Monsantos Roundup herbicide on a store shelf

Monsanto, U.S. Farm Groups Sue California Over Glyphosate Warnings

Monsanto Co and U.S. farm groups sued California on Wednesday to stop the state from requiring cancer warnings on products containing the widely used weed killer glyphosate, which the company sells to farmers to apply to its genetically engineered crops.

November 15, 2017 | Source: Reuters | by Tom Polansek

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Monsanto Co and U.S. farm groups sued California on Wednesday to stop the state from requiring cancer warnings on products containing the widely used weed killer glyphosate, which the company sells to farmers to apply to its genetically engineered crops.

The government of the most populous U.S. state added glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, to its list of cancer-causing chemicals in July and will require that products containing glyphosate carry warnings by July 2018.

California acted after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded in 2015 that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic”.

California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), which is named in the lawsuit, said it generally does not comment on pending litigation.

The controversy is an additional headache for Monsanto as it faces a crisis around a new version of an herbicide based on another chemical known as dicamba that was linked to widespread U.S. crop damage this summer. The company, which is being acquired by Bayer AG for $63.5 billion, developed the product as a replacement for glyphosate following an increase of weeds resistant to the chemical.

Monsanto has already suffered damage to its investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in glyphosate products since California added the chemical to its list of products known to cause cancer, according to the lawsuit.

U.S. farmers apply glyphosate to fields to kill weeds before planting corn fed to livestock, spray it on genetically engineered soybeans while they are growing and sometimes on wheat before it is harvested. The crops are then shipped across the country in food products.

“Everything that we grow is probably going to have to be labeled,” said Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Certain goods that meet a standard for containing low amounts of glyphosate, known as a No Significant Risk Level (NSRL), may be able to be sold without warnings under a proposal California is considering, said Sam Delson, a state spokesman.