Sacrament – California cannot require a cancer warning label on Roundup, the world’s most widely used herbicide, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Federal District Judge William Shubb issued a permanent injunction against labeling, saying the state could not meet a legal standard for such a requirement, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
California requires warning labels on cancer-causing products under the State Toxic Drinking Water and Application Act, passed by voters in 1986.
The state wanted to label products containing glyphosate, the main ingredient in the Monsanto Summary, due to a 2015 finding by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate was a probable cause of cancer in humans.
But Monsanto sued and in 2018 Shubb temporarily blocked the warning tag. In issuing the permanent mandate Monday, the judge said the state can only require a private company to change its label if the statement is “purely objective and uncontroversial.”
Shubb said the US Environmental Protection Agency. USA And similar agencies in Europe have not found a connection between the chemical and cancer.
“The weight of the evidence indicates that glyphosate is known not to cause cancer,” the judge said.
The decision is “a very important decision for California agriculture and science,” Monsanto said in a statement.
Last year, the Trump administration said it would not approve warning labels for products containing glyphosate because their research showed that the chemical does not pose a risk to public health.
Monsanto claims the product is safe but faces thousands of lawsuits. Cancer victims in Northern California have won nearly $ 200 million in awards in three lawsuits, including a couple last year who received around $ 2 billion. That award was later reduced to $ 87 million.
The verdicts are being appealed.
Monsanto’s parent company is Bayer.
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