Pesticide immunity bill advances from Iowa Senate
An Iowa bill pertaining to pesticide lawsuits would help the makers of RoundUp and other pesticides. (Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
Iowa senators narrowly passed a bill Wednesday that would protect pesticide companies from 'failure to warn' lawsuits.
Similar bills have been introduced across the country, after failing in Iowa, Missouri and Idaho last year. Legislators in Georgia advanced their version of the bill, but it has not yet been signed into law by its governor.
Senate File 394 would rule that pesticide labels issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 'shall be sufficient' in satisfying any requirement to warn users of the product's health and safety. The bill passed the Senate 26-21.
Sen. Mike Bousselot, the bill's floor manager, said despite the arguments against the legislation, 'it's a simple bill.'
'It says that if you sell your glyphosate or your product and you follow federal law to the T, you can't be sued for having done the wrong thing in labeling your product,' Bousselot said of the bill.
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The bill does not name the popular household and commercial pesticide RoundUp and its ingredient glyphosate, but debate on the bill centered on the pesticide's manufacturer, Bayer, and the numerous lawsuits that claim the product gave plaintiffs cancer.
Bousselot said the bill does not give blanket immunity, because plaintiffs can still sue under other claims, like negligence, fraud and breach of warranty.
The Republican from Ankeny also introduced an amendment that said the bill would not 'prohibit a cause of action based on any other provision or doctrine of state law.'
Sen. Matt Blake, D-Johnston, said even with the amendment, which passed, the bill is 'an immunity bill' for pesticide companies.
Blake said product liability law comprises three main theories of law, all of which would 'fail' in Iowa under the bill.
'Failure to warn is the root of a product's liability claim,' Blake said. 'If the state deems a warning label to be … sufficient, it kills the root cause.'
Sen. Adrian Dickey, R-Packwood, said the bill is about 'sue happy lawyers' and reiterated a point he made in a committee hearing on the bill that the abundance of warning labels in the country have 'diluted' their cautioning.
EPA will not allow Bayer to put a cancer warning on its label to simply 'cover their backside' if it is counter to the science submitted to agency, Dickey explained.
'Today's bill is not preventing anyone from suing a company if they feel the product causes cancer,' Dickey said. 'It's simply common sense legislation that states that you cannot sue a company for having a label on a product when the federal government doesn't allow the label to be on the product.'
Sen. Janice Weiner, D-Iowa City, noted evidence uncovered during RoundUp litigation, known as the Monsanto Papers, that show the company ghostwrote independent studies to support the safety of the pesticide.
'If they did everything right, why are there reams of discovery emails showing that they lied?' Weiner said.
Weiner noted a recently settled case against Bayer in Georgia that sided with plaintiffs. She said the same case would not be allowed in Iowa under the bill.
'A vote for this bill is a statement to Iowans that a plaintiff in Georgia will be made whole financially … but in Iowa, in Iowa, the farmer with cancer gets nothing,' Weiner said.
In February, more than 100 Iowans gathered in the State Capitol rotunda to hold a vigil for loved ones who were lost to cancer and to protest the bill they deemed the 'cancer gag act.'
Bousselot said the 'dirty little secret' is that his opponents don't want the bill to pass because it would require lawyers to prove that a pesticide chemical is carcinogenic.
'It can't be proven (that) glyphosate causes cancer,' Bousselot said. 'What is the justice in suing someone for mislabeling a product, if the label that you want would have broken federal law in the first place?'
Daniel Hinkle, senior counsel for policy and state affairs at American Association for Justice, said the bill would defer to the EPA label on a product's safety, but he said if the label changes in the future, the user would only be protected by what the label said at the time they used the product.
Hinkle explained with an example of a farmer using a different chemical, paraquat, which research has shown may be linked to Parkinson's Disease. EPA 'has not found a clear link' between the two, which is reflected in the product's label, similarly to that of glyphosate which the EPA holds is not linked to cancer.
'From this, even if the EPA came out in 2026 and says, 'You know what, paraquat causes Parkinson's disease, and we think it should be on the label,' … the farmer who is exposed under the old label, would have no ability to hold the company accountable,' Hinkle said.
Legislators in Oklahoma proposed an amendment to their pesticide bill that would remove a company's immunity from failure to warn claims in the state if the EPA canceled the registration of the pesticide based on new findings.
Proponents of the Iowa bill argue that without its protections, Bayer will stop manufacturing and distributing glyphosate, which according to Modern Ag Alliance, would double or triple farmers' input costs across the country.
Modern Ag Alliance is a group of agricultural stakeholders, including Bayer and several Iowa commodity groups, that has lobbied in favor of the bills and sponsored advertisements in farming communities across the country with slogans like 'control weeds, not farming.'
Weiner brought up the advertisements and said despite the rhetoric, glyphosate 'isn't going anywhere.'
Jess Christiansen, the head of crop science and sustainability communications at Bayer, said the company set aside $16 billion for RoundUp litigation and already, the company has spent more than $10 billion of that.
'The reality is that it doesn't matter if you're a big multinational company, like a Bayer Crop Science, or a mid size or a startup company — the math is the math,' Christiansen said. 'You can only endure so much loss before you have to make a tough decision … we can't continue to go down the path we're going.'
Bayer maintains that its products do not cause cancer and that it complied with all of the requirements from EPA for the labeling of their products.
'We're very much in favor of being a regulated industry,' Christiansen said. 'It's in the best interest of the public for that to happen –- then let's uphold that, so that's really what the (bill) language is about.'
Opponents of the bill, including several senators who spoke on the bill, allege Bayer and other pesticide companies have worked to cover up key information showing researchers are aware of the link to cancer.
Central to the argument is a 2015 finding from International Research Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, that classified glyphosate as 'probably carcinogenic to humans.'
Proponents of the bill discredit the IARC study, noting the large number of substances the body considers carcinogenic, and point to other bodies of research, including those evaluated by EPA and other countries that corroborate the safety of glyphosate.
Opponents say IRAC evaluated a greater body of work. Research published in 2019 about the divergence of the two decisions showed IARC evaluated more than twice as many studies in its decision, and more that were peer-reviewed.
Sen. Molly Donahue, D-Cedar Rapids, noted recent research showing Iowa has some of the highest rates of new cancer in the country, and said the bill would 'protect the corporate profits at the expense of public health.'
'I'm here to tell you right now that giving corporations immunity when their product harms Iowans, is like handing a wolf the keys to the hen house and hoping for the best,' Donahue said.
A bill that advanced in the Iowa Senate last year had a provision limiting the bill's protections to Chinese-owned companies, which targeted paraquat's manufacturer, Syngenta which is owned by ChemChina.
SF 394 does not mention Chinese-owned companies. The bill was immediately messaged to the House.
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