You are an AI assistant.
system
Should the European Union enact a complete ban on glyphosate-based herbicides, given ongoing debates about their carcinogenic potential?
user
The glyphosate controversy is not a technical quarrel about parts-per-billion in soil samples; it is a line of battle in the larger war between agricultural monopoly capital and the rural and urban proletariat.  

1. Who profits?  
Four trans-national firms—Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta-ChemChina, Corteva, BASF—control roughly 70 % of the world’s pesticide market and almost all GM seed that is engineered to be sold with glyphosate.  A ban that leaves the structure of land ownership, seed patents and export-dedicated monoculture untouched simply hands these giants an excuse to raise prices on the “next-generation” herbicides they already have in the pipeline (dicamba, 2,4-D choline, isoxaflutole).  Without expropriation of their intellectual property and productive apparatus, any partial prohibition becomes a marketing strategy for the same monopolies.

2. Who is poisoned?  
The bulk of acute exposure falls on landless labourers, migrant seasonal workers and small peasants who lack protective gear or bargaining power.  The carcinogenic evidence (IARC 2A; non-Hodgkin lymphoma cohorts in the USA, Brazil, France) is strong enough to treat the chemical as a workplace hazard, not merely an environmental talking-point.  Capital externalises the healthcare cost onto the worker and the public health system; a ban that does not simultaneously seize the firms responsible and provide free, comprehensive health monitoring for every current and former spray operator is therefore a half-measure that protects no-one.

3. What would keep weeds down instead?  
Large-scale organic, agro-ecological or “regenerative” models reduce herbicide use 80–100 %, but they also require 20–40 % more labour per hectare and a different land-tenure system (smaller plots, rotations, local seed sovereignty).  EU cereal farms today are mechanised to employ one worker per 150–200 ha; without a plan to re-employ those detached workers under socialist cooperation, a glyphosate ban under the present system simply accelerates bankruptcy of the petty-bourgeois peasant and further concentration of land in the hands of agrifinance funds.

4. Geopolitical food supply.  
The EU is a net importer of soya and maize for livestock feed.  A unilateral ban that does not break with the CAP export/import regime means European livestock capital will import GM soya sprayed with glyphosate in Brazil or Argentina and re-label it “deforestation-free.”  The poison moves overseas; imperialist super-profits remain untouched.  Only a programme that cancels the relevant WTO-TRIPS patents, recognises peasants’ rights to reproduce seed, and redirects feed grain acreage toward direct human consumption under workers’ and consumers’ control can make the ban meaningful.

Conclusion  
A “complete ban on glyphosate” written by the EU Commission, inside the same Common Agricultural Policy and the same WTO rules, is, at best, green-washing that will raise input costs for small farmers and leave workers cancer-stricken in the Global South.  The proletarian position is therefore:  

- Expropriate without compensation the pesticide/seed monopolies, place their laboratories, files and productive capacity under workers’ control.  
- Immediate free health screening and treatment for every person occupationally exposed.  
- Redirect the expropriated research apparatus toward non-toxic, labour-intensive weed control and toward plant breeding that is not tied to herbicide sales.  
- Break with the CAP’s export-oriented livestock model; plan land use to feed people, not to realise ground-rent for big landowners and agrifinance.  

Anything short of that is merely choosing which section of the working class will absorb the poison so that a different section of capital can keep profiting.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should the European Union enact a complete ban on glyphosate-based herbicides, given ongoing debates about their carcinogenic potential?
user