Anger is building among the MEPs on the Parliament’s environment, public health and food safety committee over the European Commission’s decision to relaunch the procedure to authorise glyphosate, perhaps for ten years. This flies in the face of the opinion of the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the revelations of the so-called Monsanto Papers that the American multinational deliberately concealed the dangers of its products to human health (see EUROPE 11790).
Thus, in Brussels on Tuesday 30 May, the committee adopted the terms of an oral question to be put to the Commission. The question seeks to have the Commission give an oral explanation on its decision, the basis for which was the opinions delivered by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) that glyphosate was probably not carcinogenic for humans and to challenge it on the guarantees it will offer in terms of transparency, reliability and safety, in line with the demands of EU legislation.
The question will be put to the Commission, with a view to a debate, at the June plenary session (12-15 June), probably on 13 June.
The idea of a hearing of the Commission by the parliamentary agriculture and environment committees meeting jointly was also agreed by the environment committee coordinators (the ECR and EPP Groups opposed this).
The MEPs point out that Monsanto owns and produces “Roundup”, the active substance of which is glyphosate and that the licence of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, approved under the regulation on marketing authorisation for plant protection products (the pesticides regulations) will expire on 31 December 2017 at the latest. They state, too, that the Monsanto Papers have “shed doubts on the credibility of some Monsanto-sponsored studies which were among the evidence used by the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency for their evaluation of the safety of glyphosate”.
Therefore, in the light of public concern, they will ask the Commission:
- what steps it is taking to ensure that the decision on the renewal of the approval of glyphosate is based on credible and independent scientific findings;
- what specific measures it is considering in the context of the ongoing REFIT evaluations of the pesticides regulation and the general food law regulation, which instituted EFSA (Regulation 178/2002/EC) with regard to transparency and the role of scientific peer-reviewed, publicly available studies in the evaluation of active substances;
- how the Commission and EFSA ensure that the requirements of Article 63 of the pesticides regulation in accordance with Court of Justice case law, specifically the judgments in cases C-673/13 and C-442/14;
- the measures it is taking to finance research and innovation with regard to alternative sustainable and cost-efficient solutions for plant protection.
Data from Professor Portier not taken into account. Two MEPs from the S&D Group who have been calling for several weeks for a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Monsanto Papers – Eric Andrieu (France) and Marc Tarabella (Belgium) – drew attention the same day to a new factor supporting their arguments: the “damning findings” of a study on glyphosate carried out by Dr Christopher J. Portier, an international expert in the design, analysis and interpretation of environmental health data, with a focus on carcinogenicity. Professor Portier has written to Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and to the heads of the European agencies detailing his conclusions which show that “eight instances where significant increases in tumour response following glyphosate exposure were not included in the assessment by either EFSA or ECHA”.
“Citizens are not guinea pigs”, rages Tarabella in a press release. Andrieu’s says that “this new evidence highlighting the dangers of glyphosate overtakes last week’s announcement by the European Commission that, to everyone’s surprise, it views the matter as closed”. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)