Monsanto parent company Bayer faces thousands of Roundup-cancer cases after $2 billion verdict

“We’re not suing them for the fact that their product causes cancer. We’re suing them because they didn’t tell people that it causes cancer.”Annually, for weeks at a time over his more than 30 years of farming, John Barton would spray a thousand gallons of Roundup every day to kill the weeds springing up among his cotton crop outside Bakersfield, California.Barton, now 70, retired from farming in 2010 and planned to move to northern Idaho with his wife. But then he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2015, and he soon concluded that the miracle herbicide that he depended on for decades had caused the swollen lymph nodes that have since derailed his life.He is now a litigant alongside 40 other plaintiffs in just one of the approximately 11,000 pending cases against Bayer AG relating to glyphosate.  A federal judge in California has ordered the company to engage in mediation to try to settle the cases, and Monsanto has consistently defended the safety of the product. Since Bayer purchased Monsanto in June of last year, however, the German firm’s stock price has plunged to nearly half its value due, in part, to picking up Monsanto’s numerous legal challenges.