A bill that would partially shield the maker of a widely used agricultural and lawn herbicide from lawsuits over its health effects was adopted by the Iowa Senate on Tuesday. Senate File 2412 would protect Bayer against claims it failed to warn people about the potential health effects of Roundup so long as its product is labeled as required by federal regulators. The legislation would apply to all domestic producers of herbicides and pesticides, but eliminating the failure-to-warn claims is part of Bayer’s public strategy to “manage and mitigate the risks of Roundup litigation”, according to its website. Iowa Capital Dispatch

 

 

In an upcoming event on Zoom on 10 April, experts and policymakers will discuss the need to limit glyphosate-based herbicide use in public areas, since the use of this herbicide endangers citizens' health and contributes to the decline in biodiversity. Sustainable and safe alternatives to glyphosate herbicides will be highlighted. Pesticide Action Network Europe

 

 

Transgenic dicamba-resistant soybean and cotton were developed to enable farmers to combat weeds that evolved resistance to the herbicide glyphosate. However, according to a new and uncompromising scientific article from US scientists, "The dramatic increases in dicamba use these crops facilitated have led to serious problems, including evolution of dicamba-resistant weeds and widespread damage to susceptible crops and farming communities. Disturbingly, this pattern of dicamba use has unfolded while the total herbicide applied to soybean has nearly doubled since 2006. Without substantive changes to agricultural policy and decision making, the next 'silver-bullet' agrotechnology will likely be no more than another step on the transgene-facilitated herbicide treadmill." Pest Management Science

 

 

Following a robust citizen response to the consultation on the marketing of gene edited precision bred (PBO) foods, the FSA recently published its analysis of the responses. Beyond GM comments that it’s hard to imagine a shabbier document, or one that is more dismissive of the ‘consumers’ whose trust the Agency is so keen to court. Out of the 412 respondents, 71% disagreed or strongly disagreed with the FSA’s proposed approach to regulating PBOs. Looking at just the consumer responses, this figure rises to 94%. Most of the responses – 66% of which were consumers – followed a similar pattern, and yet the FSA’s conclusion was that there was no reason to change its plans. Beyond GM

 

 

GM Freeze director Leonie Nimmo has published her reflections on the Food Standards Agency's latest board meeting. She writes, "It was the first time [the board] had met since the FSA analysed the responses to its consultation on the way it intends to deregulate (in England) so-called Precision Bred Organisms (PBOs) – new-style GMOs to many of the rest of us. The public and others (81%) are overwhelmingly against these plans, and there remain major unresolved issues around safety, labelling, traceability, threats to organic standards and trade with Europe and the rest of the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the board did not find anything that meant it would reconsider its approach and will blithely press on regardless. Much of the meeting was spent kicking responsibilities over the net to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or up into the higher echelons of Government that passed the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act last year. Despite a couple of members of the Board clearly uncomfortable with the direction of travel, overall it was presented as a reasonable conclusion. Remarkable." GM Freeze

 

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