Bayer takes its multi-front battle on pesticide liability to Kansas

By Renee Hickman

CHICAGO, March 10 (Reuters) – Kansas lawmakers were set to take up a bill on Tuesday backed by Bayer that would prevent people from suing pesticide manufacturers for not warning them that their products could cause cancer or other illnesses, as the German company readies a potential $7 billion-plus settlement for thousands of lawsuits over the weedkiller Roundup.

The Kansas legislation is one of about a dozen Bayer-supported bills introduced in state legislatures. It comes just weeks after the company announced a proposed $7.25 billion settlement that would resolve most of approximately 65,000 outstanding lawsuits related to Roundup.

Bayer acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of agrochemical company Monsanto in ​2018, and with it an avalanche of litigation from people who say the product caused them to develop cancer. The company is supporting state and federal legislative efforts to try to head off further Roundup-related litigation, a company spokesperson said. 

So far Bayer has had mixed success. Two bills have passed in North Dakota and Georgia; the outlook for the Kansas bill is uncertain.

Opponents of the Kansas bill distrust the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s assessment that glyphosate pesticides such as Bayer’s Roundup product are not likely to cause cancer, while proponents fear that the widely used pesticide will be made more expensive or pulled from the market, negatively affecting many businesses in the heavily agricultural state.

“I’ll wake up and I’ll have over 400 emails and half of them are saying yes, half of them are saying no,” said Democratic state senator Silas Miller, who sits on the agriculture committee. He had not decided how to vote when he spoke to Reuters. 

Kenny Titus, a Republican senator on the committee, said he was also inundated with emails both for and against the bill, but planned to oppose it.

In an earnings call on March 4, the company reported a fourth-quarter net loss of about 3.76 billion euros ($4.4 billion), attributed in part to the cost of litigation. Bayer is also the defendant in a case before the Supreme Court, which is set to hear arguments in April on whether the company had a duty to warn customers that glyphosate could cause cancer.

In Washington, the House Agriculture Committee on Thursday morning advanced a draft farm bill also supported by Bayer requiring uniform pesticide labels nationwide. If passed, it would bar local governments from requiring chemical companies to put health warnings on the labels of pesticide products that differ from language used by the EPA. 

In February, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order to encourage more domestic production of glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup.

MAHA BLOWBACK

The move has generated blowback from the so-called MAHA coalition, many of whom supported Trump in the 2024 election, and whose advocates are now in the administration – including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

“Just as the large MAHA base begins to consider what to do at midterms, the President issued an Executive Order to expand domestic glyphosate production. The very same carcinogenic pesticide that MAHA cares about most,” MAHA-affiliated pesticide activist Kelly Ryerson wrote on social media after the order was announced. 

Titus, who said many of his goals overlap with the MAHA movement, said that for his Republican colleagues, the split on pesticides among conservatives had put them in “an interesting position.”

A Missouri state court judge last week preliminarily approved Bayer’s proposed $7.25 billion settlement of a nationwide class-action lawsuit brought by people who say Roundup caused them to contract non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The judge said he will hear objections from people affected before deciding in July whether to grant final approval. 

(1 euro = $1.17)

(Reporting by Renee Hickman; Editing by Emily Schmall)