The ban on the over-the-counter sale of Monsanto’s Roundup is part of a wider fight against pesticides that may be harmful to humans.
Reuters quoted Royal as telling France 3 Television on Sunday, “France must be on the offensive on stopping pesticides.” But Royal did not specify how the ban would be enforced. “I have asked garden centers to stop putting Monsanto’s Roundup on sale” in self-service aisles, she added.
In March of this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a part of the World Health Organization (WHO), released a study in the Lancet, saying glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup was “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
The release of the study prompted public officials and consumers to call for a ban on the sale of Roundup. Monsanto responded, denying the possibility of glyphosate being carcinogenic, saying in a statement on their website: “Probable” does not mean that glyphosate causes cancer and IARC’s conclusion conflicts with the overwhelming consensus by regulatory bodies and science organizations around the world, like the U.S. EPA, which concluded that there is evidence of non-carcinogenicity.”
Roundup was first introduced in the 1970s and now produced generically, has become the world’s most widely produced pesticide, according to the IARC. The evaluation conducted on glyphosates showed “limited evidence” for a type of cancer called non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, as seen in studies done in the United States, Sweden, and Canada conducted among farm workers since 2001.
