There is no such thing as safe

A recent SCOTUS ruling highlights the tension between health concerns, scientific consensus, and the realities of modern agriculture.

Bayer and the ordinary consumer won. The Make America Healthy Again movement and trial lawyers lost. That’s a simple heuristic for understanding the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision last week in Monsanto v. Durnell. The upshot is that plaintiffs can’t sue the biotech company for not putting a cancer warning on the label of Roundup, the popular weed killer.

The decision resolves a question that has long plagued the agricultural industry. Bayer, which owns Monsanto, had been dragged into thousands of lawsuits claiming that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, is carcinogenic. Those cases can no longer proceed. The government has consistently said the product is safe, and federal law preempts state attempts to say otherwise. Good thing, too. If the company had to endure costly litigation, it might’ve pulled the product from the market, leaving farmers without a plan B.

That’s cold comfort to the portion of the president’s coalition that disdains the herbicide, and the case is sure to strain its relationship with the White House. “MAHA Moms” rallied outside the court during oral argument in April, holding signs that read “Stop poisoning us!” When the decision was handed down, one prominent influencer called it “sickening.”

It is impossible to understand that animus without a little history. The visceral opposition to glyphosate is the product of decades of questions about Roundup, a product Monsanto developed in the 1970s, and the Roundup Ready system of farming it inaugurated in the 1990s.

The idea was revolutionary: Scientists could genetically alter crops to withstand contact with herbicides. Rather than spray a field before planting, farmers could thus do so all at once, killing weeds, saving time and maximizing output. The scale of the chemical’s use is now immense. Approximately 90 percent of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States are genetically modified to be used with glyphosate-based herbicides.

That Monsanto was one of the first developers of that system made it suspect. It didn’t help that much of the public already reviled the company for manufacturing Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant used during the Vietnam War, and pesticides such as DDT. Roundup and genetically modified crops at the turn of the century were a natural next target.

Yet the criticism, then as now, is mostly lacking in evidence of the products’ harm. Monsanto’s detractors think the company should be held liable for the adverse health effects of using Roundup. Never mind that since 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly affirmed that “there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label.” In its view, the chemical is unlikely to be a human carcinogen. The majority of international regulatory bodies have come to the same conclusion. That doesn’t mean that subsequent evidence won’t change the analysis, only that for now, conclusive evidence is lacking as to the potential harms.

More problematic is the assumption that there’s another way to do modern agriculture. The movement against glyphosate is predicated on the belief that there are healthier and safer ways of growing food. Maybe. But not on an industrial scale. Farmers have yet to find a way to feed 8 billion mouths without science and technology’s help.

What they have learned is that Roundup is a great aid: Prior to the product’s introduction, they were using considerably more toxic chemicals in their quest for higher yields. Glyphosate is safer and more efficient. Corn yields, for example, have risen more than 50 percent since the late 1990s.

If Bayer had pulled Roundup from the market, the result wouldn’t have been a tsunami of organic harvesting. Farmers would have desperately sought out less-tested alternatives, each with its own health risks. Even more dire would be the likelihood of lower yields, a problem not because farmers would make less money but because people would go hungry.

There is no perfectly safe or easy way to meet our global demand for food, ethanol and animal feed. There is no agriculture without chemicals and, as yet, none of them is harmless. Glyphosate, however, is by all accounts superior to anything else on the market. It isn’t as natural as many would like, and it’s worth striving for better, healthier methods. Yet banning it — a product for which we have no ready substitute and whose benefits are clear — wouldn’t make us healthier or safer. It would throw the food system into disarray.

Kudos to the court for sparing us that unsavory result.

This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post on July 1, 2026.