Bayer to Pull Glyphosate Products, Including Roundup, From U.S. Home and Garden Market.
On July 29, Bayer announced that it will no longer sell glyphosate-containing products to U.S. home gardeners.
EcoWatch reports that the announcement comes as the company currently faces around 30,000 legal claims that these products are cancer-causing. .
Bayer's decision to end U.S. residential
sale of Roundup is a historic victory for
public health and the environment.
As agricultural, large-scale use of this
toxic pesticide continues, our farmworkers
remain at risk. It's time for EPA to act
and ban glyphosate for all uses, Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety, via EcoWatch.
Glyphosate remains a controversial ingredient as it has been linked to the development of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as noted by Cure.
In 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that it was "probably carcinogenic to humans.".
Under former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the chemical did not pose a risk to human health.
However, the Biden Administration later admitted that the review had been flawed and that it needed to be redone.
Bayer's reportedly inherited the bevy of lawsuits when it acquired Monsanto in 2018.
In 2020, Bayer settled around 95,000 cases in 2020 to the tune of $10 billion.
That settlement, one of the largest in U.S. history, allowed Bayer to continue to sell Roundup without adding any warnings to their products. .
However, EcoWatch points out that the company still faces further litigation, and said it decided to pull the product from residential use in order to prevent more.
AgWeb reported that over 90% of recent claims come from the residential home and garden market.
"This move is being made exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns," the company said when it announced its decision.
The products will be replaced with different active ingredients beginning in 2023, following reviews by the EPA and state regulatory bodies.
"This is from a regulatory and logistical point of view (of what's) possible," Condon said during a conference call with investors, as AgWeb reported