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Europe rises up against glyphosate

European campaigners have joined together to petition the European Parliament to ban glyphosate.

The groups have launched a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) calling for a ban on the toxic herbicide, as well as for reform of the EU pesticide approval process, and mandatory targets to reduce pesticide use in the EU.

The ECI is backed by a broad coalition of 38 well-known EU organisations from 15 countries, including Corporate Europe Observatory, Greenpeace, the Health and Environment Alliance, Pesticide Action Network Europe, and WeMove.EU.

An ECI is an official petition, recognised by European Parliament. It gives campaigners one year to collect at least one million signatures from EU citizens, and imposes minimum numbers of signatories that must be achieved in at least seven EU countries.

If the campaigners get the required number of signatories, the demands of the petition must be debated in Parliament. This gives concerned European citizens an unprecedented platform for having their views and demands aired in the halls of power.

The goal is to submit the successful petition before the Commission’s next move to renew, withdraw or extend the EU license of glyphosate late in 2017.

As supporters of organic agriculture we have been very vocal about getting glyphosate out of the farming system. We know many of our readers want this to, so please take the time to sign the petition.

Proven toxic

Glyphosate is one Europe’s – and the world’s – most widely used herbicides, and its negative impacts on people’s health and the environment are well-documented.

There is now a huge public database of studies demonstrating glyphosate’s toxicity. In 2015, WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen”. Around the same time it was found to increase antibiotic resistance.

Most recently new UK research found that minuscule doses can cause fatty liver disease in rats.

Even so, in 2016, following a highly controversial positive assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the European Commission proposed to re-approve glyphosate for 15 years, shortly before its license was due to expire.

A combination of public outcry and insufficient backing from several European governments forced the Commission to issue an 18-month temporary extension on the license while it awaits the results of a further safety assessment by the European Chemicals Agency.

What’s the alternative?

A glyphosate ban is certainly a possibility now and will be an important step towards reducing European agriculture’s addiction to pesticides. But it also provokes important questions, the most urgent of which is: what will we replace glyphosate with?

We have seen time and again, for instance with BPA and perfluorinated chemicals, that the ‘safer’ alternatives used to replace old unsafe ones can be just as toxic, if not more so.

When glyphosate stopped working on GM crops in the US, biotech companies simply began producing new GMOs that could withstand even stronger herbicides like dicamba,  glufosinate and, horrifyingly, 2,4-D (the active ingredient in Agent Orange). And, of course, because it is only an herbicide, banning glyphosate doesn’t tackle the increasing use of insecticides on farms and elsewhere.

Farmers and others use glyphosate because it works.  It has a broad spectrum of activity killing many different weed species. It is a systemic poison – in other words it doesn’t just sit on the surface of the plant but is absorbed into it, killing it from the inside out. But inevitably its overuse has caused weeds to develop a resistance to it. So, ban or not, we need to find other means of tackling the problem.

It’s not enough to want change. We need to know what kind of change we want. All farmers use pesticides from time to time, but our over-dependence on chemical control of weeds is a war that can only escalate – to everyone’s detriment. Like GMOs, glyphosate and other highly toxic pesticides are a symptom of a farming system that continually fails to re-imagine itself in a better light.

Imagining a better way

Organic and other forms of agroecological farming, on the other hand, tackles weeds differently, for instance through crop rotation, which promotes healthy soil, and direct control methods such as manual or mechanical control and mulching, but also using best judgement on which weeds actually present a threat to the crop – some ‘weeds’ do not. Indeed some help attract beneficial insects like butterflies onto farmland.

We urgently need to support our farmers in finding ways to tackle weeds and pests that makes farming safer for them and for us, and which turns farming from an exploitative practice into a regenerative one.

So sign the petition by all means, but also vote with your shopping trolley and help create an even bigger market for farmers – current and future – who can help lead us all into a non-toxic future.

Pat Thomas, Editor