glyphosate

Because member states disagree, the European Commission, the administrative arm of the EU, will ask for a short-term extension of the license allowing the use of glyphosate while safety studies of the weedkiller are completed, said Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis.

One of the greatest threats to cotton and soybean producers is Palmer amaranth, an invasive and aggressively growing weed. The weed has developed resistance to the widely used weedkiller glyphosate and now Palmer amaranth populations in Arkansas are resistant to a class of herbicides known as PPO inhibitors, compounding the challenge of weed control, says a University of Illinois researcher.

Two days before the EU is set to vote on whether to relicense the pesticide glyphosate, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization have decided that the chemical is “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet,” reports The Guardian.

California farmer Jack McCall died last Dec. 26 of non-Hodgkins lymphoma but remains "one of several plaintiffs in more than a dozen lawsuits that claim the active ingredient in Roundup -- a chemical called glyphosate -- gave them cancer," says Huffington Post.

The world's largest seed company, Monsanto, is counting the EPA as the third major regulator to determine that glyphosate, the weedkiller used in combination with its GMO hybrids, is safe for humans. The herbicide has been under scrutiny since the WHO's cancer agency classified it in March 2015 as probably carcinogenic to humans.

A lawsuit filed over the weekend on behalf of consumers in California and New York accuses PepsiCo of wrongfully labeling its Quaker Oats brand “100% natural” after small amounts of the pesticide glyphosate (commonly sold as RoundUp) were detected in some oatmeal, reports The New York Times.

Colombia will once again use glyphosate to kill coca plants, after banning the practice for the last year due to carcinogenic concerns, reports The Tampa Bay Tribune.

The Alliance for Natural Health said it found low levels of glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world, in 10 of 24 samples of popular breakfast foods, ranging from oatmeal and eggs to bagels and non-GMO soy creamer.

The EPA inspector general says it will assess the agency's "management and oversight of [weed] resistance issues related to herbicide-tolerant genetically engineered crops."

The planting season has yet to begin, but "some elevators have begun alerting growers that they will not accept" soybeans grown from Monsanto's new genetically engineered strain, Roundup Ready 2 Xtend, unless the EU approves the variety, reports DTN.

Two EU sources told Reuters the 28-nation bloc is unlikely at a meeting this week to approve use of the weedkiller glyphosate through 2031. That is an about-face from expectations when the two-day meeting of experts opened on Monday.

Experts from the 28 nations of the European Union "appear set to endorse a European Commission proposal to extend authorization of glyphosate for 15 years, until 2031," said Reuters.

A growing body of evidence shows that regulators’ assumptions about the safety of glyphosate, commonly sold as Roundup, are based on outdated science, according to a team of environmental and public-health experts in a statement appearing in the journal Environmental Health.

The most widely used weedkiller worldwide, glyphosate, will become a subject of pesticide residue testing by FDA for the first time, says Civil Eats.

Ten employees at Syngenta Kauai were taken to the hospital when they walked onto a corn field 20 hours after the application of chlorpyrifos, reports The Civil Beat. Typically, workers are supposed to wait 24 hours before going back into the fields after a chlorpyrifos spray. Three of the workers stayed overnight at the hospital, but all have since been released and cleared for work.