quotes from a comment by Kalfred K. Yee... a resident of Honolulu, Hawaii :
"16 plaintiffs in the DuPont... Benlate fungicide case... waiting 16 years for a... jury trial... E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Company (DuPont)... has... advertised its chemical... on television, radio, and other media... In the early 1970s, DuPont marketed Benlate WP and later followed... with the development of Benlate DF in 1987. Benlate was one of the most widely utilized fungicides globally... Dr. C.S. Tang, a research professor (Department of Environmental Biochemistry University of Hawaii at Manoa)... proved that Benlate was toxic... in the late 1980s, DuPont added waste products from its other chemical mixtures to Benlate. The fungicide was contaminated with phytotoxic (deadly to plants) weed-killing chemicals such as atrazine and sulfonylureas... in the late 1980s... farmers who had... applied Benlate to their crops saw their fields turned into wastelands of dead and dying plants. Believing that the crops had become victims of a horrible unknown disease, some farmers applied more Benlate to their stricken plants. ... In Hawaii, the once thriving... orchid industries were irreparably damaged... the trial courts imposed sanctions... against DuPont... Benlate fungicide... was contaminated with weed killers and other toxic contaminants... harmful to plants. ... Benlate fungicide has rendered hundreds of acres of plant materials devastated because of its residuals just in Hawaii. ... we lost well over a million orchid plants in the field and in pots, and another 7,000 orchid flask culturings in our tissue culture laboratories. ... DuPonts... over $1.6 billion payments to growers to date... The EPA suspended manufacturing of Benlate fungicide by DuPont in 1992... a judge of the Third Circuit Court in Hawaii... called for a mandatory settlement conference between plaintiffs and defendants.... the amount we could receive to settle the case... was... approximately 1% - 2% of our losses... The amount of settlement... would not even cover the legal costs. ... The lost I had included over 1 million orchid plants and 25 years of cloning orchids in our laboratory" URL : http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?43515c1c-a0aa-45ae-b863-9f78fad01918 ***************** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
