This is all back to front.

There needs to be some kind of evaluation of products being safe to use before they're wildly used and even sprayed onto food.

For studies to prove that there is harm, there typically needs to be widespread use of it to make it easier to use population studies and certainly long-term studies. Simply relying on "there's no definitive proof that it's harmful to humans when used in a specific way" is naive and a sure-fire way to get large corporations to get away with harming people in the name of profits.

Proving a negative is often impossible. The rate of change in society would fall to near zero.

Given that technological improvements in farming are the only reason we haven't all starved to death and that society continues to grow while the amount of farmland stays the same I oppose anything that might impede our ability to produce food.

Did you know that 80% of the nitrogen in human tissues now originated with the Haber-Bosch process? If we were still waiting around for someone to prove that Haber-Bosch, or Ammonia in general, couldn't possibly harm humans then most humans would have long ago starved to death or never have been born.

Huh?

I don't see why you're focussing on the manufacturing process rather than the products (final product and waste produced) although there are issues with the Haber process (e.g. high energy use and dumping nitrogen which can produce algal blooms).

There is a lot of distance between "we must never use any artificial process that hasn't been tested for x years" and "we must use every means of improving agricultural yields even if it means poisoning our children etc".

I feel like you're being disingenuous and not really evaluating whether poisonous chemicals should require a level of safety testing or not.

Its possible I misunderstood your perspective. To me it seemed that you were saying that agricultural products must be proved to be safe before usage. That would essentially be the opposite of today's requirements which are better stated as proving them not to be harmful. It would of course result in extremely negative outcomes, like starvation and death.

Others in this thread state that this is what they want directly, so i may have inadvertently strawmaned you.

Certainly we can find middle ground between the two approaches, and probably should.

Again, its possible I misunderstood your stance. If so mea culpa.

I'm definitely thinking of the middle ground.

Agricultural products that are not new products can be shown to not be expected to have negative effects (e.g. fertilisers made from food waste). However, there does need to be some evaluation if it's a known toxic product - is it detectable in food produced with it etc.

There's also the problem of companies being short-sighted - they'll happily push a product if they know that it'll make money, but is likely to cause issues further down the line, or in other locations (e.g. run-off polluting waterways).

However, there can be significant environmental harm caused by traditional farming methods too if they're scaled up massively, so I'd say that it's often about trying to find the products that produce the best benefits with the least harm. I'm of the opinion that glyphosate is probably too harmful, but then I'm not a farmer or chemist.

The problem is nature throws far more in the way of hazardous stuff at us than what we add. And there's basically zero acknowledgement of it, let alone any attempt to regulate it.

And the basic reason to think glyphosphates are safe is the attack mechanism doesn't apply to our metabolism and environmental persistence was believed to be very short. (Turns out there are edge cases in the latter.) And it still comes down to how does it compare to the natural risk?