Glyphosate Concern #2 – We don’t have labeling in the USA, so even if we did have an estimate on the residue, we wouldn’t even know when we were eating it anyway, because it doesn’t appear on the label. We’re never told.
You can ingest glyphosate all day long and not know it. Whether it’s promoted as relatively low in toxicity or not, it’s still considered a hazard – there’s a reason why we have a reference dose. Even for the glyphosate reason alone, you’d think the FDA would want labeling.
And speaking of reference dose, I said the EPA reference dose is 1.75 mg… well the reference dose from the World Health Organization is actually 1mg, and for the European Union, it’s .3mg. Those are pretty drastic variations, especially considering that the US dose is nearly 6 times higher than the European one. The EPA’s reference dose is supposed to be extremely conservative – meaning that they leave a huge buffer between the reference dose and what they really think you can consume before developing any negative effects. But when studies vary as much as they do, and key organizations like this vary their reference dose as much as they do, the EPA isn’t exactly instilling trust in the populace.
Glyphoate Problem #3 – This one may actually be a bit of double whammy. Two big parts of the GMO pitch were the reduction of pesticide use and then the replacement of harsher pesticides with less toxic ones – primarily referring to glyphosate as the less toxic one. I actually thought this whole “fewer pesticides overall” narrative was completely true, but look at the numbers, and it turns out that’s not really the case.
Let’s start with the data we have, again, coming straight from the US Environmental Protection Agency. First, we’re going to look at 2 key data points. For data point #1, they give us a table which provides the Annual Amount of Pesticide Active Ingredient Usage in the United States, specifically for the Agricultural Market, and those numbers have remained relatively steady over the 20 years measured – from 1987 through 2007. 1987 showed 847 million pounds used, and then 2007 showed 877 million pounds used. At no point, in that 20-year span, did we see the amount dip below 840, or rise above 960. It stayed within that range for 20 years. Here’s a link to the EPA Pesticide Usage Report if you’d like to see more.
But let’s take a look at another key data point that no one really seems to focus on – the Top 10 pesticides, and just how much their usage has changed during that same time span. In 1987, the Top 10 pesticides in use accounted for roughly 338 million pounds. In 1997, which is right when Glyphosate started to pick up steam thanks to the arrival of GMOs the year prior, glyphosate was at #5 on the list, and we used about 425 million pounds in that Top 10. Yes, this is all millions of pounds by the way – we use a lot of pesticides in the USA!
Now as Roundup Ready GMOs started to gain more serious traction, and glyphosate herbicides took hold of that #1 spot, we actually saw a dip all the way down to 395 million pounds in 2001, and again we’re just looking at the Top 10 here, because the numbers below the Top 10 drop off very quickly, usually into single digits, so we’re not talking very much pesticide usage at that point for any other active ingredient. This infographic shows the rise of glyphosate usage, and also notes the total pesticide usage for the years reported as well.
Click Here to Download THE RISE OF GLYPHOSATE PDF
2007 was the last year the EPA gave us data, and yes, that was 8 years ago now, they are WAY behind on data. But when we look at the difference from 2001 to 2007, just that 6-year span, we went from 395 million pounds in 2001 to 461 million pounds in 2007. Not only that, but the Top 10 list was more top-heavy than ever, as Glyphosate accounted for over 180 million pounds by itself. Meanwhile, the bottom two active ingredients on that list… were just 10 million, and 8 million… the two smallest amounts seen in those bottom spots for any of the years we were given data. Just look at the charts on the infographic, and you can see how overwhelmingly top-heavy they became in 2007.
What does that all mean? Well, Glyphosate clocked in at 182.5 million pounds used in 2007, and the highest rate of any pesticide ever used before it was Atrazine, at just under 80 million. So we have this herbicide, that we just talked about extensively, which has a usage rate literally off the charts, and we don’t even know how much usage has increased since 2007 – we don’t have the numbers yet. It’s been 7 full years of agricultural production since then, with GMOs taking over more and more crops, and we have no numbers. Regardless, here’s what we do know – we are using a ton of glyphosate-based herbicides in America right now, and in the world as well. It’s in its very own class when it comes to prevalence in agriculture – which of course means it’s extremely irresponsible to not track residue!
The other concern related to just how much of this stuff we’re using, since we know we’re using far more of it than any single herbicide in history (here’s that double whammy I mentioned earlier), is that we’re not just talking about glyphosate. We’re talking about formulations. Whether it’s Monsanto’s Round Up formulations, or a different manufacturer (since many different companies produce glyphosate-based herbicides now), these different formulas all have their own specific ingredients.
Glyphosate is classified as the Active Ingredient, and the EPA focuses on the active ingredient for safety testing. But it also allows what it calls “Inert ingredients” to be added to pesticides, without appearing on the label. Here’s a quote from the EPAs FAQ on Inert Ingredients:
An inert ingredient is any substance (or group of structurally similar substances if designated by the Agency), other than an “active” ingredient, which is intentionally included in a pesticide product. It is important to note, the term “inert” does not imply that the chemical is nontoxic.
There is an inert ingredients list on the EPA’s site that lists hundred and hundreds of different ingredients, and how these ingredients work in each individual mixture is always a question – especially when so much of the glyphosate-focused testing has been done on glyphosate itself, not the actual mixtures. That’s not to say the mixtures haven’t been tested at all, but I haven’t been able to find anywhere near the amount of data for the actual herbicide mixtures (especially with there being so many) as I have for straight glyphosate testing. I’m reaching out to the EPA to see if I can get some clarification, so in the meantime, we’ll put inert ingredients on the radar, and leave it that for now.
