After years of taking farmers to court to assert their patent rights, agri-giantMonsanto Co.is being sued by farmers. Lots of farmers.
Judge Naomi Buchwald heard oral arguments Jan. 31 in federal district court in Manhattan on OSGATA et al. vs. Monsanto, the latest courtroom action on a suit filed almost a year ago. Responding to what they say is a climate of fear created by Monsanto’s long series of patent infringement lawsuits, a group representing as many as 25% of the nation’s organic farmers (as well as other non-organic farmers) have sued the global biotech company to allow them to grow in peace.
Monsanto’s attorneys have asked to have the suit dismissed. Buchwald will respond by the end of March.
The innovative suit is brought under the Declaratory Judgment Act, which allows for a preemptive judgment that would clear farmers of infringement suits before they even grow their plants. The farmers are not seeking any money or injunction. Monsanto, represented by Seth Waxman, former U.S. solicitor general under Bill Clinton, has moved to have the case thrown out, saying it is “hypothetical” and “abstract.”
The problem, say the 83 individuals and groups named as plaintiffs in the case, who claim to represent more than 300,000 farmers including many in California, is that Monsanto’s transgenic plants (sometimes called genetically modified organisms, or GMOs) are contaminating organic crops, introducing the unwanted genetic material into their fields. In an ironic turn, the company has often responded by suing farmers for patent infringement, even if those farmers were desperate to keep that material out of the crops and, in fact, if their crops would lose their value because of the Monsanto genes.
“We’ve been farming organically for 35 years, and we’re very concerned with being able to continue on with our livelihood,” says Jim Gerritsen, an organic seed farmer in Maine and president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Assn. “We consider the threat of contamination from GMO crops to be significant, and the reality is that the organic market will not tolerate anything that has GMO content, either by design or by contamination.”
Stepping out of a meeting at a farmer’s conference in Bangor, Maine, on Friday, Gerritsen continued, “One of the crops that we grow is organic seed corn. Should that corn get contaminated by Monsanto, we are not only concerned with the extinguishing of the value of that seed, but we would be subject to a patent infringement lawsuit. A family farmer going up against Monsanto, we could easily go bankrupt just trying to clear our name.”
