The Corporate Lobby

The European food safety authority (Efsa) based a recommendation that a chemical linked to cancer was safe for public use on an EU report that copied and pasted analyses from a Monsanto study, the Guardian can reveal. The row over glyphosate’s safety has pitted scientists against each other – and regulators – with one branch of the World Health Organisation assessing that the substance was unlikely to be carcinogenic, while another ruled that it probably was.

Some sections are differentiated from the GTF paper by additions of text and reference numbers, different marking of headings and tables, capitalisations, changes from US to British spelling and some text cuts. Most paragraphs dealing with peer-reviewed papers, though, are copied word for word.

In June, Efsa said that where the renewal assessment report (RAR)  was concerned, “every scientific study is scrutinised for relevance and reliability by EU risk assessors based on the evidence contained within the study”.

But dozens of pages of the paper are identical to passages in an application submitted by Monsanto on behalf of the Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), an industry body led by the company.

These sections analyse peer-reviewed studies into links between glyphosate and genotoxicity (how likely it is to cause cell mutations), carcinogenicity and reproductive damage.

Franziska Achterberg, Greenpeace EU’s food policy director, said: “Whether this is a question of negligence or intent, it is completely unacceptable.

“It calls into question the entire EU pesticide approval process. If regulators rely on the industry’s evaluation of the science without doing their own assessment, the decision whether pesticides are deemed safe or not is effectively in the industry’s hands.”

The Efsa paper repeats descriptions – and analyses – verbatim from the 2012 GTF review. One of these, by former and current Monsanto employees John Acquavella and Donna Farmer, challenges the results of a study which found an association between pesticide use and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

It says: “The major limitations of this study were: the reliance on reported pesticide use (not documented exposure) information, the small number of subjects who reported use of specific pesticides, the possibility of recall bias, the reliance on secondary sources (next-of-kin interviews) for approximately 43% of the pesticide use information, and the difficulty in controlling for potential confounding factors, given the small number of exposed subjects.”