Monsanto insists Roundup is ‘safe’ despite US court verdict

Groundsman awarded €254m after jury rules glyphosate was factor in his cancer

THE maker of Roundup weedkiller has insisted consumers are safe to use the product despite a US jury backing a groundsman’s claim the pesticide contributed to his terminal cancer.

Dewayne Johnson was awarded $289m (€254m) by a state jury in San Francisco who found Monsanto had failed to adequately warn of the risks of using Roundup, which contains the world’s most widely-used herbicide, glyphosate.

The groundsman’s lawyers said he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2014, having used Roundup and a similar Monsanto product, Ranger Pro, in large quantities while working for a school authority.

Monsanto vice president Scott Partridge said hundreds of studies showed the herbicide does not cause cancer and said the company would appeal the verdict to “vigorously defend this product”.

He told the Press Association: “Roundup has been safe for four decades and will continue to be safe. There is no credible scientific evidence that demonstrates otherwise.

“It is completely and totally safe and the public should not be concerned about this verdict, it is one that we will work through the legal process to see if we can get the right result. The science is crystal clear.”

Food chain

In Britain, Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said on Twitter that the verdict has “huge implications for the food chain”.

Roundup is one of the country’s most popular weedkiller brands, while glyphosate herbicides are among the most widely used herbicide in agriculture.

Environmentalists say the weedkiller is linked to cancer, although the claim is strongly denied by manufacturers and the EU has approved the chemical for use.

In 2016, a joint report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN said that, while there was “some evidence of a positive association between glyphosate exposure and risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma” in some studies, the only large study of high quality found “no evidence of an association at any exposure level”.

It concluded that glyphosate “is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet”.

It came after the France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the WHO, said in 2015 that glyphosate was a “probable human carcinogen”.

At the end of 2017, the European Union extended the licence for use of glyphosate for five years.