II. Preliminary observations

With my inquiry so defined, in this section I shall briefly touch upon several issues that came to the fore in this controversy that are not directly related to the subject yet featured too prominently to go unmentioned. First, the glyphosate saga was not a conflict between “science” and “democracy”.Footnote ⁴ Unlike other similar controversies (eg genetically modified organisms (GMOs), hormone-treated beef, “chlorinated chicken”, etc.), in this case the two camps were organised around two “scientific” agencies. Both IARC and EFSA are expert, independent and presumably insulated from political influences, yet they came to uncharacteristically bitter disagreement with each other. Second, in my view, this disagreement, unseemly as it was, is not a problem. Elsewhere I have argued that, contrary to the widespread assumption of the universality of science, questions of safety are very much context-dependent, and therefore it is legitimate for different assessors to reach different conclusions on what appears to be the same question.Footnote ⁵ Academics often note that good decision-making does not mean uncontested decision-making,Footnote ⁶ yet this is against the common understanding of the role of “Science”. Characteristically, Bernard Url, the head of EFSA, recently stated, “Good science is the same all over the world. It does not matter where it is produced”.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, in the established paradigm of “science-based” regulation, Science is usually expected to give the (one) right answer. As this case demonstrated, this assumption cannot always hold true, so perhaps it is time for us to abandon it altogether and rethink the science-based framework that is built on it. This argument, however, is for another day.

The other set of problems raised by this controversy are the alleged bias of the agencies and the undue influence of the industry on the regulatory process.Footnote ⁸ For the present purposes it is helpful to distinguish between the two, as only the former is directly relevant. The bias may be an unavoidable feature of the law. Indeed, the Science and Technology Scholarship (STS) and the Critical Legal Studies before them have amply demonstrated how apparently neutral rules systematically work to the advantage of certain interests, and below I shall show how particular provisions of the Plant Protection Products Regulation privilege certain types of evidence at the expense of others. On the other hand, in certain cases, certain stakeholders may be able to exert more influence on the decision-making process, not because of the imperfection of the rules, but despite the conscious effort of the legislator to prevent such influences. In this case, the glyphosate authorisation was allegedly vitiated by the undue influence of its leading producer, Monsanto (now part of Bayer). First, it appeared that large parts of the Renewal Assessment Report (RAR), prepared by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) on which EFSA eventually based its conclusions, were copy–pasted from Monsanto’s application form.Footnote ⁹ Second, in the aftermath of IARCs classification, Monsanto spent some 17 million USD on manufacturing uncertainty, such as by paying “independent” scientists to publish peer-reviewed articles critical of IARC.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, the analysis below should make clear that the conclusions reached by each agency were shaped by the applicable regulations in place, and in my view these structural reasons cannot be changed by BfR cutting corners.Footnote ¹¹ This is not to say that undue influence is not invidious and harmful in other ways and should not be counteracted, but if the analysis below is correct, the reasons for agencies’ conclusions are systemic rather than contingent on the pressures on their staff.

Thus, in the view of the author, both agencies were acting as they are required to by the respective rulebooks and terms of reference, with reasonable levels of integrity, transparency and accountability. It is ironic that the accounts they were giving actually fuelled the controversy, as both agencies provided ample epistemic resources to each other’s critics. Indeed, if the agencies were less open, their conclusions would be much less vulnerable to contestations by the parties unhappy with the outcome.Footnote ¹² This is not to say that such decisions should be “black-boxed” – although black-boxing in some cases may be necessary.Footnote ¹³ While it is sometimes lamented that transparency allows for “politicisation” of the expert assessments, I believe the “politicisation” of the issue in this case would be quite appropriate given the widespread use of the glyphosate and the far-reaching implications of its (non-)authorisation.

