The logic is, at first glance, not obvious. The Commission proposed, on Wednesday September 20, to renew the authorization of glyphosate within the European Union (EU) for ten years, whereas in 2017, Europeans had only granted five years to the herbicide. The community executive even considered granting it a longer duration, knowing that it could not go beyond fifteen years.
“We have carried out two evaluations in seven years which give more or less the same results”, explains a senior Commission official. The most recent was made based on the findings of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which were published in early July. They indicated that they had not identified any “area of critical concern” for human health, that is to say toxicity profiles (carcinogenic, mutagenic, reprotoxic or endocrine disruptor) likely to prevent a new authorization of the most used herbicide in the world.
The scientific controversy remains open: since 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has considered glyphosate to be “probable carcinogen” and the collective expertise of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), published in France in June 2021, highlights converging indices of genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, reprotoxicity and epigenetic effects.
“Almost every day a new study on glyphosate is published”, we tell the Commission. Before continuing: “Nothing prevents us, in a month, in a year or in five years, from reopening the file if the work of the scientists justifies it. »
Some safeguards
The Générations futures association, which campaigns against the use of pesticides, hardly believes in it and specifies that “only 0.4% of available university studies were deemed “unrestricted reliable” and therefore actually taken into account” by European expertise. In fact, this is essentially based on regulatory tests provided by manufacturers.
For the moment, the Commission is planning some safeguards – for example “buffer strips” of five to ten meters around the sprayed areas. It also wants to prohibit desiccation, that is to say the spreading carried out on crops before harvest, to accelerate the ripening of the plants.
“By destroying biodiversity, glyphosate endangers our long-term food security. This proposal is irresponsible”judges French Green MEP Benoît Biteau. “We cannot condemn Europe to ten years of glyphosate when so many dangers and uncertainties remain”believes his socialist colleague Christophe Clergeau.
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