26
Mar
Flying Through States, Industry Seeks To Stop Lawsuits Over Failure to Warn of Pesticide Dangers
(Beyond Pesticides, March 26, 2025) State legislation to quash lawsuits against chemical manufacturers’ because of their “failure to warn” about their the hazards of their pesticide products is moving forward in seven state legislatures (Iowa, Missouri, Idaho, Florida, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Oklahoma) across the United States. After three bills failed to pass (Mississippi, Wyoming, and Montana) and one bill is awaiting signature into law by the Governor’s Office (Georgia), Beyond Pesticides, working with a broad coalition, is pushing back. (See Beyond Pesticides’ Failure to Warn resource hub, background materials, and opportunities for action.) If adopted, the “immunity from litigation” legislation would set a dangerous precedent for state common law claims against any manufacturers of products with toxic ingredients. Currently, pesticide labels under federal and state law generally do not warn of potential chronic effects, such as cancer, reproductive effects, infertility, birth defects, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, cardiovascular damage, and more (see Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database), but warn of acute effects, such as rashes, headaches, stinging eyes, and more.
After years of large jury awards, preemptive settlements, and lost appeals in cases involving exposure to the weedkiller glyphosate, Bayer/Monsanto is trying to stop the company’s financial hemorrhaging with a state-by-state strategy to deny victims access to the courts. To accomplish this, Bayer has founded, along with agribusiness groups including state Farm Bureaus, a coalition to stop “failure-to-warn” lawsuits with state legislation. Bayer’s coalition, Modern Ag Alliance, says it is fighting what they describe as “scientifically unsound lawsuits” on the weedkiller glyphosate. The alliance says, “If we don’t act, the future of glyphosate and other valuable crop protection tools and critical innovations may be at stake.” As has been reported widely, Bayer/Monsanto has lost numerous multimillion-dollar lawsuits because of its “failure to warn” of its product’s hazard by those who have been harmed. The company’s defeats include a U.S. Supreme Court denial (denial of certiorari) to hear their appeal. With this, Bayer has taken its campaign to the states to strip away peoples’ (including farmers) ability to hold corporations accountable through a common law duty to warn claims associated with pesticide products.
Despite decades of lobbying by the agrichemical industry to ensure an extremely weak and unprotective federal pesticide registration law, under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the industry argues that federal law should preempt people’s right to sue and communities’ right to restrict pesticides more stringently than the paltry federal and state laws that the industry has a hand in writing. So far, the U.S. Supreme Court in Bates et al. v Dow Agrosciences (544 U.S. 431, 2005) has found that citizens damaged by pesticides have the right to sue producers of toxic products, saying that federal pesticide law does not offer adequate protection from “manufacturers of poisonous substances.” Importantly, “failure-to-warn” claims serve as the de-facto legal backstop to hold pesticide companies accountable, given the limitations of the federal and state regulatory systems. Litigation is not only for holding chemical manufacturers accountable, but also incentivizes more responsible corporate behavior across the board, resulting in safer products.
The U.S. Supreme Court has also upheld the right of communities to restrict pesticides more stringently than the federal government in Wisconsin Public Intervenor v. Mortier (501 U.S. 597, 1991), but that victory for local democratic process to protect residents’ and ecosystems’ health has been thwarted by laws in at least 44 states that preempt the authority of their local municipalities. The question now is whether the chemical industry playbook will yield a similar result and preempt people’s right to sue in cases of “failure-to-warn.”
In the U.S. Congress, pesticide immunity language has been included in previous Farm Bill language and in the Fiscal Year 2025 Appropriations bill (See Daily News here), as well as in an ongoing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulemaking, advanced by 11 Republican Attorneys General. (Although the public hearing comment period ended on March 24, see Action of the Week here for more background.) So, the industry campaign is aggressively playing out at the state and federal level.
Public opinion does not support the chemical industry
Accountable Iowa conducted a survey of 875 Iowa voters in the 2024 election cycle on their views on the pesticide immunity bill, and the results do not support the industry’s position.
