Glyphosphate has a pretty short persistence in the environment. It breaks down relatively quickly. It has a half-life in the environment from as little as 15 days to a couple of months.

One of the significant problems with earlier pesticides and herbicides where the chemical in question would stay in the environment for decades (DDT, an insecticide, had a half life of 10-15 years and tended to accumulate in biological tissues). Glyphosphate is also not very acutely toxic.

I would have to eat an entire pound of pure glyphosphate to have a 50% chance of survival. (I consume many things every day much more toxic)

There are some questions about long term carcinogens but the signal there is not particularly strong.

As opposed to some other, especially older agricultural chemicals, many of which got their start as actual chemical weapons used in war.

You can say likewise about any other pesticide on that basis.. but I do wonder where the "hundreds of thousands of tonnes" comes from. My farm applies 540 grams of glyphosate per acre on our soybean crop each season.. if that is applied to every acre of farmland in the USA that would be 500mt of glyphosate. So you believe that a majority of the acres in the USA have at least 540g/ac applied and that a majority of that glyphosate is not metabolized by plants but is mobile in runoff?

I would be extremely interested in the research that validates that because it is not consistent with my experience.

> Whether glyphosate causes cancer or not, there is much less doubt that it has a harmful impact on insect populations and on aquatic wildlife from runoff.

It's actually not glyphosate that can be harmful to aquatic animals. It's the accompanying surfactants, added to help glyphosate to enter the plants. You put too much of any kind of surfactant (basically, a soap. A chemical that lowers the surface tension of water) to a small volume of water, and it will be harmful to aquatic life.

Lobbied. That research money is not free.