Pesticides

Guest opinion piece by Julia Sievers -of Agrarkoordination. This year, the EU will decide whether glyphosate – the best-selling pesticide worldwide – remains approved after 2015 for another 10 years. As a basis for this decision, German authorities – on behalf of the EU – have re-examined the risks of this pesticide. The German authorities argue in their assessment report that glyphosate is not dangerous and recommend a re-authorization. But the official assessment is extremely controversial. A fundamental problem is that the judgement of the authorities is based almost exclusively on studies of companies that produce their own glyphosate-based pesticides and therefore have a high self-interest in positive study results. In contrast to the assessment of the authorities and the industry studies, numerous studies of industry-independent scientists have give rise to more and more doubts about the safety of glyphosate and glyphosate-based pesticide. In addition to the adverse impacts on biodiversity, water, soil and some animal species, public attention has been paid to the health risks of the herbicide. There is scientific evidence, that Glyphosate causes cancer, […]