Monsanto’s German owners insisted yesterday that the weed killer Roundup was “safe”, rejecting a California jury’s decision to order the chemical giant to pay $289mn for failing to warn a dying groundskeeper that the product might cause cancer.
While observers predicted thousands of potential future claims against the company in the wake of Monsanto’s defeat, Bayer – which recently acquired the US giant – said that the California ruling went against scientific evidence.
“On the basis of scientific conclusions, the views of worldwide regulatory authorities and the decades-long practical experience with glyphosate use, Bayer is convinced that glyphosate is safe and does not cause cancer,” the company said in a statement.
It said that other court proceedings with other juries might “arrive at different conclusions” than the jury which ruled in the California lawsuit, the first to accuse glyphosate of causing cancer.
Jurors unanimously found that Monsanto – which vowed to appeal – acted with “malice” and that its weed killers Roundup and the professional grade version RangerPro contributed “substantially” to Dewayne Johnson’s terminal illness.
Jurors awarded $39mn in compensatory and $250mn in punitive damages.
Johnson, diagnosed in 2014 with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – a cancer that affects white blood cells – says that he repeatedly used a professional form of Roundup while working at a school in Benicia, California.
“The cause is way bigger than me. Hopefully this thing will get the attention it needs,” Johnson, 46, said after the verdict.
Johnson wept openly, as did some jurors, when he met with the panel later.
The lawsuit built on 2015 findings by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the UN World Health Organisation (WHO), which classified Roundup’s main ingredient glyphosate as a probable carcinogen, causing the state of California to follow suit.
“We are sympathetic to Mr Johnson and his family,” Monsanto said in a statement, but promised to “continue to vigorously defend this product”.
“The jury got it wrong,” Monsanto vice-president Scott Partridge told reporters.
However, Johnson’s attorney Brent Wisner said the verdict “shows the evidence is overwhelming” that the product poses danger.
“When you are right, it is really easy to win,” he said.
Wisner called the ruling the “tip of the spear” of litigation likely to come.
“The jury sent a message to the Monsanto boardroom that they have to change the way they do business,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr – an environmental lawyer, son of the late US senator and a member of Johnson’s legal team.
“You not only see many people injured, you see the corruption of public officials, the capture of agencies that are supposed to protect us from pollution and the falsification of science,” he said.
Partridge, meanwhile, announced that Monsanto had no intention of settling the slew of similar cases in the legal queue.
“It is the most widely used and most widely studied herbicide in the world,” Partridge said.
Roundup is Monsanto’s leading product.
Johnson’s doctors said he is unlikely to live past 2020.
A former pest control manager for a California county school system, Johnson, 46, applied the weed killer up to 30 times per year.
Wisner in a statement said jurors for the first time had seen internal company documents “proving that Monsanto has known for decades that glyphosate and specifically Roundup could cause cancer”.
He urged Monsanto to “put consumer safety first over profits”.
During the four-week trial, jurors heard testimony by statisticians, doctors, public health researchers and epidemiologists who disagreed on whether glyphosate can cause cancer.
The US Environmental Protection Agency in September 2017 concluded a decades-long assessment of glyphosate risks and found the chemical not likely carcinogenic to humans.
“The Johnson vs Monsanto verdict is a win for all of humanity and all life on earth,” said Zen Honeycutt, founding executive director of non-profit group Mums Across America.
In France, a leading anti-Monsanto campaigner told AFP that the California ruling would strengthen the resolve of those doing battle with the agrochemicals giant across the world.
“I was thinking of them and I said to myself that this ruling will help them and give them lots of hope,” said Paul Francois, author of A farmer against Monsanto (Un paysan contre Monsanto).
France’s minister for ecological transition, Brune Poirson, hailed the “decision”, tweeting that it validated President Emmanuel Macron’s push to ban glyphosate use in three years.
Records unsealed by a federal court lent credence to Johnson’s claims – company e-mails with regulators suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research later attributed to academics.
Founded in 1901 in St Louis, Missouri, Monsanto began producing agrochemicals in the 1940s.
It was acquired by Bayer for more than $62bn in June.
Monsanto launched Roundup in 1976 and soon thereafter began genetically modifying plants, making some resistant to Roundup.