GLYPHOSATE - AGRICULTURE
News: Centre’s restriction on the use of glyphosate
What's in the news?
● The
Union Agriculture Ministry has restricted the use of glyphosate, a widely used
herbicide.
● This comes even as the Supreme Court on November 10 is about to take up a plea seeking a ban on all herbicide-tolerant crops, including transgenic hybrid mustard and cotton.
Glyphosate:
● It
is a herbicide used to kill weeds.
○ Weeds
- undesirable plants that compete with crops for nutrients, water and sunlight.
Since weeds basically grow at the expense of crops, farmers remove them
manually or spray herbicides.
● Glyphosate
is a broad-spectrum herbicide that
can control a wide range of weeds, whether broadleaf or grassy.
● It is also non-selective, killing most plants. When applied to their leaves, it inhibits the production of a protein ‘5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS)’. This enzyme, produced only by plants and microorganisms, synthesizes aromatic amino acids that are necessary for their growth.
Use in India:
● There
are nine glyphosate-based formulations containing different concentrations of
the chemical registered for use under the Insecticides Act, 1968.
● These
are approved largely for weed control in
tea gardens and non-crop areas such as railway tracks or playgrounds.
● Farmers
also apply glyphosate on irrigation channels and bunds to clear these of weeds,
making it easier for water to flow and to walk through them.
● Weeds growing on bunds are, moreover, hosts for fungi, such as those causing sheath blight disease in rice.
What exactly has the Government now done?
● The
Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, on October 21, issued a
notification stating that “the use of glyphosate involves health hazards and
risk to human beings and animals”.
● It has, however, not banned and only “restricted” its use. The spraying of glyphosate and its derivatives shall henceforth only be permitted through “pest control operators”.
Why has this been done?
● The
scope for glyphosate is already restricted in normal agricultural crops by
virtue of it being a non-selective herbicide. Glyphosate application has increased only with the advent of genetic
modification (GM) or transgenic technology.
● In
this case, it has involved incorporating a ‘cp4-epsps’ gene, isolated from a
soil bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, into crop plants such as cotton,
maize and soybean. This alien gene codes for a protein that does not allow
glyphosate to bind with the EPSPS enzyme. The said GM crop can, therefore,
“tolerate” the spraying of the herbicide, which then kills only the weeds.
● In 2019 alone, some 81.5 million hectares were planted worldwide with herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops. The global glyphosate market is annually worth $9.3 billion, with over 45 per cent of use on account of GM crops
Health concerns over glyphosate:
● The
World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC),
in March 2015, classified glyphosate as
“probably carcinogenic to humans”.