by Steve Davies
A Kansas jury has awarded $217.7 million in damages to more than 7,000 corn growers in the state after finding that Syngenta was negligent in marketing corn to U.S. farmers that was rejected by China in 2013.
?We?re very pleased,? plaintiffs? attorney Patrick Stueve told Agri-Pulse today shortly after the verdict was announced. ?The jury awarded full compensatory damages? ? the amount sought by plaintiffs.
Syngenta maintained the claims are without merit and vowed to appeal.
But Stueve said the jury, which heard the case in federal court in Kansas City, Kan., ?was sending a very strong message that they don?t want a repeat of this pattern of conduct in the future.?
The class of plaintiffs, represented by four Kansas growers, alleged they suffered economic loss from lower corn prices and lost sales when Syngenta sold two genetically modified strains of its corn seed ? Agrisure Viptera and Agrisure Duracade ? to the U.S. market before China had approved the traits for import.
Syngenta had argued that corn prices were already falling when China began rejecting the corn shipments, and that the country?s refusal to accept U.S. corn was unrelated to the discovery of traces of the MIR162 trait. But the jury rejected those arguments. China eventually approved the trait for import in December 2014, 13 months after it had stopped accepting U.S. corn.
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