This Glyphosate, Time for Stewardship audio podcast is a roughly equivalent repeat of a June 17, 2025 presentation to NZ Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) officials.
PDF copy of PowerPoint slides: Glyphosate, Time for Stewardship presentation.
This PSGRNZ presentation briefly summarises decades of failure by the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZEPA) to undertake comprehensive evidence-based risk assessment (NZEPA). The presentation also catalogues the stepping aside from responsible monitoring, and non-availability of scientific research to assess the levels of exposures and risk to both agricultural and urban communities.
The Time for Stewardship presentation traverses the long-standing ‘shell game’ where old industry studies get locked in as key endpoints that inform acceptable daily intake (ADI) levels, which directly informs permissible levels on animal feed and human food.
At the same time there is a double movement, where governments fail to update themselves on the increasing evidence of risk in the scientific literature. When it comes to glyphosate, scientists now demonstrate myriad pathways of toxicity, and can show that glyphosate causes harm from cellular level to organ toxicity.
This long term governance failure, includes the deliberate exclusion of glyphosate from dietary studies (MPI - infants and children diet studies), the failure to conduct environmental monitoring in soil, sediment and humans (ESR, MPI, DoC), failure to address (inter-agency) occupational risk patterns from herbicide including glyphosate use (Ministry of Health, ACC), and the failure to establish long term basic research to both evaluate the weight of evidence, identify how harm might be driven by repeated occupational exposures and long-term dietary exposures, and support farmer shifts away from intensive chemical agriculture (MBIE’s focus on innovation removes the policy imperative for basic research into drivers of human and environmental harm).
The constant barriers to evidence-based engagement on glyphosate’s risk, the reluctance of New Zealand government agencies to engage with communities, to demand research to fill in informational and evidence gaps and/or recognised the growing weight of evidence in the literature, has meant that agencies have persistently - and very effectively - downplayed the real risks of glyphosate's toxicity over decades, and then failed to appropriately regulate the substance.
Government agencies have shirked in their duties - playing up the industry line - but this is the chemical industry lobby-line, and without a Whole of Government approach for any pivot away from glyphosate dependence, farmers and growers would be left hanging. But the real winners, for a long time, have been the chemical industry lobbies.
What does ‘best practice’ mean if New Zealand scientists and farmers/growers/DoC sprayers and contractors can’t broadly collaborate over the long term to identify strategies and shift away from using persistent, toxic and bioaccumulative (PBT) chemicals, because the government not only doesn’t provide research pathways to understand PBT risk, and doesn’t support farmers/growers to shift to reduced reliance on PBT chemicals?
Industry-sector groups or CRI’s can try to step in, or reflect best practice from countries with greater oversight. But because MBIE’s funding policy has ignored the weight of the problem at scale, there’s little capacity to conduct local trials, for example, with a status quo, best practice IPM and organic (pick your crop/pasture) research project to identify management for local conditions over the longer term.
Of course, weed resistance and the buildup of toxic chemicals (and heavy metals) from repeated spraying, produces harm over years.
Public-good, long-term basic research and support infrastructure for farmers/growers is virtually non-existent. There are no long-term research pathways, or government officials with detailed knowledge of best practice low-chemical IPM. In the past 3 decades, not only has the funding whittled away and disappeared, but extension services for IPM have been withdrawn. Such research and services would provide resources to support farmers to transition away from PBT chemicals with a minimal disruption to farm income.
The absent monitoring and science means that recommendations will lean towards chemical industry recommendations, or shorter-term pragmatism - because the broader integrative pest management (IPM) tool-kit doesn’t exist or is viewed as too difficult or not applicable to local conditions (because no-one is funding that research over the long term and feeding back to industry sectors).
NZ government agencies have been asleep at the wheel in failing to provide a basis for best practice that reflects global evidence in IPM management without exposing soils and workers to PBT chemicals.
Of course - when the back story is rarely discussed, farmers are ‘the baddies’!
A DECADE OF LOST OPPORTUNITIES
Perhaps the previous iteration of the NZEPA, ERMA, risk assessed glyphosate, but the NZEPA have never risk assessed glyphosate, and instead conduct re-evaluations, based around industry data supplied primarily by the industry applicants.
The IARC decision came out in 2015, it is now 2025. The NZEPA swiftly contracted an industry-study-based cancer review which was internally peer reviewed, and criticised by prominent public health scientists. The scientists demanded that:
‘the NZEPA report quotes heavily from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) report, which is itself markedly flawed, and like the NZEPA report, relies heavily on industry-funded and industry-manipulated reviews. Given the scientific flaws in both reports we urge that: the NZEPA report be withdrawn; the NZEPA respond to the concerns raised and for a reassessment to be conducted; and clearer process and better understanding of science be used to inform any future review of hazardous substances in New Zealand.’
The NZEPA then promptly ignored the evidence that came out in global court trials (such as the Pilliod trial) on the PBT potential of glyphosate, including the evidence that glyphosate caused cancer in farmers and sprayers. Monsanto knew that farmers/sprayers were far more exposed, were faced with higher risks, than they had disclosed to regulatory agencies.
NZEPA continued not to convene a subcommittee to assess whether there was any new information. Following a request from the Environmental Law Initiative (ELI), the NZEPA convened a subcommittee in 2023 and decided there was no new information.
In this past week ELI have been in court challenging, and seeking judicial review of the NZEPA decision that there was no new evidence on the toxicity.
To be clear, we are not asking for a ban.
This is about ensuring that the EPA has a full understanding of the impacts of glyphosate on human health, our environment, and our unique biodiversity, so it can make an informed decisions about how glyphosate and glyphosate-based substances are regulated here in Aotearoa.
NZ has a $54 billion export economy but no long-term basic science research to support farmer/grower transition away from the inevitable pesticide treadmill.
Unfortunately, the general public do not realise the extent to which the government has stepped away from stewardship duties.
New Zealand has an excellent opportunity to reverse this decline and support farmers and farming families.
Real Stewardship that supports farmers and growers, the general public and export markets is only possible with a whole of government response - including testing and monitoring, basic research and regulation.
The Glyphosate, Time for Stewardship video can be watched on YouTube:
The information (including citations) which underpin this video/audio presentation can be found in these links:
In May 2025, PSGRNZ sent in a submission to New Zealand's Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) Discussion Paper No: 2025/01: Proposals to Amend the New Zealand Food Notice: Maximum Residue Levels for Agricultural Compounds. New Zealand Food Safety Discussion Paper No: 2025/01. Ministry for Primary Industries.
Due to the relatively short time for feedback, PSGRNZ's focus was on glyphosate. Our concerns revolved around NZ's more lax general use patterns, that increase exposures to the general population, and government agencies hand's off approach to the stewardship of glyphosate for decades.
REFERENCES
Mazuryk J, Klepacka K, Kutner W, Sharma PS. Glyphosate: Hepatotoxicity, Nephrotoxicity, Hemotoxicity, Carcinogenicity, and Clinical Cases of Endocrine, Reproductive, Cardiovascular, and Pulmonary System Intoxication. ACS Pharmacol Transl Sci. 2024 Apr 8;7(5):1205-1236. doi: 10.1021/acsptsci.4c00046. PMID: 38751624; PMCID: PMC11092036.
Panzacchi, S., Tibaldi, E., De Angelis, L. et al. Carcinogenic effects of long-term exposure from prenatal life to glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides in Sprague–Dawley rats. Environ Health 24, 36 (2025). Doi: 10.1186/s12940-025-01187-2
