by Carey Gillam
One 2009 cable showed that the U.S. Embassy in Spain sought “highlevel U.S. government intervention” at the “urgent requests” of Monsanto to combat biotech crop opponents there. The cables also reveal that State Department officials instructed embassies to “troubleshoot problematic legislation” related to biotech crops, and to “encourag[e] the development and commercialization of ag-biotech products.” The State Department also produced pamphlets promoting GMOs in Slovenia, sent pro-GMO industry DVDs to high schools in Hong Kong, and helped bring foreign officials and media from seventeen countries to the United States to promote biotech agriculture.26
The details contained in the cables deepened suspicions that the U.S. government does more to promote global acceptance of biotech crops than to protect the public from harm. “I believe that our government is more interested in pushing ag biotech interests than looking objectively at independent science data that shows the potential harmful effects,” said Pamm Larry, a U.S. activist who has called for more scrutiny of GMOs and glyphosate. “Why is it that our tax dollars are being used to force countries and their citizens to use and consume products they don’t want from an industry that’s poisoning the planet?”27
Another South American country caught up in controversy over glyphosate is Paraguay, which borders Argentina to the north. As in Argentina, Paraguay’s landscape has been transformed as it became a leading supplier of GMO glyphosate-tolerant soy. Aerial spraying of farm fields with glyphosate and other chemicals has forced many people from their villages and raised health concerns like those seen in Argentina. People living near the farm fields have complained that their rivers have become contaminated with the pesticides used on the soybeans, and they have reported rising rates of birth defects in their children. Farmers have found it hard to grow anything but the glyphosate-tolerant soy because other crops die if they come into contact with the herbicide, which drifts from field to field.28
For Judy Hatcher, who served as coleader of the international Pesticide Action Network and as executive director of the North American arm of the organization for five years, until June 2017, the U.S. government’s work to promote pesticide products enriches powerful corporations such as Monsanto at the expense of poor and vulnerable populations. “Time and time again, global pesticide corporations have exerted far too much influence over government policy,” said Hatcher. “Family farmers around the world are demanding the right to good health, not more exposure to hazardous pesticides, and are looking for greater control over their lives, seeds, farms, and livelihoods, not locked into Monsanto’s model.”29
CHAPTER 9
Uproar in Europe
To some, the suggestion seemed more than a little unusual: members of the European Parliament, who were deep into a debate over the risks and rewards of glyphosate in the spring of 2016, should take a close look inside themselves before voting on whether or not to ban the controversial pesticide—literally. The Green Party, whose platform backs environmentally sustainable policies, pushed the idea of a “pee test,” as the press called it, in hopes of demonstrating the pervasiveness of the chemical’s reach and underscoring the very real personal implication of the political decisions being debated. Though some dismissed the idea as a political stunt—a “pissing contest”—48 of the 751 parliament members agreed to submit their urine for scrutiny by researchers at Bio-Check, a diagnostic laboratory located in the German city of Leipzig, Saxony. They handed over their samples in April and awaited the results, though not necessarily with eagerness.
At the time, the battle brewing over glyphosate was at a fevered pitch. The European Commission was preparing to approve a new fifteen-year authorization for glyphosate before the June 2016 expiration of the current license. But several European Union (EU) members were mounting fierce opposition to the plan as people across Europe protested reauthorization. The French National League Against Cancer—La Ligue nationale contre le cancer—started a petition drive seeking a ban, and a Belgian organization of medical and public health professionals known as the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL) also weighed in to demand a ban, urging European cancer societies to take a similar stand. Supporters of a ban were worried not only about ties the chemical might have to cancer but also about reported associations with birth defects, Parkinson’s disease, and other ailments, as well as damage to the environment.
In response, the European Parliament passed a resolution suggesting that glyphosate not be approved for any longer than seven years and not be used at all in public places such as parks and playgrounds. The resolution cited concerns about cancer and endocrine disruption and said that the practice of spraying glyphosate on crops shortly before harvest to ripen them was unacceptable because it increased human exposure. The members of the European Parliament, who are commonly referred to simply as MEPs, called on the European Commission to invoke the precautionary principle before making a final decision on whether or not to keep glyphosate products on the market.1 The idea of a precautionary principle took root in the 1980s in Germany, taking on global significance when included in a 1992 declaration made as part of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The precautionary principle states that “where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”2
The political divide would grow even wider as the two bodies, which act as parts of the legislative branch for the twenty-eight countries that make up the EU, wrestled over concerns about the weed killer. Those who stepped up to speak out against continued glyphosate use cited the cancer classification made by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and said the evidence of health risks was undeniable, far outweighing any benefits that made the chemical popular with many European farmers. Even though genetically modified crops are cultivated on only a tiny fraction of European farmland—primarily a small amount of GMO corn acreage in Spain—Roundup herbicide and other glyphosate weed killers have been a mainstay on conventional, nonorganic farms for decades, mainly because they were considered so much safer than other herbicides and because they worked so well.
In fact, while glyphosate was beloved by European farmers, the GMO crops developed to be used with glyphosate were another matter. Europeans never embraced the new high-tech tinkering with plant DNA. Wariness was so widespread that several countries banned any planting of them, including Austria, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and Germany. And shortly after they were introduced in the United States, European nations also tried to block any importing of GMO crops and products because of fears that the crops could be unsafe for people and the environment.
The United States spent years railing against Europe’s reluctance to embrace GMOs. In 2003, U.S. officials brought a complaint with the World Trade Organization arguing that the European communities were violating international trade rules by effectively implementing a moratorium on imports of the specialty crops. The ban translated to substantial monetary losses for U.S. interests, of course, as American farmers were the largest producers of GMO crops, and U.S.-based Monsanto Company was the prime GMO developer. The U.S. Department of State asserted that as of 2002, lost sales of GMO corn and soy products amounted to at least $300 million.3
President George W. Bush took the complaint even further, declaring that the losses went beyond financial concerns and into the humanitarian realm. The Europeans who were thumbing their noses at the modern scientific magic of genetically engineered crops were actually contributing to starvation in Africa, he said. “Our partners in Europe … have blocked all new bio-crops because of unfounded, unscientific fears. This has caused many African nations to avoid investing in bio-technologies for fear that their products will be shut out of European markets,” Bush said in a 2003 speech. “European governments should join—not hinder—the great cause of ending hunger in Africa.”4 The World Trade Organization ultimately agreed with the United States, a
nd with Canada and Argentina, which raised similar complaints; the EU was ordered by world trade authorities to lift the ban.
With all the sparring over GMOs, worries about glyphosate were mostly sidelined for many years. A handful of outlier scientists and environmentalists kept tabs on the spread of the chemical, but few others paid attention. French scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini stirred global controversy with his findings that GMOs and glyphosate caused a range of health problems in rats, but for the most part many scientists toiled away on obscure research studies that got little to no attention until the mounting evidence of troubling ties to cancer and other illnesses became impossible to ignore. By the spring of 2016, when the MEPs submitted their own urine for glyphosate testing, worries about the weed killer had matched or surpassed the fears associated with GMOs. The links to cancer, as confirmed by IARC’s review of several different research studies, made for more risk than many Europeans were willing to accept. Polls showed that two-thirds of Europeans supported a ban on glyphosate, including 75 percent of Italians, 60 percent of the French, and 56 percent of Britons.
Testing for glyphosate in urine, foods, and beverages was fairly widespread in Europe by that time, but interest had been growing for years as people wondered how much, if any, of the weed killer was making its way into their bodies. In 2012, Séralini and six other French scientists undertook a study aimed at measuring levels of glyphosate in farmers’ urine. The scientists examined a farm family in which two of the family’s three children had been born with birth defects. The farmer routinely used a hand sprayer to treat portions of his three fields and a tractor for others. The children were rarely in the fields. The scientists collected the farmer’s urine for twenty-four hours the day before he sprayed and for two days after and found that “glyphosate was easily detected in the father’s urine.” There were also detectable levels of glyphosate in the urine of one of the farmer’s three children, even though the family lived about a mile away from the field and the child did not help in the weed killer application. The scientists speculated that the child’s exposure could be due to prolonged contact with his father, but the farmer thought this was “inconceivable,” given the distance between their home and the fields.5
As it turns out, glyphosate doesn’t show up only in the urine of farmers. A survey commissioned in 2013 by the advocacy group Friends of the Earth Europe found that people in eighteen countries across the continent had traces of glyphosate in their urine. Just how the chemical was making its way into people’s bodies wasn’t certain, but tests were also finding glyphosate residues in many types of foods, particularly bread made from wheat that had been sprayed with glyphosate shortly before harvest.
In Britain, the slogan “Not in Our Bread” became a rallying cry when the Soil Association, the country’s leading organic certification organization, said that glyphosate residues had been detected in close to one-third of all samples of British bread and that glyphosate had been found to be a regular contaminant of bread products in routine tests by independent food safety experts. For whole grain products, the residue contamination was much higher, seen in almost two-thirds of the bread products. “If glyphosate ends up in bread it’s impossible for people to avoid it,” said Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association.6
So it was perhaps little surprise, then, when the results of the MEPs’ urine testing were announced in May 2016: every single parliament member who participated had tested positive for glyphosate. And, making matters worse, the pesticide was present at levels far higher than some expected. The laboratory said the average rate of glyphosate found in the MEPs’ urine was 1.7 micrograms per liter, an amount that is roughly seventeen times the permitted level of glyphosate in European drinking water. The lowest level found among the group was 0.17 nanogram per milliliter (ng/ml), almost double the safe level, the Green Party said when it announced the results.
Jean Lambert, a member of the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee, described the results as “frightening.” Her personal test results showed a glyphosate level of 0.67 ng/ml. “It is genuinely frightening that glyphosate is everywhere in our everyday lives,” Lambert said. “These test results show that no matter where we live, what we eat, or our age we cannot escape exposure to this toxic substance. With glyphosate widely used in cities, in urban parks and public spaces, on streets and pavements, the European Commission must bow to public pressure and put the safety of people and the environment ahead of the profits of chemical industry giants.”7
Green Party members announced the results publicly, using the social media hashtag #MEPee and the slogan “Let’s Keep Pee Glyphosate Free.” MEP Marc Tarabella told the local press, “The results of this milestone research should force the public and manufacturers alike to acknowledge that the omnipresence of a potentially carcinogenic and suspect substance, such as glyphosate, constitutes a phenomenal problem.”8
The findings added to similar study results published a month earlier after the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which describes its mission in part as “defending the freedom of individuals against excessive state and economic power,” looked at samples of urine from more than 2,000 people living in Germany. That research found levels of the herbicide in 99.6 percent of participants and found that roughly 75 percent of the people who gave samples had five times the amount of glyphosate in their urine than was legally allowed in drinking water. Children, particularly those raised on farms, had the most significant levels, the study found.9
The German Environment Agency, known as Umwelt Bundesamt (UBA) in its home country, also has looked at the glyphosate issue, conducting an analysis of urine in students over more than a decade. The results showed the presence of the weed killer in roughly 40 percent of students sampled in 2015, up from roughly 10 percent in 2001, with spikes as high as almost 60 percent in 2012 and 2013.10 The UBA’s president, Maria Krautzberger, said the signs that glyphosate is so pervasive that it commonly passes through children and adults, rural and city dwellers alike, should trigger more safety research and a cautionary approach to its use and regulation.11
But Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, known to Germans as the Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung (BfR), had a different response. The BfR discounted the significance of glyphosate in urine, saying that the chemical is excreted out of the body rapidly and is not at all harmful. In other words, having a little of the pesticide in one’s “pee” was nothing to worry about. “In our opinion, these very low levels are to be expected, since glyphosate is an approved active substance contained in plant protection products, meaning that residues could be expected to be ingested with the food and hence excreted,” the BfR’s president, Professor Andreas Hensel, said after the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s study results were released. The BfR claimed the study had “major flaws,” including what the BfR said was a perceived lack of proper handling of the samples. And the group said that while the levels may seem high, when calculated in the context of how much would be consumed, it was far less than the acceptable daily intake (ADI) set by regulators. “No adverse health effects are to be expected from glyphosate residues ingested with food,” the agency said.12
The BfR also maintains that glyphosate does not cause cancer. Its own assessments show that “according to current scientific knowledge, no carcinogenic risk is to be expected if the substance is used correctly and in line with its intended purpose,” the BfR states on its website.13
Confused? Determining who is right and who is wrong when it comes to glyphosate has been just as difficult in Europe as it has been in the United States. Activists say there is a simple explanation: Just as in the United States, the companies that sell glyphosate have wielded influence with a heavy hand. And just as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) relies heavily on the industry’s own studies for its safety determinations, so too do regulators in Europe.
Take the BfR, for example. The BfR operates as a “scientifically independent institution” within t
he portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) in Germany, but questions about just how independent the institution really is would come to cloud its work on glyphosate. The BfR’s job is to advise the government on questions of food, chemical, and product safety, and it was a key advisor to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) when the agency reviewed glyphosate ahead of its expiration in 2016 and the bid for reauthorization. Not only did the European Commission want EFSA’s recommendation about whether or not glyphosate should remain on the market, but also EU member states were relying on the agency to help them address safety questions about glyphosate products used in their territories.
After the World Health Organization’s IARC team of cancer scientists classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in March 2015, the European Commission asked EFSA to give special consideration to those findings—to see if there really were cancer risks Europeans might need to be protected from. And EFSA turned to the BfR to help analyze IARC’s work.
The BfR did its advisory job thoroughly, drafting a detailed report that provided the basis for EFSA to declare in November 2015 that IARC was flat out wrong about glyphosate’s ties to cancer. In fact, EFSA claimed, evidence showed that glyphosate was actually “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans.” EFSA said it had looked at more information than IARC had, and it was so satisfied with the chemical’s safety that it also advised raising the allowed amount of glyphosate residue in food, saying the ADI level should nearly double, from 0.3 milligram per kilogram (mg/kg) of body weight per day to 0.5 mg/kg/day.