Enlist Duo, an herbicide linked to cancer and widesread ecological damage, will be discontinued the manufacturer, Corteva, confirmed. Because it contains a mix of an active ingredient in Agent Orange and glyphosate, Enlist Duo is said to be one of the most dangerous herbicides still used on food crops.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency continued to approve it, which is annually spread on 4.5m acres of corn, soybeans and genetically engineered cotton fields, but not without a decade of litigation and public pressure campaigns to ban the herbicide’s use
“After over a decade of legal battles, rather than try to rebut our arguments in court, the manufacturer pulled Enlist Duo from the market,” Kristina Sinclair, a staff attorney with the Center for Food Safety (CFS) non-profit and a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said. “Our food system never should have been doused in this toxic cocktail, and now never will be again.”
Agent Orange was a chemical weapon used by the United States military during the Vietnam War “to destroy vegetation” and it caused serious health problems among soldiers and Vietnamese residents, while Glyphosate is a controversial ingredient that has prompted similar litigation because of it’s cancer-causing properties.
A Corteva spokesperson said the company stopped producing Enlist Duo because it now only represented 1 percent of sales.
“This decision is the latest in a series of steps we have taken over the past few years to streamline our portfolio and does not affect the production or availability of Enlist One, which remains a market-leading solution,” the spokesperson said.
While Enlist Duo will no longer be produced, Corteva will continue to use the Agent Orange chemical 2,4-D in their herbicide Enlist One. The World Health Organization categorized the substance as a “possible” carcinogen and it has been “linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, birth defects, respiratory problems, Parkinson’s disease and reproductive harms,” The Guardian reported.
The herbicide is also said to harm a wide range of endangered species, including butterflies, birds, fish, deer, panthers and bats, the CFS wrote in the lawsuit.
A lawsuit asking a judge to “invalidate” its approval is ongoing.
“Whenever the courts find flaws with their approach, there’s never a moment of reflection, there’s never an acknowledgment that their process is faulty, there’s simply a scramble to figure out the quickest workaround to get it reapproved,” Nathan Donley, environmental health director with the Center for Biological Diversity involved in the suits said. “Getting pesticides to market is always the goal for the EPA—and when that’s the driving force of a country’s regulator, there’s only so much you can expect from them.”
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