EU proposes 10-year renewal for glyphosate herbicide
phys.org
phys.org
There are alternatives (sustainable polycultures) but they are more labor and knowledge intensive. As a society we don't have much of that knowledge (some research is being done, but far too little) and don't want to commit the labor.
There is one possibility that could resolve this conundrum, though... very smart robots could provide the labor in the future. But we'll have to invest more on the knowledge side if we want to get there quickly and feed the world sustainably.
Up until soil has been exhausted for that particular plant, at which point yield is maintained by a) temporarily turning it back to fallow or b) artificially bringing in nutrients.
I suspect 5 is too long but both producer (ag companies making herbicide) and consumer (farmers who are serially addicted to it) want more time to convert their dependency.
As a casual backyard gardener it dripped all over me for a while. Not every day. Not all day. But I am sure many people like me read of the risks now, and worry what we've been exposed to unbeknownst (it was casually sold to us as "the safer option" although nobody would have said safer meant totally safe)
More weed tolerant forms of food production are also not risk free: There's been a small outbreak of poisoning from immature non-spinach leaking into the crop for bagged baby spinach sold in the supermarkets. Cross contamination with unexpected plant material poses some risks.
Another systemic poison "Confidor" was bloody good at keeping bugs off our plants but always came with "you can't eat anything afterward" which was a painful lesson in what it takes to kill a modern mite. It's mostly off the market now too. Chlorpyriphos was used for Cockroaches and other bugs as a surface spray, "your kid would have to lick the walls to be affected" they said: now, banned for domestic use. The lists go on.
They seem to use acetic acid (Roundup Speed Ultra) and nonanoic acid (Roundup NL).
Are they safe? Are they effective? Hell if I know. I'm going to be wearing gloves and washing my hands after using, no matter how safe Monsanto says it is.
[1] https://www.lovethegarden.com/sites/default/files/content/pr...
But I guess that's what you get when you have to make a decision between dozens of people with different opinions :)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/11/02/self-dr...
One, the evidence for it being a carcinogen remains relatively weak compared to many other substances we know of. It's in that category of chemicals where possible effects show up at the limits of detection for very high dose exposures. It's either weakly carcinogenic or that's just noise. Of course many chemicals, quite a few of them natural, are in that same class. There remains regulatory disagreement between the WHO and many other bodies on whether the evidence justifies a label as "possible carcinogen".
(toxicity to aquatic life is much better evidenced)
Second, it is indisputably much less carcinogenic and less toxic than almost every alternative wide spectrum herbicide.
It would seem disproportionate to me to entirely ban such an incredibly useful substance while we continue to live in a world with so many natural and artificial carcinogens for which we have much stronger evidence of danger and to which we are much more exposed. Nonetheless, it also seems reasonable to put additional controls on its use, restrict it to food production and other essential uses and discourage use for home gardeners and keeping city paths clear of weeds.
I think governments know damn well that banning glyphosate, or even just marking it as dangerous, will threaten food supplies, while the stuff only endangers a select few people through long-time exposure. When it comes to food security, a few farmers getting sick and a collapsing ecosystem are a relatively small price to pay (from a government's perspective, at least). Plus, the farmers want to use this stuff anyway; safe alternatives are much less effective.
Yes, there are indications that you can get toxic effects if you massively overdose glyphosate, but overall it is a miracle that a generic weed killer which decomposes as easily even exists.
For context: no-till farming is a candidate technology for binding massive amounts of carbon in farmland. In intensive farming, no-till is completely reliant on glyphosate.
This won't feed the world, but at least in the less sparse and semi-fertile areas this would be doable.
I'm tbh pretty sick of this sentence. The world could easily feed itself. The reason why half of Africa depends on grain donations and cheap grain from Ukraine and Russia is not climate change... it is because local farming can't compete in price with donations and Western excess, and due to utter incompetence and mismanagement. Simbabwe is the most dire example - it used to feed a lot of people, and then in the early '00s everything got wrecked by Mugabe.
Other countries have economic/criminal realities... say Afghanistan where it's more "productive" to plant poppy or Southern America with cocaine.
I take offense to that one.
