The EU has recently committed itself to spending €1 trillion over the next 10 years as part of a Green New Deal and devoted 30% of the €2 trillion corona recovery package to climate change measures as a last attempt of leadership to avert a global catastrophic climate crisis. With the climate crisis and environmental pollution causing one-in-eight deaths in the EU, such a firm commitment is welcome.  Components of a Green New Deal, once instituted, hold promise for global adoption in a transition towards a sustainable economy. In this context, it would be also wise to explore the potential of unprecedented regulatory reforms, capable of generating transformative change. Policy measures that account for the full environmental, health, and social costs of products would disrupt current market dominance and allow flourishing for actors committed in their business practices to the Sustainable Development Goals, for instance.

European Journal of Risk Regulation has a new Special Issue on the Symposium on the Science and Politics of Glyphosate that addresses key questions for re-imagining sustainable agriculture and for shaping a much-needed process of transformative change in risk regulation. Glyphosate, with its history briefly narrated in the Introduction, is the most used pesticide in history and the poster child for the normalization of the widespread pesticide use in contemporary industrial agriculture. From 2015 onwards, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified the substance as “probable carcinogen” for humans and found sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals, glyphosate has grabbed the world’s attention. Since then, Bayer (which acquired Monsanto, the main producer of glyphosate) has been brought to courts in the US, and with judgments of billions of dollars to compensate for farmer’s deaths using the glyphosate admixture Roundup, settled in June 2020 to pay more than 10 billions to staunch the over 120,000 suits in California courts alone. At the same time in Europe, citizens have opposed the reauthorization of glyphosate, with an European Citizen Initiative, and serious accusations have been made that Monsanto has illegally influenced regulators to decide in favor of glyphosate. In recent years, many of the political and juridical issues surrounding the sustainable future of food and agricultural practices have been encapsulated in the struggle over glyphosate regulation.

In investigating the interplay between risk regulators, industry, science and the public surrounding the most used pesticide in history, the contributions in this Special Issue clarify how ‘the controversies underpinning the glyphosate saga are related to different questions: if it is important to understand when science is right or wrong, it is equally important to ask how conclusions of rightness and wrongness can be reached in the first place’, as lucidly noted by Prof. Sheila Jasanoff during the keynote lecture of the Symposium. In many respects, the debates about glyphosate have become a proxy for broader societal decisions regarding the future of food, the role of industry in making their own regulations, independence of science from corporate influence, and moving from highly centralized industrial agrochemical models to decentralized, local, multi-scale, sustainable agriculture. This Special Issue sets the ambitious goal to stage the conversation about and beyond glyphosate so that as a polity we can re-think our risk regulation system in line with the aspiration of the European Green Deal.

Read the full Special Issue without charge until October 15.

Prof. Dr. Alessandra Arcuri is Full Professor of Inclusive Global Law and Governance at the Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Yogi Hale Hendlin is an assistant professor in the Erasmus School of Philosophy and core faculty with the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative at Erasmus University Rotterdam, as well as a research associate in the Environmental Health Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, working on the Chemical Industry Documents and Fossil Fuel Industry Documents.