Last week, the USDA announced it would issue permits for seed producers to plant the GM beets in the Willamette Valley area, but that these crops would not be allowed to flower. Really ? Another classic case of caution for life thrown to the winds.
Suffice to say that the US is among the few countries in the world that, many a time has blatantly favored corporate interest over and above the health of its citizens, its wild life, its forests and its environment. GM - or Genetically Modified - anything is not so good for you, like the government and corporations indulging in splicing the genomes of life, have you believe. GM engineering has been going on well beyond what is remotely 'acceptable' in agriculture and your food supply chain.
These are not the GMOs most people hear about: soybeans that resist weed killers or corn that kills insects. These are experimental crops that contain pharmaceutical proteins, industrial chemicals, even human genes.
They are being grown outdoors in hundreds of secret locations all over the country, in open-pollinated plants such as corn. This powerful new use of biotechnology is called "pharming," and it poses very real threats to our personal and environmental health. Cases of pharm contamination have already occurred, raising new criticisms of the regulatory system in the United States
The good news is that we still live in a democracy that allows for our government to be sued. And that is exactly what happened to the USDA. A lawsuit Thursday was filed against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal district court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, over the agency’s decision to allow the immediate planting of genetically modified sugar beets.
According to the plaintiffs, the USDA's decision violates an August court ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White that prohibited plantings of genetically modified sugar beets.
“The Court has already found that the approval of this engineered crop was illegal,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety in a release. “Rather than complying with the court’s order, the USDA is once again acting as a rogue agency in illegally allowing these crops to be planted without the required hard look at their environmental and economic dangers.”
A USDA spokesman was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.
The beets in question are modified to resist the Monsanto herbicide, Roundup, which the company sees as a way to improve crop yields but which opponents fear could threaten human and environment health.
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