Source: Des Moines Register | by Sabine Martin | February 10, 2025
Hardin County farmer Nick Schutt held up a photo of his late sister, Tammy, in the Iowa Capitol rotunda Monday as he described how several members of his family have faced a cancer diagnosis.
Now, following the death of his sister because of cancer almost a year after her diagnosis, Schutt, 53, said he’s working with doctors through the exploratory stages of identifying the disease in his own body.
The cancer link in his family is obvious, he says: The agricultural chemicals he was exposed to growing up in rural Iowa in drinking water and in the fields.
“At the end of the day, multinational chemical companies like Bayer should be held accountable … as the rest of us,” he said. “… This is not right for the families who have suffered so much already.”
Schutt was among more than 150 Iowans in the Iowa Capitol Monday who protested a bill advancing in the Senate that would limit Iowans’ ability to sue agricultural chemical manufacturers for not warning users of potential health risks.
Senate Study Bill 1051 would shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits that allege their products’ labels didn’t warn users of potential health risks, such as cancer, if the product labels have a “sufficient warning” that complies with federal regulations. The bill is one of several pushes from agricultural chemical manufacturers across the country to limit related litigation.
Protesters Monday spotlighted the main pesticide and herbicide manufacturer backing the bill, Bayer, which is the only U.S. maker of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.
Bayer officials argue passing the bill would help uphold scientific studies from entities such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that say glyphosate does not cause cancer.
“What is happening is the litigation industry is basically filing lawsuits against producers of these products, such as Bayer, saying that we failed to warn the public of cancer risk in the case of Roundup,” Jess Christiansen, Bayer’s head of crop science and sustainability communications, said Monday. “And again, that’s simply not true. The data does not substantiate that, and the regulatory authorities did not say that.”
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a research agency under the World Health Organization, in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
But the EPA in a 2020 regulatory review said “there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label” and it is unlikely to be a human carcinogen.
Bayer has faced thousands of lawsuits linking cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer to its weedkiller product Roundup. The company paid over $10 billion in 2020 to settle suits of over 95,000 cases related to Roundup labels not warning of potential cancer.
The Senate passed the same bill last year on a 30-19 vote, but it stalled in the House.
Protesters say bill is a ‘Cancer Gag Act,’ concerned with Iowa’s rising cancer rates
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.
Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the country, according to the 2024 Iowa Cancer Registry. The cancer registry predicted that 6,100 people will die in Iowa from cancer this year.
Johnston resident and retired educator Rich Gradoville, 65, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer two years ago, said he doesn’t know the cause of his cancer, but said if in the future pesticide manufacturers say their products are not safe, he wants to be able to hold them accountable in court.
“What our legislators should be doing is working on bills that lower the risk for Iowans, rather than trying to help chemical companies to protect themselves,” Gradoville said.
Bayer official: Bill highlights regulatory process for glyphosate
Christiansen said the bill in the Iowa Senate isn’t “blanket immunity” for Bayer. A Senate subcommittee advanced the bill last week.
“We would actually be out of compliance if we would label according to what the litigation industry is requesting or saying that we should label. We would be out of compliance with the regulatory process,” Christiansen said. “And so, unfortunately, we do have to support bills like this to ensure that there’s good alignments on the data and the facts and that there’s alignment and trust in the process when it comes to getting products to sale and use.”
Bayer is having conversations or backing legislation in several states other than Iowa, including Montana, Wyoming, Florida and North Dakota, she said. But the bill has significance in Iowa as a top agricultural producer and the home of Bayer’s plant in Muscatine that manufactures 70% of North America’s Roundup.
She said losing access to glyphosate would take away the estimated $611.7 millionthat Iowa farmers save using it.
“Not only does it create a ton of economic viability for our local and rural communities and at the state level and the national level, but we need to keep our food costs down,” Christiansen said. “We need access to good food and we need it to be affordable as American families.”
Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, executive director of Modern Ag Alliance, a coalition of over 90 agricultural organizations that is founded by Bayer, said Iowa farmers are “overwhelmingly support” of the bill.
” … They are tired of having their critical tools jeopardized by the litigation industry’s never-ending quest for massive paydays,” Burns-Thompson said. “Crop protection technologies, like glyphosate, have been thoroughly studied and proven safe time and again for decades, allowing Iowa farmers to grow the food, fiber and field we all rely on.”
Senate President Amy Sinclair, R-Allerton, said on “Iowa Press” on Iowa PBS last month that the bill prevents money grabs from attorneys working on lawsuits.
“We should always allow for actual harmed victims lawsuits to recover their damages. This bill would not impede that. It would impede money-grabbing attorneys from coming in and doing class action lawsuits against a company who has followed the law,” she said.
Sabine Martin covers politics for the Register. She can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at (515) 284-8132. Follow her on X at @sabinefmartin.