A Battered Bayer Breathes Sigh of Relief As Mexico Suspends Its Long-Awaited Ban on Glyphosate Weedkiller

Even as Bayer’s sales of Roundup slide as fears about the health risks of glyphosate rise, most governments continue to baulk at the idea of banning the product completely.

On April 1, 2024, Mexico’s government was supposed to make history by banning the world’s most notorious weedkiller. On that day, a presidential decree prohibiting the production, importation, distribution and use of glyphosate, the active ingredient of Bayer’s Roundup weedkiller, on Mexican soil was to finally come into effect. But it was not to be. On Tuesday (March 26), just five days before the big day, Mexico’s government suspended the ban arguing that there is no immediate way to replace the herbicide and that safeguarding Mexico’s food security must override all other concerns.

The search for alternatives will continue, reads a joint statement signed by the ministries of Economy, Environment, Health and Agriculture, and the Federal Commission for the Protection against Health Risks. However, the statement does not indicate whether the measure has been postponed or a new date set for its entry into force. The National Council of Science, Humanities and Technology, which has been working to find non-toxic alternatives to glyphosate, with apparently significant success, opposes the decision. And for the moment, Mexico’s outgoing President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (aka AMLO) has not publicly commented.

Bayer’s Regret

The news, however, will be welcomed by the German pharmaceutical and biotech corp Bayer, whose disastrous acquisition of Roundup’s toxic creator, Monsanto, in 2018 has left it hemorrhaging funds. Bayer’s shares rose just over 4% on Wednesday and are up over 7% on the week, but they are still down almost 70% from the acquisition date. As Yves wrote in 2020, since which time its litigation woes have done nothing but mushroom, Bayer’s purchase of Monsanto was almost certainly suicidal, but so too was its decision not to engage in anything approaching damage limitation:

It isn’t simply that Bayer-Monsanto has replaced AOL-Time Warner in most press reckonings as “the worst deal of all time”. Yes, nearly every penny of the $66 billion that Bayer paid for Monsanto has gone poof. Yes, Bayer is the first time in German corporate history that a public company got a majority vote of no confidence from its shareholders. Yes, Bayer is at risk of bleeding out over seemingly endless Monsanto-related liability claims (Roundup has so taken the center stage that what would ordinarily be a big-deal litigation drain, Dicamba, is treated as an afterthought). Unlike any other company ever facing similar litigation, Bayer has neither taken Roundup off the market, nor reformulated it, nor put a cancer warning on it. It looks like Bayer will eventually declare bankruptcy.

If Mexico had followed through with its ban on glyphosate, not only would Bayer have lost a key market; it would have faced the risk of a domino effect rippling across Latin America. How many other nations would have followed Mexico’s lead if it had managed to show that it is possible to feed your country without dousing most of your crops in Roundup? But that is not going to happen, at least not for some time.

Meanwhile, Roundup continues to bleed money for Bayer. In 2020, the company agreed to pay $10 billion to settle claims that its weedkiller, Roundup, caused cancer. It was one of the largest corporate settlements in history, but it wasn’t enough. In just one verdict last November, a Missouri jury awarded three plaintiffs $1.5 billion in damages. The company has since set aside a further $6 billion but concerns are rising that it, too, won’t be enough. As the NYT conceded a month later, the 160-year old company’s days may well be numbered.

Yet even as Bayer’s sales of Roundup slide as fears about its health impact rise, most governments continue to baulk at the idea of banning the product completely. Austria and Luxembourg both tried, but failed. Like Mexico, Colombia and El Salvador both banned glyphosate and then overturned the decision. Despite pledging to ban the herbicide, France’s Macron government abstained in an EU vote last year, meaning the bloc will continue to use Roundup for at least another 10 years.

As NC regular vao notes in the comments section below, after the decision was taken, ANSES, the French agency responsible for evaluating the safety of various products (including pesticides and weed-killers), was forced to release a report intended to assess the relevance of genotoxicity testing of glyphosate-based products that it had carefully hidden for eight years.

That report showed that the methods used to detect the mutagenicity of glyphosate had been flawed and inadequate. ANSES had finalized the report and discussed it in 2016, and then shelved it without approving or rejecting it. It also steadfastly refused to provide it to those asking for it (on the basis of a French law similar to the FOIA). The argument: since the report had not been formally approved, it did not formally exist, ergo could not be published. It was finally released after newspaper “Le Monde” initiated a judicial process against ANSES.

Glysophate: TINA?

Mexico’s AMLO government still considers glyphosate to be harmful to human health and the environment, but it fears that Mexican farmers aren’t ready to make the shift just yet. Many farmers and so-called “scientific experts” in Mexico have warned that there is no alternative (TINA) to glyphosate and that its ban could imperil the country’s grain production. Mexico’s imports of GMO corn from the US, rather than falling, reached record levels last year, in part due to a severe drought across many key growing regions.

Industry influence and lobbying almost certainly played a part in the government’s climb down. Days before the government announced its policy reversal, two senators of AMLO’s governing party, MORENA, proposed suspending implementation of the decree on glyphosate due to the lack of alternatives or sustainable practices that will allow the country to maintain the country’s agricultural production.” The proposal was rejected by the senate and lambasted by consumer groups, including the campaign group Sin Maiz No Hay País (Without Corn, There Is No Country), which said the following in a March 22 press release:

We insist on the proven dangers of glyphosate, classified as a probable carcinogenic agent for humans (Group 2A) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and as a highly dangerous pesticide by the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) and the Network of Action on Pesticides and their Alternatives for Latin America (RAP-AL), among others, a classification taken up in Mexico’s response to the United States in the T-MEC dispute settlement panel.

