The Center for Food Safety, Beyond Pesticides and several farmworker advocacy groups are pushing the EPA to cancel glyphosate's registration in light of a federal court decision that found fault with the agency's human health assessment.
The organizations filed an administrative petition with the agency Wednesday arguing the registration is illegal.
“Numerous studies – including many sponsored by Monsanto – show that glyphosate has harmful effects on the liver, kidney, and reproductive system, and is a probable carcinogen linked specifically with the immune system cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” the groups said in a news release announcing the petition filed with EPA.
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world. The groups petitioning the agency have been fighting in court for years to get it off the market. Bayer, which bought glyphosate developer Monsanto in 2018, has been defending itself in court against lawsuits claiming that Roundup has caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The petition notes a 2022 decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California that vacated EPA’s human health assessment for the chemical because the agency’s cancer analysis was flawed.
Following that opinion, which also found fault with EPA’s analysis of ecological effects, EPA said it was withdrawing its glyphosate interim registration review decision and would complete its review of glyphosate by 2026.
According to the petition, “as things now stand, EPA’s human health assessment of glyphosate has been held unlawful and set aside, and the remainder of the [interim registration review decision] has been withdrawn.”
That leaves glyphosate’s current registrations relying on the 1993 Reregistration Eligibility Decision, which is “based on a risk assessment conducted 30 years ago that fails to account for the 10-fold increase in use driven largely by over-the-top applications of glyphosate to crops genetically engineered to resist it,” the petition says.
With the human health assessment vacated "and the remainder of the IRRD withdrawn, EPA has no legal basis whatsoever to support the necessary EPA finding that glyphosate imposes no unreasonable adverse effects on man or the environment," the petition says. "Hence, the continued registration of glyphosate is illegal."
The petition calls on EPA “to suspend glyphosate use until the agency can conclude the cancellation process or can demonstrate that glyphosate meets the required safety standards in the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act,” the groups said in their news release. “Cancellation would make the sale and use of any product containing the chemical illegal.”
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The farmworker groups are Lideres Campesinas, the Farmworker Association of Florida, Rural Coalition and Alianza Nacional de Campesinas.
Bayer did not respond immediately to a request for comment. After last year's withdrawal of the interim registration decision, the company said the change had “no effect on the registration of glyphosate or Roundup products, nor does it change the conclusions the EPA has repeatedly reached regarding the safety and non-carcinogenicity of these products. The interim decision was a discretionary action taken by the agency and, as a result, EPA was free to withdraw it.
“We remain confident, based on the extensive science supporting its safety, that the agency will again conclude that glyphosate is safe for use and not carcinogenic as they have for decades, consistent with the findings of other expert regulators worldwide,“ Bayer said at the time.
Federal agencies can take their time responding to petitions. The Administrative Procedure Act requires only that they do so “within a reasonable time."
CFS and the other petitioners said they "will not hesitate to take EPA to court to compel a response."
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