LONOKE, Ark. (AP) — Researchers at Ghent University in Belgium set out nearly 20 years ago to do what seemed like a good thing for farmers — create a strain of rice that could withstand a popular herbicide that kills weeds in the fields.

The scientists were so successful that Bayer CropScience, part of the German chemical giant that makes and markets the Liberty herbicide, eventually bought the company that the university scientists formed.

Now lawyers for Bayer CropScience are in an Arkansas courtroom, fighting the latest of several lawsuits claiming the company hurt rice farmers rather than helping them. Bayer has already lost three suits over the past five months, with more trials to come.

Growers in Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas filed lawsuits against Bayer for hurting their sales after genetically altered rice escaped a Louisiana test plot. Bayer faces judgments of $4.5 million so far in the three cases it lost.

Two key things happened since the early 1990s. Concerns grew about foods marketed directly to consumers that were raised using genetically altered seeds. And the experimental, Liberty-resistant strain of rice — called Liberty Link — got loose and made its way into the stream of commercially marketed rice.

The announcement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in August 2006 that traces of Liberty Link rice had been found in the nation’s rice supply was not welcome news to rice farmers.

No nation has approved genetically modified rice for the marketplace. Rice futures plummeted by $150 million immediately afterward. European nations quit accepting shipments of rice from the U.S. that hadn’t been extensively tested to show they weren’t contaminated. Japan banned all American rice.