$2 million verdict against Bayer CropScience
Written on December 5, 2009
Bayer CropScience LP must pay about $2 million for losses sustained by two Missouri farmers when an experimental variety of rice the company was testing cross-bred with their crops, a federal jury ruled.
Friday’s verdict in St. Louis came in the first trial in what is intended to be a series of test cases against the unit of Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer AG. The jury of four men and five women began deliberating Wednesday, about a month after it began hearing claims brought by Kenneth Bell and Johnny Hunter.
Farmers from Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi have filed more than 1,000 similar cases against Bayer since the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in August 2006 that trace amounts of the genetically modified LibertyLink rice were found in U.S. long-grain rice stocks.
Bayer and Louisiana State University had been testing the rice, bred to be resistant to Bayer’s Liberty-brand herbicide, at a school-run facility in Crowley, La. The variety eventually "contaminated" more than 30 percent of U.S. ricelands, Don Downing, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said at the start of the trial.
The jury awarded only compensatory damages and rejected the farmers’ request for a punitive judgment no faxing payday loans. Grant Davis, one of the farmers’ lawyers, had told jurors an $80 million punitive award was "not too much to send a message."
Within four days of the 2006 USDA announcement, rice futures plunged, costing U.S. growers about $150 million, according to a consolidated complaint filed by the farmers.
The jury awarded Bell $1.96 million and Hunter $53,336. Bayer’s negligence cost Bell more than $2.2 million, Downing said during the trial. Hunter quit rice farming and lost $50,000 because of the contamination, Downing said.
While the USDA later approved Bayer CropScience’s biotech rice to be grown and sold for human consumption, it hasn’t been commercially marketed. The USDA never determined how the LibertyLink rice entered the nation’s long-grain rice supply, Bayer CropScience’s statement said.
The next test, or bellwether trial, involving farmers from Arkansas and Mississippi, is scheduled to start on Jan. 11 in St. Louis.
Filed in: money.