It has not been the best winter for Bayer Cropscience. In December, the German company was ordered by a federal jury in St. Louis to pay $ 2 million to two farmers from Missouri for losses sustained “when the company’s experimental rice cross-bred with their crops.” Now, as the St. Louis Business Journal online reports, the company has once again been ordered to pay farmers.A federal jury in St. Louis ordered the company to pay $1.5 million to two farmers from Arkansas and one from Mississippi because the company “hurt the farmers and their livelihood with its genetically modified rice.”
The St. Louis Business Journal has labeled this as the second of five ‘“bellwether trials’” involving farmers that are scheduled for the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri that could potential impact all of agriculture. Currently farmers from Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas are all involved in some form of litigation.
In these first two cases the same firm, and same attorney-Don Downing of the firm Gray, Ritter & Graham-served as lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Mr. Downing is also the lead counsel of the “multi-district litigation.” The awards for the plaintiffs in the latest case ranged from $923,154 to $96,996 because the awards were “based on the number of acres” the farmers planted and how much damage they had on their land from the contamination.
The St. Louis Business Journal notes in its article that the rice contamination affected US prices for rice because the European Union stopped buying the staple from the US. The contaminated rice was discovered in 2006.
To read the St. Louis Business Journal article click here.
Posted: 02/09/10
