Opinion: If Bayer really wanted to stand with farmers, it would stop selling them toxics
For decades, the pesticide Roundup’s key ingredient glyphosate has caused immense harm to farmers and homeowners. Despite the growing evidence bank that links the pesticide to cancer and a host of other illnesses, Bayer, the latest corporate owner of Roundup, has launched a PR blitz to promote the pesticide.
In an article for Environmental Health Sciences, Anna Lappé, Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, Stacy Malkan, Co-Founder of U.S. Right to Know, and Kendra Klein, Deputy Director of Science at Friends of the Earth, expose Bayer’s PR spin and call for the dangerous product to be taken off the market. Read an extract of the article below.
Lee Johnson’s lymphoma lesions made even wearing a cotton shirt painful as he sat in the front of the courtroom on August 7, 2018, for the closing arguments in his lawsuit against the chemical company Bayer for links between his cancer and the company’s most widely sold herbicide, Roundup.
After three days of jury deliberations, Bayer was found guilty of hiding the truth about its products’ health risks to farmers and groundskeepers like Johnson. It was ordered to pay $289 million in damages.
In the wake of that trial and the first wave of additional ones, thousands of pages of internal corporate documents became publicly available, most of them from Monsanto, the original manufacturer of Roundup that Bayer acquired in 2018. The documents clearly show the company had evidence linking Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate, to cancer as far back as 1983. The documents also reveal a multi-million dollar PR effort over years to shape the story of glyphosate and thwart regulation. The use of this cancer-linked chemical has increased in the U.S. more than 10-fold since.
Now, facing billions of dollars in payouts from settlements and trials by farmers and homeowners suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and with the scientific case mounting on Roundup’s risks — including ties to leukemia, kidney and liver disease, preterm birth and neurodevelopmental problems — Bayer has launched a new PR blitz to promote its beleaguered herbicide. A full-page ad in the Washington Post promotes the “safety and benefits” of Roundup. And a recently launched website called Modern Agriculture Alliance calls on communities to “Stand with farmers, not trial lawyers.”
Image: Pesticide protest in Brussels, 2023. Credit: Ekō/flickr, CC by 2.0.
