Latin America Summary June 21, 2022.
Bayer AG, the well-known German lab that owns Monsanto, has failed its appeal to the US Supreme Court as it seeks to dismiss thousands of lawsuits against it in cancer cases stemming from glyphosate use, according to rulings in first instance, now ratified by the highest court in that country. All information on these issues has been published in recent years in the Monsanto Papers (www.monsantopapers.lavaca.org), revealing how the company insidiously concealed information about the effects of the herbicide. The data is relevant in a country like Argentina, the world’s most smoking per capita (500 million liters per year).
Today, June 21, Reuters International announced through the Lawrence Hurley Report (covering judicial news and was a Pulitzer Prize winner) the court’s rejection of Bayer’s intention to dismiss the legal claims of those who maintain that the report (glyphosate made by Monsanto) causes cancer.
The company intended to avoid lawsuits on the scale that these numbers show:
- Bayer acknowledged that it was able to negotiate 107,000 lawsuits out of a total of 138,000, to prevent them from appearing in court.
- This implies spending more than $11,000 million on victims in 2020, but it remains to be seen what happens to those who do not accept these agreements. Bayer, preemptively, had to shell out an additional $4,500 million to meet these potential demands.
The US Supreme Court ruling rejected the appeal of Bayer (a German lab that bought questionable Monsanto in 2018 for $63,000 million) in the Edwin Hardman case, a news reporter who won one of three California effects trials. Carcinogens of glyphosate in health, manifested mainly in the form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Bayer halted the cataract process following lawsuits through out-of-court settlements of $11 billion in 2020.
The Reuters transcript reads: “Bayer has pinned its hopes for help in the Supreme Court by a conservative majority, which is notoriously favorable to businesses,” and comments that the company expressed “respectful disagreement” with the ruling, which is now final. .
Bayer said it should not be held liable for using EPA-approved herbicides. The Monsanto Papers (not a leak but the documents the company had to present to the US justice system) show how the agency subjected itself to commercial interests (https://monsantopapers.lavaca.org/2018/02/06/oficial-de-la-epa-accusado-de-ayudar-a-monsanto-a-cajonear-un-estudio-sobre-el-risk-cancerigeno- of-products/)
Glyphosate is a herbicide that kills all plants it sprouts, except those genetically modified to resist it. For this reason, the genetically modified business is closely related to the businesses that manufacture these toxins. In addition to the cost they impose on producers, they have proven in the case of Argentina a wrong approach to a problem of so-called “weeds” that has grown from one to nearly 40 in the past twenty years, causing seeding ponds and producers to shed more and more toxins, and with The mixtures are increasingly lethal, to continue killing everything that surrounds their genetically modified productions, with expected effects on people’s health and the environment.
In 2015, glyphosate was already considered a probable carcinogen by the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer, an affiliate of the World Health Organization), though the problem has continued to be questioned by the kind of denial coming from companies and companies associated with these harmful practices, as The emphasis, both on health and from its environmental impacts and mainly air, land and water pollution, which have not been the subject of these lawsuits but generate multiple claims in the cities and towns subject to these practices, have been emphasized in the face of the silence of governments.
This story will continue to be written.
Link to a note mo and lavaca.org which explains what was happening. It was published two years ago, so it suffers from a kind of inflation: the amount of agrochemicals dumped in the country today is much higher, and the number of lawsuits against Bayer Monsanto as well.
Line: a cow