Thirdly, in my view, the biggest problem in this authorisation – and of the risk regulation regime of the European Union (EU) – was the narrow framing of the issue, which made the possible carcinogenicity pivotal for the decision and thus led to two of the undesired effects discussed below – undue leverage and proxy war – while obscuring many other factors that may have been even more important for some stakeholders. Indeed, one would expect that as the most popular herbicide in the world, glyphosate would raise quite a few issues in the course of its reauthorisation. Although various environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) had been voicing concerns long before 2015, carcinogenicity was not central even for them. For example, a report by Friends of the Earth (FoE) from 2013 mentioned carcinogenicity only once, along with a number of other serious issues: endocrine disruption, loss of farmland biodiversity, water contamination, soil health, etc.Footnote ¹⁴ At that point in time, FoE was highly concerned about glyphosate, but its demands did not include an outright ban on glyphosate’s use. There are other reasons for the environmentalists to dislike glyphosate not explicitly mentioned in the FoE report. The first that comes to mind is the complementarity between glyphosate and GMOs. The increasing dependence of farmers and food chains on a single corporation, Monsanto, is another. Furthermore, glyphosate allows simplified weed management, which favours the development of large-scale industrial farming; many objections are raised against this – monocultures (“green deserts”) are detrimental to biodiversity, displace small-scale farmers and whole communities, etc. There is also the concern that heavy use of pesticides breeds resistance, so a “safe” herbicide-resistant crop locks farmers, the biotech industry and regulators in a cycle of competition between evolution and innovation. The self-sustaining growth of demand for pesticides is much welcomed by the industry, but progressively increases the effects on the environment well beyond the initial estimates. Next, the risk for particularly vulnerable groups, such as the residents in the vicinity of the sprayed fields, seems to be completely beyond the radar of both researchers and regulators.Footnote ¹⁵ Last but not least, many people would consider the presence of glyphosate in our bodies as an issue of its own: even if it were completely harmless, we may not want it trusted into our bodies without anyone’s consent.Footnote ¹⁶

Readers should be forgiven if they have not heard any of these concerns voiced in the glyphosate reauthorisation debate. This is so because carcinogenicity took up almost all of the space in the public sphere. One does not need to agree with any of the concerns above to accept that they are legitimate factors to be considered before the decision to authorise glyphosate for the next 15 years throughout the continent is taken. Yet, under the existing “science-based” risk regulation paradigm, such considerations are all but excluded from the decision-making process.Footnote ¹⁷ The focus on carcinogenicity took the attention away even from the precious little that could have been taken into account. It is important to emphasise that glyphosate protestors themselves focused on carcinogenicity alone, disregarding any other concerns they may have, because the availability of harmful effects on humans, animals and the environment is the only thing that really matters,Footnote ¹⁸ and, as we shall see, carcinogenicity alone could warrant an outright ban. This framing of risk analysis has been subject to various criticisms as soon as the current paradigm for risk analysis took shape,Footnote ¹⁹ yet it is adhered to throughout the world with remarkable persistence. It has also been noted that this framing, and in particular the arbitrary but nonetheless rigid division between risk assessment and risk management, shifts decision-making power upstream (ie to the earlier stages of the risk analysis), to less accountable and more obscure bodies. What is less well understood is that this system hides discretion, gives unaccounted and arbitrary advantages to some stakeholders and forces everybody into proxy wars. That is, instead of a robust public debate (or contestation) on all of the issues that the various stakeholders are concerned about, they are all forced to cling to a much narrower subset of issues that pass as “scientific”. The glyphosate saga highlighted these three effects – choice, leverage and proxy wars – and in the remainder of this article, I shall take a close look at the respective decisions of IARC and EFSA to demonstrate these effects.

The final preliminary issue to be noted is that this article is meant to be analytical rather than normative. I aim to show the interplay between law and science and will refrain from making any recommendations (except for where I consider possible alternatives only to make a point clearer). I believe that what the case study below demonstrates can be generalised to other instances of regulatory science. On the other hand, as a study of law in action, it is not for the present paper to discuss the reforms of the General Food Law (GFL) and related legislation introduced in 2019Footnote ²⁰ in response to the problems highlighted by the glyphosate authorisation. This would take another case study, possibly of the next glyphosate reauthorisation battle that is now underway.

III. The International Agency for Research on Cancer

IARC is an independent organisation within the framework of the World Health Organisation (WHO) based in Lyon, France. It sets up Working Groups of experts vetted for conflicts of interest who review the available scientific literature and convene for a week-long workshop where they aim to reach conclusions by consensus as to the possible carcinogenic effect of the assessed substance.Footnote ²¹ IARC’s detractors are keen to point out that it has classified as possible carcinogens red meat, night shifts and hairdressing, and that during its entire history it classified as safe (ie “probably not carcinogenic”) only one substance. The latter is rhetorically effective, but it may not show the bias it is meant to, but rather that the substances that were prioritised for assessment were selected wisely. Most importantly, IARC is not a regulator and its decisions are not binding on anyone. Yet as Arcuri notes, it exercises a form of “liquid authority”, and its opinions have significant effects in the legal realm.Footnote ²²

In 2014, a panel within IARC identified glyphosate as a substance of interest and assigned the review to a working group of 17 scientists; the concluding meeting of the latter was held on 3–10 March 2015 and the consensus conclusions were publicly announced on 20 March.Footnote ²³ The verdict was that there is “limited evidence” for carcinogenicity in humans, “sufficient evidence” for carcinogenicity in animals and “strong evidence” for genotoxicity. This warranted classification of glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic for humans”.

