The year New Zealand nearly raised its glyphosate limit

While the internet argues about glyphosate in the abstract, the country's actual rules moved twice in 2025 — and almost nobody noticed.

Most of what gets written about glyphosate is timeless in the worst way: the same arguments about the same studies, recycled until everyone has picked a side. What I find more useful is to watch what the rules actually do, because rules are where the argument turns into something that touches your plate. And in 2025, quietly, New Zealand's rules moved — first in one direction, then sharply back the other way.

Here's what happened, and what it does and doesn't change.

The proposal almost nobody saw

In March 2025, New Zealand Food Safety put forward a change to the maximum residue limit — the MRL, the legal ceiling for how much chemical residue a food can carry — for glyphosate on wheat, barley and oats. The proposal was to lift it from 0.1 mg/kg to 10 mg/kg. That's a hundredfold increase, on three of the most everyday grains in the cupboard.

The official rationale was alignment: tidying our limits to match international standards and the realities of trade. But more than 3,100 submissions came back, which is a lot for a technical residue consultation, and the weight of them was not in favour.

The reversal

On 30 October 2025, the regulator changed course. It kept the limit at 0.1 mg/kg for wheat, barley and oats — and went further, restricting how glyphosate can be used on cereals grown for people. Under the decision, the late pre-harvest use — spraying the standing crop to dry it down before harvest — is being restricted, with label changes required, on the basis that the practice is no longer common. It's the use that matters most for residues, because the plant takes the chemical up in its final days and you can't wash it back out. (I've written about how that mechanism plays into the gluten conversation here.)

The reasoning the regulator gave is worth sitting with, because it isn't really a story about regulators. It's a story about contracts. Growers and millers had already been moving away from pre-harvest use under their own supply agreements — buyers wanting low or no residues — to the point where the practice was effectively already on its way out. The rule caught up to where the market had quietly gone.

That's a genuine win, and worth saying plainly. But I read the footnotes the same way I read a label:

• Dried field peas were set at 6 mg/kg, not held at the low limit.
• The restriction covers crops grown for human food, not crops grown for animal feed — and feed is its own large exposure story, the one running through almost every chicken in New Zealand.
• And the bigger question — whether glyphosate itself should be formally reassessed in New Zealand — was being fought out in court at almost exactly the same time.

The court case that barely made the papers

Two weeks before the MRL reversal, on 17 October 2025, the High Court delivered a judgment most people never heard about. The Environmental Law Initiative had taken the Environmental Protection Authority to judicial review, challenging the EPA's 2024 decision that there was no significant new information about glyphosate to justify reopening its assessment.

The High Court sided with the regulator. The court found the EPA had acted lawfully, had wide discretion to decide whether a reassessment was warranted, and was entitled to weigh the studies ELI presented against recent reviews from overseas regulators. ELI's arguments were dismissed.

ELI's position — that New Zealand scrutinises glyphosate less closely than comparable countries, and that a reassessment is overdue — is a contested one, and the court did not endorse it. Notably, ELI wasn't seeking an outright ban; it was asking for the review to be reopened. It initially appealed the ruling, then withdrew the appeal — a withdrawal the EPA publicly welcomed — leaving the judgment to stand. So the door it pushed on is now firmly shut. The argument behind it, about how much scrutiny is enough, is still very much open.

A New Zealand example you can actually hold

If all of that feels abstract, here's where it lands in something familiar: honey.

This isn't campaign speculation — it's in the Ministry for Primary Industries' own monitoring. In a survey across 2015–16, MPI tested roughly 300 honey samples and found glyphosate in 67 of them, about 22%, with five above the residue limit of the day. A follow-up across 2018–19 found residues in 11 of 60 retail mānuka products. The wrinkle is that honey gets checked mainly under MPI's export-focused residues programme, the one that protects market access overseas — not routinely monitored to reassure the people eating it here. More recent independent testing through Hill Laboratories has kept finding traces in jars sold as pure, with the occasional sample landing over the legal limit.

None of that is a scandal on its own. Bees forage kilometres beyond any single farm, so trace residues in a wide-ranging product are almost a given, and the levels are mostly low. But it's a clean illustration of how thoroughly this molecule has settled into the background of even our most iconic-clean foods — and of why what the rules say, and what they actually monitor, are two different questions.

What it means for your plate

I'm not going to re-litigate the gut-health science here — I've gone deep on the microbiome side of glyphosate, and the practical steps for lowering your own exposure, in the bread piece. The short version is that certified organic growing doesn't use glyphosate at all, which remains the cleanest way to step out of the question entirely.

What 2025 actually shows is something I keep coming back to on this site: the rules moved because buyers and growers moved first. The contracts shifted, the practice faded, and the regulation followed. That's not purity and it isn't panic. It's direction — the slow kind, the kind that compounds. The more interesting question was never whether glyphosate vanishes overnight. It's whether we're quietly building a food system that needs less of it over time. This year, in one small corner of it, we did.

Sources

• New Zealand Food Safety / MPI, Glyphosate residue limits to stay at 0.1mg/kg for wheat, barley and oats (30 October 2025)
• Food Safety News, New Zealand scraps plan to increase glyphosate limits (31 October 2025)
• Environmental Law Initiative v EPA, High Court judgment (17 October 2025); ELI appeal subsequently lodged and withdrawn; EPA and Farmers Weekly reporting, 2025
• MPI National Chemical Residues Programme — glyphosate-in-honey surveys, 2015–16 and 2018–19
• No More Glyphosate NZ / Hill Laboratories — independent honey residue testing, 2025 (corroborating, advocacy-commissioned)