Emmanuel Macron backtracked on his personal commitments on Thursday by suggesting that French agriculture could not do without glyphosate within three years.
France will not completely do without glyphosate within three years. Even if progress has been made in this direction, in particular since January 1, 2019 with the ban on the sale of this herbicide, potentially carcinogenic, in garden centers and that there are only about sixty products containing glyphosate still available in France, compared to 316 in 2016, we are still far from healthy agriculture.
“It would kill our agriculture”
In any case, this is what Emmanuel Macron suggested on Thursday, during a citizen debate in Bourg-de-Péage (Drôme). “I know that there are some who would like us to ban everything overnight. I tell you: one, not feasible, and that would kill our agriculture. And even in three years we will not do 100%, we don’t ‘will get there, I think, not,” he said, going against one of his personal commitments. Even if the president encouraged “alternative productions” to glyphosate for no longer using this herbicide, he added that there is concretely “no report independent or not independent who showed that it was deadly”.
Indeed, if the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which depends on the World Health Organization (WHO) has judged that glyphosate was potentially carcinogenic for humans, the WHO and the Organization of The United Nations for Food and Agriculture (FAO) concluded, on the contrary, that this substance was “unlikely to present a carcinogenic risk to humans through the diet”. If the opinions of the health institutions diverge, the ecologists keep the course “anti-glyphosate”.
The ban on Roundup Pro 360
Recently, the marketing authorization of Roundup Pro 360, a weed killer containing glyphosate, has been banned. The judges considered that ANSES “committed an error of assessment with regard to the precautionary principle” by authorizing the sale of this product from Monsanto (subsidiary of the German company Bayer), on March 6, 2017. “Roundup Pro 360 should be considered as a substance whose carcinogenic potential for humans is supposed,” said the administrative court of Lyon, basing its decision on the studies of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) on glyphosate.
“Despite the approval of the active substance (glyphosate) by the European Union, the court found that scientific studies and animal experiments showed that Roundup Pro 360, a preparation whose toxicity is greater than that of glyphosate, is a potentially carcinogenic product for humans, suspected of being toxic for human reproduction and for aquatic organisms”, argued the court in a press release. “He concluded that the use of Roundup Pro 360 causes environmental harm that could seriously harm human health.”
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