Several specific features of IARC should be noted. It takes into consideration only studies that are published after peer review.Footnote ²⁴ In this it is quite different from the regulators, which rely also, and often predominantly, on studies conducted or commissioned by the industry. Such studies are generally not available to IARC.Footnote ²⁵ Second, IARC’s job is hazard identification, which is only the first part of the standard risk assessment.Footnote ²⁶ That is, it establishes the possibility for the substance to cause cancer, and the differences in its classification reflect only how certain the evidence for causal effect is, not the probability of the harm occurring. For the latter, account must also be taken of the dose response and the exposure, and this is done in risk assessment, which is usually conducted by regulatory bodies such as EFSA.Footnote ²⁷ The next key feature of IARC assessments is that it assesses both the active substances and the commercially available compounds, while EFSA considers only the former. As will be seen below, this difference in the subject matter entails differences in the epistemic base (ie the studies that can be taken into account). Certainly, these differences are based on the operational context of IARC and EFSA and, of course, have their legal basis in their foundational legal documents. Their importance cannot be overestimated because it is well known that this whole controversy pivoted on which studies could be taken into account and which could not. It is worth noting that these differences do not reflect apparent political choices: IARC’s selection of studies does not reflect directly any values or bigger issues that may or may not be shared by its members. It merely reflects its foundational documents. Yet even though these rules are meant to ensure the independence and “objectivity” of the assessments, they are by no means neutral to the content thereof. Finally, it bears repetition that IARC’s decisions do not bind anyone and do not have any direct policy consequences. IARC is in the rather unique position of not facing any trade-offs and it does not need to balance economic, social and health concerns.

Notwithstanding this, IARC’s conclusions on glyphosate were far from indisputable. It is hardly surprising that they were challenged by the industry, but they were also disputed by scientific regulators all over the world, and the exchange with EFSA was particularly bitter. One could naively expect that in the Republic of ScienceFootnote ²⁸ expert advisors would be ready to accept each other’s findings and to disagree only when an error is found. Any such disagreement would be temporary, lasting only until it is publicly exposed and the error corrected. Moreover, these expert advisors may have different epistemic policies (eg err on the safe side, delay decision until more data become available, etc.) depending on the known consequences of their decisions.

While IARC takes pride in its transparency, integrity and independence, when the stakes are high, no authority is contestation proof. It came under fire as soon as it came into the limelight with its glyphosate classification,Footnote ²⁹ and it faced allegations of conflicts of interest. The allegation that is relevant for the present article concerned the exclusion of a major study. The Agricultural Health Study (AHS) is a decade-long prospective research study conducted in the USA with nearly 90,000 farmers. An early publication (2005) based on this study found that “glyphosate exposure was not associated with cancer incidence overall”.Footnote ³⁰ Since then, significant amounts of further data were gathered, adding more power to this finding. Allegedly, by 2013, this finding was clear to the researchers conducting the study, but it was not published until 2018. Crucially, one of the researchers, Dr Aaron Blair, was the chair of the IARC Working Group on glyphosate. Yet the new findings were not taken into account by the Working Group as the study was not yet published then, which is a key condition under IARC rules. Dr Blair did not even orally report the findings to his colleagues. While publishing results does take years, and such a huge research project yields many different results competing for researchers’ attention, an investigation by Kate Kelland hints that it might be the case that Dr Blair was in a position to set the priorities and may have delayed this one to prevent its inclusion in the IARC review.Footnote ³¹ On the other hand, this particular publication might have not made any difference, as IARC and EFSA were in agreement that the AHS research revealed no significant association between glyphosate and cancer.Footnote ³² What is interesting for the present research is that if there had been foul play in this case at all, it would have been made possible by a rule meant to increase the transparency of IARC. On the other hand, the trickery could become visible only because this rule was in place – such gaming of the system in other agencies could go on unnoticed. IARC issued several statements describing all of the allegations as misleading or false.Footnote ³³ On the issue regarding Dr Blair, IARC points to evidence that his views remained unaffected by the subsequent publication of the study. While the reader may interpret this (and all other controversial details) in light of their own beliefs and find faults and biases with each side, what is important for the purposes of the present study is that IARC and its Working Group were strictly adhering to their respective rules.

