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sunnuntai 3. marraskuuta 2019

Glyphosate: EU agency must release censored study, court says

Glyphosate: EU agency must release censored study, court says
07.03.2019

An EU court has ruled that lawmakers must have access to scientific studies used by European authorities to declare the pesticide free of cancer-causing risks. The glyphosate controversy has exposed rifts in the EU.



An EU court ruled Thursday that European lawmakers must be given access to scientific studies examining the safety of glyphosate, a chemical commonly used in pesticides whose possibly carcinogenic nature has raised global controversy.
The ruling by the EU's General Court could reinvigorate debate over glyphosate in the EU, which has seen an EU-wide petition to ban the product rejected by the bloc's executive arm and raised questions of transparency.

A German pesticide label states that glyphosate is the active ingredient (picture-alliance/dpa/P. Pleul)
Glyphosate is used in agriculture to control crop-damaging pests
Ruling excerpts
The court statement read: "The public interest in having access to the information relating to emissions into the environment is specifically to know not only what is, or foreseeably will be, released into the environment, but also to understand the way in which the environment could be affected by the emissions in question."

 Views on the case
Sven Giegold, a German member of the European Parliament for the Green party, told DW ahead of the ruling that the core of the case was transparency in food and health safety: 

 "This case is about getting access to the … original studies, which were used by the European Food and Safety Agency in order to approve glyphosate."
"We asked for the data, it was refused, and so we went to court to get it," he added.

Why is glyphosate controversial?
Glyphosate is found in many pesticides used widely in industrial agriculture, as well as in domestic and urban settings. 
The most well-known example is RoundUp,
a weedkiller made by chemical giant Monsanto, which was recently acquired by
German pharma giant Bayer.

Some global health bodies have warned glyphosate can cause cancer and other health issues, while environmentalists argue it destroys crucial biodiversity.
However, others have argued the cancer links are tenuous and maintain the product is safe to use.
Watch video01:17

Glyphosate - Friend or Foe?

What was the EU case?

Four EU lawmakers — Finland's Heidi Hautala, Hungary's Benedek Javor, France's Michele Rivasi and Belgium's Bart Staes 
— filed the case in May 2017 against the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which had used toxicological and carcinogenic studies to determine the safety of glyphosate, finding that "glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans."

While the European Commission used the findings to classify the chemical as safe, lawmakers were denied access to the same studies, based on the argument that it could harm the commercial interests of companies that presented the studies.

What do EU countries think?
Views over glyphosate use in the EU and how to proceed are divided by country, as well as by branch of the bloc.
In October 2017 the European Parliament approved a nonbinding resolution to ban the chemical's use by 2022. However, the law-making executive branch of the EU, the Commission, voted a few months later to extend the glyphosate license for another five years, though the vote revealed divisions in the bloc.
France voted against the 2017 extension, and President Emmanuel Macron has pushed for phasing out glyphosate in the coming years. Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy Luxembourg and Malta also voted against the extension.
Germany supported the extension, though roughly one year later the country introduced stricter national regulations for pesticides. The Czech Republic has also announced they will limit its use.

What happens now?
With the release of the data, other scientists can also view the procedures and attempt to replicate and verify the conclusions. 
However, MP Giegold said the case was "more about the past than the future," because the approval process for pesticide has already been changed in EU law, resulting in increased public transparency.

  • Věra Jourová, Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality stands at a podium. (picture-alliance/dpa/L. Dubrule)

    TOXIC TOYS AND DODGY ENGINES: HIGHLIGHTING DANGEROUS PRODUCTS IN THE EU

    Rapid alert

    The European Commission has released its annual report on the 'Rapid Alert System' for dangerous products across 31 European countries. The system aims to provide a way for manufacturers, importers, retailers, experts, and national authorities to identify and report dangerous products as quickly as possible. Pictured is Věra Jourová, Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality.

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cmb/rt (dpa, Reuters)

DW RECOMMENDS

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Glyphosate: The key points in an endless debate

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Monsanto liable for cancer-causing Roundup weed killer, judge rules

Study shows glyphosate may be killing honeybees

EU lawmakers vote to ban glyphosate weed killer by 2022

Germany sets new restrictions on glyphosate

Toxic toys and dodgy engines: Highlighting dangerous products in the EU


WWW LINKS

https://www.dw.com/en/glyphosate-eu-agency-must-release-censored-study-court-says/a-47804040

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Agent Orange:
24 Haunting Photos Of The War Crime The U.S. Got Away With

By Mark Oliver
Published August 22, 2017, Updated November 14, 2018

For ten years, the U.S. military terrorized a country with Agent Orange, a chemical weapon whose effects are still being felt today. Gallery


For ten years in Vietnam, it rained a chemical mist. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and planes and helicopters flew over top of the country, spraying out a toxic chemical called Agent Orange.

The plan was to wipe out the enemy’s food supply. Agent Orange was an incredibly potent herbicide made even stronger in the hands of the U.S. and South Vietnamese Air Forces, who mixed it to 13 times its usual strength. It could obliterate whole farms and wipe out entire forests with nothing more than a gentle mist. Their plan was to leave the Viet Cong exposed and hungry — but they couldn’t have imagined the full impact that this plan would ultimately have.

The plan worked, in a sense. From 1961 to 1971, 5 million acres of forests and millions more of farmland were destroyed by Agent Orange. These were farms that the U.S. and South Vietnamese thought were being used to feed the Viet Cong’s guerrilla army – but in reality, most were feeding civilians. People across the country starved.

The real impact of Agent Orange, though, took years to come out: 4 million people had been exposed to a chemical that could wipe out any form of plant life it touched. Despite what the chemical's producers had promised, it wasn’t harmless.

Agent Orange caused health problems in the people who’d breathed it in, and even worse ones in their children. Babies across Vietnam started being born with horrible mutations – some with physical and mental defects, others with extra fingers and limbs, and some without eyes.

A whole generation of Agent Orange victims was born plagued with mental and physical problems that made it impossible for them to have normal lives. Today, many of these Agent Orange victims live in Peace Villages, where workers care for them and try to give them a normal life – but the mutations caused by Agent Orange still affect the people and the children of Vietnam, even today.

The ones who can live in a Peace Village are luckier than some of their siblings. Some Agent Orange victims are born too horribly deformed to even survive childbirth. “There is a room at the hospital which contains the preserved bodies of about 150 hideously deformed babies, born dead to their mothers,” one charity worker has said. “Some have two heads; some have unbelievably deformed bodies and twisted limbs. They are kept as a record of the terrible consequences of chemical weaponry.”

The American soldiers who sprayed the fields were promised that the chemicals would only be hurting plants, not people — but these soldiers didn’t come home any better off than those they sprayed. Vietnam Vets came home reporting unusual rates of lymphoma, leukemia, and cancer — especially those who had worked with Agent Orange.

The Vietnam War has been over for more than 40 years, but because of Agent Orange, it’s still tearing people apart.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/agent-orange-victims
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