AGs Seek Removal of Cancer Warning Label From Weed Killer

A customer shops for Roundup products at a store in San Rafael, Calif., on July, 9, 2018. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

WASHINGTON—Attorneys general in Iowa and Nebraska are petitioning the Biden administration to block a California rule that requires warning labels on a commonly used weed killer that say it may cause cancer.

“I will not stand by as California ignores science, breaks the law, and dictates how Iowa farmers farm,” Iowa attorney general Brenna Bird said in a statement. “Glyphosate helps our farmers control weeds and produce higher-yielding crops to feed our families.”

The attorneys general are asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create a “farming freedom” rule that would state that the cancer warning runs contrary to the EPA’s research and is, therefore, “misbranding.”

The Iowa and Nebraska attorneys general are joined in their petition by Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Dakota, South Carolina, and South Dakota.

Their argument refers to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which requires the Biden administration to approve any pesticide warning labels. They say that the California mandate flies in the face of the EPA’s research.

“The proposed rule merely seeks to clarify ambiguity concerning misbranding under FIFRA,” the petition states.

The EPA has found no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans, but in 2017, California issued a rule requiring it to be added to a list of potential carcinogens.

The labels were required under California’s Proposition 65 “right to know” law after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that the pesticide increased cancer risk in lab rats.

Glyphosate is found in Roundup, the most widely used weed killer in the world. Despite the EPA’s findings, Roundup has been the subject of thousands of lawsuits across the country, and its manufacturer, Bayer-Monsanto, has paid out billions in settlements.

The IARC findings are at the root of many of these suits since the agency determined there was “limited evidence” that glyphosate increases the risk of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a blood cancer.

But other organizations, including another branch of the World Health Organization, came to a different conclusion.

Glyphosate “is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” according to The European Chemicals Agency’s Committee for Risk Assessment, the European Food Safety Authority, and the Joint World Health Organization/Food and Agriculture Meeting on Pesticide Residues.

The California warning requirement was blocked as unconstitutional by a federal court in 2020, and a California appeals court upheld that ruling in 2023, saying the cancer risk was “at best, disputed.”

Researchers at Wageningen University, Netherlands, stated in October 2023 that a full ban on glyphosate might be “counterproductive” since current alternatives are not necessarily healthy or better for the environment.

Such a ban “will achieve the opposite of what we want to achieve for society, namely less use of herbicides,” said senior researcher Pieter de Wolf.