The bad science used to ban glyphosate

Glyphosate should not be outlawed...

The re-authorisation of glyphosate is coming up in the European Union, and with that, some old myths are likely to re-emerge as well.

As the glyphosate debate captivatestalking heads in Europe – a saturated amount of activists in lieu of scientists – French environmentalists have taken their assassination of the weedkiller one step further -- and bring up something called "glyphosate pissers".

Since April 2018, 5,500 French farmers have found glyphosate in their urine at levels above the average allowed in drinking water, which is 0.1 na/ml. “Only three participants scored below this average,” a 66-year-old environmentalist activist told the French newspaper Libération. These activists have convinced French farmers that there could potentially be big money in the effort to sue pesticide producers. Nothing could be more appealing than trying to replicate million-dollar lawsuits as those scraped together in the United States.

Over 1,500 complaints of “glyphosate pissers” have been filed for “endangering the lives of others,” “aggravated deception” and “environmental damage”.

A few hundred Euros, the environmentalists who organise these lawsuits say, would cover both the costs of the lab testing “and the presence of a bailiff to certify the results,” since nothing screams unbiased scientific research more than bringing your lawyer to the lab. On its website, the French campaign group “Campagne glyphosate” says that 100% of the tests have tested positive for glyphosate. No risks at all, dear farmers, just sign here.

If the 100% figure rings a bell, then you’d be right in feeling reminded, as Gil Rivière-Wekstein, editor of the French agriculture media outlet “agriculture & environment” points out in an editorial.

In June 2015, the German Green Party had 16 samples of breast milk analysed in Germany, with 100% positive results for glyphosate. The story was in the news across the Rhine, triggering a wave of panic among breastfeeding mothers. Odd.

Shortly after that, 2000 urine samples from German citizens were analysed as part of the “Urinale,” a campaign led by the anti-pesticide association Bürgerinitiative Landwende. This time, 99.6% of the results were positive. So close, yet so far.

In May 2016, the Green Group in the European Parliament had the urine of 48 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) tested, again with 100% positive results. Shocking.

In March 2017, 27 urine samples were analysed from Danish mothers and children, again with 100% positive results. You get the gist.

Heavily involved in the current tests is a research lab called BioCheck, based in Germany and founded in 1997 by Monika Krüger. Madame Krüger is herself an anti-pesticide activist. Not necessarily the right pre-condition for a sound and objective researcher.

In fact, their results have already been debunked. Remember the 16 samples of breast milk that were 100% contaminated? The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) affirmed that there was no evidence whatsoever that proved that glyphosate levels in breast milk were above the legal limits. The two independent studies that the BhR commissioned were put together in an article for the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. They used liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) or gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS) – processes that are, according to the risk assessment institute, 10 times more trustworthy than regular tests for detecting pesticides, and 75 times more trustworthy than those used by BioCheck.

BioCheck had been employing the ELISA test to reach its conclusions. This enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay is a test that detects and measures antibodies in your blood. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment said that detecting glyphosate in itself is a fundamentally complicated endeavour, and that the ELISA is not an adequate way of going about finding it. Marcel Kuntz, Research Director at the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in Grenoble, also confirms that ELISA is not an accurate test to detect pesticides.

That’s probably why BioCheck charged a mere €75 for their urine tests. You always get what you pay for.

Headlines like “Results of Glyphosate Pee Test Are in ‘And It’s Not Good News” have already been written and published, without retraction, so what’s the big deal? The problem is that we are looking at a thorough perversion of the scientific method.

In easy swipes, years of technological innovation in agriculture are thrown overboard for the convenience of political ideologues. We know that glyphosate is safe: when looking through the scientific literature, we see that it is a herbicide that is safe to use, and necessary for modern agriculture. Scare stories about “toxic residues'' in our body are supposed to make us anxious and suspicious,with unfortunate success. Many governments are succumbing to the pressure, and have introduced bans products at the expense of both farmers and consumers.

To these activists, re-considering more exhaustive testing isn’t of interest. They would rather pursue fanatic unproven convictions for special interests to use in the world  of lawsuits. That’s a shame.

In a comparable instance, Greenpeace has also attempted to delegitimise the weedkiller, which has been proven to be safe.

A new report by Unearthed — Greenpeace’s “investigative journalism” platform — claims that a large chunk of pesticides sold to farmers are “highly hazardous”. Their claims are highly misleading and outright wrong, and can have potentially life-threatening consequences.

Together with the NGO Public Eye, Unearthed collected “a huge dataset of $23.3bn agrochemical sales for sales (sic) of highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs)”. The highly mediatised headline coming out of the report: 35% of the top pesticide sales are HHPs, and therefore dangerous to human health, animals, and the environment.

Combined with Greenpeace’s effort to phase-out all use of pesticides altogether, no wonder that the conclusion from this report is “more bans”.

Thus, before we dive into the fundamental flaw of Greenpeace’s report, let’s establish the basic rules of acquiring scientific evidence: make an observation, ask a question, form a hypothesis or testable explanation, make a prediction based on the hypothesis, and test the prediction.

Greenpeace is an activist group that seeks to ban the use of all pesticides, since it wholeheartedly endorses agroecology, so it already violates these rules by starting with its assumption, not by establishing a hypothesis and testing the prediction.

Greenpeace claims that a third of top pesticide sales are highly hazardous. That is simply untrue.

The Unearthed report relies on a list of pesticides by the Pesticides Action Network (PAN), an association of NGOs. PAN is not a government agency, nor is it a research institute mandated or qualified to establish these lists. In fact, there is a list of criteria of Highly Hazardous Pesticides established by World Health Organization (WHO), but PAN applied its own spin, distorting the reality of official criteria.

For instance, its list includes glyphosate — a herbicide classified as safe for use by government food safety agencies — despite none of the WHO criteria applying. Using the classification of “highly hazardous” is completely arbitrary and thoroughly misleading.

Greenpeace’s aim is to get individual governments to outlaw the listed herbicides. Curiously, organic farming would be affected by this as well, since PAN’s list includes, Lambda-Cyhalothrin, which is part of the organic compound pyrethroid, which is allowed under the EU labels for organic agriculture (25 substances are allowed in the EU to be used in the treatment of organic crops).

Bans by individual governments or the European Union as a whole would have far-reaching consequences.

On one hand, it would set the precedent that any compound can be outlawed without prior scientific evidence that finds it to be a risk to human health or the environment. In fact, this could easily trigger (and has already) a witch-hunt on scientifically sound research, and distort reality for the sake of ideology. Furthermore, a ban could trouble the agricultural supply chain, and increase prices for consumers.

As food security is a vital factor in the well-being of developing countries, EU pressure for different food standards in Africa and Asia (through trade negotiations) would be devastating for affected rural communities.

The bottom line is this: consumers and producers need herbicides to protect against invasive species. Is it possible to rid one’s self of biochemicals without sacrificing major losses in crop yield? Yes, but technologies such as gene-editing – which offer promising alternatives – are highly restricted in Europe, as the Consumer Choice Center and the Genetic Literacy Project have revealed in their first gene-editing regulation index.

If farmers are restricted from using these products, they will seek refuge in the black market. The trade in counterfeit and bootlegged pesticides is already a dangerous game played by farmers who are overburdened by regulation, and a real threat to consumer safety. The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute describes illicit pesticides as “a lucrative activity for organized crime and a concrete threat to security, development, health and the environment, and consequently require urgent response from the national and regional authorities, as well as the international community and the United Nations.”

Further bans would increase this problem.

We should rather endorse safely produced and tested herbicides that guarantee food security and human health, rather than promote unscientific “research” at the back of consumer choice and the security of developing nations.