Across all surveyed voters, regardless of political affiliation or demographic makeup, the public overwhelmingly distrusts chemical corporations and opposes giving them legal shields from lawsuits. This opposition is built upon shared concerns about the corrupt entanglements and history of EPA and Bayer/Monsanto. There is also the shared preference to hold chemical companies accountable for causing serious health issues.
Breaking it down by the numbers, 87% of registered Republican respondents oppose giving chemical companies like Bayer-Monsanto immunity from lawsuits. 94% of surveyed Republican voters agreed that it is very concerning that the EPA relies on industry-funded data to carry out safety studies.
Where the Bills Stand
Idaho
The legislature of this state was the first to see the introduction of a pesticide immunity bill in 2024, which some local advocates attribute to the pesticide industry’s political power in Idaho, given that it is home to one of the few domestic phosphate production facilities in the United States. (See Daily News from last year here.)
At the beginning of the session, the Idaho Conservation League released a press release with relevant information and polling data on how Idahoans feel about corporate immunity from litigation:
“An independent survey of 2,678 registered voters was conducted in September 2024 by Embold Research, including 878 from Idaho, finding:
- 90% of Idahoans oppose chemical company immunity;
- 88% of Idahoans are concerned that the Environmental Protection Agency does not conduct its own safety studies to evaluate new pesticides;
- 96% support warning people when lawsuits show products can cause serious health problems;
- 85% of Idahoans are concerned that foreign corporations are trying to limit their access to the courts when chemicals threaten their health.”
In this year’s session, the scope of the bill has been expanded to preempt “failure-to-warn” claims on any agricultural products that produce “feed and fiber.” The bill, HB 303, is also similar to bills from other states in setting up an exception process where “failure-to-warn” claims can still be advanced “by a showing that:
- The clear weight of scientific evidence does not support the scientific basis on which the required warning is based; and,
- The manufacturer or seller knows or should have known at the time the product was sold that the required warning was not supported by the clear weight of scientific evidence.”
Advocates find this inclusion strange given the significant amount of publicly available knowledge surrounding EPA’s inability to adequately assess pesticide risks for humans, pollinators, and ecosystems, issues of industry interference in the regulatory process, allegations of industry ghostwriting scientific papers to rationalize rubberstamping pesticide registration reviews, and ongoing unresolved issues on pesticide-related regulations (see Daily News here) and scientific integrity. If passed, this would inevitably put the onerous on pesticide exposure victims—disproportionately farmers, farmworkers, and working class and majority communities of color—to prove that their legal claims have merit.
To tell your state Representatives to VOTE NO on HB 303, you can take action here.
Iowa
The Iowa legislature failed to pass this legislation last year, having passed in the Senate, but failing in the House after several attempts.
At the beginning of this year’s legislative session, over 150 Iowans mobilized a “cancer vigil” in the Iowa Capitol in protest of the bill (Senate File 394). According to reporting by Des Moines Register, “Demonstrators held a vigil in the Iowa Capitol’s rotunda Monday to honor the lives lost to cancer each year in Iowa and demanded lawmakers kill the bill.”
Local advocates point to the 2024 Iowa Cancer Registry in their opposition to this bill, referencing the fact that Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the nation.
The language remains nearly identical to last year’s attempt—a label provides sufficient warning (meaning “failure-to-warn” does not apply) if that label was approved by EPA, the label is consistent with FIFRA human health assessment, and the label is consistent with EPA carcinogenicity classification.
You can take action here and tell your state Senators to VOTE NO on SF 394.
Missouri
The battle in Missouri over pesticide immunity bills (HB 544/SB 14) hits home given that Bayer’s U.S. headquarters is in the state, with the multinational corporation employing several thousand Missourians.
There has been steadfast opposition to pesticide immunity from a broad coalition of public health, environmental, and rural community advocacy groups, as well as from far-right Senators in the Missouri Freedom Caucus. The Missouri Independent reported in February that “direct mail pieces sent out in at least nine state Senate districts accuse lawmakers of failing to protect the state’s food supply from ‘Chinese Communist Party chemicals[.]’”
