Yves here. The New Lede gives a good overview of the Monsanto/glyphosate case now before the Supreme Court, covering not only the positions set for in court filings but also the arguments made before the bench and the issues the justices are posing. The article points out that a Monsanto win would gut state rules that require companies to adhere to particular consumer disclosure standards by barring litigation over violations when warnings comply with Federal requirments.
Keep in mind that the warning issue is not trivial. One damning discovery finding was that despite not telling consumer users or farmers to take strong precautions when applying glyphosate, aka Roundup, their own employees who put glyphosate on test fields were close to hazmat-suited up.
By Carey Gillam is the editor-in-chief of The New Lede who was a senior correspondent with Reuters international news service (1998-2015). She is the author of “Whitewash – The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science,” an expose of Monsanto’s corporate corruption of agriculture. The book won the coveted Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2018. Her second book, a narrative legal thriller titled The Monsanto Papers, was released March 2, 2021. Originally published at The New Lede
Members of the US Supreme Court peppered lawyers for the former Monsanto Co. with a barrage of questions over pesticide regulation on Monday, wrestling over whether federal law preempts state actions that permit consumers to sue companies for failing to warn of product risks such as cancer.
The case, Monsanto v. Durnell, centers on glyphosate – a weedkilling chemical used in the popular Roundup brand and numerous other herbicide products sold by the former Monsanto company, which is now owned by Germany’s Bayer. The chemical has been scientifically linked to cancer in multiple studies, and was classified a probable human carcinogen by an arm of the World Health Organization in 2015.
Bayer has spent the last decade fighting more than 100,000 lawsuits by people who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma they blame on exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate weed killers. The company has paid out billions of dollars in jury awards and settlements.
In the Durnell case, as well as many others that have gone to trial, the jury found that Monsanto had failed to warn the plaintiff that glyphosate could cause cancer.
While maintaining that its products don’t cause cancer, Monsanto is asking the Supreme Court to rule that under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), it cannot be held liable for failing to warn of a cancer risk if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not found such a risk exists and has not not required such a warning. The EPA’s position is that glyphosate is “unlikely” to be carcinogenic.
If Monsanto prevails before the high court, it would make it harder for consumers to file such lawsuits, not just against Monsanto, but against other pesticide makers as well.
In arguing before the court, Monsanto attorney Paul Clement told the justices that provisions within FIFRA are “crystal clear” in barring pesticide makers from changing safety warnings on a pesticide label without EPA approval, and thus cannot be held liable for not issuing a cancer warning.
“Congress plainly wanted uniformity when it came to the safety warnings on a pesticide’s label,” Clement told the justices. “Ignoring Congress’ clear direction here would open the door for crippling liability and undermine the interests of farmers who depend on federally registered pesticides for their livelihood.”
Clement argued repeatedly that the EPA process of approving a pesticide is rigorous and that its position that glyphosate is not carcinogenic is supported by other regulatory agencies “around the globe.”
Also arguing in favor of Monsanto’s position was Sarah Harris, Principal Deputy Solicitor General for the Department of Justice. Harris told the justices that states can’t try to “second guess or undermine” the EPA’s process.
In opposition to Monsanto, attorney Ashley Keller told the justices that “the United States is wrong” and said that FIFRA does not provide the blanket authority claimed by Monsanto with “preemptive force.” He additionally told the justices that the EPA’s registration process has significant flaws and pointed out that it has not updated its glyphosate registration review every 15 years as the law calls for, and said that things “slip through the cracks with that agency.”
He also pointed out that the EPA’s findings regarding human health and glyphosate were vacated by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 for failing to follow established guidelines for determining cancer risk and ignoring important studies.
Sometimes interrupting mid-argument, the justices quizzed the attorneys on multiple fronts. Some pressed Monsanto’s lawyer on how labeling issues should be handled when new science showing harm arises in between EPA reviews, while others asked about the fairness of retroactively penalizing a company for something a lack of warnings on a label approved by the EPA.
“Both sides put on a good case,” said Daniel Hinkle, senior counsel for policy at the American Association for Justice, who attended the oral arguments. “I thought they asked some serious questions and were really grappling with the implications of the case.”
Bayer has said a favorable Supreme Court ruling will help it put an end to the litigation. Backing Monsanto’s case is Syngenta, a Chinese-owned company that is similarly being sued by thousands of people around the US who allege the company failed to warn them of research linking Syngenta’s paraquat herbicide products to Parkinson’s disease.
In addition to Monsanto and Syngenta, future cases against other pesticide makers could similarly be limited, according to legal experts.
Bayer issued a statement following the Supreme Court hearing expressing appreciation for the “Court’s careful consideration of FIFRA’s uniformity language and how its federal preemption provision applies to state-based label warnings.”
