More than 250 agriculture groups are asking the Trump administration to “correct” the direction of its Make America Healthy Again goals after releasing a report that criticized the use of common herbicides and food ingredients, according to a letter shared first with POLITICO.
The groups criticized the MAHA Commission’s lack of transparency in creating the report, which was released in May, and claimed that its number of citation errors and “false claims” could have been avoided with better industry input ahead of the release. They also asked the commission to hold a public comment period for all of its future reports and activities, per the letter addressed to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
“The stakes are high going forward,” wrote hundreds of commodity trade groups and federal and state farm organizations. “The unintended consequences of making uninformed decisions for U.S. food production based on misinformation or unproven theories would be sweeping for our nation’s farmers.”
The letter comes after weeks of backlash from the agriculture industry over the MAHA report’s decision to label herbicides glyphosate and atrazine as potential causes of negative health outcomes in the United States. Many groups have argued that the perception that U.S. agricultural processes are unsafe could risk the nation’s food producers’ spot in the international marketplace — and lead to higher food prices.
