When news broke that a majority of MEPs on the environment committee of the European Parliament had voted to scrap safety checks, labelling and liability for new GMOs, the lobby group WePlanet were jubilant, declaring it a “Huge Win!” that showed “we can beat the anti-science lobby if we stand together and get organised”. And WePlanet were in no doubt about the critical role played in this triumph for deregulation by their Open Letter, signed by 35 Nobel laureates, “calling for Europe not to listen to populist misinformation and ignorance... It is critical that the voices of these eminent scientists have been heard today.” But the molecular geneticist Professor Michael Antoniou has pointed out that WePlanet’s Open Letter – despite the star power of the Nobel laureate and celebrity author signatories attached to it – is completely “devoid of scientific substance”. It’s also dishonest. And that is not surprising, given the nature of the lobbyists that orchestrated the whole affair. GMWatch

 

 

Bayer AG’s Monsanto unit was ordered by a Pennsylvania jury to pay more than $2.2 billion to a former Roundup user who blamed his cancer on the weedkiller in the largest verdict so far in five years of litigation over the herbicide. Jurors in state court in Philadelphia Friday awarded John McKivison $250 million to compensate for his losses and $2 billion in punitive damages over his claims that years of using Roundup at work and at home caused his cancer. The 49-year-old was exposed to Roundup when he worked as a landscaper, according to evidence in the case. Monsanto has won 10 of 16 Roundup trials recently, but the cases it has lost include a $1.5 billion verdict in Missouri handed down in November to three ex-users of the herbicide. Shares of Bayer fell almost 3% before the jury announced its verdict Friday after Bank of America analysts downgraded the company to underperform from neutral because of an overhang created by the Roundup litigation. Bloomberg Law

 

 

A recently certified class action lawsuit is seeking at least $1.2 billion from multinational company Bayer on behalf of Canadians who claim to have been harmed while using Roundup weedkiller products. The Canadian case comes as the controversial ingredient glyphosate was taken out of household Roundup products in the US this month. “We took this action exclusively to help manage litigation risk in the US and not because of any product safety concerns,” a Bayer email statement reads. “The vast majority of claims in the US have come from residential lawn and garden users, so this action largely eliminates the primary source of future claims.” Global News

 

 

Environmental groups, EU lawmakers and citizen activists are launching separate legal challenges against the European Commission's controversial decision last year to renew its authorisation for the weedkiller glyphosate for another decade. The actions, which include requests for an internal review by the Commission and potential appeals to the Court of Justice of the EU, seek to overturn the reauthorization and raise concerns about the herbicide's potential health and environmental risks. The environmental group Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN Europe), leading a coalition of five other NGOs, filed a request for an internal review, arguing that the Commission's safety assessment was "not objective, transparent or scientifically sound." In a similar vein, the French NGO Secrets Toxiques and Green lawmakers in the European Parliament have launched a legal challenge alleging that the safety assessment failed to properly consider glyphosate's long-term effects on human health due to missing data. The German environmental NGO Aurelia Foundation has also launched legal action, focusing specifically on the potential risks of glyphosate to biodiversity, including on bee populations and soil health. Politico

 

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