Review 588: Urgent Updates on Glyphosate and New GMOs

Welcome to our latest Review, which not only brings news of the latest developments and studies, but also highlights urgent actions you can take on glyphosate if you’re in the US (GLYPHOSATE UPDATES) and new GMOs if you’re in the UK (NEW GMOs UPDATES).

Resistance to the prospect of new GMOs entering the food supply unlabelled continues, with legal action pending in the UK, a big petition in New Zealand, and continuing outcry in Europe (NEW GMOs UPDATES). In North America, the leading organic pork producer is calling for labelling of gene-edited pigs (CONCERN OVER GENE-EDITED ANIMALS). Academics and scientists are also joining calls for transparency and biosafety standards to be upheld (NEW GMOs UPDATES).

We also have details of some excellent new critiques of the myth making that lies behind attacks on an important glyphosate study and how ghostwriting shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse (GLYPHOSATE UPDATES). And in our final section (FAILING TO FEED THE WORLD), we have some brilliant debunking of one of the most enduring myths of proponents of GMOs, pesticides, and the industrial agriculture model as a whole.

GLYPHOSATE UPDATES

UNITED STATES URGENT ACTION: Tell your US Representative to remove bill language stopping farmers and consumers from suing chemical companies

Pushed by Bayer/Monsanto and the chemical industry, language has been inserted into Sections 453 and 507 of a bill before the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee that provides total immunity against lawsuits that challenge chemical manufacturers who withhold information on the harm that their products can cause. It also prohibits EPA action on PFAS, which includes fluorinated pesticides. This action by Beyond Pesticides makes it easy to ask your member of the US House of Representatives to help stop this dangerous legislation. For an explanation of exactly how the wording in this bill creates total immunity, see the comments of the attorney Daniel Hinkle, from the American Association for Justice, quoted towards the end of this substack.

US: Senator Cory Booker pitches bill to allow lawsuits against pesticide makers over “toxic products”
Senator Cory Booker has introduced legislation that would create a federal “right of action”, allowing people to sue pesticide makers such as Bayer and Syngenta, and others, for allegedly causing health issues such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease. The Pesticide Injury Accountability Act would “ensure that pesticide manufacturers can be held responsible for the harm caused by their toxic products”, according to a summary of the bill. If passed, the law would turn the tables on efforts by Bayer and a coalition of agricultural organisations as they push for state-by-state legislation blocking individuals from being able to file lawsuits accusing the companies of failing to warn of the risks of their products. Booker’s bill would allow those suits in federal courts instead. The industry is also pushing for federal preemptive protections against litigation – see item above.

Webinar on the Global Glyphosate Study – watch now!
A recording is now available of an important recent webinar about the most comprehensive study ever conducted on glyphosate, which featured its only UK-based contributor, Michael Antoniou (Professor of Molecular Genetics and Toxicology at King's College London). Prof Antoniou explains how the study confirms glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides cause multiple types of cancer, even at exposure levels deemed to be “safe” by the EU, and why that requires major changes in its regulation. He concludes: “Glyphosate, and even more so its commercial formulations, are carcinogenic. It’s as simple as that… it should be banned.” Such was the interest in this webinar that some 1800 people signed up for it, including those in government, academia, civil society and the private sector, as well as concerned citizens. Do watch and share. You can also read a recent article about the study here.

Glyphosate and cancer: A textbook case of “manufacturing doubt”
The recent study confirming glyphosate herbicide’s carcinogenic potential (see item above) has immediately come under fire. However, these attacks are based on flawed scientific grounds, Le Monde reports. In consultation with experts, Stéphane Foucart, Le Monde’s science correspondent, takes apart the criticisms and exposes them as baseless and involving sleight of hand. Read the analysis in full in English here.

The afterlife of a ghost-written paper: How Monsanto’s hidden authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse

Corporate ghost-writing is a form of scientific fraud, but a new paper, co-authored by the world-renowned historian of science Naomi Oreskes, shows how it can shape public health and safety. It analyses the impact of a ghostwritten paper crafted by Monsanto to support claims of glyphosate safety. Despite revelations of its ghostwritten nature, the paper has never been retracted, continues to be cited, and has exerted considerable influence, shaping public understanding, scientific discourse, and policy decisions. An analysis of policy and governance documents that cite it revealed that the vast majority referenced it uncritically. In academic literature, it is in the top 0.1 % by citation count among papers discussing glyphosate, indicating broad uptake, with minimal acknowledgment of conflict of interest. The ghostwritten paper has also been frequently cited in multiple articles on Wikipedia to support the safety of glyphosate or glyphosate-based herbicides; attempts to contextualise its ghostwritten origins have been repeatedly reversed or removed, illustrating how corporate-sponsored science infiltrates public knowledge platforms. Oreskes and her co-author say retraction and stronger oversight are vital, as these sources shape public perception and feed AI and Large Language Model (LLM) training data.

