29 September 2026, Washington, D.C.: The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and attorneys general from 12 states filed a joint motion on September 28, 2026, asking a federal court to approve a settlement that requires Corteva to pay $35 million and dismantle a pesticide loyalty rebate program that regulators say kept generic competitors out of the market and inflated prices for American farmers.
The filing, submitted in the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, asks Judge Thomas Schroeder to enter a stipulated order of injunctive and other relief against Corteva. Under the terms, Corteva is barred for ten years from conditioning payments or other benefits to distributors on their purchasing a high share, generally more than 50 percent, of a given active ingredient from Corteva rather than from generic rivals. The order also prohibits share-based programs that cap generic purchases below that threshold, volume-based loyalty schemes designed to recreate the same effect, and discrimination against distributors who choose to work with competitors. The $35 million will go to the plaintiff states to resolve their monetary claims. Corteva did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
The case traces back to a lawsuit the FTC and state partners filed in September 2022, which accused both Corteva and Syngenta of running parallel loyalty programs. The original complaint alleged the two companies rewarded distributors for keeping purchases of generic, off-patent versions of widely used pesticides below a high threshold, once reported at 90 percent or more of a distributor’s needs for a given active ingredient, letting both companies keep charging elevated, post-patent prices even after cheaper generics became available. The states involved in this settlement are California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin.
David Shaw, principal deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said the settlement would eliminate corporate practices that hurt farmers by impeding sales of lower-priced products. Litigation against Syngenta over similar allegations is continuing separately and was not resolved by this filing.
The settlement lands in the middle of a broader reshaping of Corteva’s business. The company is separating its seed business into a standalone company called Vylor, expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on October 1, 2026, while Corteva itself continues as a pure-play crop protection company. Separately, Corteva agreed in June 2026 to pay $85 million to resolve a related farmer class action covering more than 100,000 growers, a sum farmers’ attorneys in that case said represented roughly 10 percent of the damages they had calculated.
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