The lawsuit claims that being forced to comply with the state listing "compels speech that is false and misleading," because IARC only said glyphosate probably causes cancer, and its scientific conclusion is not supported by any other regulatory bodies or the scientific evidence.
IARC is "an 'outlier,'" Blake Hurst, president of Missouri Farm Bureau, told Agri-Pulse. "The science is just not there."
Noted Iowa Soybean Association CEO Kirk Leeds:
"This labeling requirement would do nothing more than compel false warnings about a safe product and unnecessarily increase food prices for consumers," said Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president of global strategy. Monsanto is also separately appealing a California court's ruling that upholds the Prop 65 listing.
Gordon Stoner, president of NAWG (National Association of Wheat Growers): "The unified voice of this diverse coalition of agriculture and business groups illustrates the devastating impact California's flawed action would have across the country."
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Prior to the IARC's ruling, California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which administers Prop 65, had itself twice concluded that glyphosate is not carcinogenic, the lawsuit says, adding "California conducted no independent analysis to verify IARC's outlier contrary conclusion."
The lawsuit also pointed to a study published last week by the National Cancer Institute, which examined more than 54,000 applicators in North Carolina and Iowa and found "no association was apparent between glyphosate and any solid tumors or lymphoid malignancies overall, including (non-Hodgkin lymphoma) and its subtypes. There was some evidence of increased risk of (acute myeloid leukemia) among the highest exposed group that requires confirmation."
The plaintiffs in the action filed today are clamoring the alarm about what they maintain as catastrophic effects for growers and handlers.
NAWG members "have already been told by millers that because millers do not want to test for glyphosate residues themselves, this requirement will be imposed on the farmers," the suit says. "Testing for glyphosate residues is very expensive."
Hurst said that when testing is brought up, that's a "red flag" for farmers. The lawsuit, he said, will alert many growers to the obvious and growing threat of the Prop 65 listing.
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In a perhaps somewhat partially conciliatory response from the relevant California government entities: there remains the possibility that food products will not have to be labeled if they fall below a No Significant Residue Level, according to a state spokesman.
"We do not anticipate that food products would cause exposures that exceed the proposed NSRL," Sam Delson, OEHHA's deputy director for external and legislative affairs, told Reuters. "However, we cannot say that with certainty at this point."
The NSRL "provides only an 'affirmative defense' to liability under Proposition 65 (and) does not immunize industry from enforcement actions," the lawsuit says, meaning that companies would still have to defend themselves against lawsuits. No NSRL is currently in place.
Says the lawsuit:
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