When Worlds Collide: Biotechnology Meets Organic Farming in Hoffman v. Monsanto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The case of Hoffman v Monsanto Canada Inc. involves a group of Saskatchewan organic farmers bringing an action for certification as a class in order to pursue class action litigation against both Monsanto Canada Inc. and Bayer Crop-Science Inc. The farmers are seeking redress for alleged damage caused to them by Monsanto's and Bayer's genetically modified (GM) varieties of canola. The Saskatchewan Class Actions Act requires a court to assess the pleadings and be satisfied that they disclose a cause of action as one step in deciding whether to certify the class thus the decision from the court of first instance addresses this issue rather than the potential liability of Monsanto and Bayer for the damage alleged against them. The plaintiff farmers have three major complaints against Monsanto and Bayer: that the release of the GM varieties of canola has resulted in the spread of the plants and modified genes such that it is impossible to grow organic canola; that volunteer GM canola plants appear in fields of organic farmers, even those not trying to grow organic canola; and that the creation and subsequent abandonment of an identity preservation programme by the companies resulted in the loss of the European market for all Canadian canola. The three complaints against Monsanto and Bayer are broken down into six causes of action: negligence, the rule in Rylands v Fletcher, nuisance, trespass, The Environmental Management and Protection Act (EMPA) of Saskatchewan and The Environmental Assessment Act (EAA) of Saskatchewan. The court assessed the pleadings under each of these causes of action and determined that only the causes of action under the EMPA, 2002 and the EAA could be sustained. The court also determined that the proposed class failed to meet the other requirements necessary for certification. The decision from the court of first instance raises a number of underlying concerns. These include how questions of the safety of GM organisms are shrouded in an economic veil in the dispute, the rights and responsibilities of biotechnology companies in light of other relevant Canadian case law and international commitments, and the issue of access to information on GM organisms held by their proponent companies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".