The Ag Law Harvest

By:Ellen Essman, Senior Research Associate Friday, July 17th, 2020

Written by Ellen Essman and Peggy Hall

 

This edition of the Ag Law Harvest has a little bit of everything—Ohio and federal legislation responding to COVID issues, new USDA guidance on bioengineered foods, and a judicial review of Bayer’s Roundup settlement.  Read on to learn about the legal issues currently affecting agriculture.  

Ohio COVID-19 immunity bill stalls.  While the Ohio House and Senate agree with the concept of immunity for COVID-19 transmissions, the two chambers don’t yet see eye-to-eye on the parameters for COVID-19 liability protection.  H.B. 606, which we reported on here, has passed both the House and Senate, but the Senate added several amendments to the legislation.  The House won’t be addressing those amendments soon because it’s in recess, and doesn’t plan to return for business until at least September 15.   The primary point of disagreement between the two bills concerns whether there should be a rebuttable presumption for Bureau of Workers’ Compensation coverage that certain employees who contract COVID-19 contracted it while in the workplace.  The Senate amendment change by the Senate concerns exemption from immunity for "intentional conduct," changed to "intentional misconduct.”  Currently, there is not a plan for the House to consider the Senate’s amendments before September 15.

Lawmakers propose bill to avoid more backlogs at processing plants.

Most people are aware that the COVID-19 pandemic created a huge backlog and supply chain problem in U.S. meatpacking plants.  A group of bipartisan representatives in the House recently proposed the

Requiring Assistance to Meat Processors for Upgrading Plants Act, or RAMP-UP Act.  The bill would provide grants up to $100,000 to meat and poultry processing plants so the plants could make improvements in order to avoid the kind of problems caused by the pandemic in the future.  The plants would have to provide their own matching funds for the improvements.  You can find the bill here

Revisiting the Paycheck Protection Program, again.  In a refreshing display of non-partisanship, Congress passed legislation in late June to extend the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).  Employers who haven’t taken advantage of PPP now have until August 8, 2020 to apply for PPP funds to cover payroll and certain other expenses.  Several senators also introduced the Paycheck Protection Program Small Business Forgiveness Act, a proposal to streamline an automatic approval process for forgiveness of PPP loans under $150,000, but there’s been little action on the bill to date.  Meanwhile, the American Farm Bureau Federation is in discussion with the Senate on its proposal for other changes to PPP that would expand access to PPP for agriculture.

More clarification for bioengineered food disclosure. You may recall that the National Bioengineered Food Law was passed by Congress in 2016.  The legislation tasked USDA with creating a national mandatory standard for disclosing bioengineered foods. The standard was implemented at the beginning of 2020, but USDA still needed to publish guidance on validating a refining process and selecting an acceptable testing method.  On July 8, 2020, that guidance was published. The guidance provides steps for industry to take when validating a food refining process under the rule.  A lot of food refining processes remove traces of modified genetic material. So, if a refining process is validated, there is no further need to test for bioengineered material to disclose.  The guidance also contains instructions on testing methods. Basically, “any regulated entity that is using a food on the AMS List of Bioengineered Foods and does not want to include a bioengineered food disclosure because the food or ingredient is highly refined and does not include detectable modified genetic material” should follow these testing instructions. Therefore, any entity with highly refined foods that do “not include detectable modified genetic material” should follow the recently published guidance. 

Bayer settlement proposal under scrutiny.  Last month, Bayer, the owner of Roundup, announced that it would settle around 9,500 lawsuits related to alleged injuries caused by using the product.  Not only was the proposal supposed to settle previous lawsuits, but it was also meant to address any future lawsuits stemming from purported injuries caused by Roundup.  A judge from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California recently pumped the breaks on this plan, stating that any settlement that would resolve “all future claims” against Roundup must first be approved by the court.  A hearing will be held on July 24, where the court will decide whether or not to “grant preliminary approval of the settlement.”