The Monsanto Company has faced hundreds of thousands of lawsuits in alleged cases of harm since its inception as a company in 1901, and the legal challenges show no signs of slowing.
Currently, over 54,000 Roundup and health related cases are pending, with Monsanto having settled over 100,000 of them. Payouts of approximately $11 billion have been calculated to date.
Recently, the approval of one of Monsanto and Bayer’s most controversial chemical concoctions to date, the highly destructive dicamba herbicide, was debated at a federal court in Chicago, with Monsanto coming out on the losing end.
The news sent shockwaves through the chemical and pesticide industries, highlighting the environmentally devastating consequences of dicamba that have been recorded by fruit farmers, including the United States’ biggest peach farm, in recent years.
Monsanto, Syngenta Denied in Federal Court
A United States court reversed a United States governmental decision to approve agricultural weedkillers in the dicamba class sold by Bayer/Monsanto, BASF and Syngenta on February 7 in Chicago according to a report from Reuters.
The ban has ‘fueled uncertainty’ among farmers who spray the dicamba-based herbicides on their genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. The herbicides are known to drift several miles away from their intended targets and damage non-GMO crops that have not been engineered in a laboratory to survive the highly corrosive chemical, which is capable of creating holes in the structure of non-GMO plants.
Dicamba became a hot national news topic in 2016 after dicamba damaged ten thousand peach trees at Bader Farms in Campbell, Missouri, the largest peach farm in the United States at the time.
GMO Growers ‘Fear’ Financial Effects of Dicamba Ruling
The Reuters report stated that “some farm groups and agribusinesses said the ruling, if enforced by the federal government,” risks “hurting farmers financially and reducing options” for fighting ‘superweeds’ that have developed resistance to the usual, less powerful farm chemicals like Roundup and its main constituent glyphosate.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s registrations of dicamba from 2020 have been ‘vacated’ according to the article, affecting Monsanto/Bayer and three other corporations that commonly use them on U.S. farms despite their destructive nature.
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About Nick Meyer
