Lhe France and the European Union are faced with a major paradox. The regulations on pesticides are, on paper, very demanding: a product can only be authorized if the risk assessment does not foresee any adverse short or long-term effect on humans or nature, in use normal. However, pesticides continue to be authorized and used, while many scientists show the existence of their harmful effects in the real world.
In June 2021, Inserm expertise [Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale] showed that the evidence for the role of pesticides is strong or moderate for sixteen pathologies, compared to eight in 2013. If their mother is exposed during pregnancy, children have an increased risk of leukaemia, brain tumors or congenital malformations. In addition, studies and reports showing that pesticides are a determining factor in the loss of biodiversity and the massacre of insects follow one another. Inrae-Ifremer expertise [Institut national de la recherche agronomique et Institut français de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer] of May 2022 shows their deleterious effects on all living things. These conclusions are in line with those published in 2019 by IPBES, a UN body qualified as the “IPCC for biodiversity”.
This paradox has an identifiable source: the practices of food safety agencies, evaluating the toxicity of pesticides before their approval, do not allow the actual toxicity of the products to be detected. The flaws are systemic and are found at each stage of the assessment. Agencies miss the dangers of molecules declared as active substances and of pesticides as they are sold.
A pesticide is never a single molecule, but a mixture of a molecule declared as an “active substance” with formulants that amplify its effect, some of which are carcinogenic petroleum derivatives. During the first stage of the process, the intrinsic dangers of the “active substances” must be identified, and some are criteria for exclusion from the market. The carcinogenic, mutagenic or reprotoxic character is one of them, as well as the endocrine disrupting character. We must go into the details of this process to understand how these properties remain invisible.
Guidelines
The study of the toxicity of substances is based almost exclusively on regulatory tests provided by manufacturers. The results of almost all studies in the international scientific literature are ignored, on the grounds that they do not correspond to the agencies’ standardized procedure. However, in 2016, 98% of industrial studies ruled out the genotoxicity of glyphosate, while 67% of scientific studies cited by the International Agency for Research on Cancer [une agence de l’Organisation mondiale de la santé] demonstrated it.
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