But in some ways, the guy who started Monsanto, John Queeny, may have gotten what he wanted.
It wanted to be this American chemical company.
Monsanto had always wanted to be separate from Bayer.
When all those court decisions came down, many of the shareholders, who are German, issued a vote of no confidence against their CEO and the board of management, because they were baffled: How is it that this company could have made the decision to buy a company with extensive liabilities? That had never happened in the history of the DAX, the German exchange. And there's a real question as to what the future of this company is going to be, given all those liabilities. And as a result, Bayer stock price has plummeted. And there are farmers that are also filing suit against the company for that. And then lastly, there's another herbicide called dicamba that has been causing a lot of problems out in farm country. Various states across the United States - Delaware, Washington, among many others - have begun filing suit against Monsanto, now Bayer, for PCB contamination, another chemical that Monsanto produced decades ago that is still affecting folks, even today. And there has also been a series of other cases that have happened in the interim. Subsequently, two other cases went against Bayer, with juries, again, finding that Roundup exposure was linked to those plaintiffs' cancers. It was a $280 million-plus verdict, finding that a gardener who had been exposed to Roundup, that his cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was linked to that. After that merger, the first Roundup case - is an herbicide that Monsanto created that was very popular - went to trial and the plaintiffs won. And there's a certain irony there, because when Monsanto was founded, the whole point of Monsanto was to be this American chemical company that would be independent of German firms like Bayer. Monsanto is no more, because Monsanto was gobbled up by Bayer, the German life sciences pharmaceutical company, in 2018. It shocked me to the core as I was writing. KCRW: Where is Monsanto at right now, in terms of any lawsuits and their fallout?īartlow J. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Elmore tells the troubling story of the company's past, present, and future in his new book " Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future." With immense detail and care, historian Bartow J.
Its genetically modified Roundup Ready crop seeds were introduced 25 years ago, and have changed how many of us both eat and think about our food. Monsanto, the chemical company with outsized influence and impact on our agricultural practices, is often in the news.
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