Further to this, IARC’s critics claim that its approach is lacking scientific rigour because its Working Groups include scientists who are reviewing their own research.Footnote ³⁴ For our purposes, it is important to note how integrity rules subtly shape the epistemic base of the final conclusions. It is almost by definition that the experts on an issue have conducted key studies of this issue themselves. Removing them, or their studies, will either deprive the decision-making body of key experts or key pieces of research. In any event, the head of IARC’s monograph programme Kurt Straif claims that this is controlled for by IARC’s rules. They provide that, first, the authors cannot directly evaluate their own studies and, second, the involvement of 20–30 people in the discussions neutralises individual interests.Footnote ³⁵ IARC stands behind its classification, but remains isolated: regulators around the world conducted own assessments and reached opposite conclusions. In the same year, the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) decided that glyphosate is not carcinogenic, and so did BfR conducting preparatory work for EFSA.

IV. European Food Safety Authority

EFSA is one of the stronger agencies in the EU, having been set up to advise the Commission on a wide variety of issues, some of which may be only indirectly related to food and feed (eg bisphenol A). Its job is to conduct risk assessments as advice to the Commission and/or the Member States (ie the national experts in the comitology committees) who are the risk managers. Although its opinions are not binding, the Commission tends to follow them, and it often claims that it is obliged to do so.Footnote ³⁶

Its independence is contested. Perhaps it is the most institutionally independent of all EU agencies, as the 14 members of its Management Board are not representatives of the Member States (which is the case for most newer agencies).Footnote ³⁷ There is one Commission representative and four representatives of consumer or other stakeholder organisations, and the remaining nine are independent experts. But its independence from the market players has generated quite a lot controversies and at least one major scandal. On the one hand, EFSA’s internal rules and procedures for dealing with conflicts of interest have been strengthened progressively (with the latest round of amendments adopted in June 2017) and appear to be quite rigorous. Thus, in a recent review of the GFL, the Commission boasted that “EFSA has one of the most advanced and robust systems ensuring its independence”.Footnote ³⁸ On the other hand, there were a number of examples of revolving doors, one of which made headlines across the world in 2012. It turned out that Diána Bánáti, chair of EFSA’s Management Board, failed to disclose that she was a member of the board of International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Europe, an industry-sponsored association promoting the products EFSA is called upon to assess. She left ILSI after the link was exposed by a Green MEP, but the pressure in the European Parliament continued, so she resigned from EFSA to become … a director of ILSI.Footnote ³⁹ This might be only the tip of the iceberg. In 2017, Corporate Europe Observatory, an NGO, identified that nearly half of the EFSA staff had some links to industry.Footnote ⁴⁰ While this is very worrisome, perhaps it should be taken with a pinch of salt. As Vos notes, “it is at the same time also evident that in practice scientists of good repute who could serve on staff committees of agencies will always be likely to be or have been involved in industry or national affairs”.Footnote ⁴¹ This is similar to the objections raised against IARC’s experts, and although in this case no question of the exclusion of studies arises, once again we are facing integrity rules that determine who can sit on the panels and whose expertise must be excluded. Indeed, expertise is usually accompanied by interest, so it may be difficult to find a microbiologist with expertise on, say, GMOs who has not been involved in the development of one. Even if there is someone who conducted their research in academia only and with no external funding – something increasingly difficult by itself – the nature of their occupation is very likely to prejudice them to favour commercialisation of the product they have spent their lives working on. Similarly, it would be very difficult to find a biologist researching certain animal species who has no strong feelings for the conservation of these species. Thus, the specific disciplinary interest of the experts involved may bias them towards certain decisions even more decisively than any direct links with former employers. As Arcuri suggests, in the latter case, at least in principle experts may be able to act as if they were disinterested by allowing data to carry the day.Footnote ⁴² On the other hand, the values that experts embrace, as a matter of disciplinary commitment, are likely to make a more lasting difference. For example, a microbiologist is likely to value innovation, an agronomist to value increasing crop yield and an environmental expert to value conservation. Depending on their respective representation on agencies’ panels, the scientific conclusions of the latter may be different. Crucially, these disciplinary biases may very well be legitimate, as they embody ethical values that are recognised parts of their respective disciplines. Thus, it may be pointless to search for “an independent expert”: the best that we can do is to make all such biases visible and to seek their diversification on the relevant boards and panels. Rather than insulating such panels, we should be seeking to reconstruct a “view from everywhere” within them.Footnote ⁴³ If the latter were the case, only covert interests would be problematic. Once again, the legal rules that determine who can sit on EFSA’s Management Board and scientific panels affect the type of expertise that is deployed and therefore the content of the conclusions.

