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People who claim the popular weedkiller Roundup caused their cancer will now have a harder time suing its manufacturer after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
The Supreme Court decided last month that Roundup maker Bayer is not responsible for providing a cancer warning label on the product. That’s because the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates U.S. labels, has not found the herbicide to be cancerous.
The ruling overturns a 2019 Missouri court decision, where a jury awarded St. Louis resident John Durnell $1.25 million based on the claim that Roundup caused his blood cancer and the company failed to warn him. And it derails tens of thousands of similar lawsuits against the company.
In a statement, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said the decision provides clarity for Bayer and companies like it.
“This litigation has enormous costs for the company and has impacted public trust,” he said in the statement. “The decision brings overdue justice on an issue that should have been clarified much earlier. It’s time to put it behind us.”
Some agriculture groups also praised the ruling for adding clarity for farmers, including the National Corn Growers Association, the Illinois Soybean Association and the Modern Ag Alliance.
“Farmers rely on clear, consistent pesticide labels and predictable rules to make informed decisions,” said Bryan Severs, Illinois Soybean Board chairman, in a statement. “The Court’s ruling provides clarity on federal pesticide regulation and the role of EPA-approved labels.”
Other groups, like the National Family Farm Coalition and the Illinois Stewardship Alliance say the ruling is a loss for farmers.
Aaron Lehman is the president of the Iowa Farmers Union. He remembers using Roundup to spot-treat weeds on his family’s farm.
“This ruling just makes it so much harder for our farmers to use the court system to defend their health, and it creates a disincentive for the manufacturers to make safe, effective herbicides that farmers need.”
Darin Luneckas is an attorney in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who specializes in personal injury and workers compensation cases, including cases involving Roundup exposure.
“It's going to be a lot different, as far as how these are litigated now, as a result of the Supreme Court decision, because the easiest path forward, the failure to warn type of claim, is now gone,” he said.
He said existing lawsuits have been significantly weakened by this decision and will now have to shift strategies to move forward. For example, they might have to argue that there was a defect in the design of the product or that Bayer failed to properly test the product.
He said changing course will be expensive because attorneys will need to consult a completely different set of experts to prove either of those strategies.
'When does EPA have a duty to act?'
Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup’s agriculture products, is a powerful herbicide that targets plants that compete with crops like corn and soybeans. It quickly became popular in the agriculture industry especially in the late 1990s, when St. Louis company Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer, started producing Roundup Ready corn and soybean seeds. The genetically modified seeds are resistant to glyphosate, meaning farmers can spray the chemical directly on the crops.
Tens of thousands of people have taken Monsanto and Bayer to court claiming the herbicide caused their cancer. Bayer recently proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve many of those cases, which is expected to go in front of a judge next month, Reuters reports.
When Durnell won his case in Missouri, Bayer appealed, arguing that it went against the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, which regulates herbicides like Roundup.
The Supreme Court’s decision last month fell in line with an old precedent from 1803 – if a state law and a federal law are regulating the same thing, but their regulations are different or opposed, then the federal law takes precedence.
Brigit Rollins is a staff attorney with the National Agricultural Law Center, which researches and communicates food and agriculture law. She’s been following the Roundup court cases for nearly a decade.
She said the EPA has a legal duty to make sure chemicals are not misbranded – which includes adding a cancer label without proof of a cancer risk.
“When does EPA have a duty to act?” she said. “And what EPA has maintained is, ‘If we have not determined that this product is carcinogenic, or is likely to be carcinogenic; if we put a cancer warning label on this product, even though we have not found this product to be cancerous, that would be misbranding the pesticide.’”
She said people suing over cancer claims might now have to try appealing directly to the EPA, rather than taking cases to the courts.
“What we might end up seeing is folks petitioning the EPA to revise the labels...which is probably going to be far more time consuming,” she said.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization that focuses on cancer research, has found glyphosate as likely carcinogenic to humans.
Yet Lynelle Phillips, an associate professor of health sciences at the University of Missouri, said it’s extremely difficult to find causal links between Roundup and cancer.
She said the existing research is varied in their approaches and results, which she attributes to the challenges that come with studying exposure to toxic substances and the onset of illness like cancer. She said it could take upwards of 30 years for cancer to show up.
“To properly study this,” she said, “You would have to follow a cohort of people who were exposed to Roundup or glyphosate through time for many decades to really have a solid case for the risk associated with that. That's super expensive, and people don't want to wait that long for answers.”
She said there are still gaps in epidemiologists’ understanding of what causes cancers like non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
“I hope one outcome of this is that more studies are funded so that we can really understand what happened and why have these people suffered,” she said. “Because no one really knows what causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
