Dive Brief:
- A judge last week dismissed a 2021 price-fixing lawsuit against agricultural chemical giants Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta, rejecting arguments from U.S. farmers that the companies conspired to push up prices for seeds, pesticides and other crop inputs.
- Farmers alleged Bayer and others colluded to avoid placing products on e-commerce sites such as Farmers Business Network since 2014, which would have increased transparency for producers and led to more competitive pricing.
- Judge Sarah Pitlyk of the Eastern District of Missouri ruled farmers failed to provide direct evidence that the chemical firms conspired among each other or that they violated antitrust laws, saying company actions appear to serve "their respective individual, legitimate business interests to maintain a profitable market."
Dive Insight:
The rise of agricultural e-commerce platforms like FBN, FarmTrade and Agroy has allowed farmers to easily purchase crop inputs or other products essential to run their operations. These platforms have also allowed farmers to analyze price differences between company products, which they claim creates competition in the industry by encouraging lower prices.
By keeping their products off e-commerce sites, however, agricultural chemical companies engaged in a widespread conspiracy to keep prices elevated, farmers say in the lawsuit.
"Farmers . . . have been deprived of the opportunity to purchase Crop Inputs at transparent, competitive prices from ecommerce Crop Inputs platforms," the lawsuit alleges.
Plaintiffs claim that companies not only collectively moved to avoid these sites, but also made a concerted effort to ensure that their retail suppliers did not place products on e-commerce platforms. Farmers noted an example where Syngenta initiated an audit of its authorized retailers after learning some had sold inputs to online platforms.
"[These manufacturers] structured the Crop Inputs market to be both secretive and opaque to obscure pricing data and product information that farmers need to make informed purchasing decisions,” farmers wrote in their complaint.
Pitlyk, a district judge covering the St. Louis area, ruled that individual company actions to avoid e-commerce sites appear to have been “in line with a wide swath of rational and competitive business strategy."
Plaintiffs also failed to provide enough direct evidence to support claims that chemical firms collectively conspired on a price-fixing scheme, Pitlyk ruled, saying multiple companies could have taken similar actions based on publicly available information.
The lawsuit consolidated multiple suits against the chemical companies, and the judge's decision also renders those individual claims as moot. The case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning plaintiffs could refile at a later point.
