Washington (AFP)
The decision was made on Saturday by a jury at the federal court in Cape Girardeau, Missouri (center), following a request by Bill Bader that the two companies were encouraging growers to use dicamba irresponsibly.
Dicamba is a popular but controversial pesticide for its tendency to kill crops in neighboring fields. It spreads easily and kills unsuitable plants.
According to the Bloomberg agency, this is the first lawsuit in the United States concerning the pesticide dicamba. Like RoundUp, another controversial pesticide marketed by Monsanto, dicamba has been on the market for many years.
Farmers across the United States have filed a lawsuit against Bayer for dicamba losses.
This court decision comes after another case in which Bayer was condemned by a Californian jury to pay 290 million dollars (267 million) to a gardener suffering from an incurable cancer, for not having sufficiently informed of the dangerousness of RoundUp. .
Bayer, who argued that dicamba was safe for crops as long as users followed the instructions, plans to appeal the decision, while BASF was not immediately available to react.
Bayer bought the American giant GMO and seeds, Monsanto, in 2018 and had to sell part of its agrochemical activities to BASF to satisfy the competition authorities.
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