8 October 2018
Following tonight’s Four Corners program, CropLife Australia encourages all observers and commentators to refer and give primacy to the independent scientific experts regarding glyphosate, instead of continuing to inadvertently perpetrate misinformation and unnecessarily escalate community concern.
CropLife Australia and our members support a rigorous, robust, independent and scientific evidence-based regulatory system to ensure the safety of Australian users, consumers and the environment.
Australia’s independent regulator, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA), undertook a comprehensive reconsideration nomination assessment of glyphosate as recently as 2016 following the IARC’s monograph report and found no grounds for it to be reconsidered. Health Canada, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and New Zealand’s Environmental Protection Authority have also all concluded glyphosate is safe to use.
Recent evaluations by the European Food Safety Authority, Germany’s Federal Institute for risk assessment (BfR), and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) found unequivocally that glyphosate poses no unacceptable risks either to human health or to the environment.
Independent regulatory safety assessments support the fact that glyphosate does not cause harm to humans or the environment.
The US Agricultural Health Study investigated the risk between glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The study analysed data from over 89,000 farmers and their spouses and found no association between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma – regardless of the exposure level.
The Four Corners program also reported on CropLife Australia’s advocacy activities. CropLife Australia’s only objective in our engagement with parliamentarians and political parties is to ensure they have a clear, evidence-based understanding of the plant science industry and its regulation. We also advocate the importance of the innovations of our industry for Australia’s farming sector.
CropLife Australia is an apolitical organisation that operates to the highest ethical standards and with the utmost integrity, transparency and professionalism in all we do. CropLife Australia is disappointed Four Corners has suggested otherwise and did so entirely unfairly and without foundation.
CropLife Australia participates in a wide range of agricultural political events. These forums are not paid for to achieve a specific policy change, we simply participate to provide factual, scientific information to political and policy decision-makers – the same way many other peak national organisations do.
CropLife acts with openness, integrity and honesty in our professional undertakings. It was entirely unreasonable for Four Corners to impugn CropLife’s reputation simply because we participate along with hundreds of other industry organisations and companies in completely lawful and legitimate advocacy activities.
Four Corners’ opportunistic harnessing of emotional speculation over validated scientific evidence only reinforces the need for an organisation like CropLife Australia to ensure the plant science sector’s interests are represented factually.