Argentine Beekeepers' Magazine

(Science, Espacio Apícola, January 20th, 2025) The news site of Science magazine, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), published on Saturday, January 18th, that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has requested permission from the appeals court to withdraw the provisional decision for 15 years of registration of paraquat granted in 2021, to carry out new risk analyses of this total herbicide due to the recent lawsuit that the EPA received based on the fact that the herbicide would cause Parkinson's disease. Apparently the volatilization of the product will not be as fast as initially anticipated and would require more than four years.

Following the numerous lawsuits against glyphosate that Monsanto and then Bayer had to face and the emergence of target weeds resistance to this herbicide as well as to glufosinate, the growth in the use of paraquat (Syngenta) was exponential in the United States, according to the article in Science.

Paraquat is also widely used in Argentina (examples in the photo that illustrates this article) where SENASA has registered 134 formulated products based on paraquat, which clearly shows the diffusion of this herbicide in this country. Most of the formulations are classified as "Harmful", coded as "yellow band", and a significantly smaller amount as "blue band" (caution).

According to the article by Meredith Wadman, a member of the editorial staff of Science in Washington, D.C., paraquat is banned in more than 70 countries, including Switzerland and the entire European Union. Therefore, in addition to the impact that its use has on the deterioration or the biodiversity lost that pollinators and in particular our commercial bee farms feed on, the possible implications for the health risk of Parkinson's are even more critical if we consider that paraquat products are also used as desiccants. Not only are they applied as a post-emergence on "weeds" but, due to their capacity to inhibit photosynthesis activity, they are used to accelerate the drying processes of plants by anticipating harvest times, for example by applying it on wheat, in order to advance the coarse grain sowing in regions where two annual crops are produced (fine winter grain and coarse summer grain).

At stake in the agency’s ultimate decision is "whether thousands of people will be unknowingly and needlessly exposed to a neurotoxic weed killer that almost certainly causes Parkinson's disease," says Tim Greenamyre, a neuroscientist and Parkinson’s researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. Greenamyre and other scientists filed an amicus brief supporting plaintiffs who sued EPA in 2021, when it provisionally approved paraquat for another 15 years, according to the editor Wadman (go to the original publication HERE).

In Argentina, this new reveals another obstacle that has not been sufficiently valued in the difficult task of achieving the approval of a free trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, or between the European Union and Argentina, not only because of the practices of deforestation, extractivism and environmental risks of certain agricultural productions but also because of the risk to human health that implies the use of agrochemicals rejected in the EU for their toxicity and that often endanger the market of certain products only suitable for animal nutrition.

For its part, the Argentine Chamber of Fertilizers and Agrochemicals Industry (CIAFA) publishes the list of Maximum Residue Levels permitted by current legislation for paraquat in 38 agricultural products, from Olives (0.05 mg/kg) to Yerba Mate (0.1 mg/kg), through Rice (grain consumption 5 mg/kg), Corn (grain consumption 0.05 mg/kg), Potato (0.2 mg/kg), Tea (0.1 mg/kg), Wheat (grain consumption 0.05 mg/kg). See the 38 listed agricultural products HERE.

Fernando Esteban