Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

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.