An Australian Federal Court judge has dismissed a class action claiming that glyphosate, the main ingredient in our most used farm chemical Roundup causes cancer. Maurice Blackburn lawyers had brought a class action against Monsanto on behalf of hundreds of sufferers of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). It was alleged the cancer stemmed from using the weedkiller.
Although Grain Producers Australia welcomed the ruling, Justice Michael Jee stressed in his decision to dismiss the action, does not amount to a definitive conclusion that the substance is not linked to cancer.
The action was led by Kelvin McNickle, who was born in September 1982, grew up using Roundup to kill weeds for his father's vegetation management business, and continued to use the product occupationally as an adult. He was often covered in or inhaled the chemical and was diagnosed with NHL in May 2018.
The judge said that it had not been proved to his ‘reasonable satisfaction on the balance of probabilities on the state of the evidence adduced at this trial that the use of and/or exposure to Roundup products increases an individual's risk of developing NHL or causes an individual to develop NHL’. But this was ‘not the same thing as saying affirmatively that it does not.’
In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans". Since then, Monsanto and Bayer have been the subject of hundreds of legal cases on the dangers of Roundup, mainly in the US but also in Europe. These matters have often settled out-of-court.
Unions in Australia have been warning their members for some time regarding the dangers of exposure to glyphosate.
Read more: AWU Don’t risk glyphosate exposure (November 2019). The UK’s research report on Glyphosate. Source: OHS Alert. Read the decision here: McNickle v Huntsman Chemical Company Australia Pty Ltd (Initial Trial) [2024] FCA 807 (25 July 2024)
