Lifting baseless ban on weed killer, glyphosate

An open letter to the Minister of Agriculture

Mr. Minister,

You have recently, on several occasions, indicated your desire to lift the highly ill- conceived ban on glyphosate, and you should please do this immediately to help the farmers to cut down on their crop production costs. Use of glyphosate for tea has been allowed as from 2020 with Japan complaining of high MCPA herbicide residues in our tea following its use in place of glyphosate after the total ban of the latter.

Glyphosate was initially banned from use in the Districts of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Kurunagala and a part of Badulla in August 2014, but totally in 2015 in the entire country following a faulty claim by some Rajarata scientists based on their publication in an open access (fee-levying) journal that it was the cause of the Rajarata kidney disease (CKDu). This highly flawed paper was, ‘torn to bits’ by several reputed chemists. However, the authors together with a Buddhist priest, with no notion of science, had convinced the Yahapalana President that glyphosate was the cause! It is now known that the aetiolating agent of CKDu is hard water and fluoride in dug wells on high ground. Those who drank river or tank (surface) water did not contaminate the disease.

The October-2015 total ban in Sri Lanka may have also been prompted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decision to transfer glyphosate from the non-carcinogenic Class 3 to the ‘probably carcinogenic’ Class 2 A of the Carcinogenic Classification of substances. However, CKDu and cancer are totally different health conditions. Further the IARC classification is for identifying ‘hazard’ and not health ‘risk’. However several international organizations such as the Joint Meeting of the WHO-FAO on Pesticide Residues (JMPR) in 2016 clarified that there is no evidence to implicate glyphosate being toxic and any risk from its recommended use . This has also been echoed by other organizations such as the EU Commission on Chemicals, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of U.S , European Food Safety Authority, the British Royal Society and some twenty Nobel Laureates. Further, on 13^th April 2016, the EU Parliament has backed a re-authorization of glyphosate for a further seven years.

The Agricultural Health Study which monitored the health of some 90,000 people in Iowa and North Carolina from 1993 to 2010, is probably the most comprehensive study that has cleared glyphosate of cancer or any other health risks. The findings are published in the Journal of National Cancer Institute (JNCL) 0f Nov. 2017. The subjects included farmers licensed to apply pesticides to crops and their spouses. The impact of more than 54,000 pesticide applications had been taken into account in this study of which 83% contained glyphosate. Many of the farmers had been using glyphosate even before the study. Yet after two decades of continuous and intense use of glyphosate there were no significant increase in cancer among those exposed to the herbicide. David Spiegelhalfer, a Cambridge University professor who was himself not involved in the study had confirmed according to press reports that ‘the analysis had been large and careful’ and shows no significant relationship between glyphosate use and cancer.

Further, a group of four independent panels of experts in 2016 looked at the relevant research on glyphosate and whether it is carcinogenic. The group which comprised 16 scientists, from Canada, the United States, Denmark, Brazil and the United Kingdom and other countries, decisively concluded that “glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans.”The authors rejected the findings of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (March 2015), which proposed that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans.

Glyphosate is the most widely used pesticide (weed killer) in the world and its total annual global use exceeds the cumulative use of all other pesticides. This was also the situation in Sri Lanka. No official or specific authority in Sri Lanka has recommended banning glyphosate, and no one has come forward to officially explain why such a ban was imposed.

This ban is seriously affecting crop production in Sri Lanka as weed-management costs have sky rocketed especially with increased fuel costs. The Chairman of the Planters Association of Sri Lanka has reported recently that the tea industry had lost over 2 billion rupees in 2015 due to the ban. An MP confessed on TV that he uses black market glyphosate in his tea estate! In rice, pre-plant weed control was widely done with glyphosate but is now done by impounding water. As a result irrigated paddy cultivation, necessitates 20% more water, a highly valuable commodity, especially in the dry zone. The maize farmers in the dry zone complain that weeding costs have increased by 300% without glyphosate.

The Yahapalana government attempted to move away from agrochemicals and conventional farming. The then President enthuastically set up a project titled ‘Toxin- Free Agriculture’ under the ages of the Strategic Enterprises Management Agency (SEMA) to drive the local agriculture towards organic farming. But the project was an utter failure, and he disbanded it after several years. Not learning a lesson from it and rejecting the views of the majority of local scientists, the new President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa virtually overnight decided to terminate conventional agriculture and turn fully to organic farming which too has been an utter failure! The consequent mess the country’s agriculture has been put in is in evident to all. The country, or for that matter, the world cannot move away from conventional farming and agrochemical as, despite numerous promotions the whole world to date has only 1.5% in in organic agriculture. The country has now fortunately turned back to conventional farming and the necessary fertilizer and pesticides should be made available to the farmers as a matter of highest priority.

, In conclusion, even at this very late stage, if the government yet has doubts, it should do well to appoint a team of experts in the field to examine and report whether there is any positive evidence to implicate glyphosate in the aetiology of CKDu or cancer. The impact of the glyphosate ban on the agriculture of the country has been severe in that weed control costs have sky –rocketed. Farmers claim that they have to invest three to four times more for manual weeding after the glyphosate ban. It is sad that the government has totally overlooked the views of the majority of main stream scientists in banning glyphosate.

Misuse of agrochemicals conventional or organic is risky to living beings and to the environment and their correct use cannot be overemphasized. This has been best put by Bombastus Paracelsus (1493 -1541), the father of the science of pharmacology. He postulated that “all substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. It is the dosage that differentiates poison and remedy”.

Dr Parakrama Waidyanatha