The Center for Food Safety on Wednesday denounced the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency for arguing that Roundup should remain on U.S. shelves for an undisclosed period of time even after admitting that the Trump-era review of glyphosate—the key ingredient found in Roundup, the world’s most widely used herbicide—was flawed and requires a do-over.
“We will ask the court to deny this extraordinary request to paper over glyphosate’s ecological harms only to approve it anyway down the road.”
—George Kimbrell, CFS
In its federal court filing (pdf) requesting to redo the Trump administration’s faulty assessment of glyphosate, the EPA failed to provide a deadline for a new decision; instead, the agency maintained that Roundup—created by agrochemical giant Monsanto, which was acquired in 2018 by the German pharmaceutical and biotech company Bayer—should stay on the market in the meantime.
The EPA’s request comes as it faces two lawsuits, including one brought by a coalition of farmworkers and environmentalists represented by the Center for Food Safety (CFS), that seek to reverse the Trump EPA’s approval of glyphosate, a decision that was made despite evidence that the substance—described by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic”—poses threats to human health and to pollinators such as bumblebees and monarch butterflies.
“Rather than defend its prior decision, at the 11th hour EPA is asking for a mulligan and indefinite delay, despite having previously spent far too long, over a decade, in re-assessing it,” CFS legal director George Kimbrell said Wednesday in a statement. “Worse, EPA admits its approval risks harms to farmers and endangered species, but makes no effort to halt it.”
According to CFS:
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