Seed Today

(08 February 2010) -- A federal court jury of St Louis has asked German multinational Bayer CropScience AG to pay about $1.5 million to the farmers in Arkansas and Mississippi for losses sustained when the company conducted an experimental variety of rice in the region.

The company's experiments infiltrated the farmers' crops, jury said on Friday.

The verdict was the second against Bayer CropScience. In December2009, a jury had awarded about $ 1.95 million in compensatory damages to Ken Bell of Bell City, and $53,336 to a rice farmer John Hunter of Essex.

The lawsuit is similar to hundreds of cases filed by farmers in Arkansas and few other states claiming that since 2006 their crops were contaminated by a genetically modified strain of rice produced by Bayer Cropscience.

In August 2006, the US Department of Agriculture had admitted that trace amounts of the genetically modified Liberty Link rice were found in US long-grain rice stocks, according to Don Downing, lead attorney for the farmers.

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, Louisiana.

The department of agriculture had, at the time of the crop contamination, said that the rice variety posed no health or environmental risk.

However, Japan and the European Union moved to ban US rice, leading to a plunge in rice prices and a drop in US rice exports.

Downing said Bayer's negligence was directly responsible for the loss of the European market.

"This was all, we believe, very preventable by Bayer, if they had just exercised the kind of care they should have exercised in handling the (Liberty Link) rice," the Arkansas News Downing as saying after the verdict.

Bayer CropScience is one of the world's leading developers of hybrid rice and has built a strong expertise in hybrid rice breeding and production.

Its conventional hybrid rice seed varieties have been commercialised under the global umbrella brand Arize in seven countries in 2007 (India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Brazil).

Bayer CropScience, with 2008 annual sales of about €6.4 billion, is one of the world's leading innovative crop science companies in the areas of crop protection, non-agricultural pest control, seeds and plant biotechnology.

With a global workforce of more than 18,000 and operating in more than 120 countries, the company offers a range of products and extensive service backup for modern, sustainable agriculture and for non-agricultural applications.

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