Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

ISIS Press Release 01/03/07
---------------------------

Approval of GM Crops Illegal, US Federal Courts Rule
****************************************************

The courts said it three times so it must be true Prof. Joe
Cummins and Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

In a surprising development that may well stump the further
approval of GMOs, Federal Courts in the US have ruled
against the Department of Agriculture (USDA) in three
successive cases for failing to carry out proper environment
impact assessment, making the original approvals of GM crops
illegal.

It has been twelve years since the world's first GM crop,
the Flav Savr tomato, was commercially approved, and
hundreds more GM varieties were granted deregulation status.
The global area of GM crops has reached 102 million
hectares, according to industry sources [1], though this has
been strongly contested around the world [2] ( Global GM
Crops Area Exaggerated , SiS 33)

The first case was on drug-producing GM crops. A federal
district judge in Hawaii ruled in August 2006 that the USDA
violated the Endangered Species Act as well as the National
Environmental Policy Act in allowing drug-producing GM crops
to be cultivated throughout Hawaii, and failing to conduct
even preliminary investigations on environmental impact
prior to the approval of planting. The plaintiffs were the
Center for Food Safety, KAHEA (The Hawaiian Environmental
Alliance) , Friends of the Earth, and the Pesticide Action
Network, North America. The defendants were the US Secretary
of Agriculture and administrators of the USDA.

>From 2001 to 2003, four companies, ProdiGene, Monsanto,
Hawaii Agriculture Research Center (HARC), and Garst Seed,
were allowed to plant corn and sugarcane genetically
modified to produce experimental pharmaceutical products
such as vaccines, hormones, cancer fighting agents and other
proteins that are still under development and hence not yet
approved.

The plaintiffs argued that USDA/APHIS broke the law in
issuing these permits. Because these crops produce
pharmaceutical products that are still at the experimental
stage of development, their effect on Hawaii's ecosystem
(especially Hawaii's 329 endangered and threatened species)
is unknown. The experimental crops could cross-pollinate
with existing food crops, and contaminate the food supply.
Animals feeding on the crops would also become unwitting
carriers of pharmaceutical products, causing even more
widespread dissemination of these experimental drugs.

The court concluded that APHIS' issuance of four permits was
“arbitrary and capricious” and “an unequivocal violation of
a clear congressional mandate” [3].

The second ruling was even more significant. A case was
filed in Federal Court Washington DC against the trials of
GM creeping bentgrass by the Center for Food Safety,
Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, and other individuals and
organizations in 2003. In February 2007, the court gave a
decision that broadly affects field trials of all GM crops.
Federal district judge Harold Kennedy ruled that the USDA
must halt approval of all new field trials until more
rigorous environmental reviews are conducted. USDA's past
approval of GM herbicide-tolerant creeping bent grass led to
widespread dispersal of pollen from the GM grass, and USDA's
approval of bent grass trials was ruled illegal [4].

The third decision was on a case filed in Northern
California by the Center for Food Safety, environment
activists, seed producers and farmers. A Federal Court ruled
(February 2007) that Monsanto's Roundup Ready alfalfa had
been approved for commercial release illegally, because
there had been no Environment Impact Statement. [5].
According to Center for Food Safety, The decision may
prevent this season's sales and planting of Monsanto's GM
alfalfa and future submissions of other GM crops for
commercial deregulation.

Joseph Mendelson, spokesperson for the Center for Food
Safety said to a reporter for Science journal [6] that his
group may demand an end to sales of GM alfalfa or even a ban
on planting GM seed already bought by farmers, while the
USDA declined to comment,

Predictably, perhaps, the pro-GM lobby has been toning down
the significance of the claims [6], reporting that, “U.S.
courts say transgenic crops need tighter scrutiny”.

In all three cases, USDA was found to have flouted the law
and disregarded health and environmental concerns in their
approvals of the GM crops. The failure to identify the
locations and the exact nature of GM crops being tested must
also be addressed along with the frivolous use of
Confidential Business Information designations to conceal
crucial information for safety evaluation and the persistent
regulatory bias towards the uncritical acceptance of GM
crops.

In the United States, as in Canada, Europe and the UK, a
clean sweep of the regulatory regime is long overdue, while
a global ban of all further releases of GMOs is in order [7]
( GM Food Nightmare Unfolding and the Regulatory Sham , SiS
33).

Read the rest of this article here:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Approval_of_GM_Crops_Illegal.php