater risk of being exposed to Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide than Europeans? Well, that might become even truer if the French government follows through with a new plan to ban some glyphosate weed killers.
The French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety announced that it intends to withdraw herbicides that combine glyphosate with tallowamine (a chemical that helps glyphosate penetrate plant leaves), citing possible health risks.
For some time now, new science has been showing that glyphosate is more toxic than it was originally thought to be.
Last year, cancer experts convened by the World Health Organization concluded that glyphosate can probably cause cancer in people. This prompted California officials to take steps to add glyphosate to the state’s list of known carcinogens, which would require that Roundup come with some sort of label warning of its dangers.
While countries like France have begun to take precautionary steps to limit exposure, the Environmental Protection Agency has ratcheted up the allowable levels of glyphosate residues on certain U.S. crops.
Earlier this year, a paper published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe found that Americans have sprayed more than 2.4 billion pounds of glyphosate over the past decade. As Dr. Charles Benbrook pointed out in a recent paper, the major driver behind the increase in glyphosate use is the widespread adoption of Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready crops, which make it possible for growers to spray their fields with glyphosate without killing their harvest.
With nearly 9 out of every 10 Americans demanding the right to know if their food contains GMO ingredients, it seems that America’s pesticide regulators could learn a thing or two from the French.
