Bayer's Roundup Faces New Setback in France -- WSJ

By Ruth Bender

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (January 16, 2019).

BERLIN -- Bayer AG's fight to prove its recently-acquired weedkillers are safe faced a setback in Europe Tuesday as a French court revoked approval for one of its glyphosate-based products because it might cause cancer.

The ruling effectively bans Bayer from selling the weedkiller in France. While the product is a small seller there, the court action could also give ammunition to plaintiffs who are suing the chemicals and pharmaceuticals company in the U.S. over Roundup and Ranger Pro weedkillers, which it inherited as part of its $63 billion takeover of Monsanto Co. last year.

Bayer is facing some 9,300 lawsuits alleging Roundup products gave the plaintiffs cancer. Bayer is appealing a first verdict in a California state court that awarded $78.5 million in damages to a school groundskeeper with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, arguing that numerous scientific studies and regulatory authorities have maintained that glyphosate was safe to use.

The administrative court in Lyon, France, said Tuesday that despite the European Union's approval of the active ingredient glyphosate, scientific studies and animal testing showed Bayer's Roundup Pro 360 weedkiller was potentially carcinogenic to humans and was likely to be harmful to human reproduction and aquatic organisms. It said the ban was effective immediately.

"The decision itself isn't precedential but it could certainly be influential," said Elizabeth Burch, a professor specializing in mass torts cases at the University of Georgia.

Corinne Lepage, the lawyer representing the Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering, which brought the case to court in France, said the principle of the decision could potentially put into question all glyphosate-based products.

Bayer said it disagreed with the decision. "This product formulation, like all crop protection products, has been subject to a strict evaluation by the French authorities (ANSES), an independent body and guarantor of the public health security," Bayer said in a statement. The company said it was considering its legal options.

ANSES, France's agency for food and environmental regulation, which authorized the marketing of the weedkiller in 2017, said it would carefully review the court decision.

The impact on Bayer sales from the loss of the French market would be minor, said Wimal Kapadia from Bernstein Research. "This is one move by a municipality, but we will likely see others, absent a change in sentiment," he said.

Glyphosate, invented by Monsanto Co. under the Roundup brand, has been hotly debated since the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015 classified the substance as potentially causing cancer in humans.

The debate has been particularly divisive in the European Union, whose member states granted glyphosate a new five-year license in 2017. The decision was reached after a surprise last-minute nod from Germany that raised eyebrows among neighbors.

The episode resurfaced on Tuesday, after a report commissioned by center-left members of the European parliament said entire sections of the glyphosate evaluation by Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, or BfR, had been copied from Monsanto's renewal application.

In the parliament members' report, a plagiarism researcher and a biochemist who is a member of a group that seeks to ban glyphosate allege that "the BfR's practice of copy-paste and plagiarism is at odds with an independent, objective, and transparent assessment of the risks, and that this practice influenced the authority's conclusions on glyphosate's safety."

The German institute denied the allegations, arguing it had by no means taken on conclusions from the applicant without verifying them.

The European Parliament on Wednesday is expected to complete an inquiry into how glyphosate was authorized on the European market and issue recommendations calling for a ban on the use of pesticides in public spaces, according to a draft of the text due to be adopted.

Meanwhile, some European countries such as France and Germany have moved to phase out glyphosate-based products in the coming years.

--Valentina Pop and Donato Paolo Mancini contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 16, 2019 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)

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