For years, Bayer and the biotech giant it purchased, Monsanto, have faced allegations that glyphosate, the active ingredient in its popular herbicide Roundup, causes cancer.
The saga has resulted in over 100,000 lawsuits, billions of dollars in settlement funds, a U.S. Supreme Court case and several actions by the Trump administration.
But amidst the flurry of legal activity, few have stopped to ask a fundamental question: Why are we spraying so much glyphosate in the first place?
The answer, in many cases, is animal agriculture. In the U.S., a significant amount of applied glyphosate is used to grow crops to feed farm animals, not humans. While President Donald Trump has defended glyphosate as crucial to maintaining food security, that’s an overly broad characterization.
In truth, glyphosate has largely made meat production cheaper, as fewer weeds lower the cost of feed production for livestock. Some studies have found glyphosate also reduces greenhouse gas emissions from feed crops by enabling no-till agriculture.
In June, the Supreme Court issued a major ruling in favor of Monsanto regarding glyphosate. A Missouri gardener who’d been using Roundup for about two decades developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and sued Monsanto for not including a cancer risk warning label on its Roundup products, arguing that it breaks a state failure-to-warn law.
The lower court ordered the company to pay him over a million dollars in damages, but the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, citing the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).
Under FIFRA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has final authority, superseding states, over what pesticide product labels are required to say.
Because the EPA had already ruled that glyphosate isn’t a carcinogen and therefore doesn’t require a cancer warning, the Supreme Court overturned the state court’s determination that Monsanto erred by not including such a warning on Roundup sold in Missouri.
Hellbound and Down 