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2010-07-18

Bayer Loses Fifth Straight Trial Over U.S Rice Crops

Vatic Note: Good, now all we need is to go after Monsanto and we can begin the journey back to health once again. After that its those drug companies, and then the chemical companies. Whew, we have a lot of repairing to do, I just thought about the banks as well.


Bayer Loses Fifth Straight Trial Over U.S Rice Crops
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-14/bayer-loses-fifth-straight-trial-over-u-s-rice-crops.html
EDITED Bloomberg, July 14 2010
Contributed to Vatic Project by Gypsy,  Australia


Bayer AG lost its fifth straight trial over contaminated U.S. long-grain rice to a Louisiana farmer who claimed the company's carelessness with its genetically engineered seed caused exports to plunge.

A jury in St. Louis said today the company should pay damages of $500,248. The company previously lost two trials in state court and two in federal, for a total of more than $52 million in jury awards.

It faces about 500 additional lawsuits in federal and state courts with claims by 6,600 plaintiffs. It hasn't won any rice trials so far. The Louisiana grower, Danny Deshotels, and his family claimed the company and its Bayer CropScience unit were negligent in testing their genetically modified LibertyLink seed, causing a dive in exports to Europe.

"Five different juries under the laws of four different states in both federal and state courts now have unanimously found that Bayer was negligent and liable to rice farmers for damages," Don Downing, Deshotels' lawyer said after the trial. "Not a single juror in any of the five trials found for Bayer."

A sixth case is scheduled to begin trial July 19 in state court in Arkansas, followed by a federal trial in St. Louis in October, Coffey said yesterday in an interview.

Farmers in five states claim the company and Bayer CropScience negligently contaminated the U.S. long-grain rice crop with its genetically modified LibertyLink seed, leading to export restrictions, bans on two kinds of high-yield seeds and a plunge in prices.

The rice growers' "reputation for producing a pure product was destroyed, with the export market lost," Downing told the federal court jury yesterday.




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