If you watch the 8PM German nightly news (on ARD, Channel One), there's probably been at least twenty-five occasions over the past year when glyphosate made onto one of the topics of the 15-minute newscast.
Glyphosate? It was originally developed by a Swiss chemist in the 1950s....which went nowhere. Around a decade later, it got picked up and developed to some degree, and eventually became this 'bread and butter' broad-spectrum systemic herbicide and crop desiccant for Monsanto.
Use today? It's used to kill annual broadleaf weeds and grasses that grow among crops.
It's internationally used since the early 1970s. You might recognize the name....Roundup.
Here in Germany, it's been deemed a BAD thing over the past decade. I won't go into the volumes of info put out, but the environmental folks and a fair number of political folks have gone to the extent of attempting to rid Glyphosate out of not just Germany....but the EU itself. For the SPD folks, and their Minister of the Environment (Hendricks)....for four years, this has been some crusade-like episode.
Farmers? It's best not to bring up the topic with most farmers. If you were to rid the land of Glyphosate....then what replacement would exist? For the environmental folks, they'd typically grin at this point because you'd be forced to go in the bio direction and see some dramatic cutback in crop production because of weeds and grass.
Are the environmentalists correct in making Glyphosate a hated thing? It's hard to tell. I've seen various presentations and if their data were correct, then yes. But I tend to go back and look at the damage that environmentalists did with DDT in the 1960s, and that research wasn't exactly four-star. So I do kinda wonder if this is slanted research as well. A skeptic? Yeah.
Why bring any of this up?
Well....the EU was going to have a vote this week to dump Glyphosate. The Germans would have shown up....with the normal coalition and voted to dump it. Since the government is in a mess right now, and no real coalition existing....the CDU had the only vote that mattered.
So the CDU voted to keep Glyphosate around, and the EU had the votes to give five more years for Glyphosate to be used on EU farms.
Hostility? Oh man....that brought the Glyphosate topic onto the 8PM news and got them almost three minutes of time while the SPD and Green Party blasted away at the CDU.
They'd like to know if Merkel knew this strategy and the direction of the vote? Merkel says almost nothing on the topic now.
Hurting the coalition process? Well, it'll be raised over and over in the coalition-building process, and I think the top CDU folks will standing there and grinning at the SPD.
The number two of the SPD? Andrea Nahles? She gave a hefty blast at the CDU and got thirty seconds of news time last night to make the point.
For the coalition exercise? I'm guessing that the SPD will demand to consolidate the agricultural ministry and the environmental ministry into one job, and be a SPD person running it. The CDU likely expects this to happen, and will deduct another cabinet post from the SPD list. Just my humble guess.
As for Glyphosate? It'll be around for five more years....at least in the EU. The deadly nature of it? To continue to be debated. The thing is....if you go and remove this option for farmers, then do you see a lesser production rate? From the farmer perspective, they know their current numbers with Glyphosate. If they have to go forward without it....the lesser numbers matter in a serious way.
As for this failed moment of trust between the SPD and CDU? I think the CDU folks can accurately say that by taking this road of denying a coalition chance for weeks and weeks....the SPD was taking a big risk. The payback on this game is the Glyphosate moment.
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