Modern farming need equipment, if you have no capital and can't access loans, because western banks won't lend you money, then your ability to farm is limited. The reality of financy in undeveloped economies is that interest might be 20% and if you fail to repay they might come aftwr your family.
The biggest irony is US appmying pressurr on african countries not to take loans from China while providing no alternative.
Similar thing goes for poppies and cocaine, if we legalised or regulated these drugs adequately, we would not be paying billuons to cartels. Cartels in South America would not exist without the US market.
Were it not for utter incompetence, these places would be swimming in money - enough money to restart local agricultural production and provide wealth to all citizens to a degree that would let Europeans look at them like when they do at a transit in Dubai.
Fun fact: a lot of this wealth is safely guarded here in Europe. We could seize it any day we wanted.
> Similar thing goes for poppies and cocaine, if we legalised or regulated these drugs adequately, we would not be paying billuons to cartels. Cartels in South America would not exist without the US market.
Fully agree with you on that. The "war on drugs" has brought nothing but suffering for the people and nature, and probably hundreds of billions of dollars for cartels.
[1] https://money.com/robert-mugabe-zimbabwe-net-worth-assets/
Judging from the next sentence, this isn't what you meant to write.
The whole practice of spraying wheat with glyphosate to kill it and dry it off, potentially then harvesting it with the herbicide still lingering on the grains… common sense tells me that’s not a good idea.
Go and ask a farmer just how much is actually applied to a crop and what his alternative might be.
The disgraceful waste of food diverted to unnecessary biofuels causes far more misery.
In what way? There is far more than enough food anyway, and no one turns flour-grade wheat into biofuels.
I'm not saying growing crops for fuel is the best idea ever, but I'm not exactly sure I understand how it's "causing misery" either?
Or like carbon capture and storage, which just allows us to burn stuff for longer and provides no guarantees of long term containment.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
The evidence for neonicotinoids fucking up bees is robust, despite ghoulish corporate propaganda campaigns screeching otherwise.
it's just pretty hard to do (even if it has bad effects)
EU population also seems to be shrinking not due to anything which makes people less likely to have children but to people having become way more likely to not "want" children for a wide variety of reasons (using a _very_ lousy definition of "want" which includes cases like wishing but feeling that you can't afford it and therefor not wanting).
I mean people got way better at not getting children by accident. And the world in general looks much more hostile for the future of children while the standards parents put on themself for what they want to give children have increase by quite a bit and parents treating children as "things" have gotten much rarer (but where pretty much the norm not "that" long ago).
it doesn't
So there you go, still ignoring the woefully underpaid science.
When the local council here in the UK spray it around the pavements to keep the weeds down, the stuff just stinks for days and weeks on end, I dont know how people can put up with it.
The US courts, if the media are to be believed, have ruled its contributed to cancer. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45155788
Whats also worth noting, is this chemical has been sold off, and its currently owned by the European company, so are economic interests overruling the health of the EU voters?
It would seem like that.
As usual, the dose makes the poison, and people both anti and pro, are camped on their position it seems.
This method requires a lot of plant knowledge to make it work, and is not suited to the current brute force method of farm machinery which is the main method of farming.
It would be better suited to little robots doing the work, but in the mean time, the only competitor is more human hands on the fields which some people see as a backwards step.
Yes, but it seems there is still the credo of "much helps much" applied (together with "toughen up you pussy"). Meaning they spray way more than what is needed. And usually there are lots of regulation when you can spray, like no strong wind etc. to prevent it from going anywhere else. You think the average farmer cares? As far as I know, the regulation authorities do not care either.
When referring to red meat, shouldnt that nitrates or nitrites?
>What I heard from farmers is that there is no know alternative that's safer.
Well actually there are alternatives, but then that would be more resource intensive, unlike the current lazy method of mono crop farming that capitalism does not reward.
So is Capitalism your enemy?
We used to have a similar discussion about contraceptive pills, at some point there was research that they increase probability of getting cancer by 30%. Holy crap, 30%!!!
Sounds horrible, right? Some political groups that call themselves "right wing" pick this subject up immediately.
