On May 1, 2013, the EPA quietly passed a rule which raised limits of the herbicide glyphosate/Roundup on fruits, vegetables, and seeds. Carrots are now allowed to have 25 times the amount of glyphosate as they did in 2013, sweet potatoes 15 times more, mustard and flax seed 400 times more!

Remember this post? USDA Found Pesticides On Over Half Of Food Tested, That Doesn’t Include The Most Widely Used Herbicide Glyphosate (in Monsanto’s Roundup) Which They Refuse To Test For, August 2015.

I noted that EPA recently raised tolerance levels, per Monsanto’s request, and that even if USDA or FDA do start testing, they will now be able to say pesticide residue levels are below tolerances.

Guess what? The FDA is going to start testing. Do you think the levels will be below the new tolerances? What I’ll be looking for is if they will be below the old tolerances:

FDA To Start Testing For Glyphosate In Food, Civil Eats, 17 February 2016

Why don’t they test now? It’s not as if glyphosate is harmless:

The World Health Organization’s cancer experts last year declared the chemical a probable human carcinogen.

It’s not as if the herbicide isn’t in food:

Private companies, academics, and consumer groups have recently launched their own testing and claim to have detected glyphosate residues in breast milk, honey, cereal, wheat flour, soy sauce, infant formula, and other substances.

It’s not as if the government doesn’t want them to:

U.S Government Accountability Office (GAO) rebuked the the agency for failing to do such assessments and for not disclosing that short-coming to the public.

It’s because:

Both [FDA and USDA] routinely skip testing for glyphosate, however, claiming such testing is too expensive and not needed to protect public health.

And:

FDA officials dubbed the issue “sensitive.”

FDA, along with the USDA, test for hundreds of other chemicals. Why is a test for one – the most widely used herbicide in the world – so sensitive?

Pesticides are not harmless. They act as endocrine disruptors – at levels much lower than that linked to cancer. And we’re being bombarded with endocrine disruptors, not just from food, although that’s a big source. People born in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s weren’t exposed to this chemical burden, not as much: “Glyphosate use by U.S. farmers rose from 12.5 million pounds in 1995 to 250 million pounds in 2014, a 20-fold increase.” Substances that disrupt the endorcrine system have been linked to obesity, diabetes, infertility, and birth defects.

Interestingly, ground zero for the neurodegenerative birth defects thought to be linked to the zika virus are occurring in a community in Brazil where a pesticide was added directly to the drinking water supply!

There’s a price to pay for flagrant use of chemicals. A price to public health, a price to the environment.