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February 18, 2026 | Source: Organic Consumers Association | by Alexis Baden-Mayer
To avoid compensating the people they’ve sickened or killed, Bayer has spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress.
They’ve managed to get a huge pesticide deregulation subtitle included in the U.S. House of Representatives’ version of the 2026 Farm Bill.
Not only would it prevent Roundup-exposed cancer victims from taking Bayer to court for hiding the fact that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide causes cancer, it would severely restrict the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate pesticides and completely eliminate states’ power to protect us.
The 2026 Farm Bill is the deregulation dream of companies like Bayer that peddle pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
It completely guts the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the law that governs how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates pesticides, with sweeping exemptions to FIFRA and huge changes to EPA reviews.
At the same time that it makes EPA’s pesticide authority weak to non-existent, it concentrates power over pesticides with the agency, forbidding states from doing anything to protect us, including preventing courts from hearing cases brought on behalf of people who have been killed, injured, or sickened by pesticides.
Here’s a section-by-section breakdown of the impact of this horrible bill:
Section 10201 exempts “plant biostimulants,” “nutritional chemicals,” “vitamin hormone products,” and “plant-incorporated protectants” from EPA regulation under FIFRA.
Critics call these bioinputs “agribusiness’s new toxic trap.” Bioinputs are supposedly derived from beneficial soil microorganisms and other “natural” ways to support and protect plant growth, but it’s really just a new name for the same old pesticides and GMOs. For example, BASF managed to get its Poncho/VOTiVO insecticidal seed treatment registered as a “biostimulant” even though it’s just the combination of a neonicotinoid pesticide that’s toxic to pollinators and a dangerous genetically engineered microbe (Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt).
This Farm Bill section would go even further than what BASF has pulled off so far, completely deregulating these categories, including the diabolical GMOs where food crops are engineered to produce their own pesticides. That’s what’s meant by “plant-incorporated protectants.” The pesticides aren’t on the food, they are the food.
On top of all of that, SEC. 10201 gives the EPA Administrator the power to exempt any pesticide whatsoever from regulation or review!
Sections 10202 and 10203 change the way the EPA reviews pesticides, requiring the EPA and the Department of the Interior to subordinate concerns about human health, the environment, and endangered species, to the economic priorities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Department of Commerce, and industry stakeholders.
Section 10204 repeals the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act, a law that’s been on the books for two decades. In 2024, it was used by the courts to overturn the EPA’s approval of three dicamba-based pesticides intended to be used with genetically-engineered dicamba-resistant corn and soy. Dicamba is notoriously volatile, drifting from the farms where it is sprayed to kill neighboring crops, as well as trees and landscaping–anything that isn’t engineered to resist it. Dicamba causes more drift damage than any other pesticide.
Repealing the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act would remove its requirement that the EPA review all pesticides every 15 years. The EPA was supposed to complete its first review by 2022. Section 10204 extends that deadline to 2031, and instead of a final review, all it requires is an interim decision.
The last three sections on pesticides, 10205, 10206, and 10207, are all devoted to blocking the states and the courts from stepping in to protect pesticide victims in the absence of EPA action.
Section 10205 would “prohibit any State, instrumentality or political subdivision thereof, or a court from directly or indirectly imposing or continuing in effect any requirements for, or penalize or hold liable any entity for failing to comply with requirements that would require labeling or packaging that is in addition to or different from the labeling or packaging approved by the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency … including any requirements relating to warnings on such labeling or packaging… .”
That language is Bayer’s solution to the thousands of lawsuits still working their way through the courts brought by Roundup-exposed cancer victims. Most of these lawsuits have been predicated on the fact that Monsanto (now Bayer) knew that glyphosate caused cancer and didn’t warn the people who used it. Section 10205 says that Monsanto doesn’t have any duty to warn beyond what the EPA requires to be put on its product labels.
Section 10207 doubles down on this, emphasizing that “the use, application, or discharge of a registered pesticide consistent with its labeling … shall be permitted and considered lawful without further permitting or approval requirements.’’
This is horrible because EPA labeling requirements are incredibly lax. The EPA never requires cancer warnings, even on pesticides that it has determined may cause cancer.
Section 10206 takes away states’ rights to regulate pesticides. It says, “a State shall not impose, or continue in effect, any requirement relating to the sale, distribution, labeling, application, or use of any pesticide or device that is subject to regulation [by the EPA].”
These sections have Bayer written all over them.
Bayer will do anything to avoid paying billions more to Roundup-exposed cancer victims.
Judges and juries agree Monsanto acted with “malice, oppression or fraud,” to hide the fact that its glyphosate-based weed killer causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. An $11 billion settlement in 2020 resolved most of those cases, but there are still 67,000 people demanding their day in court.
To avoid compensating the people they’ve sickened or killed, Bayer has spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress. It even created a front-group to hide behind, the Modern Ag Alliance.
As a foreign corporation (a German company with Nazi roots), Bayer wasn’t allowed to make political contributions. Buying Monsanto in 2018 changed all of that. Now that it has a U.S. subsidiary, it too can buy politicians just like American companies do.
Bayer is now one of the top companies engaged in the legal bribery we call lobbying and campaign contributions. Bayer spends more money influencing the U.S. Congress than most American businesses. Spending about $8.5 million a year, it ranks 50th among 9,200 corporations buying influence on Capitol Hill.
Let’s make Bayer the number-one company that Members of Congress are hearing complaints about!
The post 2026 Farm Bill Would Let Pesticide Companies Poison Us With Impunity appeared first on Organic Consumers.
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