This effort, it has been alleged by the nine targeted Senators, is a “propaganda” campaign that “Bayer is paying for the flyers but have no solid evidence.” A follow-up article by the same outlet on March 13 reported “Bayer within a week will lift the veil of secrecy on some documents detailing its campaign to influence public opinion regarding the safety of its herbicide Roundup, attorneys said Wednesday [, March 12].” Matt Clement, a lawyer representing a Wisconsin-based man claiming Roundup gave him non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, argued that 46 Bayer records “should be unsealed as an emergency measure to show how the German chemical giant is trying to influence lawmakers and potential jurors.”
Advocates view these moves as representative of a strategy employed by pesticide companies that is reliant on muscle and money, rather than facts and fairness, to avoid further lawsuits.
HB 544 passed the House on February 20 [85-72], however you can take action here and tell your state Senators to VOTE NO on SB 14.
North Dakota
The legislation moved through the state very quickly, with the House unanimously voting in favor of HB 1318 early in the session. After several public hearings, farmers, environmental advocates, and legal professionals expressed their concerns with allowing federal agencies to have the final say in matters of public health and environmental stewardship.
“The EPA is at the same time perfectly suited to regulate this but overbearing and killing business at the same time and must be cut,” says Sam Wagner, food and agriculture organizer at Dakota Resource Council, in written testimony on this bill in a public hearing before the Senate Agriculture and Veteran Affairs Committee on March 14. “Every time we talk about regulation we get into a game of hot potato, the federal government tells us the state and local governments should handle this, and the state and local government tells us that the federal government should handle this and in the meantime the people suffer from this.”
This bill is problematic because it inevitably would take away the primary legal argument used to hold pesticide companies accountable in the face of regulatory failure to adequately assess full pesticide formulations and conduct human health risk assessments. In the case of loosening regulations on a potent fumigant pesticide 1,3-Dichloropropane (Telone), a 2022 EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report found multiple failures in how it conducted the full human health assessment, including EPA staff’s failure to conduct an open scientific literature review on the chemical at the start of the investigation, applying a novel approach to evaluate 1,3-D’s carcinogenicity that the agency itself went on to question its validity, and the open knowledge that “not all members possessed the appropriate scientific expertise for using and implementing the…approach for evaluating the evidence of the carcinogenic potential of 1,3-D,” according to OIG interviews. (See Daily News here.) As of June 2024, EPA OIG reported that the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention has still failed to “[c]onduct an external peer review on the 1,3-Dichloroproene cancer-risk assessment.” (See Daily News here.)
You can take action here by telling your state Senators to VOTE NO on HB 1318.
Florida
There was a version of the pesticide immunity bill in Florida last year, however it failed to move forward. This year, however, there are active bills in both chambers (HB 129/SB 992).
This year, there is an additional liability shield for any “agricultural employer” who may face “failure-to-warn” claims in court moving forward. Like some of the other states, the Florida legislation offers carveouts for when “failure-to-warn” could apply:
- If the product was altered, if the label was not followed, among other clauses; and
- Builds in a carveout for “foreign” manufacturers, most notably Syngenta/ChemChina.
These bills are problematic for Florida because they not only apply similar repercussions as the North Dakota legislation, but also attempt to pit farmers against farmworkers by shielding “agricultural employers” from liability. Farmworkers, farmers, and anyone living near areas sprayed with pesticides or holding mixtures of pesticide residues will have this legal argument taken away from them if this legislation is signed into law by Governor Ron Desantis (R). The Florida bills would also set a dangerous precedent by establishing contradictory policies for domestic versus foreign pesticide manufacturers, when in reality the four top pesticide companies – Syngenta (China), Bayer (Germany), Corteva (U.S.), and BASF (Germany) – “controlled around 70 percent of the global pesticide market in 2018,” based on reporting in the 2022 Pesticide Atlas. In other words, advocates across the state and the country are frustrated that the majority of pesticide companies are already foreign-owned, and yet their pesticides are registered for use in the United States without regulatory repercussions. This law would only worsen the problem.
You can take action here and tell your state Senators and Representatives to VOTE NO on HB 129 and SB 992.
Georgia
The bills moved through the Senate and the House, passing both chambers.
SB 144, if signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp (R), gives foreign chemical corporations like Syngenta/ChemChina legal immunity from future lawsuits—even if they fraudulently hide the risks and violate federal misbranding rules. Just like the other bills, SB 144 strips farmers and families of their right to hold pesticide companies accountable when the label is a lie.
This legislation if passed would set a dangerous precedent for all state legislatures to contend with the ability to immunize certain industries from legal accountability in the face of federal and state inaction on regulatory matters vital to the public interest. There is also the problematic and revisionist nature of lines 40-44 in the bill to attempt providing an exception for when “failure-to-warn” claims can still apply,
“provided, however, that the provisions of this subsection shall not apply when a determination has been made by the Environmental Protection Agency that a manufacturer knowingly withheld, concealed, misrepresented, or destroyed material information regarding the human health risks of such pesticide in order to obtain or maintain approval of its label by the Environmental Protection Agency.”
This legislative language is dangerous because it ignores the institutionalized pattern of corruption in various EPA offices that go back to the creation of the agency in the 1970s. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, there was the Industrial Biotest and Craven Laboratories scandals that brought to public attention fraudulent laboratory animal test data that supported the registration and tolerances (acceptable residues), respectively, of pesticides. Then corruption was called out in 1984 when Congress held hearings on another corruption blow-up dubbed the “cut-and-paste” scandal, where EPA staff were found to use verbatim chemical company toxicology review analyses, pasting them on to EPA letterhead as if they were independently reviewed by Office of Pesticide Programs staff. (See Daily News here.)
Fast forward to 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voided EPA’s “interim registration review” decision approving continued use of glyphosate, issued in 2020 saying, “EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate cause[s] cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).” On this matter, the Supreme Court refused to consider a Bayer petition to throw out cases against cancer victims alleging harms from their glyphosate-based herbicide products. (See Daily News for more context here and here.)
There is a clear pattern of corruption that demonstrates the importance of protecting “failure-to-warn” claims. You can take action here and tell Governor Kemp to VETO SB 144.
Debunking Myths
Proponents of this legislation rely on several buckets of arguments to legitimize this effort, including putting trust in the regulators and the risk assessment process.
Myth One: These bills do not prevent anyone from suing pesticide manufacturers.
These bills undermine the foundational legal argument used in thousands of previous and pending cases filed by those who have been harmed by pesticide use and exposure.
Myth Two: EPA’s registration process for pesticides is robust, involves rigorous testing, and ultimately leads to safe products
Substantial scientific literature, inspector general reports, and litigation going up to U.S. Supreme Court point to limitations of pesticide registration, including safety claims.
Myth Three: The weedkiller glyphosate in Roundup will be taken off the market if state legislation is not passed. We need a fair legal climate!
“Failure-to-warn” claims have been a basic right in state courts going back to 1947. Users of pesticides are better protected by fair warning of product hazards in the marketplace.
Myth Four: Farmers will be reliant on unsafe products developed in foreign countries if legislation is not adopted.
The current ability to sue for a manufacturer’s failure to warn protects farmers, gardeners, and users of chemical products because it incentivizes truthful labeling of products, which enables informed consumer choices with full information.
See the Myths & Facts sheet for more information and context.
Call to Action
Through grassroots efforts, coalitions and communities across the nation have to-date successfully beat back this legislation in Mississippi, Wyoming, and Montana this year after defending the public’s right to sue in Missouri, Idaho, and Iowa in the 2024 legislative session. Your voice is pivotal at this time!
See the “failure-to-warn” resource hub, which is updated by Beyond Pesticides in real time to account for legislative movement, public hearing timelines, and other background information so that your communities and organizations can speak out against these bills and protect the right to sue.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
