Glyphosate - European Food Standards Agency keeps cancer data secret - TruePublica
Glyphosate – European Food Standards Agency keeps cancer data secret
The ongoing political drama around renewing the EU
authorisation for glyphosate began as a rather unusual conflict between
two international public health organisations, the WHO’s International
Agency for Research against Cancer (IARC) and the European Food Safety
Authority (EFSA).
Although they reached opposing conclusions on the cancer-causing
properties of glyphosate, the issue that quickly escalated their
discussion into hostility was the impossibility of cross-examining the
underlying evidence. EFSA was able to include the entirely public IARC
assessment into its own work, but was obliged to withheld the superior
evidence it said it had, only publishing summaries lacking essential
information.
The reason?
The studies in question were part of the dossier companies must
habitually provide when requesting market re-authorisation – they had
not been published anywhere and belong to the companies, meaning EFSA
would most likely get sued by said companies if it were to publish them.
In December 2015, CEO filed an access to documents request to EFSA,
asking for three studies, owned by Monsanto, Cheminova and Arytsa
respectively, that were particularly central to EFSA’s assessment of
glyphosate’s carcinogenic characteristics and thus far unavailable to
the IARC. But seven months down the line, we’re still waiting : the
companies continue to refuse disclosure, negotiating redactions with
EFSA as well as the Commission, as broader disclosure requests have been
made. Instead, they keep proposing useless “reading rooms”, which do
not allow for public scrutiny of the studies, nor sufficient analysis of
the data.
What arguments are used to prop this up?
