Monsanto Is Playing Chicken With the US Legal Machine
Photographer: Photo by Wolf von Dewitz/picture alliance via Getty Images.
A ruling coming this year from the US Supreme Court could undermine thousands of lawsuits alleging that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup weedkiller causes cancer. Rather than bank on this ending nearly eight years of damaging litigation, parent Bayer AG is trying to settle those claims now. It’s an expensive but shrewd legal tactic.
Months after Bayer paid $63 billion for Monsanto in 2018, a jury awarded $289 million to a Roundup user suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Bayer has vigorously defended glyphosate’s safety profile, citing numerous scientific studies and regulatory approvals. Nevertheless, the company has faced an avalanche of similar legal cases. It has won some, lost some and settled some. At the last count, there were nearly 70,000 outstanding claimants.