NEW GMOs UPDATES

UK ACTION: Support legal action and say “no” to hidden GMOs

Beyond GM has announced important news about a significant legal challenge they have just launched – and how you can help make it happen. In May, the UK government quietly brought in new regulations that fundamentally change how GMOs are regulated in England, with knock on effects for the rest of the UK. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025 create a new category of GMOs, with the Orwellian name “precision bred organisms” (PBOs), which are exempted from the food and environmental safety requirements of other types of GMOs. This is sleight of hand, not least because the gene-editing process is far from precise and has serious implications for the environment and our food system. The new regulations also allow these gene-edited GMOs with no history of safe use to enter the food system and wider environment without labelling, without adequate traceability systems, and without any proper safety testing or impact assessments. Please, if you can, donate to Beyond GM’s legal action “fighting fund”. You can read more about the details of their legal challenge here.

New GMOs: 18 French NGOs warn of the risks of European deregulation
Eighteen French organisations, ranging from farmers' unions to consumer associations, have joined forces in an open letter to the French government and MEPs. The message is clear: the draft European regulation on new GM techniques (new genomic techniques, NGT) that is being discussed in Brussels represents a major threat to agriculture, food and the environment.

European laboratories join forces to call for detection methods for all new GMOs

On 27 June, 12 laboratories across Europe came together to write an open letter to EU policy makers, ahead of the recently-cancelled round of trilogue negotiations on the legislation to determine the regulation of New GMOs (NGTs/new genomic techniques) – which had been due to start on 30 June. Initiated by Spanish lab and ENGA (an organisation that advocates for the European non-GMO food and feed industry sectors) member Imegen Agro the letter urges lawmakers to ensure the future NGT legislation requires that laboratories get detection methods, reference material and data on the genetic modification and its location for category 1 NGT plants.

New Zealand: Petition calls for halt to Gene Technology Bill as export leaders urge cautious approach
A group of concerned citizens is urging the government to halt the proposed Gene Technology Bill, which deregulates a whole class of GMOs. A petition was presented to Labour MP Deborah Russell at Parliament requesting work on the bill be paused. The thousands of signatories included scientists, health professionals, and organic producers. Among those urging caution is Beef + Lamb NZ, which says many farmers support reform in principle but are concerned about traceability, export risk and a lack of engagement. Dr Elvira Dommisse, a former government crop researcher during the first wave of GMOs in the 1990s, called the bill “the Wild West of genetic modification”. One of NZ’s leading GMO risk experts, Prof Jack Heinemann, was not consulted on the bill before it was presented to Parliament. “I have never been contacted by either officials or government to discuss the Gene Tech Bill,” he said. “It is no secret that I do not support the bill in its present form.”

Why regulations in plant gene editing are a must
Although some scientists believe current regulations on agricultural gene editing are too restrictive, a new paper from the University of Adelaide highlights the need for clear, well-defined rules to ensure emerging technologies are applied safely and ethically. Published in The Plant Journal, the focused review – authored by Dr Emily Buddle, Michail Ivanov, and Professor Rachel Ankeny – argues that regulation is essential not only for safety, but also for fostering public engagement and trust in gene-editing innovation. “Regulatory decisions are not just about scientific facts or economic benefits. They always involve value judgements, especially concerning safety, risk and societal benefits,” Buddle explains. The paper concludes, “Regulation permits regulators and diverse publics to engage with research and assess whether the particular application of gene technology is desirable and beneficial beyond the laboratory bench or field.” The new paper is here.

AI and genetically engineered organisms: a biosafety issue

Experts agree that advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering can result in new risks for health and biosecurity. A wide range of users, including malicious actors, will be enabled to engineer biology and generate new pathogens, toxins, or other outputs that could be weaponised. At the same time, possible biosafety issues often slip under the radar. These include applications in plants and animals that may, even though well-intentioned, result in substantial risks for nature and the environment. In the EU, ongoing negotiations on new GM techniques (new genomic techniques, NGTs) applied to plants could exempt the huge majority of these plants from risk assessment. AI could make it even easier to circumvent the Commission's ‘magic threshold’ of 20 genetic changes, underneath which NGT plants would be considered safer than other genetically engineered plants. When taking their decision on this far-reaching deregulation, policymakers must take risks for environment, biodiversity and health into account. A video of experts discussing these issues will soon be available from Testbiotech.

GMO deregulation won’t fix potato blight

In a letter published in the Dutch KNPV (Royal Netherlands Society of Plant Pathology) member magazine Gewasbescherming (“Crop Protection”), Piet Boonekamp, a researcher at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), advocates the use of cisgenesis – the transfer by genetic engineering of genetic material within a particular species – to control Phytophthora, the fungus that causes late blight in potatoes. He argues that the long-standing impasse in removing new GM techniques from “outdated” EU regulations is causing much-needed innovation to stagnate. Do we need GM – old or new – to combat potato blight? Agriculture and food writer Theo Grent says we don’t. He responded to Boonekamp’s letter in an article in Gewasbescherming. Bottom line: There are agroecological ways to manage potato blight and GM approaches have only offered years of failure at the taxpayer's expense.

