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Judge Rejects Approval of Engineered Sugar Beets
countertrolling writes "A federal judge has ruled that the government failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of genetically engineered sugar beets before approving the crop for cultivation in the United States. The decision could lead to a ban on the planting of the beets, which have been widely adopted by farmers. Beets supply about half the nation's sugar, with the rest coming from sugar cane. The Agriculture Department did conduct an environmental assessment before approving the genetically engineered beets in 2005 for widespread planting. But the department concluded there would be no significant impact, so a fuller environmental impact statement was not needed. But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets. He said that the 'potential elimination of farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer's choice to eat non-genetically engineered food' constituted a significant effect on the environment that necessitated an environmental impact statement. There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?"
What about Round Up ready Corn?! http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto_and_the_Roundup_Ready_Controversy
Now I'm not all that fussy about not eating bio-engineered food. But I think that biodiversity is a Good Thing, and that it's probably a good idea to preserve some uncontaminated stock (the old adage of "work on a backup" applies doubly when you're dealing with your food supply).
Add to that the way a lot of the bioengineering agritech firms love to assert copyright over their "intellectual property" (plant genetic material), whether or not the farmer actually wanted it or if it was undesirable cross-pollination, and I say good for Judge White.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Definition of evolution: change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.
Eg Delta, change, any change good or bad. You people need to get off of the soundbite train and get a grasp on what evolution is.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Not even the summary says anything about end product safety. The concern is environmental impact, which has nothing to do with what the beets are eventually turned in to.
I think companies like Monsanto should not be allowed to sue farmers just because the pollen from their genetically modified food crops spread to other fields, Monsanto released the product in to the open air world so it is only natural that the pollen from their products are going to spread to other plants, proving the farmer not at fault...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Direct insertion of DNA sequences from other species is different to breeding and selection.
End of story.
By all means get pissy about the definition of evolution, you're just trying to play semantics that have nothing at all to do with the argument at hand.
And I wish you people would stop "you people"'ing me. For god's sake, it's as if you people are incapable of addressing individuals.
This is getting to be less and less true, regardless of how "cheap" you are, and that's the point.
There was an article in Wired a while back that dealt with genetically engineered beef, going in depth into the whole process by which it's created, interviewing the farmers and other people along every step of the chain. The upshot was that it's basically impossible *not* to buy genetically engineered beef these days, because there are so many people out there who don't follow what few rules there are, there's so little enforcement and such big financial incentives for breaking the rules. (Nobody wants to buy cattle with stringy beef when it's next to a bunch of other cattle that are plumped up artificially.)
And the thing you have to remember is that once you've contaminated the chain, it's impossible to uncontaminate it. It's like trying to remove paint thinner from a pitcher full of drinking water. Once it's in there, it's almost impossible to separate it again. If you have one genetically modified bull producing offspring with non-modified cattle, all of those offspring will then be genetically modified, and nobody knows about it. They will then have their own offspring, and REALLY quickly you will have an entire system full of contaminated beef.
All anybody wants is the choice to eat this stuff or not. And that's being taken away with the lack of rules, the lack of oversight and the lack of labeling. Nobody is saying this stuff shouldn't even be on the market, we're just saying it needs to be labeled, and separated from the natural stuff.
That's fine, the problem which the judge is rightly pointing out is when pollen from GE self terminating sugarbeet plants pollinates a "warty disease filled" heirloom crop of sugar beets, thereby destroying that farmers heirloom strain while he's getting sued by Monsanto for having a 95% match rate in his crops DNA with the patented GE crop.
Do we really have the confidence in our understanding of genetic mechanisms to rule out harmful side-effects?
Turn that question around: What are the side effects of non-GMO crops? How do you know that this mushroom is safe to eat, and not that one? It's very simple: people tried them, and they discovered that this particular type made them sick and die. At least GMOs get tested for this in a lab before they're released into the environment.
Keep in mind that with GMO crops you're taking two things: corn and chrysanthemum, for example, and pasting them together to create corn with a borer-resistant root. It's not like that mix is going to result in corn that grows gills and glows in the dark. So you test the corn that comes out, and if there's no permethrin in the kernels, what difference does it make to you in the food chain? None.
