More than 100 Government, Farm, Business and Non-Profits Join Amici Briefs in Support of Monsanto

The United States: “Allowing common-law claims like respondent’s would gut the ‘[u]niformity’ essential to FIFRA’s labeling scheme. All 50 States could pick their own warning regimes for health concerns, inhalation risks, first-aid procedures, or water quality, either legislatively or via jury trials. Some state legislatures or juries might demand prominent warnings about the threat of blindness or Parkinson’s; others might prioritize risks to flora and fauna; yet others might deem such labeling misleading or incomplete. FIFRA rejects that State-by-State cacophony and vests EPA with responsibility to determine what pesticide warnings are necessary to protect human health and the environment.” (Page 4)

Attorneys General from Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and 12 Other States: "Amici States submit this brief to underscore that many States value their access to affordable glyphosate products, and it is neither appropriate nor lawful to permit other States’ laws to jeopardize that access...Allowing other States’ laws to work such perverse results within Amici States’ borders would offend a bedrock principle of our federal system: equal state sovereignty.” (Page 5)

The Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America, American Chemistry Council, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Product Liability Advisory Council, and Washington Legal Foundation: “Not only is respondent’s rationale patently incorrect, it also presents a genuine threat to nationwide markets, and to the agricultural economy more broadly. FIFRA and other federal labeling requirements emphasize the importance of uniformity in labeling: a different labeling requirement for every state (or worse, every locality) would make nationwide marketing impossible. Statutes like FIFRA allow the best-equipped decisionmakers—here, the EPA and the Department of Agriculture—to evaluate whether to remove a pesticide from the national market and make a single nationwide judgment. Respondent’s rationale would put those nationwide economic decisions in the hands of state juries who lack the same economic and scientific resources.  These real-world harms threaten not only individual businesses, but the national economy.” (Page 25)

Missouri State Senator Jason Bean (Chairman of the MO Senate Committee on Agriculture, Food Production, and Outdoor Resources), 33 additional elected officials, the Missouri Soybean Association and Seven other State Agriculture Organizations: "Once Monsanto buckles under the weight of compliance with a 50-state tort regime, Chinese companies will happily fill the void. And they will do so with an economic edge because they will not pay the “tort tax”—which includes costs to install safety measures to prevent tort lawsuits, litigation costs, and massive U.S. tort judgments. That’s because these Chinese companies have the advantage of the “Great Legal Wall of China,” which inhibits litigation and judgment enforcement and enables them to hide behind asset-starved shell companies. The only winners will be noncompliant Chinese companies. The losers will be U.S. farmers like Senator Bean and MSA members, consumers, and ironically, tort plaintiffs." (Page 12)

American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce: “Durnell, like some lower courts, tries to make this case more complicated than it really is. Durnell claims that EPA’s approved label is not a “requirement” under FIFRA because the label is not a regulation or a complete defense in a misbranding enforcement proceeding. That argument fails. EPA’s registration is a binding licensing order, and the label is a condition of the license: selling the product without the label would make the product misbranded. It doesn’t matter that this labeling requirement is necessary, but not sufficient, to prove compliance with FIFRA. What matters is that the label is a requirement.” (Page 23-24)

American Tort Reform Association, alongside eight other groups including Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, Center for Truth in Science, International Society for Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology: “The preemption issue before this Court presents two paths for determining the labeling of herbicide products and, potentially, whether those products (and others subject to similar federal regulatory approval) remain available in the United States. The first option is for the Court to find that the product registration process under FIFRA establishes the requirements for product labeling based on the agency’s comprehensive, periodic review of all available science. The alternative is to rule that, regardless of the EPA’s determinations, whether the products adequately warn of a risk of cancer can be determined, without consistency, in thousands of trials, spurred and supported by the flawed IARC classification."

Atlantic Legal Foundation: “False, misleading, or unnecessary health and safety warnings on a pesticide label are deleterious. They discourage use of highly beneficial products such as Roundup, and detract from warnings and precautionary statements that truly are needed to protect health and the environment.” (Page 2)

Crop Life America: "The Missouri Court of Appeals erroneously held that the only relevant federal ‘requirement’ for purposes of FIFRA’s Uniformity provision is the statute’s command that a pesticide not be misbranded… This myopic reading of FIFRA’s regulatory provisions overlooks both the critical scientific determinations made by EPA in approving the contents of a pesticide label and the unalterable nature of the label without prior EPA approval.” (Page 5)

Farm Bureau Organizations of California, Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, the Indiana Agricultural Law Foundation, and the North Carolina Chamber Legal Institute: “Amici and their members are consumers of Roundup, but they are producers of meat and poultry products, which are likewise subject to federal labeling approval schemes coupled with preemption clauses. If respondent is free to impose state tort liability on Monsanto in this case, amici’s members likewise will face the risk of failure-to-warn suits across the board. These results are impractical to the point of absurdity. The decision below should be reversed.” (Page 5)

National Agricultural Associations: "Beyond affecting existing products, the increased exposure to state tort litigation chills pesticide innovation, incentivizing manufacturers to reallocate research and development from high-agronomic-value, broad-spectrum chemistries to products with lower litigation risk, such as pesticides with targeted application. Indeed, the products with the greatest agronomic value—and thus the greatest potential to protect yields across a broader range of crops and acres—carry the highest risk of litigation, deterring their development and distribution. This distortion of research and development priorities will deprive growers of versatile, effective crop protection tools, increase production costs and operational complexity, and ultimately undermine efforts to combat herbicide-resistant weeds and maintain agricultural productivity." (Page 26)

Retail Litigation Center: “If left to stand, the decision below will invite the very multistate patchwork of product labeling requirements that Congress designed FIFRA to prevent. The costs of that patchwork will be borne not only by manufacturers but also by retailers and their customers. A uniform labeling regime is critically important to retailers, many of whom stock their shelves with scores of products subject to scrutiny under FIFRA.” (Page 9)