Our poisoned land

Across Britain thousands of wheat crops will soon be ripening in the summer sun. Shortly before harvest, many will be sprayed with a weedkiller, not because the fields are thick with weeds, but because this particular chemical helps dry the crop, making the operation of the combine harvester more efficient. Some of the compound will survive the milling and baking processes and turn up in the bread, cakes and pastries we all eat.

It’s why this weedkiller has, over the years, accumulated in many of our bodies. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that the chemical in question – glyphosate – causes multiple types of cancer, including leukaemia and cancers of the breast, kidney, bladder, pancreas, skin, liver, ovary, bone, uterus and spleen.

The cancer link with the world’s most widely used weedkiller, formerly marketed as Roundup, is confirmed in a new research report in the journal Environmental Health. The researchers fed low doses of glyphosate to laboratory rats, either on its own or in the commercial formulations used by farmers to increase its uptake by plants. The rats were dosed over two full years. The timescale is significant.

When the weedkiller was licensed more than 40 years ago, its manufacturers – Monsanto – were only required to run their toxicity tests for three months. Over this short period no cancer tumours appeared. But when, as in this new study, the tests were continued over a full lifetime, multiple tumours showed up. Scandalously, the same discovery was made 13 years ago and ignored. The research was done by a French team led by Gilles-Eric Seralini, professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen.

When his research paper was published in 2012 both the professor and the journal – Food and Chemical Toxicology – came under savage attack, professionally and personally, from Monsanto. Though the journal editor caved in and retracted the report, Seralini was made of stronger stuff. He withstood the onslaught and went on to show that the chemical was even more toxic in its commercial formulations than when used alone. The new study confirms his findings.

How much misery, sickness and death will have been caused by the continuing delay in banning this deadly chemical, we’ll never know. Its dangers are by no means limited to cancer. Research scientist Stephanie Seneff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has studied the chemical for more than a decade, looking in detail at its mode of action in plants, soils and the human gut.

In her book, Toxic Legacy: How the weedkiller glyphosate is destroying our health and the environment, she links the chemical to the mass extinction of wild species as well as to the rise in many chronic diseases across the world, including Alzheimer’s, autism, celiac disease, diabetes, encephalitis, inflammatory bowel disease and obesity.

She writes: ‘Something terrible seems to be affecting every living thing on the planet – the insects, the animals, and the health of human beings, including children. Seemingly hidden in plain sight. While we can’t reduce all environmental and health problems to one insidious thing, I believe there is a common denominator – glyphosate.’

In my time as a farming journalist I once met a leading scientist from Monsanto. This was back in the 1990s. In those ‘green revolutionary’ days the pesticide companies were the new lords of the land, spreading their largesse to farmers and spray contractors from the biggest, glossiest trade stands at agricultural shows around Britain. At a pesticide ‘seminar’ I asked the Monsanto scientist how he could be sure Roundup was safe, given that this molecule was capable of turning a lush, flower-filled pasture into a brittle, lifeless scene of utter desolation within the space of a few days.

He stared at me in amazement. Of course it was safe. Glyphosate was the most tested molecule there had ever been in the history of crop protection, he assured me. It was at that moment I realised we were in big trouble. This was missionary zeal, not the proper scepticism of real science.

In my student days in the 1960s, agricultural science was still dominated by the immense legacy of Sir George Stapledon, founder of the Welsh Plant Breeding Station and architect of Britain’s wartime farming policy. In his later years Stapledon became disillusioned with agricultural science. Its increasing specialisation and myopic reductionism when dealing with ecosystems of mind-boggling complexity would, he feared, lead to catastrophe. He called it his ‘law of operative ignorance’.

Glyphosate is one such catastrophe. Currently the world is in denial about it. It’s too big for governments – and least of all for farmers – to even contemplate. It won’t be the last, though. There will be many more such catastrophes until we end our insane chemical war on nature. We have to find a way of re-claiming real farming and real food. Anyone up for joining me in this?

(1) Panzacchi S et al., 2025, Environmental Health 24:36 doi.org/10.1186/s12940-01187-2