The radical greens who try to scare people about GMOs play upon people's gullibility. They want us to not understand that we animals don't merge with the DNA of the foods we eat. Our stomach acids break the cells down, and our bodies collect and use only the raw nutrition components. If it didn't work this way, eating a cow could give you hooves, or eating corn might make a tassel grow out of your head. For those bits of food where the digestion process opens the cell walls, the same digestion process breaks up the DNA into amino acids. The undigestible bits come out the other end.
I do agree that the Terminator gene is as evil as DRM, but from a humanity/political point of view, not from a scientific view.
John
It's still not that unusual. Viruses do that very thing all the time. It'd take a really long time to do it the sexual way, but it's nothing that can't be done with enough patience. GM is just really really fast breeding. Get over it.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Call me a "green" if you wish but lab results on some of the genetically modified food have shown stomach cancer in lab rats. You think this federal judge ruled against the crop without any reason at all?
If you want a ton of specifics (just too many to list here) about GM food and it's health effects, there's a good documentary (which also covers how farmers get screwed) call "The Future of Food" located at TheFutureOfFood.com.
I see a lot of "it's just sugar" or "everything's genetically modified" arguments cropping up here; it's really not that simple. Plants are surprisingly "promiscuous" (follow this thread for a number of, no doubt, terribly ribald comments on *that* one). Traits adopted by one set of plants can make their way over to others of the same or different species. Depending on what traits are being modified, this can be a bad thing; consider that Roundup resistance in weeds is not just a result of selective pressure, but of the movement of genes from Monsanto's Roundup resistant seed stocks to neighboring plants.
Yes, this sort of "gene flow" happens in the soi disant natural world as well, but, like CO2 production, modern technology allows us to make bigger, more significant differences over a much shorter period of time. Caution is appropriate here.
Unless you happened to live in California for a few years in the 1990s you've never tasted a genetically modified tomato (and I understood they sold quite well during that time).
Unless you were at one point a grad student who engineered them yourself (or worked in a lab with someone who did) you've never tasted a GM strawberry.
If I'm wrong please point me toward where I can buy the GM seed for either of those.
For the record the only GM fruit or vegetable anyone will probably encounter right now would be a papaya from Hawaii engineered to resist papaya ring spot virus, as GM papayas were introduced after ring spot virus decimated the conventional papayas.
Do we really have the confidence in our understanding of genetic mechanisms to rule out harmful side-effects?
Turn that question around: What are the side effects of non-GMO crops?
Almost all of this debate misses the fundamental point of introducing alien species (and that's what GMO crops are... we've just refined the granularity of introduction to genetic fragments rather than a whole creature). Toads would not have been a problem in Australia or pigs in Hawaii, had they evolved there, naturally. They problem is that it takes centuries for an ecosystem to adapt to even the smallest change in an existing species and millennia or much longer to adapt to major changes.
In short, it's not the evolution of the crops that's in question, but of the environment around them and how it will respond.
We're currently at the "what could possibly go wrong" stage, and companies like Mosanto correctly point out that they'll go out of business if they need to wait for 100 years to see what the results of their tinkering might be, but are we protecting a company at the cost of our future health and well being? We literally have no idea.
He's referring to a case in Canada. Monsanto claimed he had gotten hold of some Roundup Ready rape seed, and used it to grow a seed crop of his own. Monsanto has the patent on that, and farmers are required to pay Monsanto a fee when they grow it. This, btw, is long established practice - the first patent was granted Burpee for the Red Delicious apple tree, and every single RD Apple tree in existence is a graft linking back to that tree - and if an orchard decides simply to graft from one they have already and establish 50 more trees, they still owe Burpee the license fee. Same with hybrid roses.
The farmer claimed that it was wind blown pollen from a neighbor's field that contaminated his seed crop. A couple of things that came out at the trial were that
a) it wasn't a scattering, it was a whole field, and
b) it occurred over multiple seasons, which negated his claim that he didn't know.
c) Despite Monsanto's claims, contamination by windblown pollen can occur.
Best guess is that he DID have a small patch of seed corn contaminated with the RR variant, but instead of destroying it and claiming damages from his neighbor, he selectively harvested it and planted another seed crop with it. Which is illegal, and he knew it. But since the story had the words "Monsanto", "GMO", "contaminated", and "farmer" in it, we wound up with most people forming opinions like the GP. If it would have been one of Monsanto's other patented but NOT GMO strains, the story wouldn't have gone farther than the local grange newsletter.
Monsanto sucks for plenty of other reasons than using 50 year old precedent to enforce plant patent rights against someone who violated them.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Direct insertion of DNA sequences from other species is different to breeding and selection.
