The administration of US President Donald Trump has backed German chemical firm Bayer in its bid to get the Supreme Court to shield it from liability over cancer claims related to its Roundup weedkiller, Reuters reported.
Bayer had paid about US$10bn to settle lawsuits linked to its glyphosate-based Roundup, which came with its US$63bn acquisition of agrochemical firm Monsanto in 2018, the 2 December report said.
In a brief filed at the Supreme Court, US Solicitor General D John Sauer said Bayer was correct that federal law governing pesticides pre-empted lawsuits making claims over products under state law, Reuters wrote.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had repeatedly determined that glyphosate was not likely to be carcinogenic in humans and had repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings, Sauer said in the brief.
"Where, as here, EPA has specified the health warnings that should appear on a particular pesticide’s label, a manufacturer should not be left subject” to state labelling regimes each prescribing different requirements, Sauer said.
“The labelling requirements imposed by Missouri’s failure-to-warn law are pre-empted by [the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act,]” the brief stated.
The specific case at issue was a claim from Missouri, where cancer patient John Durnell was awarded US$1.25M, The Hill wrote on 2 December.
The case could have far-reaching impacts, as Monsanto faced 100,000 similar claims, the report said.
Bayer released a statement welcoming the government’s intervention, saying the Supreme Court would now be more likely to hear its case.
“The support of the US government is an important step and good news for US farmers, who need regulatory clarity,” Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said in the statement.
However, the Trump administration’s move could anger its allies in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which had been sceptical of pesticides, The Hill wrote.
While the EPA has said there was insufficient evidence that glyphosate caused illnesses in humans, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had classified the chemical as “probably carcinogenic to humans”, the report said.
