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Listen to This Week’s Earth Minute on KPFK Los Angeles: GE Rice Contamination Settlement

Genetic rice lawsuit in St. Louis settled for $750 million

Listen to the Earth Minute on KPFK by going to the following link and forwarding to minute 35:06.

http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_110712_070010sojourner.MP3

Late in the afternoon of Friday July 1st, just before the holiday weekend, Bayer CropScience agreed to pay $750 million to farmers in five states due to the contamination of the U.S. rice supply with Bayer’s LibertyLink GMO rice in 2006.  This GMO rice had not been approved for human consumption, yet somehow found its way into the rice supply.

Because of the rice contamination scandal, Rice futures plunged, and Europe and Japan banned the import of U.S. rice, which devastated US rice farmers. Many farmers had to leave fields fallow, plant lower-value crops or spend money cleaning equipment of contaminated rice.

The first of what would eventually grow to more than 400 lawsuits representing 11,000 plaintiffs were filed within weeks. Many were eventually consolidated in federal court in Saint Louis Missouri.

The attorney for the farmers believes the outcome sends a signal to those who develop genetically modified seeds that they need to keep those seeds very carefully contained…”

Other groups, like ours, believe that GMOs just shouldn’t be grown in the first place.

For the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth Show this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project

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Filed under Climate Change, Earth Minute, Food Sovereignty, Genetic Engineering, Posts from Anne Petermann