Monsanto, the agrochemical multinational acquired by Bayer in 2018, has suffered another courtroom defeat. Back in 2019 it had already been ordered to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement to a citizen who developed cancer after using Roundup, the controversial glyphosate-based herbicide, for decades. The company had attempted to appeal, but that request was rejected on Friday 14 May by a federal court in San Francisco.

Edwin Hardeman's legal battle against Monsanto

This legal dispute began in 2015 when Californian Edwin Hardeman was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The seventy-year-old, who had used Roundup for a full thirty years to weed his fields, decided the following year to sue Monsanto. In March 2019, in a landmark ruling, a United States federal judge recognised glyphosate as a "substantial factor" in the onset of the disease. The company was then ordered to pay compensation of 80.8 million dollars, later reduced to 25.3 million on procedural grounds. This was not the very first such ruling, but the first handed down by a federal court. Prior to that, Monsanto had already been ordered to compensate Dewayne Johnson, an American gardener who had also fallen ill after prolonged use of glyphosate, but that verdict had been issued by a lower-level court.

Monsanto appealed, but the district court denied its request. A decision now upheld by the San Francisco judges "because the evidence showed that the carcinogenic risk of glyphosate was knowable at the time of Hardeman's exposure". Specifically, the amount of compensation awarded to Hardeman is deemed to be "at the outer limits of constitutional propriety" but nonetheless acceptable.

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Edwin Hardeman's suit was one of many by thousands of people who contend that Monsanto's products caused their cancers. trib.al/uqA4uNN

16 mag 2021 · Apri su X →

More than 13,000 open lawsuits over the health consequences of glyphosate

For years now, an intense debate has been raging over the health risks linked to glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (Iarc) added it as far back as 2015 to the list of substances "probably carcinogenic", while the European Food Safety Authority (Efsa) has described that risk as "unlikely" and the European Chemicals Agency (Echa) considered it did not have sufficient scientific evidence to classify it as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic.

While academic journals publish studies highlighting risks even at low doses, thousands upon thousands of citizens are seeking to assert their rights in court. To be precise, around 13,000 legal actions have been brought in the United States. Bayer, now Monsanto's owner, has announced that it has set aside 11 billion dollars to cover compensation and legal costs, having so far reached settlements in around 90,000 cases.