Community | February 08, 2010 | 9 comments

Bayer must pay $1.5 m to AK ,MS, rice farmers for GMO contamination

source: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9767916

Image
JanforGore
A federal court jury has ordered the German conglomerate Bayer CropScience to pay $1.5 million to farmers in Arkansas and Mississippi whose rice seed was contaminated with a genetically altered strain.

Friday's verdict was the second against Bayer CropScience for losses sustained by farmers when an experimental variety of rice that the company was testing infiltrated crops.

A jury awarded about $2 million to two Missouri farmers in December, and three additional test cases are scheduled for this year involving farmers from Louisiana and Texas as well as a rice exporter. No punitive damages have been awarded in any of the verdicts.

About 6,000 rice producers have filed claims against Bayer since the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in August 2006 that trace amounts of the genetically modified Liberty Link rice were found in U.S. long-grain rice stocks, according to Don Downing, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the first two cases.

Bayer and Louisiana State University had been testing genetically modified rice, bred to resist a Bayer brand of herbicide, at a school-run facility in Crowley, La.

Though the USDA said at the time of the crop contamination that the rice variety posed no health or environmental risk, Japan and the European Union moved to ban U.S. rice, leading to a plunge in rice prices and a drop in U.S. rice exports.

Downing said Bayer's negligence was directly responsible for the loss of the European market.
  1. groups:
    Community,   Green,   Earth and Science,   Sustainable Agriculture
  2. tags:
    Environment,  Biodiversity,  transgenic contamination,  Farmers,  5 more
  3.     
    |

9 comments // Bayer must pay $1.5 m to AK ,MS, rice farmers for GMO contamination

more from Community:
from the community

top videos