End of story.
Beginning of story, actually.
Viruses are not precisely reliable. They'll frequently inject genetic material into a cell but then the reproductive phase will fail. This can cause cancer, various metabolic faults in the cell including immediate cell death, or frequently nothing at all because the genetic material will usually remain inert. Usually it's nothing to worry about because it's just one cell.
But what if the cell is a reproductive cell that turns into a zygote, forming an embryo? What'll happen is that the viral DNA will get replicated into every cell in the embryo --- including the embryo's own germ cells. This means the change will breed true. Viral DNA has now part of the animal's bloodline. It's rare, but it happens --- and the viral genetic material may not stay inert; it's frequently coopted and used. Apparently it's fairly well proven that the genetic sequence that protects babies from the immune systems of their mothers was stolen in this way from a retrovirus like HIV.
But this also works in reverse. A virus can attack a cell, reproduce, and accidentally scoop up host DNA. Now the animal's genetic material has entered the viral bloodline (as it were).
Add the two together, and what do you get? A mechanism for directly inserting DNA sequences from one species to a totally unrelated species. And it's all completely natural.
It's called horizontal gene transfer.
That's just animals. Plants are even worse --- they're extremely lax about cellular security, and will happily swap genetic material with organisms nearby. If you look on the verges of fields planted with a pesticide-resistant crop, you can frequently find unrelated weeds that have become pesticide resistant themselves; they've snapped up the useful genetic sequences from the crops nearby. I don't know if they've found the mechanism for this yet --- anyone know?
That's right, ooh scary - GMO's are a bit scary. No human safety tests were done - ever. Were all just supposed to trust the warm an fuzzy Monsanto would never sell us anything bad. It's just the company who made agent orange.
Now that studies are being done, GMO's are shown to cause increased allergenicity, as well as other problems:
"Animal studies consistently indicate serious health risks associated with GM food, including infertility, immune system dysfunction, organ damage, and increased mortality. Smith warns, "The only published human GMO feeding study confirmed that genes from the genetically engineered foods transfer into intestinal bacteria of humans and that these genes continue to function."
According to the State of Texas, not all things that happen in the bedroom are natural.
Direct insertion of DNA sequences from other species is different to breeding and selection.
Of course it's DIFFERENT, duh.
Your burden of proof is to show us it's WORSE. So far you haven't done that. You've just laid out a lot of scary language designed by Greenpeace to frighten people who don't know jack about genetics or science-in-general. You'll find the audience here is not the man-on-the-street.
So, go ahead, prove that using GM to obtain specific traits is worse than breeding for specific traits. Prove it.
Comment of the year
Fructose is a monosaccharide and is derived primarily from glucose extracted from corn. While there are natural sources of fructose, corn isn't one of them.
Have you eaten wheat? Corn? Beef? Chicken?
All of these products were genetically modified by people long before we knew what genes were. In its natural state, wheat blows away in the wind, leaving no food to eat. Mutant strains kept the seeds, and we cultivated those. Mutant strains developed by Borlaug in the 1950s saved millions from death and billions from starving.
Cows are domesticated from aurochs, now extinct. Wild corn is an inch long and hard as a rock.
Everything we've eaten for millenia has been genetically modified for maximum yield and higher efficiency.
We just have different tools now. What if they'd used phenotype selection to create a super-sweet beet instead? Would that be a problem? Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
For the record, I am a vegetarian.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I guess that the worst problem with these technologies is monoculture.
But monoculture has nothing to do with genetics. Nothing at all. For example, most plantations growing bananas are a monoculture, but they aren't genetically modified at all.
So you're basically saying, "I have absolutely no evidence that GM is worse, but here's a completely unrelated example that has nothing to do with GM." We're not that stupid, buddy, bring facts or go home.
Comment of the year
Look, he wasn't caught because Monsanto was rooting around testing people's crops. He was caught because Monsanto noticed he was buying vast quantities of Roundup, which was weird. Further investigation revealed the farmer was spraying Roundup indiscriminately over his crop.
Now, if your crop doesn't have the Roundup Ready gene, spraying it with Roundup kills it. So this farmer knew that the crop he was planting was all Roundup Ready. Then when he was caught, he then made up a cock-and-bull story about inadvertent contamination in hopes that he could avoid the legal consequences of deliberately, intentionally, and systematically violating Monsanto's patent.