Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/glyphosate/)
The pesticides glyphosate and dicamba, both in products produced by Bayer (formerly Monsanto) have made headlines in the past year as lawsuits mount against the company for damages from these products.
Last month Bayer AG offered up its latest Goldilocks offer to settle potential future lawsuits from plaintiffs claiming Roundup herbicide gave them cancer. Bayer is hoping the deal will be judged “just right” by Northern District of California judge Vince Chhabria who after poking through Bayer's first bowl of porridge decided it too hot if not downright unlikely to pass constitutional muster.
A pre-trial hearing on the merits of Bayer's settlement conditions is being held later this week. Presiding district judge Vince Chhabria – who's handling the class action lawsuit – has all but slam-dunked Bayer back to the drawing board.
When it comes to recent federal court rulings on Bayer AG core herbicides glyphosate and dicamba Bayer is now 0-for-4. Most recently – this past February to be exact – a Missouri federal jury awarded $15 million in comensatory damanges and $250 million in punitive danages to the largest peach farm in Missouri, which successfully argued Bayer's dicamba herbicide drifted from neighboring fields causing extensive damage on 1,000 acres of peach orchards. Bayer and co-defendant BASF are challenging the verdict in appellate court and how that turns out is a coin-flip. But with more than a hundred other dicamba drift cases waiting in the wings, Bayer finds itself in a difficult position.
A number of those dicamba related cases are seeking class action status before U.S District Court Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. which ultimately could represent not hundreds but thousands of farmers – both row crop and specialty crop. If that is not enough Bayer has lost three consecutive cases defending Roundup and its active chemical glyphosate. Bayer acquired the glyphosate headache when it purchased Roundup manufacturer Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion. Since then it's been nothing but trouble.
Seeing the handwriting on the federal court wall Bayer is doing its best to plug the lawsuit deluge by attempting to hammer out a settlement proposal with current and potential future litigants. Several pending trials have been postponed in recent weeks as information trickles out of Bayer central that it's working on a global settlement worrth rougly $10 billion dollars.
Five years ago, the owner of Missouri’s largest peach farm started noticing damage to his orchard. A year later, Bader Farms estimated a loss of more than 30,000 trees.A lawsuit filed by the farm in 2016 alleges Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, and herbicide maker BASF Corp. are to blame because the weed killer drifted from other fields. Both companies deny the allegations.
“The egg business has undergone massive changes in the last 45 years. Once predominantly represented by such small family farms, it began to shift heavily toward industrialization and more vertically integrated systems, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center (AGMRC). Where once a flock of 400 laying hens was the norm, industrial flocks today can top 5 million hens.”
General Mills has outlined a new company approach to curbing pesticide residues in the grain used to produce its cereal and other products.
Farmers have been using the weed killer glyphosate – a key ingredient of the product Roundup – at soaring levels even as glyphosate has become increasingly less effective and as health concerns and lawsuits mount.
A California jury made an unprecedented $2.055 billion ruling in favor of a married couple who claimed a pesticide made by agrichemical company formerly known as Monsanto caused their cancer. Alva and Alberta Pilliod filed the case on Aug. 14, 2017, against Monsanto alleging the repeated use of the pesticide Roundup and its key ingredient glyphosate since the 1970s caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The Livermore, Calif. couple were awarded $1 billion each in punitive damages and $55,206,000 in compensatory damages, the Associated Press reported.
A new bill , H.R. 1783: Keep Food Safe from Glyphosate Act of 2019, has been introduced to set a tolerance for glyphosate residue on oats, prohibit the use of glyphosate on oats before harvest and require annual testing of the pesticide on foods most likely consumed by infants and children.