With the companies nearing completion of their marathon merger process, significant developments are unfolding in lawsuits facing two of Monsanto’s top weedkilling products — and soon to be inherited by Bayer.
In San Francisco on Friday, jurors found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit alleging that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is a carcinogen.
And in Cape Girardeau the week prior, two master complaints were filed grouping crop-damage and anti-trust cases lobbied against dicamba — a hot-selling but controversial weed control technology being turned to as a successor to Roundup in the fight against “superweeds.â€
People are also reading…
The legal developments combine for an eventful backdrop as Monsanto, the Creve Coeur-based agribusiness titan, and Bayer, the German life sciences company, potentially pull to within weeks, or even days, of realizing their $63 billion merger first announced almost two full years ago.
Bayer officials said on June 7 that the company was “approximately two months†away from the point at which integration with Monsanto could officially begin, with the companies held separate until that time. In the interim, Bayer needs to sell off certain parts of its business to competitor, BASF, in order to satisfy conditions of the merger outlined by the U.S. Department of Justice.
That process is ongoing. Bayer and Monsanto officials said that a key round of required divestitures was completed Aug. 1. That day, BASF signaled that the remaining divestment — involving Bayer’s vegetable seeds — could be completed by mid-August.
“These transactions are now completed, except for the vegetable seeds business for which closing is expected in mid-August 2018,†BASF said in .
The glyphosate trial decided Friday in San Francisco’s Superior Court of California pitted Monsanto against Dewayne Johnson, a former pest control manager for a California county school system who has terminal cancer, and who used to apply the company’s glyphosate-based herbicides about 30 times per year. More than 5,000 plaintiffs nationally have echoed claims that Monsanto weedkillers using the chemical caused cancer.
Monsanto said it would appeal the jurors’ decision to have the company pay $289 million in damages.
“We are sympathetic to Mr. Johnson and his family,†said Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s vice president of global strategy, in a statement released after the verdict was announced. “Today’s decision does not change the fact that more than 800 scientific studies and reviews – and conclusions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and regulatory authorities around the world – support the fact that glyphosate does not cause cancer, and did not cause Mr. Johnson’s cancer. We will appeal this decision and continue to vigorously defend this product, which has a 40-year history of safe use and continues to be a vital, effective, and safe tool for farmers and others.â€
But other legal challenges loom for Monsanto — and, soon, Bayer — thanks to class suits surrounding dicamba. Off-target movement of the hard-to-control chemical is blamed for damaging millions of acres of crops and other plants over the last few growing seasons, and some farmers say they have felt pressured to adopt Monsanto seeds engineered to tolerate dicamba solely to protect themselves. That trait is now found in about half of the country’s soybeans — the top crop planted in the U.S. this year — doubling its acreage from 2017.
Those issues and allegations have fueled legal complaints from multiple angles. “Last week we filed two master complaints — one for all the crop damage cases and one for the anti-trust cases,†said Don Downing, a leading lawyer behind the lawsuits from the ºüÀêÊÓƵ law office, Gray, Ritter and Graham.
“It sort of frames the issues that are going to be teed up first in the case,†Downing said, adding that the first trial for the complaints is scheduled to begin in May 2020, with lots of depositions and discovery proceedings yet to happen.
Monsanto has steadfastly denied that there are defects associated with its dicamba weed control system, or that it is liable for damage associated with the herbicide.
Under its ongoing mandate from the Department of Justice to function as a technical competitor to Monsanto, Bayer said it was unable to comment on the legal battles facing both glyphosate and dicamba.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Editor's note: This story was corrected on Aug. 14 to say the glyphosate trial in San Francisco was not a class action case.