A judge dismissed claims that agricultural chemical companies such as Syngenta and Corteva purposefully avoided e-commerce sites as a tactic to skirt price competition.
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.
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