In debates about GMOs, many people bring up the Farmer Assurance Provision (more commonly known as the Monsanto Protection Act), and seem to misunderstand the nature of the act and its effects on lawsuits against biotech companies such as Monsanto. In a lawsuit over safety, the normal route is as soon as the lawsuit is filed, all production is put on hold, and massive recalls are put into place. Once the product has been recalled, the court starts investigating its safety. Should it be demonstrated to be safe, the court lifts the restrictions imposed on the product, and the company goes about its way.
With GMOs, this presents a unique problem. There is a massive amount of outright fabrication from the anti-gmo community that has caused quite a few people to try to file suits against biotech companies. In America, biotech engineered foods account for about 80% of all foods produced, both directly through the crops themselves and indirectly through feed for animals. If the courts followed standard procedure for biotech crops as they do for other products, it would remove the vast majority of food from shelves, and cause both widespread panic and an extremely high potential for widespread hunger and starvation.
The Farmer Assurance Provision was drafted in response to a flurry of suits from a number of groups and individuals in the wake of Seralini's 2012 study, and was enacted on March 26, 2013. It had a sixth month time limit, after which it was to be removed. The idea was that those 6 months would be sufficient for the courts to conclude their investigations. The provision was given a slight extension from the original date of September 30th, 2013 until December 15th, 2013, when it was allowed to expire.
The Farmer Assurance Provision of the Plant Protection Act creates an exception to the standard policy of immediate recall, and actually follows the opposite route. When a lawsuit is filed, the Secretary of Agriculture can put a hold on all recalls and bans of crops until the investigation on their safety has been concluded. Should the investigation demonstrate a legitimate source of concern, the standard procedure shall then be enacted, with bans on production and distribution, and court ordered recalls. The company in question can then proceed to fight the suit like other companies do.
Around this time, courts started dismissing large numbers of lawsuits before they were taken to trial, and this gained notice because many were related to the Seralini study. This led some people to believe that the Farmer Assurance Provision placed limits on lawsuits filed against companies, which couldn't be further from the truth. In dismissing many of these suits, the courts relied heavily on precedent. Those suits which relied on evidence that had already been dismissed were ruled insufficient to proceed.
Because of this change of protocol, all new lawsuits will be thrown out unless they present new evidence that previous lawsuits have failed to provide. This has led some people to equate the correlation of the large numbers of lawsuits being thrown out with causation of the Farmers Assurance Act being implemented, assuming the act prevented people from suing Monsanto and other biotech firms. In reality, it functions a lot like the “Double Jeopardy” clause in criminal law. It prevents a company from being repeatedly sued over the same alleged offense when it has already been exonerated. The standing precedent is that all available evidence points to GM technology meeting the safety standards required by the EPA and various other governmental agencies, and evidence such as Seralini’s study has been deemed inadmissible due to its unreliability