The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) Stop glyphosate was officially registered by the European Commission on Wednesday 8 February, a procedural step with potential political implications for ensuring a sustainable future and protecting the environment and health that was hailed simultaneously by NGOs in Rome, Brussels, Paris and Berlin and by those whose initiative it is.
The ECI seeks to have a ban placed on glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in Europe, and on all herbicides containing this active substance that causes cancer and damages ecosystems, in line with the provisions contained in current EU environmental legislation. But that is not all.
It also seeks the adoption of new EU-wide measures to protect people – farmers first and foremost – and the environment from exposure to toxic pesticides, in-depth reform of the procedure for approving pesticides in the EU to ensure that the prior scientific assessment is based on published scientific studies commissioned by public authorities and not by the pesticide industry. It also seeks to have imposed binding targets for reducing pesticide used to achieve a pesticide-free future.
For this, the signatories call on the European Commission to put proposals to the member states of the EU.
The text points out that Directive 2009/128/EC establishing a framework for Community action to achieve the sustainable use of pesticides requires that pesticides should only be used when all other methods have failed and mandates EU member states to establish concrete measures and objectives to reduce overall pesticide use.
In Brussels on the same day, a group of environmental and health NGOs from among the 38 organisations in 15 EU member States that want to gather over one million signatures (seven member states is the minimum required) highlighted that the Stop glyphosate ECI is a massive European civil society movement on an issue of public health and environmental protection.
The active substance of the total herbicide glyphosate, which has been recognised as being probably carcinogenic by the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and a potential endocrine disruptor, has had its licence in the EU extended until the end of 2017 while awaiting the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) assessment of its toxicity (see EUROPE 11583). The Commission hopes to receive the opinion in June.
“We are very worried. Thousands of tonnes of glyphosate are sprayed each year on our fields, in our countryside and our neighbourhoods. (…)We should not be using any weed killer linked to cancer. If we are serious about protecting people’s health, and giving our wildlife a chance to recover, then our governments must step in to ban the most toxic pesticides, and reduce the overall amount that is used”, said Génon K. Jensen, Executive Director at Health and Environment (HEAL). The Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN-Europe) said that the carcinogenic cancer potential of glyphosate is only the “tip of the iceberg” and that Regulation 117/2009/EU on the placing of plant protection products on the market already states that substances “presumed to have carcinogenic potential for humans” must not be authorised for use in pesticide products.
Pointing out that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) only releases, when asked, the redacted raw data from the assessments carried out by the pesticide industry, Martin Pigeon of the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) said that the main problem is that companies are responsible for the scientific evaluation of their own products and the scientific data belongs to them. The information used by legislators to authorise marketing is very difficult to obtain by independent scientists seeking to analyse it and by the public, he stated, adding that the list of scientists whose careers have been ruined by the industry for simply publishing evidence that it does not want seen is long.
Franziska Achterberg, Greenpeace EU Food Policy Director, said: “This kind of secrecy panders to industry and prevents proper scrutiny of EU food safety decisions. Regulators – not industry – should be responsible for ensuring public safety based on published scientific evidence”. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)