06
Feb
U.S. Abandons International Collaboration on Existential Health Challenges at Time When Most Needed
(Beyond Pesticides, February 6, 2026) The United States, under Donald Trump’s direction, has withdrawn from 66 international organizations, the most important for health being the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. International organizations committed to the application of the best available science and policy development via consultation and consensus serve as a vital check against rampant personal and industry nest-feathering at the expense of global health. The Trump administration has removed this check while expanding his and his associates’ self-dealing and dismissing the critical interactions of crises such as climate change and synthetic chemicals.
Although Trump announced this move on inauguration day last year, the completion of the process last week puts the stamp of finality on his total abandonment of public health. This in turn threatens the collapse of WHO—and even the U.N.—altogether, which has wide implications for agriculture, particularly pesticide policies, climate action (and inaction), and infectious disease monitoring, including vaccines and pandemic prevention. [See commentary: On Public and Environmental Health and Worldwide Collaboration.]
Other U.N. environmental, health, and agricultural organizations on the list are groups focused on forest degradation, freshwater and oceans, mining, minerals, metals, and sustainable development, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Non-U.N. organizations being ditched include a lead and zinc study group, renewable and energy groups, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Pacific Regional Environment Program.
According to reporting by StatNews and Ars Technica, Trump’s first-term abandonment of WHO was reversed by the Biden administration, but in January 2025, he immediately refused to engage at all with the agency, complaining about dues payments, favoritism of China, and mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The U.S. owes the WHO $278 million in dues for the 2024-2025 budget cycle, stiffing the agency after a promise that the dues would be paid before the U.S. left; NPR reports that Trump has no intention of keeping that promise.
Of the many centers of research and international collaboration maintained by WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) focus most on the hazards of pesticides. Curiously, in April 2025, Trump cut off U.S. funding from FAO but did not withdraw the U.S. from it at that time. Instead, on February 3 this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced an agreement to deliver U.S.-grown foods such as soy and lentils to FAO’s Food for Peace program. These products will undoubtedly be grown by conventional agriculture and laden with pesticide residues.
Trump has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, supporting conventional agriculture and refusing to participate in regulatory infrastructure that health and environmental advocates say should be improved, not destroyed. One problem crying out to be corrected is industry influence.
As Beyond Pesticides has stressed many times, numerous investigations prove that the chemical industry routinely manipulates U.S. chemical policy. For example, Beyond Pesticides analyzed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2018 report on the corruption of science by industry at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
More infamously, Monsanto (now Bayer) has long exerted control of EPA’s glyphosate regulations. Its influence extends beyond U.S. borders as well. In 2015, WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) determined that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans. The IARC glyphosate monograph swiftly triggered a concerted attack on the agency by many corporate groups and pro-industry experts. In addition, an October 2017 investigative report by Reuters journalist Kate Kelland alleged that the monograph had been changed between a draft and the final version to suggest carcinogenicity in rodents when there was none, and that the agency’s process was entirely opaque.
But Monsanto’s eliding of rodent tumor evidence began long before IARC’s monograph. See this investigative report by Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman in In These Times—published a month after Ms. Kelland’s—demonstrating that EPA scientists were convinced, based on rodent tumor studies, of glyphosate’s carcinogenicity during its preparation for registration review in 1985. EPA suppressed this evidence in favor of Monsanto’s interests.
IARC published a defense of its monograph in 2018, noting that Ms. Kelland’s information derived primarily from a review provided to her by Monsanto, whose authors were affiliated with industry consultancies and the Glyphosate Task Force (now the Glyphosate Renewal Group), a group of corporate proponents of glyphosate.
IARC itself has long been criticized by many experts and stakeholders for procedural weaknesses and failure to reveal the names and affiliations of members of its working groups. In the case of the glyphosate working groups, the panel members’ names were widely available, including the name of the chair—Aaron Blair, PhD, MPH, former chief of the National Cancer Institute’s Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch. A 2003 The Lancet editorial pointed out that agency weaknesses worked mostly to the advantage of industry: “[I]ndustry often tried to slip in their unpublished data on the condition that such data remained confidential.” According to The Lancet, in another journal the year before, a former chief of an earlier IARC program reported that of 17 monographs, “nearly a third of about 250 monograph authors were ‘aligned’ to industry, as were eight of 19 chairpersons or vice-chairpersons.”
