(Bush) Change limits farmers from suing pesticide-makers (for crop damage)

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=676&ncid=676&e=5&u=/usatoday/20031006/ts_usatoday/11886986

Change limits farmers from suing pesticide-makers
Mon Oct 6, 6:10 AM ET Add Top Stories - USATODAY.com to My Yahoo!


By Peter Eisler, USA TODAY

The Bush administration has adopted a new policy that aims to cut off farmers' ability to sue pesticide and herbicide makers when bug-and weedkillers don't work as promised on their labels and damage crops. The new position, not announced publicly, is a sharp reversal in federal policy toward hundreds of thousands of farmers or anyone else who might claim damages from pesticide use.

In recent years, the government generally has supported people's right to sue manufacturers of pesticides that are alleged to have harmed crops or not performed as promised. But the administration is taking the position that federal law bars such suits, according to legal briefs and an Environmental Protection Agency memo obtained by USA TODAY.

The new interpretation will carry great weight in the courts. Farmers who file product liability, or tort, suits on charges of pesticide damage must defeat the government's position. The policy shift is a huge win for the pesticide industry, which pushed for the change. Pesticide-makers face millions of dollars in suits each year alleging that their products caused damage.<snip>

In 1999, the Clinton administration asserted that the labeling law did not block such claims. It took that stand in the case of some California walnut farmers who sought $150,000 for damage to three orchards after they mixed two pesticides that didn't warn against combined use. The farmers lost, but the federal position became an oft-cited legal pillar for farmers in other pesticide damage cases. Last month, EPA General Counsel Robert Fabricant laid the legal basis for reversing the Clinton policy in a confidential memo. "Developments in the law and a reanalysis ... (of) the potential impacts of allowing such crop damage tort claims has led EPA to rethink the agency position," he wrote.<snip>

The new policy also could bolster pesticide-makers' contention that federal labeling insulates them from suits alleging that their products caused broader health and environmental harm ...

[clar]

1. This policy

is a fucking disaster- and it will get virtually no attention.

[jody]

2. The Corporatist's Game -- "Heads We make immoral profits,

tails the People pay obscene costs". That's the meaning of "We the People" under BFEE and their financial supporters.