Bayer’s Roundup Is an Example of Fatally Underestimated Risk
In yet another blow to German chemical giant Bayer, a U.S. court recently dismissed the company’s proposed $2 billion settlement as unconscionable in seeking to prevent future legal claims from cancer victims exposed to Roundup. As a result, the company announced that it will consider the future of Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides for the American retail market. Bayer stock fell 5% following the announcement.
This action is the latest in the company’s sad saga of managing the consequences of its acquisition of Monsanto, the maker of Roundup. Since the purchase of Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has faced 125,000 Roundup lawsuits from customers (30,000 of them still outstanding). Three high profile cases in which individuals who used Roundup on home lawns and gardens, and later fell ill with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, have gone to trial. In each case, Bayer was found liable for selling a product that caused or substantially contributed to the individuals’ cancer, without adequate warning of health risks. The judgments in these 3 cases alone amounted to over $2 billion.
Investors in chemical companies ought to take note of Bayer’s follies. The company has drastically underestimated the material risk to its business of knowingly selling a product that harms human health. The scientific research on a variety of health risks associated with glyphosate has been growing for years, yet the company failed to change course in either providing warnings or reformulating to a less harmful ingredient.
Particularly noteworthy to investors is that, while Bayer is reconsidering Roundup’s future for retail sales, its announcement does not appear to affect its use in agriculture. The company will continue to gamble with the lives of the many people exposed to glyphosate through agricultural applications including farmworkers, fence-line communities, and consumers who eat foods contaminated with glyphosate residues. Over 280 million pounds of glyphosate are applied to crops annually in the U.S. where current regulations do not prevent glyphosate’s use (although glyphosate is banned in other developed nations).
Knowing how much its Roundup blunders have cost the company and its shareholders, this seems like a dangerous road for Bayer to continue to travel.
As You Sow has covered the Roundup issue extensively in previous reports. For more background and analysis, read Roundup Revealed and Pesticides in the Pantry.