RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - North Carolina’s Supreme Court is setting up a whopper of a lawsuit to settle claims by 800,000 past and present tobacco farmers in five Southeastern states for a piece of $340 million.
The state Supreme Court said Wednesday it was impractical for courts to handle hundreds of thousands of individual lawsuits in the fight over the reserve funds held by a North Carolina-based tobacco marketing cooperative.
The decade-long lawsuit involves money collected by the Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corp. Tobacco growers across North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia paid into the cooperative over six decades dating back to the mid-1940s.
Membership has dropped 99 percent since U.S. taxpayers quit underwriting tobacco crop prices in 2004.
The lawsuit now returns to a state trial court in Raleigh.
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