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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Modified Beet Gets New Life
  • Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:00:36 -0700


Modified Beet Gets New Life
FEBRUARY 5, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704709304576124454083334630.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Agriculture Department, trying to avoid a shortage of U.S. sugar, said
Friday it would allow U.S. farmers to resume planting the widely used
genetically modified version of the sugar-beet plant that a federal judge has
effectively banned.

More than half of the nation's granulated sugar—the stuff that consumers buy
in supermarkets for baking or to pour in coffee—has in recent years come from
beet plants genetically modified in the same way as most of the corn,
soybeans and cotton grown in the U.S. The other half comes from sugar cane.

The beets, which are grown extensively around the border between North Dakota
and Minnesota, have a Monsanto Co. gene that gives them immunity to
glyphosate-based weedkiller, which the St. Louis biotechnology company sells
as Roundup herbicide.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White, who sits in San Francisco, last year
blocked farmers from planting the weedkiller-resistant beets again this
spring. He concluded the USDA should have conducted a lengthy study of the
crop's potential consequences for groups such as organic farmers before
originally clearing it in 2005.

An environmental-impact statement of the type ordered by the judge is usually
thousands of pages long and takes years to conduct. That would have kept the
genetically modified sugar beets out of the hands of farmers at least through
2012.

Monsanto said Friday that the USDA's move would allow U.S. farmers to begin
planting genetically modified sugar beets this spring. But environmental and
organic-seed groups that originally sued the USDA said Friday they would ask
Judge White to block this latest move by the USDA.

Crop biotechnology and sugar interests had appealed to the USDA for some way
to temporarily circumvent the judge's planting ban. According to
biotechnology officials, that door opened when Monsanto successfully argued
before the Supreme Court in 2010 that the USDA should be able to partially
deregulate a genetically-modified crop while the agency completes
environmental studies.





  • [Livingontheland] Modified Beet Gets New Life, Tradingpost, 02/07/2011

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