The differences between the set of studies that are taken into account by IARC and EFSA were already discussed, but now we need to reconsider them with regards to EFSA’s aims and foundational regulations.Footnote ⁴⁴ Perhaps the most widely discussed difference was that EFSA possesses and must take into account proprietary studies conducted by the applicant. Paradoxically, while this is the biggest source of criticism of EFSA’s decision, this is also its main defence: it might be that as a matter of law these studies ought to have greater weight than the academic literature, and in any event this, is how the Commission interprets the law. As the recent REFIT review of the GFLFootnote ⁴⁵ states:

I have difficulties in finding where the GFL requires EFSA to base its assessment “primarily” on industry studies (“guideline studies”), but systematic interpretation of the Plant Protection Products Regulation suggests that this could be the case for pesticides. Article 8 of the latter provides quite comprehensive requirements for the content of the application dossiers and is clearly focused on the data that are to be gathered by the applicant. Only its very last paragraph says that “scientific peer-reviewed open literature … published within the last 10 years … shall be added by the applicant to the dossier”.Footnote ⁴⁷ While this may be understood to give certain priority to the industry studies to provide the minimum baseline data, it is far from clear that these studies should be given preference when other data are available. On the contrary, in Paraquat,Footnote ⁴⁸ the General Court annulled the authorisation of a herbicide partly because the Commission failed to take into account several third-party studies. Notwithstanding these disagreements, if this is how priorities are understood by the Commission, there is little reason to expect that EFSA’s panels are doing something different. As we shall see below, in the case of glyphosate, five industry studies were “key” and “pivotal” for EFSA’s conclusion.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, it turns out that one particular interpretation of a single article in the relevant law predetermines which scientific study will carry the day. Notice that if the Commission or the Court were to change their views, the weighting of the studies could be different, and the conclusions of the “Science” as represented by EFSA could be entirely different.

V. Entanglement

The detailed scrutiny of the way IARC and EFSA arrived at their conclusions provided in the preceding two sections already suggested that the entanglement between “law” and “science” goes very deep. This section will zoom in on this entanglement. First, it was seen that the very rules that serve to establish the integrity of the expert agencies and to ensure the highest quality of their expertise are not neutral to the substance of the scientific conclusions. Law provides criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of studies, and thus precisely delineates the epistemic basis for the scientific conclusions. Furthermore, there are regulations precisely delimiting the competences of the agencies (ie what issues they may or may not consider) that reflect the operational principles of the broader system each agency is embedded into. There are also the rules defining who can and who cannot sit on the respective panels, letting in certain types of expertise (eg how many microbiologists) and certain types of interests while excluding others (eg do representatives of civil society or the regulated industry get invited for consultations?). There are the guidelines to structure experts’ discretion that prevent them from choosing or weighing conflicting evidence arbitrarily. There are the requirements for the form and content of the guideline studies provided by the applicantFootnote ⁵⁰ and for the final decision issued by the agency. Thus, contrary to the common understanding that expert advisors speak for some universal “Science”, the legal rules to a great extent determine the scientific conclusions. While the scientists and the experts may have little direct interest in or understanding of law and politics, they are fully embedded in the respective legal environment and every step in their work is controlled by the law.Footnote ⁵¹

That “scientific” is entangled with the “legal” and “political” has been robustly demonstrated by decades of research in STS. Yet outside of STS circles, this is usually understood merely to mean that the line between science and law must be either “reinforced” and/or drawn on a different place or at a different level. The glyphosate case stands out because two purely “scientific” agencies have reached opposite conclusions and, by focusing on the legal reasons for reaching these scientific conclusions, the present article hopes to have made clear that law and science are intertwined at every level, “all the way down”. While we can distinguish law and science with a significant intellectual and oftentimes legal effort, they remain entangled pretty much like the fish and the birds in an Escher drawing (Figure 1). While in Figure 1 we can identify both the birds and the fish and tell one from the other, if we try to remove the fish, the birds also disappear (and vice versa). Similarly, if we want to remove the legal from the scientific, the latter would collapse into the opposite of science.Footnote ⁵² Certainly, if we want to remove the science, the law would also lose its subject matter and vanish into thin air.

