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.
ByJohnathan Hettinger, Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
Bayer has reached a $400 million settlement with farmers whose crops have been damaged by drift from the herbicide dicamba, the company announced Wednesday. The settlement was announced alongside the company’s $10 billion settlement over claims that the herbicide Roundup causes cancer.
Bayer-owned Monsanto and law firms representing about 100,000 plaintiffs reached a settlement on Wednesday over the alleged cancer-causing effects of the popular herbicide Roundup.
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.
ByCynthia Voelkl/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
Missouri agriculture officials are struggling to address a backlog of complaints from farmers who allege that dicamba-based herbicide drift from another farm has damaged their crops. The Missouri Department of Agriculture has about 600 pending pesticide investigations. Some of them date back to 2016, the year that Bayer-owned Monsanto began selling its dicamba-tolerant soybeans.
ByCynthia Voelkl/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
The new rule allows slaughterhouses to opt in to the New Swine Slaughter Inspection System (inexplicably, NSIS), a “modernized” system that eliminates maximum line speeds and shifts some of the responsibility for removing sick animals from the processing line from USDA inspectors to plant employees.
ByChristopher Walljasper and Ramiro Ferrando/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
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.
ByClaire Hettinger / The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting |
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.
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