The fight to protect farmers from the harmful effects of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s multi-billion dollar herbicide Roundup, recently scored a legislative win in California after Fresno County Superior Court Judge Kristi Kapetan formalized her January ruling to allow the state to require Monsanto to label its product as a possible carcinogen on Friday, March 10.
Judge Kapetan first issued a tentative ruling against the company on January 27 in Monsanto Company v. Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, et al., one year after it sued the state of California for listing their product as a Proposition 65 chemical in order to warn consumers about its possibly carcinogenic effects.
Attorney David Domina is currently representing four farmers who claim that using Roundup gave them non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Proposition 65 was passed in California in 1986, and requires the state to publish a list of products that are known carcinogens, can cause birth defects or other types of reproductive harm. Glyphosate was added to the list in September of 2015 by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) after it was classified it as a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), overruling their previous conclusion following their evaluation of the chemical between 1997 and 2007.
California is the first state to take this large of a step towards alerting consumers of the potential danger associated with glyphosate. David Domina, an attorney at Domina Law Group, is currently representing four farmers – Larry Domina, Frank Pollard, Robert Dickey, and Royce Janzen – who claim that using Roundup gave them non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“Roundup is used by Nebraskans raising everything from grain to grass and tulips to trees. Nothing on the label alerts users to health risks,” Domina said in an interview. “Nebraskans deserve the benefit of the WHO research, and protection against unknown exposure.”
While this California ruling may not directly affect the outcome of the case in Nebraska, it could pave the way for broader changes across the United States and potentially provide necessary protections for the countless people who are affected by glyphosate every year.
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