A bill advanced Wednesday in the Iowa House of Representatives would limit Iowans’ ability to sue pesticide companies when their products are linked to serious health problems.
The bill says manufacturers cannot be held liable for failing to alert people of potential health risks as long as their pesticides have a federally-approved warning label.
Craig Mischo is a lobbyist for Bayer, the pharmaceutical and chemical company that proposed the bill. He said Bayer produces the weed killer Roundup in Muscatine, and it’s commonly used on corn and soybean crops across Iowa.
“And that bring us to why we’re here today,” Mischo said at a subcommittee hearing. “Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate have been subject to litigation and significant media attention for the past several years.”
Brad Epperly, another lobbyist for Bayer, said people are suing the company alleging that Roundup caused them to get cancer, and that Bayer failed to warn them of the risk. He said the company can’t warn people of a cancer risk when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found Roundup is not likely to be carcinogenic.
“We’ve got a product, we’ve spent millions of dollars developing it. It spent probably, you know, a decade going through regulatory trials before it was approved,” Epperly said. “And we’ve complied with the requirements for what we’re supposed to label on it.”
He said the bill would still allow people to bring lawsuits alleging that Roundup exposure caused health problems—they just couldn’t sue alleging that the company failed to warn them of that particular health risk.
But lawyers who opposed the bill said it would effectively eliminate Iowans’ ability to seek justice for pesticide injuries by cutting off the main legal avenue for these lawsuits.
Brian Marty said his West Des Moines law firm has several clients who have Parkinson’s disease from paraquat exposure and non-Hodgkins lymphoma from Roundup exposure.
“These are primarily farmers and ag workers who use these products consistent with their labeling and consistent with custom usage of these products that they thought were safe—and especially in the Parkinson’s context with paraquat—are now faced with, essentially, a death sentence,” he said.
Marty said suing based on the company’s alleged failure to warn people of health risks is the only way for his clients to have a chance in court.
Kellie Paschke, a lobbyist for the Iowa Association of Justice, which opposes the bill, said the more than 100-page label for paraquat does not mention health risks related to exposure.
“Unfortunately, this bill today…protects ChemChina,” she said “We are protecting China with this bill and their manufacture of paraquat, which is known to cause, or is linked to, Parkinson’s disease.”
Rep. Megan Srinivas, D-Des Moines, who is also a doctor, said she reviewed some scientific studies on the main ingredient in Roundup. She said she found articles that show higher levels of exposure to Roundup are linked to carcinogenic activity.
“Given that we have about 70,000 migrant farmworkers here in this state, many of whom don’t speak English—if they have access to these labels, are they really being warned if they can’t understand the label?” Srinivas asked. “That’s a big concern of mine.”
Republicans on the House subcommittee agreed to advance the bill.
But Rep. Megan Jones, R-Sioux Rapids, said it would have to be amended before she would support it at a later stage. She said she has “zero interest” in in giving legal protections to the Chinese government.
“And I certainly think that this needs to be corralled in, because it is too big of a beast,” Jones said. “It kind of grosses me out at this point.”
She said the only thing she likes about the bill is that it attempts to rein in liability without putting a dollar limit on lawsuits, unlike recently enacted laws limiting financial compensation in medical malpractice and commercial vehicle accident lawsuits.
Several agriculture and business groups—including the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, the Iowa Corn Growers Association, and the Iowa Soybean Association—registered in support of the bill. But no one except for the Bayer lobbyists spoke in support of the bill at the subcommittee hearing.