“We believe the U.S. Government and the Company made persuasive arguments that state-based warning claims ‘in addition to or different from’ warning labels approved by EPA under FIFRA, as in Durnell, are preempted, and this is necessary to avoid a patchwork of 50 different warning labels,” the company said. “Companies should not be punished under state law for complying with federal label requirements. The security and affordability of the nation’s food supply depend on farmers’ and manufacturers’ ability to rely on the science-based judgments of federal regulators.”
Both before and during the hearing, protesters affiliated with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement rallied outside the courthouse to protest the Trump administration’s support for Monsanto, citing the Solicitor General’s backing of Monsanto’s position as well as Trump’s recent executive order declaring protection of glyphosate production a national security issue. Some shouted “People over poison” and others waved signs with slogans such as “Roundup the guilty” and “Make Monsanto pay.”
“It’s crucial right now to show up and let not just the Supreme Court know but also our legislative branch and our executive branch that we will not stand for being poisoned …. anymore. These companies must have accountability and it starts today,” said Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America and a MAHA leader.
Alexandra Munoz, an independent toxicologist, marched with the protesters. “I’ve read the literature on glyphosate and it is definitely a carcinogen. The evidence is really clear.”
US Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine, was among multiple lawmakers joining the rally.
“These are issues I’ve been fighting on for a very long time,” Pingree told The New Lede. “To have an actual rally in front of the Supreme Court, to have so many people show up from all over the country and to have so many Republicans and Democrats who are united about keeping poisons out of our food, out of our environment, out of our agriculture system, it’s a big day.”
The Supreme Court hearing comes as the U.S. House of Representatives Rules Committee takes up the new Farm Bill,formally known as H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026.
Pingree and US Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, last week announced an amendment to the Farm Bill that would remove provisions to shield chemical manufacturers like Bayer from lawsuits and “preempt state and local warning label laws or usage regulations for potentially harmful products.”
13 comments
Comments are closed.
I am so impressed by the utter dishonesty in these legal arguments. Monsanto seems to claim that they would have put more honest labels on their products, but they were trapped by the EPA’s uniformity rule, and they could only go with approved labels, so they can’t be blamed for not advertising about its cancer-causing nature!
Please, judge, think of the farmers. They need this chemical, and we’re following one interpretation of the law, so please make the lawsuits from the huge numbers of people we poisoned stop. Despite the EPA’s obviously insufficient efforts around regulating glyphosate, it must be trusted and states must be disallowed from filling in the gap to protect people… for the farmers’ own good.
If anyone wonders if Orwell’s 1984 is alive and well… refer them to this article.
Thanks to NC for posting.
I work in pesticide regulation for a chemical company, so feel free to take what I say with a heap of salt. That said…
Monsanto is not wrong about the label requirements. FIFRA makes it illegal to use labeling that differs from what EPA has approved, and EPA is the one that decides the hazard language on pesticide labels. They are jealous of that authority, and the fact that they are late on registration review doesn’t change Monsanto’s obligations at all. So I’m sympathetic to Monsanto’s case there.
(At one point, EPA even sent an open letter to California essentially saying that they would consider it misbranding if Monsanto put a cancer warning on Roundup: https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/letter-californias-office-environmental-health-hazard. It’s now withdrawn, so I can only speculate as to what all went on behind the scenes.)
However, the hazard language EPA mandates is based on studies paid for and submitted by pesticide companies. If I were the plaintiff, I’d want to know if everything was aboveboard there.
The other thing is that FIFRA 6(a)(2) requires companies to tell EPA “if at any time … the registrant has additional factual information regarding unreasonable adverse effects” of the pesticide. If Monsanto was hiding something, it seems like that would be the place to get them.
That kind of malfeasance is harder to prove, of course, but I think (and, frankly, hope) that it’s difficult to argue they should have used labeling different from what EPA approved.
I’m not sure why people freak out about glyphosate. Despite the quote in the story, the evidence of badness is slim: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5515989/ . The problem with gylphosate today isn’t really about glyphosate, but because there’s growing resistance in weeds to that chemical, farmers are adding other things to kill the weeds and some of that stuff is nasty.
It’s potent gut microbiome disruptor, and possible a contributor to obesity. And traces of it are in a lot of food, as it is used as a crop drier just before harvest.
Sounds like a lot of the arguments they used for DDT.
And CFCs, leaded gas, asbestos, thalidomide, etc.
Shows how nasty farmers are, right? Growing so-called food. Here in Iowa it’s sodey-pop sugar, gasahol, and gross meat raised in nasty and cruel conditions. Yum!
Not to mention glyphosate probably impairs bees:
Research from Virginia Tech, supported by a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and a graduate student grant from the university’s Department of Entomology, found exposure to glyphosate — a common weed killer — disrupts honeybee foraging and threatens the long-term stability of hives.
https://news.vt.edu/articles/2026/03/cals-honeybee-glyphosate-impact.html
We let our lawn go over to flowers and have two Mason Bee houses for the local pollinators.
