Federal officials say they plan to begin testing for residues of the controversial herbicide glyphosate on foods sold in the U.S. for the first time this year, Newsweek reports.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is widely used on American farms, and is the most-used agricultural chemical in the world. It has been labeled “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the United Nations’ International Agency for Research on Cancer, though a European food safety agency has disputed those claims.

The US. Food and Drug Administration said it didn’t test food for glyphosate in the past because the “available methods” would have been “very cost- and labor-intensive to implement.”

“Also, glyphosate levels, if present in genetically engineered corn and soybeans, are likely to be reduced by the processing done to those foods,” FDA press officer Lauren Sucher said.
But she added that the FDA has recently developed “streamlined” methods to test for the chemical.

“The agency is now preparing plans for Fiscal Year 2016 to measure glyphosate in soybeans, corn, milk, and eggs, among other potential foods,” she said.

The FDA’s action comes two years after the U.S. Government Accountability Office chastised the agency for not sufficiently monitoring residues of the chemical on foods.

“FDA does not disclose in its annual monitoring reports that it does not test for several commonly used pesticides with an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established tolerance (the maximum amount of a pesticide residue that is allowed to remain on or in a food) — including glyphosate, the most used agricultural pesticide,” the GAO said in a report.

A study published this month in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe calculated that U.S. farm workers have sprayed 1.8 million tons of glyphosate since 1974. Globally, 9.4 million tons of the chemical have been sprayed onto fields — nearly half a pound of Roundup on every cultivated acre of land in the world — making it the most widely used agricultural chemical ever.