A grain shipping company has filed for bankruptcy, blaming market disturbances that they attribute to the Swiss agricultural company Syngenta AG.

Trans Coastal Supply Co. of Decatur, Ill. ships corn and other agricultural products to China and elsewhere in Asia. The company says their business was crippled in the wake of a ban on imports of U.S. corn by the Chinese government. The ban triggered a wave of events throughout the U.S. corn industry that Trans Coastal now says caused them to need federal bankruptcy protection.

Chinese officials instituted a ban on U.S. corn in 2013 after finding traces of Syngenta’s Viptera corn in shipments of U.S. corn. At the time, the Chinese government had not yet approved Viptera for import. China has since approved Viptera for import and lifted the ban.

Now Trans Coastal and other participants in the U.S. corn market are attributing a drop in the market price of corn to the Chinese ban, and they’re blaming it all on Syngenta. The National Grain and Feed Association estimates that industry members may lose up to $3.4 billion during the 2014-2015 season.

Today, Syngenta is facing hundreds of individual Viptera GMO corn lawsuits, including one from Trans Coastal. Other plaintiffs include smaller players in the corn industry like individual farmers, as well as some larger agricultural companies such as Cargill Inc. and Archer Daniels Midland.

A spokesperson for Trans Coastal said that prior to the Chinese ban, Syngenta led Trans Coastal to believe that Chinese approval of Viptera was just around the corner and that no traces of Viptera would be found in shipments to China before then. Many plaintiffs now say they relied on these assurances from Syngenta, then lost big when the Chinese ban began.

Trans Coastal says the ban triggered not just a drop in the price of corn but also a wave of rejected shipments and defaults on contracts by their customers. Then Trans Coastal’s own creditors began to sue.

Viptera, also known as MIR162, is a strain of genetically engineered corn developed by Syngenta to resist corn pests like black cutworms and corn earworms. Viptera has been approved for sale in the U.S. and for import into Brazil and Argentina since 2011. Syngenta had applied for Chinese approval back in 2010, and that application was still pending when Chinese officials discovered the tainted U.S. corn. Some plaintiffs allege that Syngenta rushed into sales of Viptera to reap extra profits before its patent expired.

Based in Switzerland, Syngenta has business interests in 90 different countries. In 2013, the company reported sales of $14.7 billion. The company continues to reject the plaintiffs’ Viptera corn arguments. The company says it was transparent in its marketing of Viptera corn.

While some Viptera lawsuits are continuing in state court, almost 1,500 federal Viptera lawsuits have been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation in Kansas federal court. Syngenta’s Duracade corn variety is also at issue in this MDL.

The Syngenta Corn MDL is titled In re: Syngenta AG MIR162 Corn Litigation, MDL No. 2591, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas.