Drug and pesticide giant Bayer has agreed to pay $10.9bn to settle lawsuits that claimed the popular weedkiller Roundup caused cancer.

There were up to 125,000 US filed and unfiled claims, accounting for roughly 75% of the plaintiffs who will be part of the settlement.

"The Roundup settlement is the right action at the right time for Bayer to bring a long period of uncertainty to an end," chief executive Werner Baumann said.

Bayer said they inherited some of the cases with the 2018 purchase of rival manufacturer Monsanto.

There has been much controversy over the glyphosate-based pesticide roundup and the settlement will see the end of a long-running dispute.

Bayer said they will not add a cancer warning label to their product and maintain that it is safe to use.

The German government has approved plans to systematically reduce the use of herbicides containing glyphosate from 2020 onwards, and intends to ban its use in Germany by 2023.

Glyphosate renewal – what’s happening now

The approval of glyphosate in the EU is up for renewal in 2022. Earlier this month, a dossier containing 1,000 scientific studies on glyphosate was submitted to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) seeking reapproval of the active.

This dossier was submitted by the Glyphosate Renewal Group (GRG). The CRG is a new industry group which consists of a collection of companies seeking the renewal of the EU authorisation of glyphosate.

The CRG’s member companies have pooled resources and efforts to prepare a single dossier with all the scientific studies and information on the safety of glyphosate.

Renewal process

In the case of glyphosate, because of the very large numbers of scientific studies to evaluate and the related high workload, member states agreed that a group of them would act jointly as Rapporteur: France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Those four countries form the so-called Assessment Group on Glyphosate (AGG), which was set up in April 2019.

The AGG are charged with conducting a scientific evaluation of the dossier, and a draft report is due to be completed by June 2021.

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