DAILY TRIFECTA: Will Congress Catch Glyphosate's Drift?
If you can't beat 'em, enjoin Congress to change the law
TITLE: Bayer lobbies Congress to help fight lawsuits tying Roundup to cancer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/20/bayer-roundup-farm-bill-lobbying/
EXCERPT: The biotech giant Bayer has lobbied Congress over the past year to advance legislation that could shield the company from billions of dollars in lawsuits, part of a national campaign to defeat claims that its weedkiller Roundup causes cancer in people who use it frequently.
The measure threatens to make it harder for farmers and groundskeepers to argue that they were not fully informed about some health and safety risks posed by the popular herbicide. By erecting new legal barriers to bringing those cases, Bayer seeks to prevent sizable payouts to plaintiffs while sparing itself from a financial crisis.
At the heart of the lobbying push is glyphosate, the active ingredient in certain formulations of Roundup. Some health and environmental authorities contend it is a carcinogen, but the federal government — which previously conducted its own review — does not. Under local laws, thousands of plaintiffs have filed lawsuits targeting Roundup over the past decade, claiming at times they were never warned that regular exposure could cause them to develop debilitating or deadly diseases, such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Throughout the legal wrangling, Bayer has maintained that its popular weedkiller is safe, though it agreed to pay roughly $10 billion in a landmark settlement that concluded thousands of cases in 2020 without any admission of wrongdoing. Yet tens of thousands of additional claims remain unresolved, prompting Bayer to mount a nationwide lobbying campaign in hopes of reducing its risk of future liability.
In Washington, the company recently has set its sights on the sweeping legislation known as the farm bill, which Congress must adopt every five years to sustain federal agriculture and nutrition programs. The approximately 1,000-page House version of the measure contains a single section — drafted with the aid of Bayer — that could halt some lawsuits against Roundup, according to documents viewed by The Washington Post and seven people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The provision builds on an earlier proposal introduced by Reps. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) and Jim Costa (D-Calif.), two members of the House Agriculture Committee. Bayer helped craft that measure, then circulated it among lawmakers to rally support before later pushing the House to add it to the farm bill, the people familiar with the effort said. The House doesn’t yet have a vote scheduled on that package, which expires Sept. 30.
Johnson and Costa each declined through their spokespeople to be interviewed. Johnson said in a statement that his legislation chiefly aims to “prevent a patchwork of state requirements and regulations” around pesticides, and Costa said the measure would “create a more sustainable and secure food supply.”
Jess Christiansen, the head of crop science and sustainability communications at Bayer, acknowledged that the company “worked with a lot of different lawmakers on different parts of the language.”
TITLE: Bayer’s Monsanto Roundup Update
https://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/legal-news/monsanto-facing-lawsuits-over-alleged-roundup-cancer/bayers-monsanto-roundup-update-23917.html
EXCERPT: According to Insurance Journal, some lawmakers have raised concerns that if the lawsuits persist, Bayer could pull Roundup from the U.S. market, which would force famers to rely on alternatives from China. “This is bigger than just those states, and it’s bigger than just Bayer,” Jess Christiansen, head of Bayer’s crop science and sustainability communications told Insurance Journal. “This is really about the crop protection tools that farmers need to secure production.” Although Bayer has not made public any decisions about Roundup’s future, Christiansen intimated that it will “eventually have to do something different if we can’t get some consistency and some path forward around the litigation industry.” The company has been busy campaigning and bankrolling a new coalition of agriculture groups by blasting ads on TV, newspaper, radio and billboards backing protective legislation for pesticide producers. It has targeted Missouri, once HQ of Monsanto, where about 57,000 legal claims are still pending.
If this legislation goes forward, i.e., it favors Bayer, other pesticide companies would also be protected from claims they failed to warn their products could cause cancer if their labels otherwise comply with EPA regulations.
Meanwhile, Bayer says it continues to make progress on a five-point plan it devised to manage and mitigate the risks of Roundup litigation in the U.S. “We settled most of the claims in this litigation and have appropriately provisioned for the remaining claims. Having won trials, the company will continue to try cases based on decades of science and worldwide regulatory assessments that continue to support Roundup’s safety and non-carcinogenicity,” the German multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company reports. And despite its cries for help, Bayer reported “strong growth last year, posting significantly higher sales and earnings...2022 was a very successful year for Bayer despite the challenging environment. We were able to deliver, even during these difficult times.”
And despite setting aside $16 billion to cover Roundup lawsuits, it reported that agricultural sales advanced by 15.6 percent to “a record 25.169 billion euros”, (more than $26,801,250,000 US dollars) with business up in all regions. “Growth was strongest at Herbicides, which saw sales rise in Latin and North America and in Europe/Middle East/Africa in particular thanks to higher prices, as supply for glyphosate-based products [e.g., Roundup] was tight.”
TITLE: Avá-Guarani Indigenous people sieged by glyphosate in Brazil
https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2024/06/11/ava-guarani-indigenous-people-sieged-by-glyphosate-in-brazil
EXCERPT: The contamination of the Avá-Guarani people by glyphosate has become the subject of a complaint against the biochemical company Bayer at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for the harms of the pesticide on the environment and human health.
Along with the Avá-Guarani, three other cases from Latin America joined the complaint made to the National Contact Point (NCP) in Germany, where Bayer's headquarters are located. The agency is responsible for promoting the OECD guidelines for multinational companies, as well as dealing with cases through non-judicial complaint mechanisms.
Glyphosate has been produced by the agrochemical company Monsanto since the 1970s, which was bought by Bayer for US$66 billion in 2018, consolidating the company as the world's largest agrochemical and transgenic group.
Among the organizations that filed the complaint at the end of April are Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, from Argentina; Terra de Direitos, from Brazil; Base Investigaciones Sociales, from Paraguay; Fundación Tierra, from Bolivia; and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, from Germany.
The abovementioned organizations report that “the intensive use of pesticides contaminates rivers, food, animals and Indigenous peoples. Pesticides are used as a chemical weapon to confine Indigenous peoples to a strip of land that gets smaller every day. Dependent on rivers and springs to access water, Indigenous communities report frequent illnesses such as vomiting, headaches, miscarriages, difficulty breathing and others, especially among the elderly and children."
They also highlight “the disappearance of wild species of birds, bees, butterflies, game animals and a decrease in the number of fish and loss of food production capacity due to the contamination of rivers, affecting the food sovereignty of the Avá-Guarani people. There are areas fumigated with pesticides near Indigenous houses or roads."
Jaqueline Andrade, a lawyer at the Brazilian NGO Terra de Direitos, explains that “the communities are surrounded by large farms, with monoculture, mainly transgenic soy with high pesticide usage. As a result, Indigenous communities have been denouncing a process of territorial confinement,” she said of the Avá-Guarani.
"Due to the presence of agribusiness around these communities, the level of contamination of the soil, water and intoxication of Indigenous people – both acute and chronic – is alarming. Also, Indigenous people are denouncing the process of losing biodiversity, subsistence crops such as manioc, corn and beans, because pesticides fall on these plants and they wither, their roots rot and their fruits don’t grow,” she says.
In the lawyer's words, this is also a state of “food insecurity” added to latent health issues. There are “reported cases of itchy skin, fever, vomiting, headaches, which are classic symptoms of acute intoxication, as well as many cases of depression and suicide. According to the studies we've done, pesticides play an important role in contributing to mental illness."
"There are cases of miscarriages precisely because of pesticide drift [according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “is the movement of pesticide dust or droplets through the air at the time of application or soon after”]. Several studies prove that having pesticides in these areas is a risk because they cause endocrine and carcinogenic diseases, which influence breast milk contamination."