Chandre Dharma-wardana

Credit: Global Justice Now (CC BY 2.0)

What chemicals or environmental exposures are likely to cause cancer? That’s a complex question with a wide variance in views across the scientific community. 

First, one needs to determine whether a substance or situation is likely to ever cause cancer. For instance, we know that drinking hot coffee or tea or any drink can increase the chance of esophageal cancer. In other words, they present what scientists call a hazard. 

Whether a hot coffee drinker is likely to get cancer — what scientists call risk — is a much different formulation. It depends on how many hot drinks a person consumes, every day, for many years. In other words, Risk = Hazard x Exposure. 

That appears straightforward, but journalists and even some scientists, botch that simple equation in their discussions of environmental exposures, particularly chemicals. That often leads to bizarre public policy debates over the potential danger of one chemical or another, which can lead to lousy regulatory decisions.

This problem is not an abstraction. It was only four years ago that Christopher Wild, then-head of a United Nations-affiliated research group known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), declared that breakfast bacon and cold cuts are carcinogenic, and that hamburgers and other red meat are probable” causes of cancer. The IARC classifications prompted some uncritical praise but mostly ridicule, and debunking by scores of scientists. 

IARC also shook up the agricultural industry when it declared that the world’s most popular herbicide— considered for decades to be both the most effective and among the safest to use weedkillers — was also a probably carcinogenic to humans” —  putting it in the same ‘danger’ category 2A, as red meat, hot drinks, being a barber or hairdresser, or working the nightshift — not very scary exposures. 

While environmental activists, journalists and social media shrugged off or mocked IARC’s classification of lamb chops and a visit to the beauty parlor as probably” dangerous, they literally exploded in horror when IARC issued a proclamation in 2015 that glyphosate — sold generically and by Monsanto (now Bayer) under the trademark name Roundup — posed an identical hazard. This headline is from the UK The Guardian:

The Group 2a classification ignited mass litigation in the United States against Monsanto that is still going on and could lead to a ban on glyphosate sales across the European Union and elsewhere.

How did the mainstream science community react? Initially with panic because literally all the regulatory and risk studies to that time had concluded that glyphosate did not pose any substantial cancer risk at all. Did they all get it wrong? That sets off a frenzied reassessment of glyphosate by 18 of the world’s premier regulatory and risk agencies. [Click on the bolded excerpts to take you to the document issued by the regulatory or research agency.]

The most recent one, released last summer by the European Food Safety Authority that upheld its former conclusion — the EFSA did not identify critical areas of concern,” finding the weedkiller unlikely to be genotoxic or to pose a carcinogenic threat” to humans, animals and the environment. All told, there have been 24 risk assessments of glyphosate over the past decade and not one concludes the weedkiller is a carcinogen.

As Health Canada wrote after two recent reviews after IARC made its hazard declaration: No pesticide regulatory authority in the world currently considers glyphosate to be a cancer risk to humans at the levels at which humans are currently exposed”.

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IARC and its impact

IARC, if you are not familiar with it, has become one of the most controversial health agencies in the world over the past decade precisely because of such controversial findings. It has a controversial history. It started as a research institute in the 1950s before affiliating with the World Health Organization. IARC was chartered to assess cancer hazards and has since passed judgement on 1035 chemicals or exposures.

[Ironically, an investigation by Reuters after IARC’s controversial 2015 classification found that the agency was poised to designate glyphosate as non-carcinogenic”— only the second of the 1036 substances it has reviewed over the decades to be so designated.  

Mysteriously and inexplicably, an 11th hour edit by the agency moved glyphosate into the probably carcinogenic” category — much to the glee of anti-biotechnology advocacy groups and predatory tort lawyers who soon cashed in on IARC’s re-classification. 

Christopher Portier, a key member of IARC’s review board at the time, became a consultant to the US-based Church of Scientology tort firm Baum Hedlund, which served as point litigator in the first three glyphosate court cases filed against Monsanto, in a partnership with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.]

IARC was again in the news in July when it announced that aspartame, found in many sugar-free chewing gums, Diet Coke and other products, is probably carcinogenic. The claim was widely circulated, in many cases uncritically, by the global media, and it was hyped incessantly by environmental activist groups, such as Environmental Working Group, with known ties to both IARC and Baum Hedlund.

