France has become the latest country to ban the use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide. Glyphosate is now the subject of over 55,000 lawsuits in the United States against Roundup manufacturer Bayer-Monsanto due to scientific evidence that links the chemical to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
France’s Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) announced that it will no longer allow 36 of the 69 products containing glyphosate to be sold or used in the country by the end of 2020.
ANSES cited a “lack or absence of scientific data ruling out any genotoxic risk” in its decision to disallow the products. In conjunction with the announcement, ANSES denied approval of four new glyphosate products and said it would issue decisions as to whether to allow three other products currently under review by the end of the year.
The move follows similar bans by other European countries. In 2018, representatives from Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, and Slovenia joined France in asking the European Union Commission to look into weed control alternatives to glyphosate-based products.
Bayer-Monsanto’s home country, Germany, is expected to ban glyphosate use completely by 2023.
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization, issued a report that named glyphosate “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Despite the report, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued a statement saying glyphosate is safe in April 2019. The statement came in spite of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry report that corroborated IARC’s findings.
