Shareholders everywhere must cringe at the news stories about juries awarding billions to claimants attributing their cancer to the widely used herbicide glyphosate.
Major news outlets — the likes of The New York Times, Forbes, and Reuters — have taken to reporting on the outcomes of these jury trials as if they were sports scores.
“Plaintiffs have won the last four trials over their claims that the product causes cancer, each time securing a larger verdict. Those losses ended a nine-trial winning streak for Bayer, shattering investor and company hopes that the worst of the Roundup litigation was over,” Reuters reported in December.
In some cases, the courts have steered clear of saying the product causes cancer, a claim that is the source of much conjecture but not supported by science. Rather, the cases have hinged on whether the company that owned Roundup, the brand name for the original glyphosate product, warned people on product labels that it might.
That’s a dilemma. A lot of things we expose ourselves to regularly ‘might’ cause cancer — sugar, bacon, alcohol to name a few — but we don’t put warning labels on them. But it’s the dilemma Bayer inherited when it bought Monsanto in a 2018 merger, and a cautionary tale for all investors in this era of corporate takeovers and consolidation.
Where this stops, no one knows. There are about 50,000 outstanding cases before the courts. Bayer is bearing the financial brunt, but glyphosate is also sold under a variety of generic brands.
Many farmers cringe, too. They have depended so heavily on glyphosate to control weeds over the past 50 years many fear they would be hard-pressed to farm without it. At some point however, change may be forced upon them because it’s not just lawyers nipping at the product’s heels. The weeds are coming after it, too.
Two dozen scientists with U.S. land-grant universities teamed up with USDA researchers recently to compare notes tracking the product’s declining effectiveness over 25 years, a decline that escalated with the development of glyphosate-tolerant crops.
Calling it “the silver bullet that wasn’t” in a paper published in PNAS Nexus late last year, they chronicle not only how one product transformed modern agriculture, but also the trailing legacy of its eventual demise.
There’s no denying glyphosate’s role in fuelling the shift away from soil-destroying tillage in Prairie agriculture.
It’s ability to kill every plant it touched without leaving residues allowed farmers to leave their soil intact, which conserved moisture and soil health. That saved fuel, improved yields and expanded the cropping mix farmers could grow, leading to a host of other developments that grew the agricultural economy.
On the downside, it was so effective it had a chilling effect on research and development into new active ingredients. According to the research, chemicals with new modes of actions were being developed every two years from the 1950s until the mid ’80s, when glyphosate was widely embraced. Then there was a 30-year pause — there was just no point investing in new chemistry.
Along with abandoning tillage, farmers also stopped worrying so much about managing weeds by using other chemistries or cultural practices such as varied seeding dates.
The weeds figured it out. There are now 57 weed species globally that are resistant to glyphosate. Several have evolved resistance to other modes of action as well. Other species adopted a duck-and-cover strategy where they changed their emergence and growth patterns to escape control.
The release of Roundup Ready crops — genetically modified canola, corn, soybeans that don’t die when sprayed with glyphosate — increased its use tenfold and the pace at which resistance evolved.
Lately, the crop-protection industry has been buying time by mixing glyphosate with other active ingredients to make new products that help farmers confound resistant weeds.
But the focus is increasingly shifting to what comes next. “Loss of glyphosate as an effective weed management tool could result in up to $4.17 billion in crop losses per year in North America,” these researchers write.
Even if there were another silver bullet on the horizon, they advise against counting on it.
Laura Rance is executive editor, production content lead for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at [email protected]
