Global Glyphosate: New Challenges in Regulating Pervasive Chemicals in the Anthropocene

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, VIA ZOOM

Dialogues on Science and Action 1
2:00-3:00pm 

Featuring: Emily Marquez, Abhigya, and Maria Soledad Castro

Panelists will reflect on significant challenges in the regulatory landscape of pesticides, followed by a facilitated discussion with workshop participants and registered attendees.

Emily Marquez is a staff scientist with Pesticide Action Network North America. 

Abhigya is a doctoral candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her research lies at the intersection of Public Policy and Science and Technology Studies. 

Maria Soledad Castro is a doctoral candidate at the Environmental Science and Technology Institute (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona and a tropical ecotoxicologist from Costa Rica.

Dialogues on Science and Action 2
4:00-5:00pm  

Featuring Dr. Katarzyna Kordas and Dr. Jim Olson. 

Panelists will offer brief reflections on exposure science and possibilities for collaboration with social scientists, followed by a facilitated discussion with workshop participants and registered attendees. 

Dr. Kordas is Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health. Her work focuses on multiple exposures to chemicals and metals, and how to understand the effects of the totality of exposures on health, especially in children. Dr. Kordas is Co-Director of of UB CGHE.

Dr. Olson is UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health. His work focuses on the effects of and susceptibility to organophosphate pesticides. Dr. Olson is Director of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences. 

Synthetic pesticides are deeply woven into our landscapes and bodies, transforming ecologies and biologies in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, offers a window into the problematic of pervasive chemical compounds as agents in the Anthropocene, the geologic epoch in which humans have permanently changed the planet.

Worldwide struggles over the production, international trade and use of highly toxic pesticides in the 1970s and the 1980s led to international conventions restricting circulation in global markets. In the wake of these regulatory changes, scientists and multinational agrichemical corporations introduced new generation compounds that held a double promise: to meet the economic demand for cheap and effective weed and pest control and to do so with substances that were safe for humans and the environment. Paradigmatic of this shift and its promise was the herbicide called glyphosate. Marketed by the US multinational Monsanto under the brand name Roundup, glyphosate was deemed to be non-toxic to humans and animals. Because glyphosate acted on plants systemically, rather than topically, it allowed for applications of smaller amounts and killed unwanted and yield-depressing weeds at their roots. Scientists and agronomists touted the compound to be a ‘revolution,’ a ‘once-in-a-century’ discovery. 

Glyphosate use expanded rapidly in the late 1990s once it was packaged with genetically modified seeds that were resistant to its application. Rates of adoption for maize, soybean, cotton, and later, sugar beet, alfalfa and rapeseed (canola) reached over 90 percent in less than a decade in the United States; a similar process followed in Argentina, Brazil and Australia. When patents expired in 2000, low prices and mass generic production in China and India led to widespread adoption in emerging economies for a large number of conventional crops as well as genetically-modified ones. Today, glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the global food system. Three-quarters of worldwide application has occurred only in the last decade. While activists and environmentalists long challenged the mostly industry-backed science on glyphosate, controversy over the compound reached new heights in 2015 when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified the compound as a probable carcinogen. In 2018, Dewayne ‘Lee’ Johnson, a school groundskeeper in California, won the first case against Monsanto (now part of the German Bayer Corporation) for failing to protect human health and was awarded $78 million in damages; over 8,000 lawsuits are now pending in US courts. 

While the public debate over glyphosate continues to rage, the proposed workshop draws upon critical social science approaches to reframe the perceived problem. The workshop takes glyphosate as a window into the problematic of pervasive chemical compounds as agents in the Anthropocene, the geologic epoch in which humans have permanently changed the planet. Humanities and social science scholars have adopted the nomenclature of the Anthropocene to signal an alternative to the Nature/Society dualism at the heart of Western epistemology.  We use the term here to highlight the conceptual shift that motivates our workshop. If the paradigm of regulating pesticides in the late twentieth century rested upon notions of Man-made toxicity that damaged a pristine Nature, today, alternative concepts and additional regulatory tools are needed. Synthetic chemicals are deeply woven into our landscapes and bodies, transforming ecologies and biologies in ways that we are only beginning to understand.  The distribution of chemical burdens is highly uneven territorially and socially, and the conceptualization of toxicity itself rests upon narrow definitions derived principally from controlled ex situ experiments. Comparative, interdisciplinary, conceptually-related engagements with glyphosate offer an opportunity to grasp and deepen the Anthropocene perspective and, by extension, to consider the ecological, economic and regulatory implications of the chemicalization of life.  

The workshop brings together three largely unconnected areas of debate surrounding glyphosate in order to deepen an Anthropocene perspective on the problem of pervasive chemicals. The first, centered in the global North, is the debate over product safety and the corporate control of knowledge production. Safety reviews by the US EPA and FDA face considerable industry resistance in a regulatory context weakened under the current Administration.  Elsewhere in the global North, including the EU, the product safety debate also remains consumer-focused and disconnected from developments in the global South. The second area of interest is the contemporary ‘herbicide revolution’ underway in emerging economies. The adoption of glyphosate, along with other herbicides, is proceeding at breakneck pace. In countries with expansive monocropping such as Argentina and Brazil, glyphosate has already enabled a highly capital- and knowledge-intensive agriculture that has expelled manual labor en masse from farming, and fundamentally transformed rural livelihoods. In many other emerging economies, out-migration from rural areas has led to labor shortage in contexts where farmers have little choice but to turn to corporate-controlled agrichemical solutions. In turn, inputs are now more widely available as lower-priced and less regulated generic products have transformed the market. Thus, the intensification of a capitalist agricultural transformation for the world’s majority remains tethered to the adoption of agrichemical inputs – and glyphosate in particular – just as the safety of glyphosate is being questioned in its mature markets. The final area of debate cuts across these first two. Similar to antibiotics, the mass application of a single biocide has accelerated the development of weed resistance, now threatening yields by as much as 20 percent in Australia and the United States, a problem also making headlines in Argentina and Brazil. The consumer-centered regulatory framework of toxicity and exposure fails to account for such ecological transformations, where ‘harm’ to humans and the environment ultimately rests upon a modernist epistemology that reinforces the nature/society dualism.