Ordering a study on the controversial herbicide, the French agency demanded that the International Cancer Research Center collaborate with industry, which the latter refused.
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Glyphosate is the bane of regulatory agencies. In March 2018, the government seized the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES) to set up and finance a series of studies likely to settle the controversy over the carcinogenicity of the herbicide. The first part of this work was entrusted to a consortium of public laboratories, which withdrew in mid-July. The second was attributed to the International Cancer Research Center (IARC), but it too has just informed ANSES that it is giving up.
The French pesticide gendarme announced it in early December with a singular discretion, by adding to one of its press releases , dated July 23, a brief two-line footnote. “In October 2020, can we read there, IARC informed ANSES of its decision to withdraw its study program on the toxicity of glyphosate in order to refocus on new research priorities.” A version that differs significantly from that of the IARC.
Conflicts of interest
In June, the revelation of internal conflicts of interest in the procedure for awarding research funds had already created the trouble. Several researchers who had been chosen by ANSES to establish the specifications for the studies to be carried out had indeed applied and their laboratory had won the tender. The specifications had been validated by a group of experts from ANSES in which one of the winning researchers also sat. A situation denounced to the National Assembly by the deputies Delphine Batho (Generation ecology, Deux-Sèvres) and Loïc Prud’homme (La France insoumise, Gironde). Faced with the controversy, the consortium appointed by ANSES had given up, in mid-July, to conduct the studies in question.
This time, it is ANSES’s demands on the IARC that led to a disagreement on the involvement of industrialists in the project, and ultimately to its withdrawal. “Originally, the IARC responded to a call for tenders from ANSES to study the potential mechanisms of action of glyphosate on the development of cancer”, explains the UN agency based in Lyon. , and responsible for leading cancer research at the global level.
The goal of the project proposed by IARC was “to provide quality data on the epigenetic mechanisms of action of glyphosate linked to development of cancer “. According to the UN agency, “this project as a whole was not selected for funding by ANSES, which decided to finance only the part devoted to the genotoxic effect [DNA toxicity] of glyphosate”.
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