In 1985 I attended the first International Society of Plant Molecular Biology meeting. It was truly international. Those rainy five days in Savannah were a revelation. The highlight for me was hearing Barbara McClintock speak about her discovery of mobile genetic elements in corn/maize, for which she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine two years earlier. The techniques for genetic engineering in bacteria, fungi, and mammalian cells still required building almost everything from scratch. I cloned my first gene in 1986 and it took more than two years to do what can be done in less than a week now. Or two days, because most genes (protein coding regions) are available for purchase or can be synthesized overnight, ready to be spliced into the expression vector of your choice. FedEx will deliver the package, sequence confirmed, the next day. Techniques for plant genetic engineering were primitive, mostly still in development. Bt corn and other GMO crops were not yet a thing, but what became known as Roundup Ready commodity crops were a bright gleam in the eye of most of the attendees. Monsanto was a big supporter of the meeting IIRC. Golden rice was then a dream of the Rockefeller Foundation that came true years later.
The outcomes have been underwhelming. Roundup ready commodity crops have been most effective at goosing profits of vertically organized Big Ag and selecting for pesticide-resistant weeds. Golden Rice is yellow but it has still not lived up to its promise of alleviating vitamin A deficiencies in populations with a vitamin A-poor diet.
These products are technical marvels. The plant molecular biologists were ingenious. A cell is a cell, but plant cells have cell walls and other differences that make DNA transfer difficult. Nevertheless, GMO commodity crops are also just technical solutions for problems better solved by conventional means such as crop rotation on biological farms instead of GMO monocultures on thousand-acre fields where industrial agriculture has replaced soil with chemically treated dirt.
Your indictment of GMO and the technical marvels of plant molecular biologists is damning. However, I am troubled by the seeming simularity between the techniques used in ancient times to develop many of our key food crops and the GMO and technical marvels of today’s plant molecular biologists. The selective breeding our ancestors used to develop the food crops we rely on today are different in their ‘power’, and scale, from the genetic engineering techniques of today. I am not convinced they are different in kind. Rather than damn the techniques I am inclined to damn the ‘context’ that directs and de facto controls their application. The climate is changing rapidly and dramatically. If Humankind hopes to adapt to the new world as it unfolds, I believe we need the ‘power’ of the techniques that GMO offers. The world is changing faster than present life can adapt without ‘help’.
In many ways this ‘help’ is not inherently different from from the ‘help’ geoengineering offers for adapting to and managing climate change. Even so, I remain very much opposed to most geoengineering proposals I am aware of. To me, geoengineering operates at a significantly different scale and consequence than that of the genetic engineering which might be used to the adapt the plantlife Humankind depends upon, to the very new world that is rapidly developing. I am aware that some untested efforts at genetic engineering could have catastrophic effects, were they to escape into the wild. I like to believe such catastrophes are more readily managed and controlled than they would be for geoengineering mis-steps. Again, it is a matter of scale and the size of the profits directly involved.
As I view our present situation, many of our conundrums originate from the economic system that has enslaved Humankind and most, if not all of the artifacts of our present Society/Civilization, including Science and Technology. To survive, Humankind must throw off these chains.
Good points, all, Jeremy. The selective breeding of einkorn, our ancestral wheat that is probably better for us than modern wheat varieties, may have started us down the road to something called Wheat Belly, but I am not sure the book is all that convincing. Teosinte became corn/maize, and there are data that show the landraces of corn in Mexico are good for us. NAFTA solved that “problem,” though. And Americans wonder why there is anti-Americanism. Most modern industrial/GMO corn is fed to nonhuman animals or used to make corn syrup or ethanol. I think most sweet corn for human consumption is fine, but usually produced industrially.
If genetic technologies are used in the production of “public goods” they will be beneficent. Otherwise, not so much. And the latter has been the general tendency. That genetically engineered organisms can escape and be killers has been a topic of discussion since before the Asilomar Conference 50 years ago. I was very young and green as a scientist at the time but was astonished that prominent scientists thought insertion of a cancer causing gene into our major gut bacterium was something to do without a thought of potential consequences. It turned out that the first generations of clones produced by conventional recombinant DNA technologies were benign. I think people have been lulled into a sense of security that may one day turn out to be false. Who knows what lies within the confines of Fort Detrick?
As for our chains, most people seem to be happy as successors of Plato’s cave people who were only able to watch the shadows on the wall of the cave and think that is reality. I never had much use for Plato’s snobbery, but he did make a few good points ;-) TikTok and our assorted malign influencers and content creators would not have been foreign to him.
In any case, the world will get smaller as things fall apart and industrial agriculture will fail. I regret that I will inevitably leave the solution to my children and grandchildren.
Does anyone think that this Supreme Court is going to actually rule against a massive multi national corporation?
Not the Justice from Monsanto (Thomas)