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EU Drops Plans For Safer Pesticides After Pressure From US
An anonymous reader writes: The European Union recently published plans to ban 31 pesticides containing chemicals linked to testicular cancer and male infertility. Those potential regulations have now been dropped after a U.S. business delegation said they would adversely affect trade negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. "Just weeks before the regulations were dropped there had been a barrage of lobbying from big European firms such as Dupont, Bayer and BASF over EDCs. The chemical industry association Cefic warned that the endocrines issue 'could become an issue that impairs the forthcoming EU-US trade negotiations.'"
News like this makes me angry and sad at the same time. The problem is that it's all so complicated that one cannot really understand the matter without spending years of work and research on it, and even then a citizen only gets a subset of all information that was presented.
The chemical industry for sure had arguments and data that supported their case, in same way that the opponents of the pesticides have their arguments and data. It all comes down to spinning information and conveniently omitting some facts (for sure on either side). How anyone, who is not a subject matter expert, can make a decision in this is just beyond me.
Everything that is good for citizens is bad for TTIP and vice versa.
Tech is not only Si-tech, it is Chem-tech and Bio-tech too.
PS If your nerdiness ends by your keyboard, it is your own issue.
No, apparently US business interests are far more important.
I think it's time the rest of the world told the US: we don't give a fuck about your business interests, we care about not putting toxic crap on our foods.
"Aggressive US lobbyists" should be told the STFU or simply shot.
Free trade with the US is "we will ignore any obligations, and we will cram our laws down your throat."
If diplomacy with the US is entirely about advancing US business interests to the detriment of local industry and environment ... the response should be a big giant "fo fuck yourself".
Because the US pushes for trade deals, and then still reuses to ignore them ... things like steel subsidies, massive corn subsidies, and country of origin labeling requirements are things they've repeatedly lost in WTO arbitration.
So why the hell do countries keep putting up with this shit?
Such horseshit. It's time the rest of the world stopped giving a shit about US business interests ... because they never actually coincide with domestic interests.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In the politics section. About how US business interests are over-ruling domestic environmental laws.
If you don't want to read it, don't read the politics section.
The rest of us don't care what you feel should be here or not.
Yes, aggressive lobbying form 'Merican companies like Bayer AG (oddly headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany) and the largest chemical producer in the world, BASF (again, oddly headquartered in Ludwigshafen, Germany).
It's really nice that the political class of the EU can rely on the old "blame the US" trick to convince Europeans to ignore their own indebtedness to European corporate interests. Always shocking to me to see propaganda work so well and so easily.
I respectfully disagree. This is an environmental issue. It is an important one but I do not feel it belongs an a tech news aggregator.
The TPP has serious technology implication in the means of enforcing IP provisions and other areas in addition to environmental issues. The main problem is though no one knows what is in it because the negotiations and text are being done in secret so, mainly, it's a structural issue of how law will be framed.
It's the deal to end all deals, where each country gets to sign away it's sovereignty. So, yeah, it's stuff that matters and completely appropriate to discuss.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yes indeed. Whenever I read a story in the press that asks me to believe that a large group of people are utterly, totally evil and get their rocks off by being malicious psychopaths, I go looking for a reality check.
Digging through apparently endless links arrives us at this quote:
In other words, the EU doesn't actually know these chemicals are dangerous to humans. They have some initial findings from animal studies that should be followed up on, and the chemical industry agrees with that, but heck if every mouse study translated directly to humans we'd all live a thousand years and be totally disease free by now.
So this entire dispute boils down to non-expert bureaucrats wanting to ban some chemicals early without clear evidence that they harm people, based on an abundance of caution, and the chemical industry saying "you should really prove your case first". Not entirely unexpected - EU regulators won't be the people who actually have to find alternatives and then do all the work to transition to them. They'll just issue a regulation, then go home and tell the wife/husband the story of how they fought the Big Chem to save helpless babies. The cost will get passed on the consumer. Skilled manpower and resources will be diverted from other things.
If they're right and the effects reproduce in humans - great, we got a few fewer years in which the chemicals were interfering with fertility. If they're wrong, well, the cost of that would be huge.
I don't see any clearly right or wrong side on this, which probably means the government should stay out of it. Mandate labelling at most, so consumers themselves can decide, at least until the scientific evidence of harm is stronger.
The proposed ban was not based on sound science, just scare tactics from European greenies.
The proposed ban was largely the result of research showing that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have incredible costs to human health. We're not talking some vague feel-good argument about the birds and the bees -- we are talking about lost IQ points and health costs that run into the hundreds of billions:
The new series of reports by 18 of the world’s foremost experts on endocrine science pegs the health costs of exposure to them at between €157bn-€270bn (£113bn-£195bn), or at least 1.23% of the continent’s GDP.
As Ars points out, if even a fraction of the economic loss attributed to these chemicals could be reduced, the net result could easily be far more valuable than even the most wildly optimisitic projections for the value of the TTIP agreement.
Hey mate, spare a sig?