Pesticide companies are among the wealthiest corporations in the world.
Take Bayer: The chemical and pharmaceutical corporation made about half of its $50 billion revenue last year from pesticide and seed sales.
These behemoths are not, however, without a weak spot: liability to lawsuits filed by ordinary citizens.
But that could soon change.
Tennessee lawmakers are considering a bill to make pesticide companies immune to certain class action lawsuits. The legislation would effectively block residents from holding companies liable for illnesses caused by pesticide exposure.
Courtesy AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall A farmer sprays a soybean field with pesticides in Granger, Iowa on July 11, 2013.
Similar bills have been introduced in 16 other states this year. Rep. Rusty Grills, R-Newbern, is a farmer and a sponsor of Tennessee’s version of the bill. He says he wants to protect farmers’ use of pesticides.
“This bill is here today to protect what you do…so that you can move forward and make money, make a living and provide a safe food for the world,” Grills said during a recent state House hearing.
But the only thing the bill does is protect pesticide companies from lawsuits by shifting responsibility to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — which has been accused of colluding with pesticide companies in the past to bury scientific evidence.
Here is the full bill, as amended by the state Senate:
“Provides civil action protection for pesticide manufacturers and sellers against failure-to-warn product liability claims if the label has federal approval by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and registered by the Commission of Agriculture. Excludes liability protections if the EPA determines that a manufacturer knowingly withheld, concealed, misrepresented, or destroyed information regarding the human health risks of such pesticides, in order to obtain or maintain the approval of its label.”
The proposed legislation protects all pesticide companies. But Bayer, which absorbed the agrochemical company Monsanto years ago, is at the heart of it.
Monsanto created the world’s most popular pesticide
Monsanto was founded as a chemical company in 1901. The company has produced food additives, like caffeine, industrial chemicals and chemical weapons, including Agent Orange, which is a type of pesticide. (In 1979, Monsanto faced a class action lawsuit filed by veterans of the Vietnam War based on claims that exposure to Agent Orange caused cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects. Monsanto denied and discredited scientific evidence and testimonials. It ended in a small settlement.)
In the 1970s, Monsanto introduced glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup. But there was a problem: it killed essentially all vegetation, including crops. By the late 1990s, Monsanto had engineered a new way to ensure their pesticide stayed in use: genetically modified seeds that tolerate glyphosate.
Today, more than 90% of corn, soy and cotton in the U.S. are grown from genetically altered seeds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Roundup is now the world’s most common pesticide.
Courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture The use of genetically engineered seeds exploded after Monsanto introduced its first “Roundup Ready” seeds in 1996.
While Monsanto’s product — now owned by Bayer — was designed to kill plants, it’s had other consequences for people, animals and other forms of life.
Tennesseans have sued Bayer’s Monsanto
More than 300 Tennessee residents have filed lawsuits against Bayer, according to Danny Ellis, president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. Farmers, landscapers and home gardeners say they got sick from using Roundup.
Another 100 Tennessee residents have filed lawsuits against companies like ChemChina that produced paraquat, a pesticide originally marketed by Chevron. (About 99% of synthetic pesticides are derived from fossil fuels.)
In these cases, the plaintiffs often argue that the defendants — the pesticide companies — are liable for injuries because of their “negligent and willful failure” to provide adequate warnings on the labels of their products.
“This bill takes away your rights when the pesticide label is a lie and it makes you sick or destroys your fields. Bayer knows this. They are betting that you don’t,” Tiffany Carpenter, an attorney from West Tennessee, said during a recent state Senate hearing. Carpenter litigates class action lawsuits like “mass tort” cases — the type of lawsuit workers sickened after the Tennessee Valley Authority’s 2008 coal ash spill used to hold the utility’s contractor accountable.
The law would not directly affect the availability of pesticides for farmers or other users. Bayer, for example, has never formally threatened to withdraw Roundup from the U.S. market, though it replaced glyphosate with other chemicals in consumer products.
Courtesy AP Photo/Haven Daley Roundup is the most widely used pesticide in global agriculture.
Nationally, more than 170,000 claims have been filed in the past decade against Monsanto over its failure to warn consumers about the dangers of glyphosate use. Multiple lawsuits went to trial and ended in settlements. In 2020, Bayer agreed to a more than $10 billion settlement — one of the largest in history — to settle close to 100,000 claims.
But cases are ongoing. Last week, a jury in Georgia ordered Bayer to pay $2 billion after concluding that Roundup caused a man’s cancer.
Monsanto, and subsequently Bayer, has been trying to escape liability since the first cases in 2016. Bayer has argued that it should be shielded from liability because its products have been approved by government regulators. The U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal in 2022 that would have limited the corporation’s liability. Bayer is still seeking a positive ruling from the Supreme Court, according to the company, which also says it is engaging with policymakers at the state level.
Of the 17 states bills this year, Georgia is the only state to pass its bill in both chambers of its state legislature. But the state’s governor has not yet signed the bill into law. Six states have defeated the bills, and 10 states are still considering the legislation.
Experts say Monsanto ‘manipulated’ the science
Pesticides are designed to kill bugs or plants but often kill or harm other life in the process, persisting in the environment and affecting local ecosystems. Glyphosate can trigger biodiversity loss, increase carbon dioxide emissions from wetlands and negatively impact microbial communities in the soil like bacteria and pollinators like honeybees.
In humans and animals, pesticides have been linked to cancers, organ damage, brain disease and reproductive harm. Glyphosate has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a group of blood cancers.
In 2015, the World Health Organization classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic,” which is the category one step lower than “carcinogenic to humans.” A classification in the first group is very difficult — only 120 chemicals, substances or exposure circumstances are considered “carcinogenic to humans.”
Monsanto and later Bayer have repeatedly denied claims that Roundup causes cancer.
Over the years, Monsanto manipulated the scientific literature on glyphosate by “ghostwriting” papers and engaging in other research misconduct, according to some experts.
“The firm’s apparent goal was to manipulate the regulatory process so that it could continue selling a product that the firm’s own research indicated might be dangerous,” in attempts to prevent oversight by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, one academic article states.
Monsanto also asked the court to discount reliable studies during a trial in California to cover up its health effects, according to lawyers involved in the case.
The agrochemical company also seemingly colluded with EPA, according to reporting in The Intercept. For glyphosate, EPA relied on Monsanto’s science for its regulatory decisions and even “buried evidence” linking the pesticide to cancer, according to documents released during litigation. EPA is currently in the process of updating its cancer evaluation of glyphosate following a federal court order.
“The labeling process begins with what is given to [EPA] by Monsanto and Bayer, which has already been found to be false,” Ellis, the trial attorney, said during a state Senate committee hearing last week. “This bill would make it sacrosanct.”
The bill has passed several key committees. It is scheduled to be heard next by the House Judiciary Committee on April 2.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM