This essay is part of a series on environmental health.
Glyphosate just sounds like nasty stuff. It’s the main active ingredient in the common weedkiller Roundup, and the natural-health influencers focused on toxic chemicals invading our food and bodies routinely denounce it as a people-killer.
President Trump’s health secretary and Make America Healthy Again leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has condemned it as a poison fueling a disease crisis. Mr. Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, wrote on X that it’s driving a “slow-motion extinction event,” begging her followers: “For the love of God never buy Roundup.” In May, the administration’s initial MAHA report on childhood disease linked glyphosate to “a range of possible health effects,” from cancer to ominous “metabolic disturbances.”
But the administration’s follow-up strategic plan in September didn’t mention glyphosate. It didn’t propose any tighter regulations of any agricultural chemicals. Now many MAHA activists believe that Mr. Kennedy has abandoned his principles to appease Mr. Trump’s agricultural donors, and that the Roundup crisis will only get worse.
They’re right: Farm interests are driving Mr. Trump’s farm policies. But they’re also wrong: There is no Roundup crisis.
This debate is what happens when politics, vibes and hysteria drown out science, facts and data. There’s no weighing of benefits versus costs, much less any subtler distinction between hazards and risks. Instead we have pseudoscientific MAHA opposition to anything “chemical” or “unnatural” and agribusiness lobbying to protect agribusiness profits. Pesticides are the latest culture-war battleground where the combatants choose between for and against, as if distinctions don’t exist between better and worse.
The MAHA movement’s war on glyphosate is part of a broader war on modern farming — not only herbicides and other pesticides but synthetic fertilizers, genetic engineering and factory feedlots. It reflects a fantasy of agricultural purity where less intensive food production can heal the land and reverse climate change, even though less intensive farms that make less food per acre need more acres and more deforestation to make the same amount of food. Many liberals repulsed by Mr. Kennedy’s unscientific bias against vaccines and Tylenol share his unscientific bias against agri-chemicals, genetically modified organisms and industrial agriculture.