EPA and RoundUP

EPA and RoundUP

Susan Allen
Susan Allen
With Today's AgriBusiness Report, I'm Susan Allen WSJ reports that Peter Barfoot and Graham Brookes, two British researchers calculated the environmental benefit from not having to run tractors to spray pesticides on GMO crops. The effect in 2014, they wrote, was "equivalent to removing nearly 10 million cars from the roads." That amounts to about 4% of the passenger vehicles in the U.S. To keep current production without the gains from GMO crops, more than 97,000 additional square miles—an area larger than Ohio and Indiana combined—would have to be cultivated globally. Instead the carbon in all that land, which would be released to the air during tilling, stayed in the dirt. And it seems backwards but after the EPA released an issue paper that said the evidence shows that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup and the most heavily used herbicide in the world, does not cause cancer in humans. They have gone ahead and compiled a panel of experts to examine the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate. AGri-Pulse reports that the panel will meet October 18-21.
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