Germany-based Bayer AG said it will reassess its activities in the U.S. lawn care market after U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on May 26 rejected a proposal for the company to pay as much as $2 billion to resolve future claims that its Roundup herbicide causes cancer, according to Bloomberg.
Bayer, which took over Roundup as part of its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto Co. for $63 billion, reached the $2 billion settlement earlier this year (GM Feb. 5, p. 32). The rejected settlement is part of a broader $11.6 billion agreement to resolve Roundup lawsuits in the U.S. from about 125,000 consumers and farmers.
In his decision, Chhabria said the settlement covering future claims is “clearly unreasonable” for consumers who are exposed to Roundup but are not yet diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and may not be for a decade or longer.
Chhabria also said provisions in the settlement “greatly exaggerate” the potential benefits of four years of “vaguely described medical monitoring” for those who have not yet been diagnosed, while describing the benefits of a compensation fund for those individuals as “vastly overstated.”
Bloomberg reported that while Bayer remains committed to the Roundup brand and the residential sector, the company indicated it may no longer use glyphosate in its products. Other steps to mitigate its risks from future Roundup claims, according to Bloomberg, include continuing legal appeals, reassessing settlement efforts, and creating a website addressing Roundup’s safety concerns.
“We have an alternative course of action: we are in charge and in control now,” Bayer CEO Werner Baumann said in a May 27 conference call. “We continue to pursue a comparable solution. There are different ways to skin a cat.”
Bayer announced last June that it had agreed to make a payment of $8.8-$9.6 billion to resolve approximately 75 percent of the then current Roundup cases (GM June 26, 2020). The company reported last fall (GM Sept. 18, 2020) that it had settled approximately 15,000 more U.S. lawsuits over Roundup, bringing the total number of resolved cases to 47,000 of an estimated 125,000 filed and unfiled Roundup claims.
Bayer traded down 2.7 percent at €53.50 as of 9:08 a.m. on May 27 in Frankfurt, after falling as much as 3.2 percent.