Yet industry has tried to turn the frustration with monograph panels’ procedural challenges to its own advantage. In 2017, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) launched a “Campaign for Accuracy in Public Health Research” to “correct” the IARC’s monograph program’s “lack of transparency, minimal consideration of the weight of scientific evidence, misapplied conflict of interest policies, and confusing communication of its monograph decisions.” That campaign appears to now be moribund, its URL now leading to the Foundation for Chemistry and Initiatives, itself an ACC entity.
However, attempts to rationalize the debate on glyphosate remain a focus of industrial resentment, and critiques continue. In 2024, a former National Cancer Institute statistician, Robert E. Tarone, called the IARC glyphosate report “weaponized incompetence” at the industry-funded website Genetic Literacy Project and in a post at the Substack Firebreak, which specializes in attacking “the media, foundations and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations].”
Despite these attempts, the power gradient between science and industrial manipulation was dramatically reversed (at least temporarily) by the retraction in 2025 of a Monsanto-funded review published in 2000. The review—a typical means of industrial undermining of actual scientific studies—was published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology by one academically-affiliated author and two industry consultants. It found no human health hazards whatsoever from glyphosate. The journal editor retracted the review—better a quarter-of-a-century late than never—because its authors had misrepresented their contributions and failed to reveal both the study sponsor (Monsanto) and their own conflicts of interest.
U.S. citizens are not completely bereft of connection with efforts to protect international environmental health. The Governors Public Health Alliance (GPHA), comprising governors of 14 states and Guam, warns that Americans will be at far greater risk from disease without WHO membership. The group was formed to buttress public health within the country as Trump dismantles all federal capacity to respond to chronic health effects from environmental exposures, as well as new and emerging infectious diseases, but the GPHA intends to “liaise with the global health community” in the vacuum left by federal abandonment.
Neither international nor national regulatory and scientific agencies are faultless. But claiming that scientists and regulators make decisions behind closed doors while ignoring the conflicts of interest posed by industry behind those doors is viewed by advocates as specious, hypocritical, and deeply harmful. Despite their flaws, Beyond Pesticides does not call for the abolishment of EPA, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Department of Agriculture. The organization calls for improvements and reform because the underlying need for the institutions and their missions is critically important. Trump takes a wrecking ball to international agreements and institutions that play a valuable role, despite their limitations, in a global world where health, biodiversity, and climate challenges are intricately linked across borders and worldwide.
Beyond Pesticides believes WHO and IARC are important forces in fostering human and biosphere health. IARC has made decisions that are more protective than EPA. In addition to glyphosate, EPA last month dismissed IARC’s finding that the herbicide atrazine is probably carcinogenic to humans. As with any governmental or quasi-governmental organization, advocates believe that there is certainly room for criticism of some of WHO’s decisions, including those excessively influenced by regulated industries. At the same time, they affirm WHO’s stated commitment “to working with all countries in pursuit of its core mission and constitutional mandate: the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right for all people.”
Sources:
Tell Congress To Fund International Organizations Critical to Global Health and Governors To Step Up
Beyond Pesticides
https://secure.everyaction.com/SPSdlOVXzUKk0yvhRNRtow2
As Trump Steps Back from Global Health and Environmental Crises, Congress and States Asked To Step Up
Beyond Pesticides, February 2 2025
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2026/02/as-trump-steps-back-from-global-health-and-environment-crises-congress-and-states-asked-to-step-up/
Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States
The White House
January 7, 2026
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-international-organizations-conventions-and-treaties-that-are-contrary-to-the-interests-of-the-united-states/
Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations
Press Statement
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
January 7, 2026
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/01/withdrawal-from-wasteful-ineffective-or-harmful-international-organizations
Trump Sinks to New Low by Announcing US Withdrawal from 66 International Organizations, Including UNFCCC and IPCC
Union of Concerned Scientists
January 8, 2026
https://www.ucs.org/about/news/trump-sinks-new-low-announcing-us-withdrawal-66-international-organizations-including
Governors Warn U.S. Withdrawal from World Health Organization Undermines Public Health Preparedness & Reaffirm Their Commitment to Protecting Health
Governors Public Health Alliance
January 22, 2026
https://www.govsforhealth.org/news/governors-warn-u-s-withdrawal-from-world-health-organization-undermines-public-health-preparedness-reaffirm-their-commitment-to-protecting-heath/
How Monsanto Captured the EPA—And Twisted Science—To Keep Glyphosate on the Market
Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman
In These Times, November 1, 2017
https://inthesetimes.com/article/poisoned-science-epa-food-monsanto-glyphosate-milk-usda
