NC court OKs big fight: 800K tobacco growers, $340M, 1 case

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.

(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)