Glyphosate has caused serious damage to biodiversity, the environment and human health. According to information from the National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (Conahcyt), its high residuality has been proven and it is present in the soil, in water wells intended for human consumption, in people’s blood and breast milk, and in corn grains.

The decree is not about replacing glyphosate with another specific product, but rather changing the agro-industrial model of food production, for which Conahcyt has disseminated alternatives and successful experiences of agroecological production, implemented together with the Undersecretary of Food Self-Sufficiency at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (Sader)… [These have] demonstrated that production without glyphosate is viable.

With the implementation of agroecology, on more than 5 million hectares and with the participation of almost 2 million small and medium-scale farmers, they have seen increases in yields and improvements in profits, as well as a significant reduction in the use of toxic agrochemicals.

The press release also eviscerates Mexico’s Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, Victor Villalobos, for paying lip service to the “government’s policy of prohibiting glyphosate and genetically manipulated corn in Mexico” while “supporting and parroting the arguments of agribusiness,” including the claim that “there is no scientific evidence that confirms the multiple effects caused by the use of glyphosate in food production.”

What About Mexico’s GMO Corn Ban?

It is not yet clear what the AMLO government’s U-turn on glyphosate means for its proposed ban on the use of GMO corn for human consumption. The government’s justifications for the ban, announced initially in 2020 to encompass all forms of GMO corn consumption but amended last year to only cover human consumption, included protecting the health of the population, the environment and Mexico’s genetic diversity of maize.

Needless to say, the plan has been fiercely opposed by US corn growers, for whom Mexico is their largest overseas market. To cushion the impact, the AMLO government in December proposed postponing the deadline for the ban until January 2025 as well as exempting yellow feed corn from the ban until an independent investigation (i.e. not financed by GMO producers) can be conducted into its effects on human health.

But that wasn’t enough to placate the US’ hugely powerful Big Ag lobbies. In August last year, the US government responded by calling for the formation of a dispute settlement panel under the USMCA North American trade deal.

This is all par for the course. Regardless of the party in power, the US government has repeatedly used its clout on behalf of Big Ag lobbies to bully smaller countries, including Thailand and now Mexico, into abandoning policies that could threaten the profits of pesticides and biotech companies, as a recent expose by New Lede, a journalism initiative of the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, reveals:

[Newly obtained e]mails show that high-ranking US officials, including presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, US Trade Representatives Robert Lighthizer and Katherine Tai, and the US Secretaries of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Tom Vilsack are among American officials who have been involved in lobbying countries amid industry complaints over foreign efforts to limit the reach of certain pesticides and genetically engineered crops within their borders.

The correspondence adds to a body of evidence showing that US government fights with foreign countries over the agricultural crops and chemicals come as USTR, USDA and EPA meet with, and coordinate communications with, corporations selling those crops and chemicals and their lobbyists.

In one example…, when the European Union was considering limitations on two neonicotinoid pesticides, Craig Thorn, a partner with DBT Associates, a trade firm that represents CropLife America, a lobbying association for the agrochemical industry funded by Bayer, BASF, Corteva, Syngenta and other pesticide manufacturers, emailed the USDA, encouraging them to intervene and warning US officials that the vote would be sooner than expected.

The records show industry players have also asked officials in other countries, including Colombia, South Africa and Japan, to push back against pesticide bans in Europe, Thailand and Mexico where opposition to pesticides has been growing.

In its trade dispute with the US and Canada, Mexico should have science on its side, notes Ernesto Hernández-López, a Professor of Law at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law, Chapman University:

Its reply to US and Canadian demands to offer scientific proof backing its case includes 150 scientific studies referred to in peer-review journals, systemic research reviews, and more.Mexico incorporates perspectives from toxicology, pediatrics, plant biology, hematology, epidemiology, public health, and data mining, to name a few…

Based on this, Mexico points to safety risks when humans consume GMO corn and consume corn exposed to herbicides like glyphosate. A World Health Organization (WHO) agency concluded that glyphosate is a likely cause of cancer. Five years ago American courts agreed and continue to do so.

Science-based research supports the Decree in two ways, with justifications for safety measures and with trade obligations. First, corn plays an enormous role in Mexican diets. Because of this, any potential risk from corn creates significant public health concerns for Mexico. Corn provides half of the daily protein intake for Mexican adults. In Mexico corn products are consumed at rates ten times higher than in the United States, according to data from the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization). Put simply, any toxicity from eating corn poses substantial dangers for Mexico.

Luckily the USMCA permits food safety policies tailored to specific risks. This points to a second kind of support for the Decree. Specifically, Mexico has the “right to adopt” measures needed to protect human health. To narrowly craft the measure, Mexico identifies risks to human health from contaminants or toxins in GMO corn in human food. This is why the Decree only applies to tortillas and masa and not animal feed, what American farmers mostly export.

In its defence, Mexico refers to over fifty individual studies for its section on the health risks of GMO corn, with examples from the WHO and leading journals like Nature, while also presenting major risks posed by glyphosate, including liver cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. By contrast, says Hernández-López, the US stance essentially ignores science, drawing on industry-led studies from decades ago to try to maintain that GMO corn is safe. But whether having science (instead of corporate $) on its side will be enough to tip the balance in Mexico’s favour is far from clear.