Milling & Baking News - March 28, 2017 - 10

Business X

Monsanto fires back sharply over
Roundup cancer trial e-mails
ST. LOUIS - Amid a new round of legal
and public relation broadsides aimed at
undermining glyphosate's claims as a
safe herbicide, the Monsanto Co. is fighting back against renewed allegations
their Roundup weed killer causes cancer.
The agribusiness giant also is battling
negative perceptions from e-mails released
in a court case that indicate an environmental regulator alerted Monsanto of his efforts
to help the company by disputing evidence
glyphosate may be carcinogenic. Other emails the company said are misleading include those from a Monsanto employee in
2015 suggesting the company ghost-write a
portion of a research paper on glyphosate
to be published in a scientific journal.
The Monsanto position that glyphosate is safe for humans got a recent shot
in the arm when the European Chemicals
Agency in mid-March announced findings determining the main ingredient in
Roundup should not be classified as a
carcinogen. But controversies continue to
dog glyphosate and Monsanto, the company that invented the widely applied
herbicide that has been both praised and
derided for decades.
Challenges to the safety of glyphosate
emerged afresh following a decision by the
International Agency for Research on Cancer (I.A.R.C.), a branch of the World Health
Organization, to classify glyphosate as a
probable carcinogen in 2015. Since then,
Monsanto has made efforts to mount a robust response countering those claims.
"While I.A.R.C.'s erroneous classification has attracted media attention and been
used repeatedly by certain anti-agriculture
organizations to generate unwarranted
fear and confusion, regulators around the
world continue to support the safe use of
glyphosate," Charla Lord, a Monsanto
spokesperson, told Milling & Baking News.
"In fact, since I.A.R.C. classified
glyphosate, regulatory authorities in the
United States, Europe, Canada, Japan,
New Zealand and Australia have publicly reaffirmed that glyphosate doesn't
cause cancer," she said.
"We empathize with anyone facing
cancer," Ms. Lord added. "We can also
confidently say that glyphosate is not the
cause. No regulatory agency in the world
considers glyphosate a carcinogen. Still,
plaintiffs' attorneys in the United States
have been soliciting plaintiffs for potential lawsuits since an ad hoc working
group called the International Agency for
Research on Cancer Research (I.A.R.C.)
incorrectly classified glyphosate.
"These attorneys are attempting to tie
10 / March 28, 2017 XMilling & Baking News

the I.A.R.C. classification to individual
cases of cancer, and they have been running advertisements to recruit plaintiffs.
These lawsuits have no merit."
The lawsuits are part of a case in U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California,
in which dozens of plaintiffs charge that Roundup
caused their non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a
form of cancer that has been implicated in
some studies of glyphosate and dismissed
in others. In mid-March, the judge on the
case ordered confidential e-mails from
Monsanto be released and made public,
which included potentially embarrassing
information for the company that set off a
flurry of press reports.
The released e-mails included some
written by Jess Rowlands, a now-retired
official in the Environmental Protection
Agency's pesticide health effects division,
who told a Monsanto executive in an e-mail

'No regulatory agency
in the world considers
glyphosate a carcinogen.'
- Charla Lord,
Monsanto spokesperson

that Mr. Rowlands "should get a medal"
for finding a scientific study involving mice
that would exonerate glyphosate after the
herbicide was labeled as "probably carcinogenic" by the I.A.R.C. The judge suggested
Mr. Rowland may be asked to testify in the
case, but not other E.P.A. officials.
Regarding the comments of Mr. Rowlands, Ms. Lord said, "while Monsanto
cannot speak for the E.P.A., our understanding of this comment is that E.P.A.
was concerned about the Agency for
Toxic Substances and Disease Registry
(A.T.S.D.R.) starting a duplicative safety
analysis of glyphosate without realizing
the E.P.A. was already far along in its
own comprehensive safety analysis."
The A.T.S.D.R. is a federal public health
agency based in Atlanta that is part of the
U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services.
Also included in the trove of released
communications was an e-mail exchange
about whether Monsanto employees
should get involved in writing parts of a
research paper. According to The Wall Street
Journal, a senior Monsanto regulatory scientist in 2015 suggested to colleagues that
"we ghost-write" sections of a potential
study on glyphosate, citing a 2000 study

that was handled in a similar fashion.
Monsanto countered that any allegations
of ghost-writing parts of "Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide
Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans" published in 2000 in Regulatory & Pharmacology are false.
"The paper also underwent the journal's
rigorous peer-review process
before it was published," Ms.
Lord said.
The question of whether
glyphosate causes cancer
in humans has been debated almost from
the beginning of the chemical's use in
agriculture and home gardening in the
1970s. Monsanto developed Roundup, the
world's most widely used herbicide, and
then marketed genetically modified seeds
of a variety of crops ranging from soybeans
to cotton that were developed to be immune to the herbicide's effects, which led
to much greater use of glyphosate by farmers and other users, such as governments
and home gardeners, with estimates of a
100-fold increase in the frequency of applications from the late 1970s to 2016. With
Monsanto's patent protection of its herbicide expiring in 2000, other manufacturers
have stepped in, and China is now the largest producer of glyphosate worldwide.
Monsanto earns many more revenues
on its "Roundup Ready" seeds that are
glyphosate tolerant than it does on the
herbicide itself. The seeds feature "terminator technology," which prevents second generation seeds from being able to
grow, requiring farmers to buy new seeds
from Monsanto each year.
Current glyphosate-resistant crops include soybeans, corn, canola, alfalfa, sugar beets and cotton, with 89% of U.S. corn
and 94% of U.S. soybeans bioengineered
to be herbicide tolerant.
Glyphosate-resistant wheat remains off
the market, developed by Monsanto but
never sold commercially. No genetically
modified wheat is available for purchase
globally.
Part of the resistance from U.S. farmers to planting bioengineered wheat was
the fear that European and Asian markets
would be lost because of their regulations
forbidding the purchase of genetically
modified crops.
In May 2013, small amounts of glyphosate-resistant wheat of the type developed
by Monsanto were found on an Oregon
farm. Japan responded by suspending imports of soft white wheat from the U.S., and
Monsanto contended the wheat was probably planted as an act of sabotage. Further
disruptions in wheat trade with Asia were
minimal as a result of the rogue wheat.
The U.S.D.A. concluded no bioengineered
wheat was being marketed anywhere. MBN
bakingbusiness.com / world-grain.com

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Milling & Baking News - March 28, 2017

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