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Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Sherri Dugger. I co-own Dugger Family Farm in Morristown, Indiana, with my husband, Randy. I serve as the executive director for Women, Food and Agriculture Network and also for Indiana Farmers Union.
I want to start out by telling you a little about me. I like to tell people I was born to eat. As a newborn, I weighed in at a hefty 12.3 pounds. I’m certain that I tumbled into this world hungry. And, for as long as I can remember, I have always loved food. The only trouble is that I—like most Americans—never really thought much about what was on my plate. I never considered how the food was raised, what chemicals it might have in it, or the impact those chemicals would have on my body.
The highly anticipated opening of what would have been a fourth Roundup cancer trial was postponed indefinitely on Friday amid settlement negotiations between Monsanto owner Bayer AG and attorneys representing thousands of people who claim their cancers were caused by exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides.
St. Louis City Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan issued an order stating only “cause continued.” The order came after lead lawyers from the plaintiffs’ firms of New York-based Weitz & Luxenberg and The Miller Firm of Virginia left Hogan’s courtroom unexpectedly shortly before opening statements were due to begin at mid-morning Friday. Sources close to the legal teams initially said opening statements were pushed back until early afternoon to allow for time to see if the plaintiffs’ attorneys and lawyers for Bayer could finalize a resolution that would settle tens of thousands of lawsuits. But by early afternoon the proceedings were called off and it was widely speculated that a deal had been achieved.
Tests by a US government agency on common weedkilling products made with the chemical glyphosate have found some formulations sold to the public to be genotoxic, meaning they are damaging to human DNA. But the government scientists at the National Toxicology Program (NTP) say the danger probably lies with added ingredients in the products – not glyphosate.
It’s been nearly five years since international cancer scientists classified a popular weed-killing chemical as probably carcinogenic, news that triggered an explosion of lawsuits brought by cancer patients who blame the former chemical maker Monsanto Co. for their suffering.
Tens of thousands of U.S. plaintiffs – some lawyers involved in the litigation say over 100,000 – claim Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and other glyphosate-based weed killers caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, while Monsanto spent years hiding the risks from consumers.
The first three trials went badly for Monsanto and its German owner Bayer AG as outraged juries awarded over $2.3 billion in damages to four plaintiffs. Trial judges lowered the jury awards to a total of roughly $190 million, and all are under appeal.
In Brussels, the European Commission (EC) has just decided not to renew approval of the neonicotinoid pesticide thiacloprid, citing both environmental and health concerns related to use of and exposure to the pesticide. The decision was approved by a majority of European Union (EU) governments last fall, after the EC had made the proposal to them.
Imagine you awake early one morning to hear about the disappearance of 100 million people from North America. That’s right. A hundred million people removed from the continent’s population over a 50-year period. Oh my, you might say over your coffee. How catastrophic. “I live here. And why didn’t anyone notice?”
As reported by U.S. Right to Know last May, court documents showed that a domestic policy advisor at the White House said, ‘We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.’ In a new and unsettling report from the Center for Biological Diversity, we now have confirmation that this promise is being kept.
Anticipation is building around the belief that there could soon be an announcement of at least a partial settlement of U.S. lawsuits pitting thousands of U.S. cancer patients against Monsanto Co. over allegations the company hid the health risks of its Roundup herbicides.
Letting TV cameras into Monsanto’s trial over the safety of Roundup herbicide might put witnesses and employees at risk, the company’s lawyer told a judge. “Monsanto witnesses and lawyers have received threatening calls,” JoAnn Sandifer told a St. Louis judge at a hearing Thursday ahead of a trial set for this month over allegations that the weed killer causes cancer.
Like all the best con artists, Randy Constant was a charmer, hard not to like. Big hearted. Good listener. You’d never have guessed that the father of three, grandfather of five was a liar, cheat and serial philanderer who masterminded one of the biggest and longest-running frauds in the history of American agriculture.
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