Syngenta moving to settle thousands of lawsuits claiming paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease

Besieged by thousands of lawsuits alleging that its paraquat weedkiller causes Parkinson’s disease, Syngenta has entered into an agreement aimed at settling large swaths of those claims.

The company and lead counsel for thousands of plaintiffs have “entered into a signed Letter Agreement intended to resolve” the litigation, an April 14 court filing states. 

The lawyers for the plaintiffs confirmed the settlement but declined to answer questions about the details.

“Public details of the settlement will be available for counsel and their clients once the process is finalized,” a team of plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a statement. 

In a court hearing Tuesday, one of the lead plaintiff lawyers, Khaldoun Baghdadi, said the terms of the settlement should be completed within 30 days. He said further trial planning proceedings should be delayed. 

Syngenta confirmed that it has “settled certain claims” related to paraquat, but said in a statement that it continues to believe that there is “no merit” to the claims.

Litigation “can be distracting and costly,” the company said. “Entering into the agreement in no way implies that paraquat causes Parkinson’s Disease or that Syngenta has done anything wrong. We stand by the safety of Paraquat. Despite decades of investigation and more than 1,200 epidemiological and laboratory studies of paraquat, no scientist or doctor has ever concluded in a peer-reviewed scientific analysis that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease. This view is endorsed in science-based reviews by regulatory authorities, such as in the US, Australia and Japan.”

The move to settle comes amid mounting calls to ban paraquat from both state and federal lawmakers, and as growing numbers of Parkinson’s patients blame the company for not warning them of paraquat risks. Numerous scientific studies have linked Parkinson’s to exposure to paraquat, a weedkiller commonly used in agriculture.

The agreement would not resolve all of the cases filed in the United States against Syngenta, but could resolve the majority of them if enough plaintiffs agree to the terms.

As of mid-April, there were more than 5,800 active lawsuits pending in what is known as multidistrict litigation (MDL) being overseen by a federal court in Illinois. There were more than 450 other cases filed in California, and many more scattered in state courts around the country.

The agreement notice applies to people whose lawsuits are part of the MDL, and could provide settlements for plaintiffs in the cases outside the MDL as well, said Baghdadi. 

Lawyers for plaintiffs in cases outside the MDL expressed frustration with the situation, however, saying they were not included in the settlement discussions, and were doubtful the terms would provide value to the majority of plaintiffs. They fear that plaintiffs who do not agree to settle may see their cases delayed or otherwise negatively impacted by the deal.   

“These plaintiffs are dying every day,” Majed Nachawati, a lawyer whose clients are outside the MDL, told a judge in a California court hearing Tuesday on the matter. He said the news of the settlement was a “shock” because he was not apprised of the settlement negotiations by the other plaintiffs’ lawyers, as he should have been.

Several trials have been set to start in the last two years, but in each case, Syngenta has successfully delayed those trials. A case in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is now set to start at the end of May, after being previously delayed. Syngenta also successfully was able to get a delay in a trial that had been set to start in early May in Washington state.  

“We just don’t want the can to be kicked down the road any further,” lawyer Curtis Hoke, whose firm represents 200 plaintiffs suing Syngenta, told the California judge in Tuesday’s court hearing.

Paraquat was introduced in the 1960s by a predecessor to the giant global agrochemical company Syngenta, which is now a Chinese-owned entity. The herbicide has become one of the most widely used weedkilling chemicals in the world, used by farmers to control weeds before planting their crops and to dry out crops for harvest. In the United States, the chemical is used in orchards, wheat fields, pastures where livestock graze, cotton fields and elsewhere. 

Internal Syngenta documents revealed by The New Lede show the company was aware many years ago of scientific evidence that paraquat could impact the brain in ways that cause Parkinson’s, and that it secretly sought to influence scientific research to counter the evidence of harm.

Syngenta was allegedly aided in suppressing the risks of paraquat by a “reputation management” firm called v-Fluence.. Internal documents also show that the company withheld damaging internal research from the EPA and worked to try to discredit a prominent scientist whose work connected paraquat to Parkinson’s. 

Syngenta’s effort to settle the litigation before any high-profile trials comes after Monsanto’s owner Bayer was rocked by similar litigation alleging its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer. After the company lost the first Roundup trial, its stock price plummeted, investors became enraged and Bayer has spent years and billions of dollars fighting to end the ongoing litigation.