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GLYPHOSATE Myth Buster
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Glyphosate isn’t the only pesticide applied in towns and cities but it is certainly the most widely-used. It is sprayed by local councils as a weedkiller in parks, playgrounds and other green spaces, road verges, cemeteries, pavements and around council houses. Land managers other than councils also use it in a range of spaces including university campuses, car parks, hospitals, private housing developments, shopping centres and schools. Concerned citizens wanting their council (or other land managers) to stop using glyphosate come up against the same objections time and time again. This guide arms local pesticide-free campaigners with the information they need to counter these objections and help spread the word that glyphosate use in towns and cities is entirely unnecessary, and that viable alternatives are available. This leaflet is part of PAN UK’s Pesticide-Free Towns campaign. For other materials, including a guide to starting your own Pesticide-Free Towns campaign, or to find out if there is already a campaign in your local area please visit our website at www.pan-uk.org/pesticide-free.
Many local councils and other land managers will tell you that... The EU and UK government say that glyphosate is safe. In November 2017, EU Member States narrowly voted to relicense glyphosate for five years. Many have chosen to misinterpret this decision as a declaration that glyphosate is ‘safe’. However, due to concerns over its human health and environmental impacts, glyphosate was in fact relicensed with the condition that Member States “Minimise the use in public spaces, such as parks, public playgrounds and gardens.” This has unfortunately been ignored by the UK government and many local councils. Despite the EU decision, many countries remain deeply concerned that glyphosate is harming human health and the environment. As a result, it has already been banned from use in urban areas in France, Luxemburg, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, with Germany committing to a total ban (including in farming) by 2024. Huge problems have also been identified with the process used by the EU to reach the 2017 decision to relicense glyphosate which has been found to be opaque and therefore susceptible to manipulation by the pesticide industry. However, despite the widespread acknowledgment that the
EU process was deeply flawed, the UK government, and many local authorities, continue to justify their support for glyphosate by quoting the EU decision. The EU was required to decide whether to reapprove glyphosate in December 2022. However, saying that they didn’t have sufficient time to review all the required studies, the European Commission decided to delay this decision and, instead, chose to grant glyphosate a one-year approval extension until December 2023, causing public outrage. In the UK, due to a lack of capacity post-Brexit, the UK government decided to grant an automatic threeyear extension to all pesticides due to be reapproved in the EU before the end of 2023. Unfortunately, this includes glyphosate which is now approved for use in the UK until at least the end of 2025. Meanwhile, in the US, there have been a spate of court cases linking Monsanto’s Roundup – which contains glyphosate as its key ingredient – to the potential risk of contracting Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (a type of cancer). It is worth noting that the majority of these cases have concerned non-agricultural activities such as grounds maintenance and landscape gardening.