Key Highlights
- “There has been intensive lobbying by Bayer.
- This has been quite a hard fight.”The now-deleted language was part of a larger legislative effort that critics say is aimed at limiting litigation against pesticide industry leader Bayer, which sells the widely used Roundup herbicides. An industry alliance set up by Bayer has been pushing for both state and federal laws that would make it harder for consumers to sue over pesticide risks to human health and has successfully lobbied for the passing of such laws in Georgia and North Dakota so far. The specific proposed language added to the appropriations bill blocked federal funds from being used to “issue or adopt any guidance or any policy, take any regulatory action, or approve any labeling or change to such labeling” inconsistent with the conclusion of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) human health assessment. Critics said the language would have impeded states and local governments from warning about risks of pesticides even in the face of new scientific findings about health harms if such warnings were not consistent with outdated EPA assessments.
- The EPA itself would not be able to update warnings without finalizing a new assessment, the critics said. And because of the limits on warnings, critics of the rider said, consumers would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to sue pesticide makers for failing to warn them of health risks if the EPA assessments do not support such warnings.“This provision would have handed pesticide manufacturers exactly what they’ve been lobbying for: federal preemption that stops state and local governments from restricting the use of harmful, cancer-causing chemicals, adding health warnings, or holding companies accountable in court when people are harmed,” Pingree said in a statement.
- “It would have meant that only the federal government gets a say – even though we know federal reviews can take years, and are often subject to intense industry pressure.”Pingree tried but failed to overturn the language in a July appropriations committee hearing. Bayer, the key backer of the legislative efforts, has been struggling for years to put an end to thousands of lawsuits filed by people who allege they developed cancer from their use of Roundup and other glyphosate-based weed killers sold by Bayer.
- The company inherited the litigation when it bought Monsanto in 2018 and has paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts but still faces several thousand ongoing lawsuits.
