When the two countries announced Monday that they would ban the controversial weedkiller by 2020, the decisions seemed like knee-jerk reactions to being on the losing side of a vote in Brussels to extend the license of the world’s most common herbicide for another five years.
But French President Emmanuel Macron’s promise to outlaw glyphosate in France as soon as “alternatives are found” wasn’t fueled by blind faith. After all, he and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni can’t risk infuriating powerful agricultural constituencies that see weedkillers as vital for growing everything from barley to carrots.
In fact, both France and Italy have a Plan B: a more natural product that threatens to oust Monsanto’s ubiquitous glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup from its dominant position in European agriculture. [...]
On Monday, France, Belgium and Italy joined six other countries to vote against a new license for glyphosate. They lost the vote when Berlin cast the swing ballot in favor of the weedkiller, extending the license by five years. The German chemical giant Bayer is poised to acquire Monsanto for $66 billion.
The decision by national experts in a food safety committee marked the culmination of a bitter political debate over whether glyphosate is a carcinogen. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said it “probably” causes cancer. Both the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency subsequently declared glyphosate as safe for use, however.
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