This essay is part of a series on environmental health.
Glyphosate just sounds like nasty stuff. It’s the main active ingredient in the common weedkiller Roundup, and the natural-health influencers focused on toxic chemicals invading our food and bodies routinely denounce it as a people-killer.
President Trump’s health secretary and Make America Healthy Again leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has condemned it as a poison fueling a disease crisis. Mr. Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, wrote on X that it’s driving a “slow-motion extinction event,” begging her followers: “For the love of God never buy Roundup.” In May, the administration’s initial MAHA report on childhood disease linked glyphosate to “a range of possible health effects,” from cancer to ominous “metabolic disturbances.”
But the administration’s follow-up strategic plan in September didn’t mention glyphosate. It didn’t propose any tighter regulations of any agricultural chemicals. Now many MAHA activists believe that Mr. Kennedy has abandoned his principles to appease Mr. Trump’s agricultural donors, and that the Roundup crisis will only get worse.
They’re right: Farm interests are driving Mr. Trump’s farm policies. But they’re also wrong: There is no Roundup crisis.
This debate is what happens when politics, vibes and hysteria drown out science, facts and data. There’s no weighing of benefits versus costs, much less any subtler distinction between hazards and risks. Instead we have pseudoscientific MAHA opposition to anything “chemical” or “unnatural” and agribusiness lobbying to protect agribusiness profits. Pesticides are the latest culture-war battleground where the combatants choose between for and against, as if distinctions don’t exist between better and worse.
The MAHA movement’s war on glyphosate is part of a broader war on modern farming — not only herbicides and other pesticides but synthetic fertilizers, genetic engineering and factory feedlots. It reflects a fantasy of agricultural purity where less intensive food production can heal the land and reverse climate change, even though less intensive farms that make less food per acre need more acres and more deforestation to make the same amount of food. Many liberals repulsed by Mr. Kennedy’s unscientific bias against vaccines and Tylenol share his unscientific bias against agri-chemicals, genetically modified organisms and industrial agriculture.
Glyphosate is a convenient target because it’s the most widely used herbicide, and because “Roundup ready” GMO crops engineered to tolerate weed-killing doses of glyphosate are the ultimate symbol of the GMO revolution. There’s overwhelming evidence that GMOs are safe, and glyphosate happens to be one of the most benign forms of weed control. You shouldn’t drink it or bathe in it, but you shouldn’t worry about eating food made from crops sprayed with it — the bulk of the science suggests the traces you could conceivably digest are far too minuscule to make you sick.
The Environmental Protection Agency, the European Food Safety Authority and regulators in Canada, Japan and Australia have all concluded it’s safe for humans. Even the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which campaigns against unsafe chemicals, noted that glyphosate has “significantly lower acute and chronic toxicity than many other herbicides on the market.” It inhibits an enzyme that’s vital for plants but nonexistent in animals, so it can kill weeds without harming anything else.
Some controversial studies have linked heavy glyphosate exposure to health complications. The International Agency for Research on Cancer lists it as a “probably carcinogenic,” which is one reason Bayer, which acquired Roundup’s creator, Monsanto, in 2018, has paid billions of dollars in settlements to farm workers and gardeners. But the cancer agency also classifies red meat and working as a barber as probably carcinogenic. Critics such as Robert Tarone, who spent 28 years as a National Cancer Institute statistician, says the agency relied on studies that exposed rodents to preposterously huge doses, and even then ignored exculpatory tumor data.
“There’s just no compelling evidence that glyphosate causes cancer,” Dr. Tarone told me. “That’s why every agency that looked at the actual dose found it’s safe.”
This is a scientific truism that MAHA misses: The dose makes the poison. You shouldn’t swallow an entire bottle of Tylenol, but it’s a safe product, and it would take a higher dose of glyphosate than Tylenol to kill someone. Some rats might — might! — have gotten sick from ingesting glyphosate, but the proportion of it in their diets was almost certainly thousands and maybe millions of times higher than the proportion in yours.
In any case, it’s much less damaging than the alternatives. One study found that glyphosate made up 26 percent of the herbicides used on U.S. corn and 43 percent on soybeans, yet contributed 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent of the total chronic toxicity of the herbicides used for those crops. Really, the most pressing glyphosate danger is that it could be replaced by much nastier chemicals.
These days, philanthropists, environmentalists and even Big Food conglomerates have joined MAHA activists to push for a global transition to organic and regenerative agriculture that nurtures the soil instead of drenching it with chemicals. But agri-chemicals and other technologies have nearly tripled farm yields over the last half-century, so without them we’d need something like three times as much farmland to make the same amount of food. And by 2050, the world is projected to need to grow 50 percent more food; avoiding runaway deforestation from expanded farm fields will require much higher yields in an era when climate-driven droughts, floods and heat waves will pose new threats to harvests.
Chemical fertilizers do help crops grow. Chemical herbicides and insecticides do kill weeds, insects and other pests. When Sri Lanka abruptly banned agri-chemicals, the result was a crash in yields, food shortages and food riots.
We don’t want that. We also don’t want an anything-goes approach where truly dangerous agri-chemicals receive federal protection. “MAHA moms” are right to fight absurdly broad House Republican legislation that aims to shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits and state regulations.
A better approach to food and farming products and policies would be less all-or-nothing: considering benefits as well as costs, acknowledging that some chemicals are safe when used as directed while others are not. A mature society would evaluate food and farm inputs by what they do, not by how “natural” they seem.
Ultimately, the best path would be to develop effective substitutes with even less impact. One promising approach involves RNA technologies; these could help kill pests with precise cellular messages that avoid collateral damage to other organisms, the equivalent of sending in an assassin to take out a single bad guy rather than nuking an entire city. Too bad Mr. Kennedy is slashing funding for RNA-related research because of its link to vaccines. Maybe it isn’t purely natural, but it’s good.
Michael Grunwald is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.”
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