Government researchers around the world reject IARC’s hazard finding as ludicrous, noting that an adult would have to consume between 12 and 36 cans of diet soda every day for the rest of her life to even hazard the longshot possibility of getting cancer. As recently as July, the European Food Safety Authority

But unfortunately, IARC’s classifications are no longer a joke, as EU member states are fighting an extended battle over whether to renew glyphosate’s year registration for another 10 years.

IARC has caused much harm by fueling eco-extremist organizations and activist scientists, whose pressures led to the collapse of governments and the devastation of thriving agricultural economies. Here I’d like to revisit the ongoing impact of IARC’s glyphosate finding so that history does not repeat itself in Europe.

When IARC released its probably carcinogenic to humans” finding on glyphosate, the green lobby knew it had been handed a devastating weapon beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, an official-sounding agency classified glyphosate as potentially cancerous, even though all other regulatory agencies in the world have concluded the opposite.

Environmentalists supporting the European Green Deal, which proposes to reduce toxins in Europe, began amplifying marginal studies that found tiny amounts of glyphosate – a few parts per billion – in wine. Those are levels far below what any science agency believes could be harmful. (Ironically, IARC has classified wine and other types of alcohol as the most dangerous carcinogen humans can be exposed, Group 1, so focusing on the ppb of safe glyphosate in ‘dangerous’ wine is scientifically ridiculous.)

Fear still grips the public and regulators, and sound toxicological science on glyphosate produced by EPA and other leading regulatory agencies has become a victim of activist efforts. A computer scientist turned amateur epidemiologist named Stephanie Seneff churned out scientific” papers claiming that practically every noncommunicable disease could be related to glyphosate’s presence in the food chain. In one of her more ridiculous studies”, Seneff and a colleague drew up laughable correlation figures blaming the increased use of glyphosate on autism.

Mocking her, scientists posted correlation charts showing the link” between increased consumption of organic foods and autism.

Seneff’s research” is promoted by Dr. Joseph Mercola and other international pseudoscience gurus” with millions of social media followers. The glyphosate hysteria even tripped up the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS bestowed its 2019 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility to two crank Sir Lankan scientists, Drs. Sarath Gunatilkake and Channa Jayasumana, who authored two much-ridiculed papers linking glyphosate to chronic kidney disease. The announcement of the award touched off a backlash among AAAS members, and it was rescinded.

Public as victims and a new reality

The biggest victims of IARC’s glyphosate misinformation bombs have been the countries banning or limiting glyphosate use. Inspired by the eventually-rescinded AAAS award, and led by eco-extremist ideologues such as Vandana Shiva, activists duped Sri Lanka’s leaders into going in sync with nature” by adopting an all-in organic policy. Then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned 100% of agrochemicals, even mineral fertilizers. 

This pleased then-Prince Charles and other green ideologues at the 2021 Glasgow Climate Summit, but it nearly destroyed the tiny island nation. Yields plummeted in this once-flourishing agricultural sector, thanks to rampant weed infestations and a lack of nutrients. As the New York Times wrote, Sri Lanka took a ”sudden and disastrous turn toward organic farming”.

Within a year, the country could not adequately feed itself. The cost of food exploded, the country starved, and Rajapaksa had to flee his own nation  after a farmers’ revolt blew into a full-scale mass uprising that demanded his exit.

It appears EU leaders are taking note of Sri Lanka’s lessons spurred by the Ukraine war, which has transformed the views of many of its politicians. In August, Frans Timmermans, European Union commissioner for the European Green Deal, submitted his resignation as Member of the European Commission. The Dutch farmers’ party has taken control of the Dutch senate in response to Green Deal efforts to buy out livestock farmers. And, President Macron’s team no longer talks of banning glyphosate. 

Organic agriculture with its emphasis on composting, manual weeding and tilling of soils, and its rejection of genetic engineering techniques, cannot hope to address global farming challenges.

The impact of the Ukraine-Russia War has helped show that Europe’s food supply is fragile. Europe’s Zeitenwende” or epochal turn” from its back to nature” dreams has started, but it’s incomplete unless it eschews agricultural policies rooted in anti-science hogwash. It must reject elitist and eco-extremist pseudo-solutions that have negatively influenced EU policymaking.

Chandre Dharma-wardana, a scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, currently works for the National Research Council of Canada and the Université de Montréal.