January 14, 2013
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Image: Crops (Wikimedia Commons). |
The group of plaintiffs, which included many individual American and Canadian family farmers, independent seed companies and agricultural organizations, were seeking preemptive protections against Monsanto’s patents. The biotech leviathan has filed over 140 lawsuits against farmers for planting the company’s genetically-engineered seeds without permission, while settling around 700 other cases without suing.
None of the plaintiffs are customers of Monsanto and none have licensing agreements with the company. The group argued that they do not want Monsanto’s genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) and want legal protection in case of inadvertent contact with the company’s products.
The appeals court decision was based on Monsanto’s supposed promise not to sue farmers whose crops – including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola and others – contained traces of the company’s biotechnology products.
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