Our Perspective on the Bayer Settlement

If you’re just hearing about the Roundup litigation news now, then here’s a little background information to get you up to speed:

• Glyphosate has been declared a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer and is banned in many countries. 

• In August 2018, Monsanto (purchased by German chemical company, Bayer, earlier that year) lost a landmark cancer trial in San Francisco and was ordered to pay $289 million in total damages to former groundskeeper Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) as a result of using Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkiller. This amount was later cut to $78 million.

• Since then, juries in two other glyphosate lawsuits yet again found that Roundup was the cause of the plaintiffs’ cancer: Monsanto was ordered to pay Edwin Hardeman $80 million and Alva and Alberta Pilliod $2 billion. All three plaintiffs are currently living with NHL while going through the appeals process; none of them have yet received a single dollar of their settlement money. 

• Spurred by the momentum of these three victories, over 125,000 cases were filed by people experiencing health problems related to exposure to Roundup, and a class-action lawsuit took form.

Now that you’re almost all caught up, here is the announcement that everyone is talking about today: Bayer has agreed to pay over $10 billion to settle around 95,000 of these individual lawsuits and cover damages from the inevitable future lawsuits over Roundup-caused cancer. This settlement, in conjunction with two other settlements reached this week for damages caused by dicamba and PCBs, has effectively allowed Bayer to wipe their legal slate clean.

What’s our take at Re:wild Your Campus? While it’s great that some of those who have suffered from pesticide exposure might be finally getting financial compensation, we believe that the settled amount is not nearly enough to penalize Bayer, especially when you consider that Bayer bought Monsanto for over six times the total settlement amount. These payouts are a band-aid solution, one that fails to address the dire need for institutional change through policy and increased regulation. Furthermore, Bayer themselves said that these agreements “contain no admission of liability or wrongdoing." Roundup will continue to be sold in the U.S. without any safety warning, and plaintiffs’ attorneys will agree to stop taking new cases or advertising for new clients. This is not the first time Bayer has skirted justice by making big payouts. A couple of years ago, the company dealt $2 billion in settlements for the life-threatening side effects of its birth control products.

Let’s compare this glyphosate settlement to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) of 1998. In the case of tobacco, a sizable portion of the settlement sum went towards public education and public health. One such initiative was creating and funding the National Public Education Foundation, dedicated to reducing youth smoking and preventing diseases associated with smoking. The settlement also dissolved the tobacco industry groups Tobacco Institute, The Center for Indoor Air Research, and The Council for Tobacco Research. In the MSA, the original participating manufacturers agreed to pay a minimum of $206 billion over the first 25 years of the agreement. It also included stronger warning labels and restrictions on advertising.

Bringing it back to glyphosate, you would think a $10 billion settlement and thousands upon thousands of cases would mean the product would be off the market, right? Nope; you can still find Roundup at almost any Home Depot and Lowe’s, and it remains widely used in backyards, schools, and farms across the country. (If you are interested in working to fix this, contact us!) What about a cancer warning? Nope. In fact, a federal judge in California recently blocked the cancer warning label on the Roundup product, maintaining the appalling lack of regulation requiring warnings on carcinogenic agrochemicals. 

For the future class agreement, Bayer says that an independent Class Science Panel composed of expert scientists will decide whether Roundup causes cancer. It is absolutely critical that this panel truly be independent, as plaintiffs’ lawyers have presented evidence of a deceitful coverup of Roundup’s ties to NHL by Monsanto. “The Roundup cancer trials have proven critical to uncovering how this carcinogen has managed to stay on the market for so many decades. Through ghostwritten research, scientific fraud, regulatory manipulation, and aggressive PR campaigns, Monsanto (Bayer) has enjoyed substantial financial profit from sales of their products,” notes Kelly Ryerson, the author of the blog Glyphosate Girl. Additionally, the panel’s findings could dictate the direction of future lawsuits, as Bayer and future plaintiffs must abide by its decision.

So, what can we do? Well, the good news is that a group of independent scientific institutions has recently convened to perform the most comprehensive safety study on glyphosate to date, and early results are not in favor of agrochemical giants like Monsanto. Revelatory studies like these could be the catalysts for justice that Bayer’s settlements fail to provide.

Our youth-led organization has also spread Re:wild Your Campus campaigns all over the country, where students are working to eliminate herbicides from their schools. Started at UC Berkeley in 2017, we now have campaigns at 18 schools in 10 states. We also worked with Dewayne “Lee” Johnson and the Protect Our Keiki Coalition to get all herbicides out of every public school in the state of Hawaii! Here’s a video of Lee’s family trip to Hawaii and the victory.

If you are passionate about eliminating herbicides from your school campus, then please contact us. If you want to get these herbicides out of your residential neighborhoods and parks, then reach out to Beyond Pesticides or Non Toxic Communities. And if you want to support the elimination of pesticides in agriculture, then be sure to connect with the Pesticide Action Network. And in the meantime, all of us can help to eliminate Roundup from every store in the nation; be on the lookout for an action coming out soon about how we are going to do that.