Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on a topic close to my heart and close to my origins in farming. The topic is the use of glyphosate, one of the most effective, safe and useful chemicals that, I think it's safe to say, was ever available to the farming community. Why is it such an important chemical for the Australian agricultural sector? It's important for many reasons, but one of the key reasons is that glyphosate has actually been one of the key tools in allowing the use of minimum-till technology in the Australian broadacre farming environment.

Minimum-till agriculture has a few impacts. Basically, it offers farmers the chance to farm broadacre landscapes in a much less invasive way. Glyphosates allow weeds to be controlled on the surface without having to be ploughed. What does this do? It means that nutrients and water are retained in the soil. Ploughing, obviously, can release nutrients, increase run-off and increase evaporation from the soil. Minimum-till farming has been shown to reduce erosion in landscapes by up to 90 per cent. Obviously, that's great for the farmer, as it preserves those nutrients on the farm and preserves water in the soil, but it's also great for the environment. Healthier soils permit healthier crops. Healthier soils permit greater yields. So, to get the same tonnage of grain or the same production of beef or sheepmeat, you need fewer acres. In addition, obviously, there are significant reductions in emissions and in expenses associated with minimum-till farming.

Glyphosate is used to control a very large number of often aggressive or noxious weeds which, if left unchecked, do have the potential to take over landscapes and can be devastating to native flora and fauna. Unfortunately, there is a campaign underway—and we've seen it in the US and, in particular, in Europe—to try and knock glyphosate out of use, to take it out of a farmer's toolkit and to remove what is a very safe and effective chemical from use, particularly in broadacre landscapes. Recently, we saw in a US court case the award of damages of around $300 million to a groundskeeper whose claim centred on a case of terminal non-Hodgkin's lymphoma which he attributed to his use of Roundup at work over many years. Obviously this is a dramatic case and a dramatic finding from a court, but we must always remember that such findings are not based on scientific assessments. Yes, duelling expert witnesses are often part of such cases, but we must recognise that court cases and findings such as this are not based on the science. The case has been seized upon by activists and by the media to shine a light on the use of glyphosate, and that has effectively sidelined the very significant body of scientific literature that says that glyphosate is safe and has been proven to be safe over 30 years of significant use around the world when used as per the instructions on the label. In fact, every science based regulator around the world, including Australia's own APVMA, has approved glyphosate use as safe for humans, animals and the environment when used according to the instructions on the label.

There are over 800 scientific studies on the use of glyphosate. I cannot prove this, but I'm fairly certain it's safe to say that no other agricultural chemical has faced the kind of scrutiny and the kind of scientific assessment that glyphosate has faced and been found to be a safe and effective chemical. The US Agricultural Health Study analysed data from 90,000 farmers. I think we'd all agree that that's a fairly good sample size. It found no link between glyphosate use and the incidence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, regardless of exposure levels. Whilst glyphosate is typically not applied to food crops—for the obvious reason that you don't want to kill the crop if you're going to use it for food production—it is actually safe to do so. In May 2016, the Joint Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and World Health Organization Meeting on Pesticide Residues concluded:

… glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet.

And a scientific adviser to Cancer Council Australia stated:

… residues in food are so low for all chemicals and glyphosate too, that there is no cancer risk.

There is a report that is often cited, particularly by those who are opposed to the use of glyphosate, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is linked to the World Health Organization and which did list glyphosate as a probable carcinogen, along with many other things. I know that this list has been read into Hansard many times and has been in the public domain many times, but it's worth citing it again. Glyphosate is there alongside things like alcohol, red meat, hot beverages, fried food and hairdressing. The lead author of the IARC report also acknowledged that he did not take into account a subsequent literature analysis of all the scientific evidence, which said that glyphosate was safe, and that if he had taken that particular literature review into account the outcome of the listing probably would have been different. This report has been looked at by Australia's own regulator, the APVMA, who concluded:

exposure to glyphosate does not pose a carcinogenic or genotoxic risk to humans

…   …   …   

there are no scientific grounds for placing glyphosate and products containing glyphosate under formal reconsideration

The IARC report has also been assessed by Health Canada, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and New Zealand's Environmental Protection Authority. All of them have found glyphosate to be safe where it continues to be used. Whilst the IARC is a World Health Organization program, there are in fact three other World Health Organization programs on the record stating that glyphosate does not pose a human health or cancer risk. They are the International Programme on Chemical Safety, the Core Assessment Group on Pesticide Residues and the World Health Organization's Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality.

Obviously, if we ban a chemical or move to restrict a chemical as important as Roundup, there will be flow-on effects. I've already talked about the impact of reducing the amount of minimum-till farming in Australia and the negative environmental consequences that would have. There would also have to be substitutions, and those substitutions would almost inevitably have to be chemicals that are less safe and less effective. There is a fallacy floating around that naturally occurring herbicides or pesticides are in some way safer; they are not. In fact, glyphosate is one of the safer chemicals you can use.

Australian farmers are export dependent. We don't have highly protected domestic agriculture markets like Europe, the US and Canada. We need to export our product right around the world and, to do so, we need to be as effective and as efficient as we can be in growing the produce that the world needs. Part of the way to do that is by accessing modern technology, and one of the key tools we have in doing so is glyphosate. I'm sure this will come up again, as the matter has been referred to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee.