20
Jan
Protection from Elevated Chemical Hazards Before High Court, Converges with Adverse Effects of Deregulation
(Beyond Pesticides, January 20, 2026) With Monday’s celebration and affirmation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy, the question of adequate protection of the people and communities at greatest risk from toxic chemical production, transportation, use, and disposal looms large. This is especially true with the current diminished federal regulatory authority and Bayer/Monsanto’s U.S. Supreme Court challenge of chemical manufacturers’ responsibility to warn users of their products of hazards like cancer.
Actions Being Taken
- In response to the chemical industry campaign to deny people the right to sue under longstanding failure to warn law, groups are calling for public support of U.S Senator Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) bill, Pesticide Injury Accountability Act(S. 2324) seeks to uphold this right to sue. The groups are calling on the public to “Tell your U.S. Senator to co-sponsor S. 2324, the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act.” This bill will amend the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 (FIFRA) to create a federal right of action for anyone who is harmed by a toxic pesticide.
- In an additional action in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Pesticides is calling on the public to “Tell members of Congress to ensure that with the termination of environmental justice programs at EPA, they must uphold the right of those at the highest risk of harm to sue manufacturers responsible for their failure to warn about their products’ hazards.”
A 2025 study published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, “Environmental and Human Health Impacts of Agricultural Pesticides on BIPOC Communities in the United States: A Review from an Environmental Justice Perspective,” in analyzing 128 peer-reviewed articles, books, and reports on pesticides, environmental justice, and [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] BIPOC communities in the U.S., finds “uneven distribution of pesticide-related health and environmental burdens along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.” This finding confirms a long history documenting disproportionate risk of chemical hazards to people of color and their communities. (See also here.)
Without a rigorous regulatory system to restrict toxic chemicals, including pesticides, from poisoning people, the courts provide a critical vehicle for constraining the behavior of corporations responsible for harm. Since chemical manufacturers know this, and after over $10 billion in jury verdicts and settlements over the last several years in cases involving the weed killer glyphosate/RoundupTM, they are seeking to be shielded from litigation. Aware of the termination of regulatory programs that are intended to protect those at greatest risk of harm, the companies, led by Bayer/Monsanto, say publicly that their compliance with EPA regulations should protect them from disclosing the hazards of their products and even immunize them from accountability for the harm that they cause.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work to pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act advanced the principle of racial equality, which extends to economic and environmental justice. However, when the Trump administration announced the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in January 2025, ending government-wide efforts to address “entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies,” it did not take long for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin to “terminate” the agency’s environmental justice program. This put the federal government on a path to reject the principles intended to address elevated risk factors associated with chemical, and specifically pesticide, induced illnesses for people of color.
The science establishes the disproportionate risk associated with pesticide use under current law. The authors of a 2022 study, “Pesticides and environmental injustice in the USA: root causes, current regulatory reinforcement and a path forward,” assert that the disparities identified continue via current regulations and statutes that (1) inadequately protect workers, (2) operate with a pesticide safety “double standard,” and (3) permit the export of toxic pesticides to “developing” countries, including specific findings such as:
- Disproportionate exposures to harmful pesticides: biomarkers for 12 dangerous pesticides, tracked over the past 20 years, were found in the blood and urine of Mexican-American and Black people at average levels up to five times those in white people.
- Weaker protections for agricultural workers: although 10,000–20,000, largely Latinx, farmworkers are sickened annually from pesticide exposure, such workers are not covered by the same regulatory pesticide protections provided to the general public.
- Unequal risks: people of color comprise 38% of the aggregate population of California, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but that 38% represents 63% of those living nearby to 31 pesticide manufacturing facilities that are in violation of environmental laws (such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act).
- Poor enforcement: based on available data for a recent five-year period, approximately 1% of agricultural operations that use pesticides had any annual inspections for violations of worker protections — despite violations found at nearly half of inspected facilities; further, enforcement actions proceeded against only 19% of the violators.
- Toxic housing: 80% of low-income housing sites in New York State, for example, regularly apply pesticides indoors; a home air quality monitoring study found that 30% of pregnant African American and Dominican women in New York City had at least eight pesticides in their bodies, and 83% had at least one pesticide in umbilical cord samples.
- Export of harm: pesticides banned in the U.S. are nevertheless allowed to be produced here and exported; the study notes that organophosphate and carbamate pesticides banned domestically were sold to 42 countries between 2015 and 2019, and 78% of importing countries report more than 30% of their workforce members are poisoned by pesticides annually.
After the termination of EPA’s environmental justice program in March, 109 members of Congress wrote a letter to the agency, which states,
“We write to demand that you reverse your plans to terminate all U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) environmental justice regional offices and programs. This action would cause extraordinary and disproportionate harm and constitute a complete dereliction of the EPA’s statutory responsibility to protect human health and the environment. On February 4, 2025, you released a statement affirming that all Americans deserve access to clean air, water, and land. You must honor this commitment and reject any effort that weakens public health protections or rolls back decades of EPA’s work—under both Republican and Democratic administrations—to support communities unfairly burdened by pollution.”
The Trump administration maintains a commitment to eliminate environmental justice programs as part of a larger effort to curtail regulations that protect health and the environment. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Letter to Congress on Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.
On the day marking the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy of embracing racial, economic, and environmental justice, we urge you to preserve a basic right of protection from the harm caused by toxic chemicals, including pesticides—especially those who suffer disproportionately elevated harm, people of color. With deregulation of the chemical industry and termination of environmental justice and other EPA programs intended to protect health and the environment, chemical manufacturers are seeking to shield themselves from lawsuits filed by those who have been harmed, but not warned, about toxic hazards.
Without a rigorous regulatory system to restrict toxic chemicals, including pesticides, from poisoning people, the courts provide the only vehicle for constraining the behavior of corporations responsible for harm. Since chemical manufacturers know this, and after over $10 billion in jury verdicts and settlements over the last several years in cases involving their pesticide glyphosate/RoundupTM, they are seeking to be shielded from litigation. Knowing that the dismantling of regulatory programs that are intended to protect those at greatest risk of harm, the companies, led by Bayer/Monsanto, say publicly that their compliance with EPA regulations should protect them from disclosing the hazards of their products and even immunize them from accountability for the harm that they cause.
A 2025 study published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, “Environmental and Human Health Impacts of Agricultural Pesticides on BIPOC Communities in the United States: A Review from an Environmental Justice Perspective,” in analyzing 128 peer-reviewed articles, books, and reports on pesticides, environmental justice, and [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] BIPOC communities in the U.S., finds “uneven distribution of pesticide-related health and environmental burdens along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.”
Please be vigilant against a provision in proposed legislation denying people the right to sue chemical companies for nondisclosure of product hazards. While it has been reported that bill language shielding chemical manufacturers has been dropped from the FY2026 funding bill moving through Congress, you know that the legislative process is unpredictable in the current Congress. This summer, a provision passed by the House Appropriations Committee that would have denied farmers, farmworkers, landscapers, gardeners, and consumers generally the right to sue companies that do not disclose on their product labels and in marketing information potential hazards associated with their products’ use.
The chemical industry is pursuing all possible legislative vehicles to move its legislation, which has a disproportionate adverse effect on people of color, especially those who grow and harvest our food.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Please advocate on behalf of those who are harmed disproportionately by chemical and specifically pesticide-induced disease, and honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Protect access to the courts by those who have been harmed by hazardous chemicals but not warned.
Thank you.
Letter to U.S. Senators [except Sen. Booker, sponsor]:
Tell your U.S. Senator to co-sponsor S. 2324, the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act.
I am writing to ask you to cosponsor U.S. Senator Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) bill, the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act (S. 2324), to protect the rights of farmers and consumers by holding pesticide manufacturers responsible for the harm caused by their toxic products. This bill has been introduced in the wake of congressional and state legislative attacks on “failure-to-warn” liability claims that are taking place in response to extraordinary jury verdicts against Bayer/Monsanto for harm caused by glyphosate weed killer products like Roundup.ᵀᴹ
As you know, the bill will amend the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 (FIFRA) to create a federal right of action for anyone who is harmed by a toxic pesticide.
Despite growing peer-reviewed scientific evidence linking widely used pesticides to a host of health harms, including cancers, birth defects, endocrine disruption, Parkinson’s disease, and infertility, a coordinated effort is being led by pesticide manufacturers in state legislatures and in Congress seeking legal immunity—a liability shield—for these big corporations.
With the massive dismantling of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programs by the current administration, Congress has been seeking, through appropriations bill provisions, to limit court oversight, which in many cases serves as a backstop for public health and environmental protections. Provisions in the U.S. House appropriations bill would, in the future, prohibit cases like those filed by victims of glyphosate (Roundupᵀᴹ), who have won large jury verdicts and compensation. The language removes the incentive for chemical manufacturers, under threat of accountability for compensatory and punitive damages, to develop safer products or remove products altogether, slowing the critically necessary shift to less- and non-toxic land and building management practices to protect health and the environment. Legislative history added to the bill in the committee will do little to ensure a fully functioning EPA and court redress.
As Bayer/Monsanto leads the charge, the chemical industry successfully lobbied for a weak federal pesticide law, FIFRA, and then tried to hide behind the law when sued for damages, telling the courts that their products are in compliance with pesticide registration standards and therefore they are not liable for harm. Juries have ruled that chemical manufacturers failed to provide adequate warning through their product labeling, given the independent peer-reviewed science, including what the company knew or should have known, and a clinical assessment of the harm caused to the plaintiff.
However, the Interior and Environment Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee voted July 22 to support a bill that includes language (Sec. 453) providing total pesticide immunity language, blocking farmers and consumers from suing chemical manufacturers when they fail to disclose the harm that their products cause and blocking states from providing information on product harm beyond EPA-approved language.
Chemical companies—many foreign-owned—seek liability shields because they know the harm their products have already caused. Syngenta, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned company ChemChina, reached a $187.5 million settlement in 2021 for paraquat-related Parkinson’s disease claims. Monsanto, now owned by Germany’s Bayer, has paid billions of dollars to settle lawsuits linking Roundup ᵀᴹ (glyphosate) to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. If legislation shields companies from liability, it would leave farmers, farmworkers, and other injured individuals without meaningful recourse for the harms caused by these toxic substances.
Please co-sponsor the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act (S. 2324).
Thank you.
Letter to U.S. Senator Cory Booker [sponsor]:
I am writing to thank you for sponsoring the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act (S. 2324), to protect the rights of farmers and consumers by holding pesticide manufacturers responsible for the harm caused by their toxic products. This bill has been introduced in the wake of congressional and state legislative attacks on “failure-to-warn” liability claims that are taking place in response to extraordinary jury verdicts against Bayer/Monsanto for harm caused by glyphosate weed killer products like Roundup.ᵀᴹ
The bill will amend the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 (FIFRA) to create a federal right of action for anyone who is harmed by a toxic pesticide.
Despite growing peer-reviewed scientific evidence linking widely used pesticides to a host of health harms, including cancers, birth defects, endocrine disruption, Parkinson’s disease, and infertility, a coordinated effort is being led by pesticide manufacturers in state legislatures and in Congress seeking legal immunity—a liability shield—for these big corporations.
With the massive dismantling of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programs by the current administration, Congress has been seeking, through appropriations bill provisions, to limit court oversight, which in many cases serves as a backstop for public health and environmental protections. Provisions in the House appropriations bill would, in the future, prohibit cases like those filed by victims of glyphosate (Roundupᵀᴹ), who have won large jury verdicts and compensation. The language removes the incentive for chemical manufacturers, under threat of accountability for compensatory and punitive damages, to develop safer products or remove products altogether, slowing the critically necessary shift to less- and non-toxic land and building management practices to protect health and the environment. Legislative history added to the bill in the committee will do little to ensure a fully functioning EPA and court redress.
As Bayer/Monsanto leads the charge, the chemical industry successfully lobbied for a weak federal pesticide law, FIFRA, and then tried to hide behind the law when sued for damages, telling the courts that their products are in compliance with pesticide registration standards and therefore they are not liable for harm. Juries have ruled that chemical manufacturers failed to provide adequate warning through their product labeling, given the independent peer-reviewed science, including what the company knew or should have known, and a clinical assessment of the harm caused to the plaintiff.
However, the Interior and Environment Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee voted July 22 to support a bill that includes language (Sec. 453) providing total pesticide immunity language, blocking farmers and consumers from suing chemical manufacturers when they fail to disclose the harm that their products cause and blocking states from providing information on product harm beyond EPA-approved language.
Chemical companies—many foreign-owned—seek liability shields because they know the harm their products have already caused. Syngenta, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned company ChemChina, reached a $187.5 million settlement in 2021 for paraquat-related Parkinson’s disease claims. Monsanto, now owned by Germany’s Bayer, has paid billions of dollars to settle lawsuits linking Roundup ᵀᴹ (glyphosate) to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. If legislation shields companies from liability, it would leave farmers, farmworkers, and other injured individuals without meaningful recourse for the harms caused by these toxic substances.
Again, thank you for your leadership in sponsoring the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act (S. 2324) to protect the rights of farmers and consumers.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
