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New York (Reuters) – In the United States, farm workers and environmental groups want the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to end the approval of the weed killer glyphosate.
In the petition, six groups, including the Center for Food Safety and the Florida Farm Workers Association, are calling for measures banning the sale or use of the herbicide pending an analysis of the health and environmental risks by the EPA. The continued approval violates the federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, which requires the EPA to determine with “reasonable certainty” that herbicides will not cause unreasonable harm to humans or the environment before they can be approved for use in food, they said the groups on Wednesday.
There was no immediate comment from the EPA. The petition is the groups’ latest attempt to combat the use of glyphosate after they successfully challenged a 2020 EPA review of the herbicide’s risks that found glyphosate was “unlikely” to cause cancer in humans. An appeals court partially reversed the review in 2022 after finding that the EPA’s conclusions were not supported by sufficient evidence. The court referred the review back to the authority, but did not revoke the existing approvals for glyphosate.
The EPA had said it was evaluating the risks of glyphosate. But the agency’s basic findings, including that the herbicide is unlikely to pose a cancer risk, remained unchanged. Glyphosate is the most commonly used weed killer in the USA and the active ingredient in the Bayer Group’s herbicide Roundup. With its takeover of glyphosate developer Monsanto, the company received a wave of lawsuits in the USA because of the substance’s alleged carcinogenic effects.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers had recently pointed to last year’s federal appeals court decision as evidence that the EPA’s approval of the product is on shaky ground. Bayer, on the other hand, speaks of significant procedural errors and emphasizes that the authority’s assessment has not changed. A Bayer spokesman called the petition “unfounded” on Wednesday.
The company has always rejected the allegations against glyphosate. Authorities worldwide classified the drug as not carcinogenic. The cancer research agency IARC of the World Health Organization (WHO), however, rated the active ingredient as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015. Bayer had recently suffered a series of defeats in the trials. Most recently, agreements were still pending for 52,000 of the total of around 165,000 registered claims.
(Report by Clark Mindoc, written by Patricia Weiß, edited by Myria Mildenberger. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and economics) or [email protected] (for companies and markets).)
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