Syngenta cuts UK wheat breeding, GMO lobby worried
Despite UK governments rushing post-Brexit to loosen GMO regulations in order to steal a march on the more cautious European Union, the GMO and chemical giant Syngenta will close its Cambridge-based UK wheat breeding programme after 35 years, focusing its activity on the European continent instead. Lamenting this development and others that might affect the future of GMOs in the UK, the long-time GMO-pushing farmer David Hill writes on the pro-GMO lobbying website Science for Sustainable Agriculture: “While England has carved out a clear head start over the rest of Europe in relation to gene editing in agriculture with the passing into law of the Precision Breeding Act, are we about to cede advantage to the EU on this issue too?”

CONCERN OVER GENE-EDITED ANIMALS

Organic producer calls for mandatory labelling of gene-edited pork in North America
As we reported in Review 584, the US Food and Drug Administration recently greenlighted CRISPR gene-edited pigs, engineered to resist the respiratory virus known as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. The virus thrives on intensive factory farms and kills piglets in the womb. Now duBreton, North America's leading producer of organic pork, is calling for transparency, saying it “adamantly opposes gene editing in livestock production, citing both ethical concerns and a lack of long-term risk assessment”. While GMO promoters claim engineering PRRS-resistance will reduce animal suffering and limit antibiotic use, duBreton disputes these assertions as misleading and unsupported by evidence: “We’ve achieved the same outcomes for decades – without genetic modification… Through natural husbandry, selective breeding and strict biosecurity protocols, duBreton has raised healthy pigs without antibiotics, while upholding the integrity of organic farming.”

Gene-edited pigs may soon enter the Canadian market, but questions about their impact remain
The Canadian government is currently considering approving the entry of gene-edited pigs into the food system. If approved, these pigs would be the first gene-edited food animals available for sale in Canadian markets. Prof Gwendolyn Blue and colleagues’ research examines how including the public in decision-making around emerging applications of genomics can help mitigate potential harms. Public reactions to previous GM food animals in Canada – including AquAdvantage salmon and the EnviroPig – show that lack of inclusive engagement can contribute to the rejection of GM animals. According to Prof Blue: “Social science research has, for decades, demonstrated that resistance to biotechnology is not because of the public’s lack of knowledge, as is often argued by biotechnology proponents. Public resistance to biotechnology is better understood as a rejection of potential harms imposed by governments and industry without public input and consent.”

FAILING TO FEED THE WORLD

The enduring fantasy of “feeding the world”

In an important new essay, the food scholars Adam Calo, Maywa Montenegro, Ben Iuliano and Alastair Iles debunk the feed-the-world myth of industrial agriculture. In its latest repackaging, this myth with its fixation on boosting yield is being promoted not just as the remedy for global hunger through greater output, but as using less land – due to its efficiency in commodity production, and hence the way to leave more land available for nature. But the authors show that industrial agriculture has not only proven bad at feeding people, failing to budge food insecurity, but it doesn’t lead to “land sparing” either. In fact, the environmental geographer Gregory Thaler, who followed the implementation of land-sparing policy in the Brazilian Amazon, calls it an “alibi for ecocide”. The authors also argue that this productivist approach fuels colonialism. What the enduring fantasy of feeding the world is good for, of course, is promoting all manner of supposedly yield-boosting technological fixes, while laundering the horrors of the industrial food system. It also enables global hunger to be weaponised to silence the voices of agrarian change, being “consistently used as a cudgel to silence alternative farming and nourishment strategies”. This must-read essay contains so many well-argued points that it more than repays reading in full.

Commentary on the “feeding the world” fantasy
On Bluesky, the anthropologist Dr Andrew Flachs, who researches food and agriculture systems, has done a thread commenting on Adam Calo et al’s essay (see item above). In this thread, as Calo commented, Flachs highlights “a depth of research on this issue, which is just so much more than yields vs hunger”. Check it out for its insightful comments and links.

Is famous proof of the triumph of science the most deceptive graph ever made?
Nobody is better at debunking the myths of industrial agriculture than Glenn Davis Stone. It was Stone who famously pointed out that new research suggested the claim of a “billion lives saved” by the Green Revolution, which is so often used as a framing for GM crops, was not just badly wrong but that the number of lives actually saved appeared to be zero. In a new piece on another key component of industrial agriculture mythology, Stone looks at “the most reproduced chart in anything ever written on agriculture,” which shows the meteoric rise in US corn yields following the adoption of hybrid corn. This also gets used, as Stone notes, to validate GM crop technologies. But in reality, as he explains, “If the input-intensive, over-producing corn hybrids were a disaster in the 20th century, they are likely to be even worse in the 21st”.

GMWatch News Review archive

Review 588: Urgent Updates on Glyphosate and New GMOs