10 feels like the classic "find a half-way mark" decision between 5 and 15 which reflects expediency more than evidence.
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.
My understanding is that there is no alternative to Glyphasate which is definitely safer. There are some candidates, but there's not research to be sure whether they are better, or worse. What would you propose?
I don't know how safe there are, but not only are there glyphosate-free weed killers on the market, there are even Roundup-branded glyphosate-free weed killers available.
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.
60g/l acetic acid ... that's literally just slightly strong household vinegar. (safety precautions, especially not breathing it in, are definitely advisable though, it's a fairly strong acid)
what I don't understand is why they only count in multiples of 5. It's the same with EVs (it doesnt have to be 2030 or 2035, it could also be 2032 etc.). It strikes me as needlessly imprecise.
But I guess that's what you get when you have to make a decision between dozens of people with different opinions :)
> But the European Chemicals Agency last year said scientific evidence did not justify classifying glyphosate as a carcinogen
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.
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?
A lot of things "contribute" to cancer, including alcohol and red meat. The question is what the alternatives are, and their pros and cons. What I heard from farmers is that there is no know alternative that's safer. There's just less research done on the alternatives, so they may be better. But could be worse.
I feel in this case, the real issue is protecting the farmers by reducing exposition. They already are way, way less exposed than gardeners used to be, but by switching cultivation technique ('Semi sous Couvert Végétal' , I do not find the English translation), you can divide the exposition by 10 to 20.
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.
Yes the average American farmer cares because inputs are expensive. Really expensive. That's why spot spraying on a massive scale has been invented. If you want to see one in action look up Welker Farms in YouTube. There are some videos and anecdotal evidence in a single field on input savings.
Ok, I think the average american farmer has way bigger field, but here in germany, there are often small patches of fields, so it might be expensive, but not soo expensive that quite some farmers would care to not spray on a windy day, as long as they can cover their fields (and their organic neibhor then cannot sell his products as organic).
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.
It is all playing with the statistics. How the risk of getting cancer grows if one eats glyphosate? How does it compare to other factors, like pollution, obesity, etc.
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.
Yeah, and those Germans got their expensive energy bills because they believed in "Green" (like Soviet/Russian funded) propaganda about dangers of nuclear power, even though the risk of Chernobyl or Fukushima in Germany has always been extremely low.
>See how much popularity gets NSDAP reconstruction group, called AfD (in the polls they have 20% and still growing).
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.
> The US courts, if the media are to be believed, have ruled its contributed to cancer.
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.
"In 2001, a researcher from pesticide manufacturer Syngenta noticed that newborn rats moved less after their mother had been given glyphosate, which is widely used in agriculture. European authorities only saw the study[1] last year."
Unfortunately I only see media coverage about this in Dutch, so here is a Dutch article with a translated version.
I many EU countries (all?) the usage of pesticides _of any kind_ for killing weeds in such a use-case is strictly forbidden because it can (will!) end up in some amounts in apartments, on clothes of pasants etc. Which would not be in line with it's regulation of it's application and the risk models based on it.
> 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.
OK, but maybe you need to say why and explain the argument?
From the comments and reading elsewhere, it seems like it's a pretty reasonable decision and probably a lesser evil compared to the alternatives.
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.
There are health concerns with long-term exposure to glyphosate, but not by consumption of the end product. The stuff that gets sprayed with Roundup will get washed down and dairy doesn't contain glyphosate. Very few people actually come into contact with dangerous amounts of it, even over a long period of time.
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.
The reason this makes sense is that without glyphosate, farmers (and private gardeners) would start using something else, and the likelihood that whatever new compound they find will be worse than glyphosate is very low.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, often enough it is incompetence and malice. Just look how much all the various dictators of "officially" piss poor third world countries have looted away. Robert Mugabe, who wrecked Zimbabwe, is suspected to have looted over a billion dollars [1], and he's just a small fish compared to what other dictators have looted [2]. Libya is one of the world's top oil reserve holders, and yet the country is in shambles, with war lords not caring about anything. Venezuela just the same, tons of oil but mismanagement has worn down everything so massively that they depend on foreign imports of refined oil products, not to mention food.
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.
No in EU, but the production of biofuel from corn creates more CO2 than just burning gasoline. Some Biofuels are nothing but a waste of food. Maybe its a deliberate diversion tactics by the oil industry, just like the Carbon footprint campaign by British Petroleum.
Or like carbon capture and storage, which just allows us to burn stuff for longer and provides no guarantees of long term containment.
Was a link between bee population decline and glyphosate use ever proven? I thought I had read that bee populations across Europe had rebounded a few years after the ban came into effect.
The EU has never actually banned glyphosate, though some countries ban or restrict its use in residential areas, and Austria has banned it altogether. The 'renewal' in the article is a renewal of its authorisation, not a revocation of a ban. You might be thinking of neonicotinoid pesticides? These were banned a few years back, and if you squint you could conclude that this more or less coincides with bee populations starting to recover.
Sorry, why is squinting necessary to conclude that stopping the use of neonicotinoids (which collapse bee populations) is responsible for the recovery of bee populations?
The evidence for neonicotinoids fucking up bees is robust, despite ghoulish corporate propaganda campaigns screeching otherwise.
pretty much nothing negative wrt. glyphosate (if used roughly in proper manner) has been "proper proven"
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).
The problem isn't so much with specific compounds like glyphosate, but the whole method of industrial farming. The current method is the "nuclear option"; chemically kill everything, plant the one crop you want (preferably genetically enhanced to withstand your choice of poisons) together with the basic nutrients this plant needs in a easily absorbable ionic form and apply more nutrients and pesticides at predetermined intervals. After harvest, kill everything again and repeat. This is simple and effective and produces consistently high yields. The price is residual chemicals on the food produced this way and "leakage" of the poisons into the environment. You'll pay some variation of this price no matter which specific chemicals you use. And in all fairness it must be added that from an ecological perspective this is already an improvement over the heavy use of tillage from before the age of RoundUp(tm) because the tillage was causing severe top-soil erosion, and GM-crops do reduce the need for poisons (a bit).
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.
Soil exhaustion is mostly irrelevant to this industrial method... it just means adding a more complete nutrient mix. In much of the US or Europe they can get awawy with only adding NPK (until, as you say, the soil gets exhausted, meaning some of the other nutrients are no longer available in sufficient quantity), but in a lot of the tropics (where I've practiced agriculture) the soils are so poor that they go with a complete nutrient mix from the start, i.e. treat the soil as just a substrate to hold the roots and add everything else, both macro and micro nutrients (often in the irrigation water, so it's basically hydroponics in soil). The method remains the same.
If this renewal came with a condition that it shouldn’t be used as a convenience method to dry out cereals just before harvest, then I’d be fine with it.
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.
53 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadI 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...
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...
1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11237511/
> 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.
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/
[2] https://lists.ng/13-richest-african-dictators/
Judging from the next sentence, this isn't what you meant to write.
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
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.
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.