Supreme Court rejects farmers’ Monsanto lawsuit
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal filed by farmers in Maine, the United States and Canada in a “pre-emptive lawsuit” against Monsanto that would have protected farmers from patent infringement lawsuits if their fields became contaminated by the biotech giant’s patented genetically modified seeds.
The Supreme Court denied the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association the right to argue its case in court and gain protection from Monsanto. The 83-member plaintiff group also had hoped to prove in court that Monsanto’s genetically engineered seed patents are invalid.
Jim Gerritsen, an organic seed potato farmer in Bridgewater and head of the group leading the lawsuit against Monsanto, said in a press release safeguards laid out in an earlier U.S. Court of Appeals ruling were “insufficient to protect our farms and our families” from patent infringement lawsuits Monsanto could file against farmers not using the company’s seed products but whose crops might show trace amounts of its proprietary seeds.
“The Supreme Court failed to grasp the extreme predicament family farmers find themselves in,” Gerritsen said in a press release.
In their 2011 lawsuit filed in federal district court in Manhattan, farmers in the plaintiffs’ group had sought the high court’s protection under the Declaratory Judgment Act – requesting that should their crops become contaminated by Monsanto's patented gene-splice technology they could not be sued for patent infringement. The large plaintiff group included American and Canadian family farmers, independent seed companies and agricultural organizations whose combined memberships total more than 1 million citizens and more than 25% of North America’s certified organic farmers.
In a complicated ruling issued in June 2013 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., American farmers were handed a partial victory when the three justices agreed with the farmers’ assertion that contamination by Monsanto was inevitable. The justices ordered Monsanto not to sue American farmers whose fields were contaminated with trace amounts of patented material, which the court defined as 1%.
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