Five million Brazilian farmers have taken on US based biotech company Monsanto through a lawsuit demanding return of about 6.2 billion euros taken as royalties from them. The farmers are claiming that the powerful company has unfairly extracted these royalties from poor farmers because they were using seeds produced from crops grown from Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds, reports Merco Press.
In April this
year, a judge in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, ruled in
favor of the farmers and ordered Monsanto to return royalties paid since 2004
or a minimum of $2 billion. The ruling said that the business practices of seed
multinational Monsanto violate the rules of the Brazilian Cultivars Act (No.
9.456/97).
Monsanto has appealed against the order and a federal
court ruling on the case is now expected by 2014.
About 85% of
Brazil’s massive soyabean crop output is produced from genetically engineered
seeds. Brazil exports about $24.1 billion worth of soyabeans annually, more
than a quarter of its total agri-exports.
Farmers say that
they are using seeds produced many generations after the initial crops from the
genetically modified Monsanto seeds were grown. Farmers claim that Monsanto
unfairly collects exorbitant profits every year worldwide on royalties from
“renewal” seed harvests. Renewal crops are those that have been planted using
seed from the previous year’s harvest. Monsanto disagrees, demanding royalties
from any crop generation produced from its genetically-engineered seed. Because
the engineered seed is patented, Monsanto not only charges an initial royalty
on the sale of the crop produced, but a continuing two per cent royalty on
every subsequent crop, even if the farmer is using a later generation of seed.
The first
transgenic soy seeds were illegally smuggled into Brazil from neighboring
Argentina in 1998 and their use was banned and subject to prosecution until the
last decade, according to the state-owned Brazilian Enterprise for Agricultural
Research (EMBRAPA).The ban has since been lifted and now 85 percent of the
country’s soybean crop (25 million hectares or 62 million acres) is genetically
modified, Alexandre Cattelan, an EMBRAPA researcher told Merco Press. Brazil is
the world’s second largest producer and exporter of soyabean. China is one of
its biggest buyers.
“Monsanto gets
paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the
seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again).
Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production,” Jane Berwanger,
lawyer for the farmers told the media agencies.