Figure 1.

© M.C. Escher, Bird Fish (1938).

VI. Leverage and proxy wars

As was mentioned above, initially carcinogenicity was not the main concern for the glyphosate protestors – it used to be just one concern amongst many. Furthermore, before 2015, these protestors insisted only on regular monitoring of its levels in food and the environment, for the adoption of glyphosate reduction programmes and for only certain uses (eg for desiccation) to be prohibited. What made carcinogenicity central and overwhelming in the worldwide public debate was not the evidence that was available at the time, but an obscure provision in the relevant EU legislation.

The Plant Protection Products Regulation seems to suggest that if a pesticide is formally classified as carcinogenic, then it cannot be authorised. While its Article 4 stipulates that EFSA must consider any “immediate or delayed harmful effects”, and this seems to provide for some discretion, according to Annex II, 3.6.3, substances shall be approved only if, on the basis of the appropriate assessment, they are not classified as a category 1A or 1B carcinogen (exceptions apply).Footnote ⁵³

Thus, if glyphosate protestors could prove that glyphosate is carcinogenic, they could both scale up their demands and have a clear pathway to win on them. Annex II, perhaps unwittingly for its drafter, provided the protestors with leverage. Although this was but one issue within the big picture, some evidence for it could push the lever and bring about a planetary change.

Indeed, Annex II, 3.6.3 made it impossible for the producers to live with the claim that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic.Footnote ⁵⁴ They had to do all that they could to undermine IARC’s claim (and did not have to bother very much with addressing any of the other concerns; nor had they to extoll any of its benefits). On the other hand, the environmentalists could seize the opportunity IARC had unexpectedly provided to contest the reauthorisation of glyphosate on this ground alone. And, of course, this particular ground would be perfectly sufficient for the regulators to act or not to act. Thus, all sides in the controversy had to make carcinogenicity a proxy for everything else that was at stake. This was acknowledged by EFSA’s head, Bernhard Url, who complained in an opinion piece in Nature that scientific assessment suffers when “questions about a society’s values are thrust onto scientific agencies rather than elected officials”.Footnote ⁵⁵ He further argued that “when campaigners allege that EFSA did not follow due scientific process when assessing glyphosate … they are really railing against bigger issues: the role of modern agricultural practices and multinational biotech firms in our food supply”. I suspect that this is true, but I part company with Dr Url where he insists that elected officials and regulatory agencies have separate jobs that can and should be insulated from each other.Footnote ⁵⁶ To Dr Url’s possible dismay, the legal and the scientific are entangled “all the way down”, and any attempt to insulate “science” further would inevitably take the form of law, thus increasing rather than curbing the entanglement.

There are two problems with the leverage effect. The first is the elevation of one consideration – important as it is – to the status of a trump card at the expense of all other legitimate considerations. The second is the arbitrariness. Such leverages may make favours to one party or another at random, or they may systematically favour one of the parties: either way is normatively problematic.Footnote ⁵⁷ While every rule may, in certain circumstances, provide leverage to someone and therefore this effect cannot be avoided ex ante, we should do a better job in recognising this effect and reflect on whether it works for our set normative goals or against them.

With the proxy wars, the first problem is that transparency is lost. We, the public, can see only the arguments of each side on the proxy issue, while most of the other relevant factors remain unheard of and often unmentioned. The other problem is substantive: the grounds for the ultimate decision are severely distorted. Indeed, the proxy issue may be less significant than many others that would warrant different outcomes if they had only seen the light of day.Footnote ⁵⁸ Furthermore, the issues cannot cumulate: whoever wins the proxy war wins it all.Footnote ⁵⁹

VII. Choice

One may think that the legal regimentation of scientific assessments at every level reduces or removes the discretion from the system. This impression may well be reinforced by the way rules may be leveraged to force unexpected and momentous outcomes. Yet the careful reader should have noticed that at many points judgment and choice remain in the system. Choice is present at two levels. First, there is always space for the individual experts to interpret results, to trust one study more than another, etc. Second, when their choice is constrained by rules (or institutional context) – such as the preference for published or industry studies – in such cases the choice has already been made at the design level. At both levels the agents may genuinely believe that they are “objective”; they may well be unaware even that there is any other way to do their thing. Both the judgments they make and the rules they follow, by definition, prefer one type of expertise to another, one threshold to another, one scale of measurement to another, and as we have seen above, these are not neutral to the outcome. The glyphosate saga provides three neat examples that illustrate the irredeemable choices at each level.