German agrochemical company Bayer — last week holding its annual shareholders meeting (AGM) – should not be seeking legal impunity. Nor should any other corporation.
In an open letter to Bayer's shareholders, over 100 organisations from the EU, US and around the world warned them that Bayer is doing precisely that.
The organisations — representing consumers, farmers, academics, human rights and environment defenders — called on the shareholders to question and stop Bayer's lobby campaign in the US, aiming to prevent citizens from going to court when suffering health damage after using Roundup - or any other harmful pesticide.
Bayer's toxic weedkiller Roundup is one of the company's best-selling products, with glyphosate as main ingredient (Bayer is responsible for 40 percent of global glyphosate production).
The golden hen (Monsanto, aka ‘the most hated company in the world’) that Bayer bought in 2018 for €53bn, appeared to lay merely toxic eggs.
Monsanto made huge profits by selling the world the ‘toxic twins revolution in agriculture’ — genetically modified seeds resistant to RoundUp — but which came with huge environmental damage and painful and expensive health consequences.
As a result Bayer has had to deal with 180,000 lawsuits in the US from people suffering from cancer.
Very soon after the deal with Monsanto was closed Bayer shares plunged because Monsanto lost one of the first trials, brought by a US citizen who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma due to his exposure to RoundUp.
An avalanche of litigations followed.
Many US citizen have won multi-million-dollar and even multi-billion-dollar jury verdicts, and tens of thousands have received settlements from Bayer. But many more trials continue. Bayer was forced to agree in 2020 to pay around $11bn [€9.67bn] in an attempt to settle similar claims. Bayer’s purchase of Monsanto was called one of the “worst corporate deals” in recent history by the Wall Street Journal.
Bayer is now responding by lobbying US federal and state authorities to block citizens from taking producers to court when they suffer damage to their health after using their toxic products. As reported in the Washington Post, a draft of the US Farm Bill contained a section, “drafted with the aid of Bayer”, that would prevent state and local authorities from setting their own standards on pesticide safety warnings.
Laws to this end have been introduced in at least eight US states and are being prepared in more than 20 states.
Bayer's CEO Bill Anderson's speech at last week’s AGM, is crystal clear: to stop litigations is a top priority for the pesticide maker.
In doing so, Bayer attempts to scare farmers by announcing that the company might stop producing glyphosate altogether, because the US litigations over their harmful weedkiller is costing them billions in profits.
This is what we call plain and simple "blackmailing" and "scaremongering".
It’s another step in Bayer’s aggressive lobbying for its business interests. As a Wall Street Journal article stated "more than 90 percent of soybean, corn and cotton crops planted in the US are genetically modified to withstand glyphosate-based weedkiller, according to the agriculture department.
American farmers apply almost 300 million pounds of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, to their fields each year."
Seeking corporate impunity like this, is both unethical and irresponsible. The signatories of the open letter are telling the shareholders to demand Bayer to cease promoting the pesticide makers’ legal immunity bills in the US and to refrain from any further lobbying efforts that are damaging to the public interest, and to stop undermining scientific integrity by attacking independent science.
Court documents show that Bayer and Monsanto have long and aggressively fought the science on glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides such as Roundup.
In an open letter of April last year, Bayer called scientific studies brought forward in the litigations against Roundup “junk science”.
This includes studies by scientists working independently of pesticide companies, which were reviewed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and led it to classify glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.
There are indeed alternatives to the use of glyphosate-based herbicides, though it often requires a different approach. Scientists have made it abundantly clear that pesticide reduction is a prerequisite for a more sustainable food production.
Just like Donald Trump got impunity for crimes he was involved in, Bayer is now also seeking legal immunity, by attacking the legal provisions in US law that protect citizens. Bayer’s efforts to change laws that protect people and planet indeed fits with the anti-democratic political wave ruling in Washington.
With Bayer’s CEO Bill Anderson personally attending Trump's inauguration, Bayer seems to be cosying up to the new administration. Anderson was accompanied by Bayer's US CEO Sebastian Guth who posted on social media: "Congratulations to president Trump and vice president Vance on today's inauguration. (..) Ready to do my part in working with the Trump administration to make the impossible possible for all Americans."
Immunity for Bayer from citizens seeking justice and repair should be the impossible here.
Hans van Scharen and Nina Holland are researchers at Corporate Europe Observatory, the NGO monitoring Brussels lobbying.
Hans van Scharen and Nina Holland are researchers at Corporate Europe Observatory, the NGO monitoring Brussels lobbying.