Hurst is also a freelance writer and former head of the Missouri Farm Bureau a PAC. I wouldn't be surprised if they received funding from Monsanto. That said his claims that the US EPA has found the active ingredient in Round UP safe is correct. Click the link for more dets and the EPA update on litigation.
I continue to use Roundup in my garden, but I do not eat my flowers.
Roundup Lawsuits Pose a Threat to My Missouri Farm
Bayer has already pulled the herbicide from the consumer market based on false cancer claims.
By Blake Hurst, WSJ
Sept. 13, 2024 2:12 pm ET
Roundup, a herbicide developed by Monsanto, has been a blessing to agriculture. Unfortunately, it’s also been a boon to trial lawyers who have made a career and a fortune from Roundup litigation.
The German chemical company Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018. Since then Bayer has paid out well over $11 billion in settlements to plaintiffs who have convinced juries that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands of suits that remain unsettled, or suits in which Bayer is appealing the settlement. My Facebook feed is cluttered with ads soliciting more plaintiffs, which isn’t surprising. In one case a Philadelphia jury awarded plaintiffs $2.25 billion, later reduced to $400 million.
At the time of the Bayer purchase, total annual sales of Roundup were short of $5 billion, and Monsanto profits from Roundup were less than $2 billion. Bayer’s costs are unsustainable, and the company has begun to admit the obvious by pulling Roundup from the consumer market, although the weed killer is still available to farmers. Ironically, this has led lawn-care companies to replace Roundup with chemicals that are harsher, more toxic and more likely to drift and cause damage to surrounding vegetation.
Glyphosate isn’t a carcinogen, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, the European Chemicals Agency, and regulators in Canada, New Zealand, Japan and Australia. Every regulatory body that has studied the compound has found it to be safe—with a single exception. The outlier, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, has examined several hundred other compounds as well, finding only one that isn’t a potential cause of cancer.
We use Roundup on every acre of our corn and soybean farm, and it is an important part of our efforts to protect crops, soil and the environment. The real chance that Roundup will no longer be available to farmers brings back memories of my life before Roundup and genetically-modified seed.
We would walk the three-quarter-mile-long rows of soybeans in the hot Missouri sun, hoes flashing up and down as we attacked weeds with stalks thicker than our arms and leaves taller than our heads. We called it “bean walking.” It was miserable work, lasting for a month or longer, and I hated it with a passion.
Bean walking ended once soybeans were genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup. Soybean fields became a beautiful carpet of green, unmarred by unsightly and yield-robbing weeds. It was a technological change that freed thousands of farmers from weeks of mind-numbing and back-breaking labor every year.
In a few years, we learned that Roundup could be substituted for tillage before crops were planted, which ended the need for several tillage passes. Over the years, no-till farming has improved soil health and saved us millions of tons of soil and thousands of gallons of fuel. Those savings have been repeated on thousands of farms like ours.
The U.S. headquarters of Bayer is in St. Louis. Missouri is an agriculture state, and Republicans have a veto-proof majority in the state Legislature. Efforts to level the legal playing field here have been unsuccessful. Tort-reform legislation in the state has been blocked by “conservative” Republican state senators for years, and this session was no different. Populism demands that conservatives pay lip service to the “little guy,” even if that means ignoring science, economics and common sense.
The bill backed by Bayer in Missouri would protect pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits for failing to put cancer warning on their labels. This seems only fair, since federal regulations regarding pesticide labels forbid the company to do so. It seems useless and maybe harmful to anybody but trial lawyers to warn about the dangers of cancer when they don’t exist. The label bill died in the Missouri Senate before the end of this year’s legislative session in May.
If farmers lose the ability to use a beneficial technology because of one bad scientific report and the efforts of lawyers willing to mislead cancer patients, then no technology is safe. The U.S. economy will continue to suffer from out-of-pocket tort costs that are around 2% of gross domestic product. Who knows what new ideas and products were never tried or developed because of the threat of product liability lawsuits?
A recent decision by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has led to a split in federal appeals courts on the labeling issue. The three-judge panel decision will be reviewed en banc at the Third Circuit, and if the split in the circuit courts remains, the Supreme Court may decide to hear the issue.
The courts may help preserve farmers’ access to Roundup, but that desirable outcome is a long way away. If the Supreme Court doesn’t help, consumers can plan on spending a lot more on food. As for me, I guess I’ll have to sharpen my hoe and head to the bean field.
Mr. Hurst is a Missouri farmer and greenhouse grower.
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