Syngenta corn lawsuit moves forward
by Vincent Marshall
Dodge City Daily Globe
Excerpts:
Town hall meetings have been taking place recently regarding corn litigation with the Syngenta company.
The lawsuit is regarding claims that Syngenta sold genetically modified corn with a strain called MIR-162 to China without their approval of the modification.
“The first shipment that tested positive for MIR-162,” Hecker Law Group attorney Jacob Hecker said, “was destroyed by the Chinese in 2013. Afterwards all other shipments with trace amounts of the strain were sent back to where they came from.”
Due to the strain, China, who at the time was the third largest importer of US corn, boycotted all corn from being imported from the US.
“The lawsuits being filed in approximately 22 states,” Hecker said, “are to determine if Syngenta was negligent on using the MIR-162 seed without the permission of the Chinese government. Due to the boycott that ran from November 2013 until China approved the use of MIR-162 on Dec. 16, 2014, agriculture experts say the cost of the damages involved is in the range of $5 billion.
As of Monday we currently represent 11,000 clients and 10,300 of those clients have filed suit against Syngenta.”
Read the full article here.
See Also:
U.S. GMO Policy Hurting Exports, Costing Jobs, As China Rejects US GMO Corn