The point is that you calculate this 30% out of a very small probability value and, as a result, it is negligible if you look on other factors like smoking, bad food, pollution, alcohol or drugs usage or genetic factors. They increase getting cancer by thousands percent, so, in practice, contraceptives influence is not practically important, as it might affect just a few cases out of millions.
Same with herbicides. What if we stop using them, are we able to stop the biggest killer from old times, various fungus, that grow on plant, are not visible but very toxic. Does the risk of consuming glyphosates is that big so we can drop it and risk something else?
How about prices, food will be more expensive, people in Europe will perceive themselves poorer and will riot. Bollocks! What an absurd claim, you say, Europeans are rich as they've never been!
Objectively this is true, the point is people are not objective - see what happens in Germany, one of the richest countries on our planet. People got more expensive gas & oil and what happens? See how much popularity gets NSDAP reconstruction group, called AfD (in the polls they have 20% and still growing).
Is the cancer risk enough to justify a risk of getting us into political rumbles Western Europe hasn't seen since 1939?
And so on, this is not simple if you deal with something that might affect millions.
You do realize that this kind of nonsense is one of the main reasons they have as much support as they do? By treating people like caricatures you are turning yourself into one as well. Which people react to. Tribalism and signaling isnt going to solve this, its causing it.
One description for the difference between progressives and conservatives is what they are most concerned with. Either fixing perceived injustices or preserving systems perceived as functioning (Or reverting back to such a state). The more dysfunctional and reckless your approaches at fixing stuff becomes, the more the willingness to accept pretty fucked up systems increases in the other half of the population.
Please try to not turn the AFD into the lesser evil through your behavior. The word nazi has some actual meaning. By messing with that you risk not just normalizing actual nazis but also some pretty fucked up politics. Its a really bad idea, especially if its done just for ingroup signaling. The stakes are too high for that.
Even worse, herbicide companies are supposed to collect data from unbiased studies that cover their products effects and provide them with a summary to the authorities to show they are safe for use. The court case uncovered an internal email chain where Monsantos management was openly discussing its methods for snuffing out "problematic" studies using contacts it had with various institutions. This undermines the entire "there is no conclusive proof" narrative and should have had dire consequences for every institute with close contacts to Monsanto for fucking with such an important safety process on global scale.
because it show how there a quite a bit of corruption in both places in ways which is harmful for the general population in bother places
Unfortunately I only see media coverage about this in Dutch, so here is a Dutch article with a translated version.
Translated: https://www-nrc-nl.translate.goog/nieuws/2023/08/18/hoe-syng... Original: https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrc.nl%2Fnieuws%2...
> The US courts,
yes, but that was more politically motivated after Monsanto was bought up by a EU company then anything else
Basically the court decided it on a study which was not yet peer reviewed and all the points the court decision based it on where pretty much taken apart by the pair review as improper since. (Basically anything which increases total cell grows (e.g. by killing cells which need replacement) is carcinogen if consumed in very very high dose. I.e. with the methods used there fresh lemons juice probably would be carcinogen...).
At the same time the court ignored a bunch of studies which showed that (with the viable methods of studying that aspect) it doesn't seem to carcinogen.
To top that of the people which sued because their got cancer had other habits which mad them quite a bit more likely to have cancer, exactly the cancer type they got too. I think it was a past heavy smoking but I don't that fully.
And somehow the judges decided they need to make a ruling before the study is properly reviewed and rule different to all the other curt cases in the past which tried to sue the same way just after the company was sold of to outside of the US... very ... normal.. right?
Honestly I'm 0% worried to get cancer because of glyphosate.
BUT I do not trust it and many similar pesticides at all.
I.e. I would not be surprised if we find out at some point that traces consumed with food lead to stomach issues or that it affects certain insects in ways which is so bad for the environment that burning down docents of forests would have been way less of an issue.
Through that generally seems to be an issue for this kind of "roud up" stile of pesticides.
And then there is the issue that especially outside of the EU glyphosate is often used in doses WAY above the safe limit publicized up by Monsanto and I wouldn't be surprised if some EU farmers do so, too.
But here is a thing all that applies to (at least nearly) all alternatives to it.
So what is needed is more like a fundamental change to how farming is done, mainly focused on long term sustainability and environment which likely would happen to also remove any potential subtle negative effects on human.