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A FRENCH COURT has upheld a guilty verdict against chemical giant Monsanto over the poisoning of a farmer who suffered neurological damage after using one of its weedkillers.
This is the latest legal setback for the company over its controversial pesticides.
Cereal farmer Paul Francois has been fighting Monsanto, a former US company which was bought by Germany’s Bayer last year, for the past 12 years.
In the first ruling of its kind against Monsanto anywhere in the world, a French court in 2012 found it guilty of poisoning Francois.
He said he began experiencing symptoms including blackouts, headaches and loss of balance and memory after inhaling fumes while using the now-banned weedkiller Lasso.
Monsanto appealed and lost in 2015. However, it decided to go a third round.
“I won, and I’m happy, but at what cost?” Francois told reporters after the verdict.
He denounced what he called years of “legal harassment” by Monsanto.
The ruling, he said, was “a message to the government”, which he urged to ban other toxic pesticides that contain glyphosate, used in Monsanto’s top-selling Roundup.
“History will judge them for not acting,” he said, referring to a campaign pledge by President Emmanuel Macron to phase out glyphosate in France, which he backed down on last year.
The company can still appeal today’s ruling by the Cour de Cassation, a top French appeals court.
‘Not a chemist’
Francois said he fell ill in 2004 after accidentally inhaling fumes from a vat containing Lasso, a monochlorobenzene-based weedkiller that was legal in France until 2007. However, it had already been banned in 1985 in Canada and in 1992 in Belgium and Britain.
He argued that Monsanto was aware of Lasso’s dangers long before it was withdrawn from the French market, and sought damages of more than €1 million for chronic neurological damage that required long hospital stays.
The court in Lyon, southeastern France, rejected the company’s appeal but did not rule on how much Monsanto might have to pay, which will be determined in a separate ruling.
It did order the company to pay €50,000 immediately for Francois’s legal fees.
In its ruling, the court found that Monsanto should have clearly indicated on Lasso’s labelling and instructions for use “a notice on the specific dangers of using the product in vats and reservoirs”.
The plaintiff’s assumed technical knowledge does not excuse the lack of information on the product and its harmful effects – a farmer is not a chemist.
Speaking after the verdict, a lawyer for Monsanto France, Jean-Daniel Bretzner, said it would probably appeal, since the ruling applied to Lasso’s producer – in this case, Monsanto Europe.
Parent company Bayer confirmed it was weighing an appeal.
“Supposing that Paul Francois was accidently exposed to Lasso, by definition such exposure is rare,” it said in a statement.
Other cases
This is the latest conviction against Monsanto involving its weedkillers and pesticides, which have been widely used around the world for years.
Last month, a San Francisco court ordered the $80 million (€71 million) payout to a retiree who blames its popular Roundup weedkiller, which contains glyphosate, for causing his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The company said it would appeal as it faces thousands of similar lawsuits in the United States.
It had already been ordered last year to pay $78.5 million (€69.7 million) to a California groundskeeper who attributed his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to using Roundup as well as Monsanto’s Ranger Pro.
Monsanto denies that Roundup causes cancer.
It has challenged findings by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), which classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen” in 2015.
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40% of people who live in the USA are suffering from a chronic illness of one sort or another. Think on that. That’s nearly half of the population of the USA. Pesticides, unlabled GMO foods, food riven with additives, growth hormones, ammonia, have a huge bearing on that figure of 40%. When Monsanto can place its people in the Supreme Court, and on the board of the FDA there will never be any chance of that number of 40% decreasing. The number will only rise.
@Dave Doyle: Sedentary lifestyles and too much calorie-laden, salty processed food is the cause of those problems.
Glyphosate is used just as widely in Europe as it is in the US, so there’s very little basis for your above post wrt. pesticides.
@Dave Doyle: Likely nothing to do with Monsanto or Glyphosate but to do with the adulteration of the food chain with sulphite preservatives & sulphite colorants.
Sulphur dioxide & sulphites are the only one of 14 allergens that can be legally HIDDEN in food if the levels are below 10mg/kg or 10ml/l. Imagine if same rules applied to peanuts.
The sulphites are driving chronic inflammation which we suspect is exacerbating a newly defined disease called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome that may already be an epidemic in developed nations even Ireland. The disease is an immune disease likely triggered by environmental factors such as smog, diesel exhaust, of gassing polyurethane plastics and other household chemicals we assume are safe WD40, 3 in 1 oil, deodorant propellants….very long list.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, Mast Cells within the immune system start to misidentify threats and one threat it mis-identifies are sulphites in food which are now ubiquitous. Sulphites are used to cheat on shelf life and cheat on colour.
Acute exposure by thousands of personnel to vast amounts of known sensitizer chemicals at the Air Corps at Baldonnel has left a medical trail that will be very valuable to any scientist looking to get to the bottom of this problem. Young men suffered MCAS symptoms in late teens/early 20s when the measured profile of the illness in the USA is confined 80% to middle aged women.
Monsanto is a convenient bogie man but the answer is likely simpler and happening every time we eat breakfast, dinner and tea as well as nibbles and a glass of wine.
@Chemical Brothers: A well researched, reasonable and balanced response but you’re dealing with Journal prejudice where everybody goes off pushing their own little barrow.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is the primary agency of the European Union for risk assessments regarding food safety.
In October 2015, EFSA concluded that ‘glyphosate is unlikely to pose a hazard to humans and the evidence does not support classification with regard to its carcinogenic potential’.
@James Brady: Study after study has shown that is does cancer -Common weed killer glyphosate increases cancer risk by 41%, study says https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/14/health/us-glyphosate-cancer-study-scli-intl/index.html
Weedkiller glyphosate a ‘substantial’ cancer factor
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47633086
2 recent cases in US have been win by people who sued and win.
Have you ever wondered why cancer is skyrocketing why bees are dying etc
@GO GREEN: Jury Rules Against Bayer in California Glyphosate and Cancer Trial https://www.agriculture.com/news/crops/jury-rules-against-bayer-in-california-glyphosate-and-cancer-trial
@James Brady: that conlusion only came after the heavyweight German corporations got involved. The WHO has been compromised for a good few years now.
@Cormac Ó Braonáin: actually, the WHO considers that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic”, inline with findings from the IARC. It’s the EFSA, completely unrelated to the WHO, that is compromised.
@GO GREEN: But the resurges agreed that the findings are limited. Also it is unlikely to cause cancer when handling in a proper way. Everything can be harmful if not proper used.
“The plaintiff’s assumed technical knowledge does not excuse the lack of information on the product and its harmful effects – a farmer is not a chemist.”
French judges appear to show sense. The State Claims Agency has managed to successfully argue in an Irish Court that military aircraft mechanics in the Irish Air Corps with ZERO medical training were able to diagnose themselves with chemical injure thus starting the statute clock.
SCA have argued that an Air Corps technician going to an doctor asking did chemicals harm me and doctor saying maybe or maybe not means the technician had “knowledge” that the chemicals had harmed him.
Like I said the French judge appears to have displayed common sense against a formidable corporate foe.
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