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St. Louis / Missouri. What the farmer does not see is something that John Raines has for $ 1,000 a year through agile algorithms. The director sits in a light-flooded conference room plant protection and crop protection company Monsanto in Chesterfield near St. Louis, recently bought by German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, and dances the application "Field View ". The tractor navigates the smartphone in real time, indicating the amount of spray fertilizer applied to the fields, the seeds to be spread accurately and weeding, such as glyphosate, to help them. Fields appear while the software is ejected on the screen, and so on. In the Midwestern states, harvests could be increased.
The message calibrated specifically for a group of German journalists this week is intended to show that Bayer is doing something worthwhile and good after swallowing the hostile Monsanto group in the US for $ 63 billion. In line with Liam Condon's Credos. The boss of the Agrochemicals division, an Irishman with a contagious smile, says plant protection products and badociated seeds are "not an alternative" in "modern agriculture", "if you want to feed a world population of up to ten billion people in 2050 ".
Bayer has a huge stomach ache
Alone, Bayer has a huge stomach ache. Since California school director, Dewayne Johnson, who attributes her terminally ill lymph node cancer to the use of glyphosate (brand name: Roundup), has been seen to grant 78 Millions of dollars in damages following a lawsuit, Bayer is in decline. The market value has fallen by 25 billion euros since early August. With more than 9,000 similar lawsuits pending in the United States, badysts see a financial risk of up to $ 10 billion. Bayer is convinced that the main "herbicides" of the world are safe and that they want to "defend themselves against the verdict by all legal means". Investors fear however that the pharmaceutical giant was unable to leave the Rhine.
Bayer Council shows the flag
Reason enough for Bayer CEO Werner Baumann to display his colors on the floor. It does it in a sometimes neat atmosphere, sometimes with thin skin, in a steakhouse located at the foot of the famous concrete arch and Kruppstahl ("door"), which symbolizes the west gate of the old colonial town of America. The 56-year-old Roundup is considered by Roundup as "the proven, safe, effective and economical broadband herbicide" certified by hundreds of studies and licenses issued by the state's regulatory authorities. whole world. did not find a "smoking gun" when examining Monsanto's books; that is, evidence of the plaintiffs' claims that the Monsanto experts were aware of the cancer risk but did not disclose it. Baumann: "We have nothing to blame."
Previously, Monsanto's experts had rejected the claims by suggesting that explanatory quotes from internal researchers ("We can not say that Roundup is not carcinogenic, we have not done the tests necessary to do so"). The least that can be said is that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which operates under the auspices of the World Health Organization, has clbadified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans ".
Hope of decision until the end of 2019
No one knows if this reading will convince the three-person professional judges team that is set to move to San Francisco following Bayer's appeal to Johnson. On the domestic front, the company, which has a lot of product liability lawsuits and is considering new lawyers and "another strategy", is waiting for a decision from here. the end of 2019. If Bayer wins, Johnson's lawyer, Brent Wisner, told the newspaper that the California Supreme Court would adhere At the same time, according to Wisner, "eight or nine" glyphosate processes begin. 39 next year. His opinion: "Our case is getting stronger, and it's getting worse and worse for Bayer, and the group should be involved in a comparison."
Up to now, 9,000 lawsuits in progress
Werner Baumann does not want to know about 9,000 lawsuits in progress at the present time. The following few cases are "open to everyone," he said, with practitioners like Mark Scott, 53, who runs a father-owned farm in Wentzville, near St. Louis, with 1,700 hectares of soybeans and corn. Scott is a fan of glyphosate. "I've been using it since 1996. It works, and that's for sure, I'll use the Roundup as long as it's on the market." The judgment against Bayer, the farmer considers "absolutely false".
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