Despite a flawed Trump-era review on glyphosate, the harmful key ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp, Biden’s EPA has decided to keep the toxic herbicide on shelves.
The Center for Food Safety called the Biden administration out saying prior approval of Monsanto’s RoundUp failed to account for risks to monarch butterflies and other endangered species. Not to mention the harm it causes to farmers.
But even with this knowledge, the EPA keeps this toxic chemical on the U.S. market while under review, with no deadline as to when a decision will be made.
The EPA’s request comes as it faces two lawsuits, including one brought by a coalition of farmworkers and environmentalists represented by the Center for Food Safety (CFS), that seek to reverse the Trump EPA’s approval of glyphosate, a decision that was made despite evidence that the substance — described by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic” — poses threats to human health and to pollinators such as bumblebees and monarch butterflies, reports EcoWatch.
According to CFS:
EPA is required by law to re-assess each pesticide every 15 years in a process known as registration review. EPA completed part of its registration review of glyphosate in 2020, designating it an “interim” decision because it had failed to assess glyphosate’s impacts to endangered species, or complete other key assessments, such as glyphosate’s potential to disrupt hormonal systems and harm pollinators. The 2020 interim decision represented EPA’s first comprehensive assessment of the herbicide since 1993.
“We will ask the court to deny this extraordinary request to paper over glyphosate’s ecological harms only to approve it anyway down the road. Time to face the music, not run and hide,” says CFS legal director George Kimbrell.
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