The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer convenes a panel of scientific experts to review available evidence on whether specific chemicals or occupational exposures may cause cancer.
Soybean plants on an Arkansas farm. Those at left show signs of damage from dicamba; others at right were planted later in the season.
Washington Post via Getty Images
Farmers are stuck in a chemical war against weeds, which have developed resistance to many widely used herbicides. Seed companies’ answer – using more varied herbicides – is causing new problems.
Containers of the herbicide glyphosate at a farm supply store in northeast Thailand in 2019.
AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit
Roundup may be taking a beating in the US, where three juries have concluded that it gave plaintiffs cancer, but it’s still widely used around the globe.
Soybean farmers in Brazil sued Monsanto for a royalty collection system that they say violates their planting rights. A soybean harvest in Mato Grosso, Brazil, March 27, 2012.
AP Photo/Andre Penner, File)
Karine Eliane Peschard, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)
Farmers worldwide say Monsanto’s policy of charging for every use of its genetically modified seeds violates their planting rights. But judges in these patent law cases aren’t so sure.
Law and science seek proof in similar ways, but at very different speeds.
Chinnapong/Shutterstock
What is proof? In both law and science, it’s basically a consensus of experts – but they work at very different speeds. That means juries may reach verdicts on an issue before the science is settled.
Two driverless tractors spray vines in a Texas vineyard. Each one is controlled from a single command station (2012).
ASIrobots/Wikipedia
The world’s most widely used herbicide poses a threat to honey bees.
Bottles of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer in the United Kingdom, relabelled by activists to highlight the World Health Organization’s judgment that its main ingredient is a probable carcinogen.
Global Justice Now
Thousands of people are suing Monsanto, claiming that its Roundup herbicide gave them cancer. A California judge has reduced the first damage award but let the verdict against Monsanto stand.
Roundup is the most common weed killer used worldwide.
from shutterstock.com
A US court recently ruled the weed killer Roundup contributed to a former gardener’s cancer. Juries don’t decide science. The weight of evidence shows Roundup has little association with cancer.
Activists protest against the acquisition of the U.S. agrochemical company Monsanto by the German Bayer company in Bonn, Germany, Friday, May 25, 2018.
(AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
Bayer, the new owner of Monsanto, will need to up its PR efforts, in the wake of last week’s legal ruling on glyphosate weedkillers.
Plaintiff Dewayne Johnson reacts after hearing the verdict in his case against Monsanto at the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, Aug. 10, 2018.
Josh Edelson/Pool Photo via AP
A jury concluded on Aug. 10 that exposure to the herbicide Roundup caused Dewayne Johnson’s cancer and ordered the company to pay $289 million in damages. Thousands more claims are pending.
The first flower grown on the International Space Station.
NASA