dicamba drift
There was a great deal of action last Friday in the case that vacated the registrations of XtendiMax, Engenia and FeXapan dicamba-based products. Despite a barrage of court filings on Friday, however, nothing has changed the current legal status of the dicamba products in Ohio, and Ohio growers may use existing stocks of the products now but must end use by June 30, 2020.
Here’s a rundown of the orders that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued in the case last Friday:
- The court denied the emergency motion that the petitioners (National Family Farm Coalition, Center for Food Safety, Center for Biological Diversity, and Pesticide Action Network North America) filed on June 13. That motion asked the court to enforce its previous mandate to vacate the registrations, to prevent any further use of the products, and to hold the EPA in contempt for issuing the Cancellation Order the agency had made that allowed continued use of existing stocks of the products. The court did not provide its reasoning for denying the motion.
- The court granted amicus curiae (friend of the court) status to CropLife America and American Farm Bureau (representing itself as well as national soybean, cotton, wheat, corn and sorghum association interest.) Those parties filed their amicus curiae briefs in support of the EPA’s Cancellation Order and in opposition to the petitioners' emergency motion.
- The court granted also emergency motions to intervene in the case filed by BASF Corporation, maker of Engenia, and DuPont (Corteva) , maker of FeXapan. The companies argued that they did not know that the scope of the court’s order on Bayer's XtendiMax product registration would also affect their dicamba product registrations and they should now be permitted an opportunity to defend their products.
- BASF filed a motion asking the court to recall the court's mandate that had cancelled the registrations of the products, claiming that the court had not followed appropriate procedural rules. In its brief, BASF also suggested that the company would be filing petitions for rehearing since BASF had not had an opportunity to be heard when the court vacated the registration of its Engenia product.
- The court ordered the original petitioners to file a brief in response to BASF’s motion to recall the mandate by June 23, and for BASF to reply to that brief by June 24.
The companies that make the dicamba products clearly intend to challenge the vacatur of their product registrations, even though the EPA's Cancellation Order allows continued use of existing stocks of the products until July 30, 2020. This dicamba battle is not yet over, and we'll keep you posted on new developments.
Read our previous posts on the court's vacatur in National Family Farm Coalition here, on the EPA's Cancellation Order here, and on the Ohio Department of Agriculture's ruling on use of the products in Ohio here.
Tags: dicamba, National Family Farm Coalition, dicamba drift, pesticides, FIFRA
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Valentine’s Day was indeed a sweet day for Bader Farms, a peach farm in Missouri that claimed that dicamba products by Monsanto/Bayer and BASF drifted onto its property and injured 20,000 of its peach trees over 700 acres. A federal jury agreed and awarded the farm $15 million in compensatory damages. The following day, the jury gave the farm another $250 million in punitive damages against Bayer and BASF, bringing the total award to $265 million.
In 2016, Bader Farms was the first to file a dicamba drift lawsuit against Monsanto. A summary of the lawsuit from our partner, the National Agricultural Law Center, explains that the farm’s claim alleged widespread damage to the peach orchards and a multi-million dollar financial loss. At the center of Bader Farms’ original complaint was Monsanto’s genetically modified Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans and Bollgard II Xtend cotton seeds (“Xtend crops”), dicamba-resistant seeds that Bader Farms alleged were released without an accompanying EPA-approved dicamba herbicide in 2015 and 2016. The farm argued that by selling the Xtend crop seeds without a corresponding herbicide, it was foreseeable to Monsanto that farmers would use old, highly volatile, drift-prone dicamba that had a strong chance of damaging neighboring crops.
Bader Farms later added BASF as a defendant to the case and also added new complaints for dicamba-related damage it suffered during the 2017 growing season. Bader Farms stated that Monsanto and BASF had worked together to manufacture, market, and sell dicamba-based products that they knew would cause harm.
The jury in the federal lawsuit ruled in favor of Bader Farms on all counts. Specifically, the jury concluded that Monsanto was negligent by releasing dicamba-tolerant seeds before releasing the herbicide. The jury also determined that both Monsanto and BASF were negligent because they issued new dicamba products that drifted off-target although the companies claimed that the products were less likely to drift. Important to the punitive damage award, the jury found that Monsanto and BASF had engaged in a “conspiracy to create an ecological disaster to increase profits.”
The Bader Farms case is the first of many dicamba-based cases against Monsanto/Bayer and BASF, combined last year into Multi-District Litigation involving both a Crop Damage Class Action Master Complaint and a Master Antitrust Action Complaint. For an excellent review of the dicamba cases, see the National Agricultural Law Center’s series on “The Deal with Dicamba,” available at https://nationalaglawcenter.org/the-deal-with-dicamba-part-three/.
