Bayer agrees to pay $10 bln to settle Roundup lawsuits

Chemicals giant Bayer has agreed to pay more than $10 billion to settle several thousand lawsuits claiming herbicide Roundup causes cancer.

Doha Madani reported the news for CNBC:

Bayer will pay more than $10 billion to resolve thousands of lawsuits regarding claims that its herbicide Roundup causes cancer, the company announced Wednesday.

Monsanto, which Bayer bought in 2018, lost a lawsuit that same year brought by a school groundskeeper who claimed its weedkiller had caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Since then, thousands of U.S. lawsuits have been filed against the company.

Bayer CEO Werner Baumann called the decision to settle the lawsuits the right one in order to end a long period of uncertainty.

CBS News wrote:

In a statement Wednesday, Bayer said it was also paying up $1.2 billion to settle two further cases, one involving PCB in water. They said the Roundup settlement would “bring closure to approximately 75%” of the current 125,000 filed and unfiled claims.

Bayer said it would also pay up to $400 million to settle cases involving the weedkiller dicamba having drifted onto plants that weren’t bred to resist it, killing them.

The agreement is subject to approval by Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Bob Edelko from the San Francisco Chronicle noted:

Brent Wisner, a lawyer for cancer victims suing Monsanto, called the settlement “a huge first step in correcting 40 years of glyphosate harm.”

One of Wisner’s clients is Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a groundskeeper and pest-control manager for the Benicia Unified School District from 2012 to May 2016, whose case was the first in the nation to go to trial. Johnson, who sprayed a highly concentrated form of glyphosate called Ranger Pro 20 to 30 times a year for two to three hours a day, had been diagnosed with a terminal case of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of lymph cancer.