Biotech Critics Challenging Monsanto GMO Sugar Beet
KANSAS CITY, Missouri - Opponents of biotech crops said on Wednesday they were filing a lawsuit to challenge the USDA’s deregulation of Monsanto Co’s genetically engineered sugar beet because of fears of “biological contamination” and other harm to the environment.
The Center for Food Safety, the Sierra Club and two organic seed groups said the lawsuit involved the United States Department of Agriculture’s approval of Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant sugar beet, which is engineered to withstand treatment of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.
The “Roundup Ready” sugar beets are slated to be grown on a commercial scale for the first time in the United States this year, the groups said.
Neither Monsanto nor USDA officials could be reached immediately for comment.
The groups said the wind-pollinated biotech sugar beets will cross-pollinate and contaminate conventional sugar beets, organic chard and table beet crops.
As well, the groups said the biotech sugar beets will increase the recent rise of weeds resistant to herbicide, which have been reported on 2.4 million acres of U.S. cropland, the groups said.
“The law requires the government to take a hard look at the impact that deregulating Roundup Ready sugar beets will have on human health, agriculture and the environment,” said Greg Loarie, an attorney at the Earthjustice law firm, which is helping represent the plaintiffs. “The government cannot simply ignore the fact that deregulation will harm organic farmers and consumers, and exacerbate the growing epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds.”
The lawsuit is similar to one biotech crop opponents filed over the USDA’s deregulation of Monsanto’s genetically altered alfalfa, which led a federal judge last year to issue a nationwide ban against the planting of the Roundup Ready alfalfa.
The judge found that U.S. regulators improperly allowed the commercialization of the biotech alfalfa without a thorough examination of its effects.
Reporting by Carey Gillam, editing by Jackie Frank
© 2008 Reuters
Soon there will be nothing that we can eat.
““The law requires the government to take a hard look at the impact that deregulating Roundup Ready sugar beets will have on human health, agriculture and the environment,” said Greg Loarie, an attorney at the Earthjustice law firm, which is helping represent the plaintiffs. “The government cannot simply ignore the fact that deregulation will harm organic farmers and consumers, and exacerbate the growing epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds.””
Not if examining the impact or halting deregulation is deemed a threat to National security..(roll eyes)
Conservatives must be rejoicing in their pigpens as liberals leave the country.
> The groups said the wind-pollinated biotech
> sugar beets will cross-pollinate and contaminate
> conventional sugar beets, organic chard and
> table beet crops.
> As well, the groups said the biotech sugar beets
> will increase the recent rise of weeds resistant
> to herbicide, which have been reported on 2.4
> million acres of U.S. cropland, the groups said.
This shows how desperate the anti-biotech lobby is to find a legitimate or even plausible argument.
First, they resort to the magical concept of “contamination” by artificial DNA due to exactly the same kind of cross-pollination that leads to the uncontrolled, untested, unknown genetic modification, recombination and spread of adaptive mutations both in nature and in “traditional” agriculture.
“Contamination” involves a violation of the magical concept that the “organic” crops, whose commercial profitability is threatened by such a perceived violation, possess a kind of goodness bestowed by Mother Nature and still inhering in them due to their inviolate nature. This magical goodness persists due to our adherence to the prescribed rituals of Organic farming, even after ten thousand years of human agriculture and active genetic modification (beyond recognition) of these crops from their wild ancestors.
Second, they suggest the somewhat more plausible argument that the use of glyphosate-tolerant crops leads to an increase in glyphosate resistance in weeds. If this is indeed occurring, it poses a management problem if Roundup is not to lose its commercial value. As it is, farmers are told to rotate fields and incorporate buffer zones when planting recombinant as well as other crops. I don’t see a disaster scenario in here, anyway.
“It’s alive, ALIVE!!!”
Mark Abram, part of the problem is that Monsanto has a patent on the gene. Monsanto says that farmers owe Monsanto a royalty if they plant seeds carrying the gene. Monsanto successfully sued a Sask. farmer for having RondupReady canola growing on his land that he didn’t plant. They sued him for the retail cost of the seed. Monsanto sneaked onto his farm (and others probably)to collect samples for genetic testing…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/779265.stm
in the end the farmer won at appeal to the Supreme court.
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/decisioncomments.htm
But wind and bees (if they don’t go extinct) will carry the pollen great distances and that gene will be transfered to the real crops. Then Monsanto can (and will) collect samples, find *their* gene and try to sue the farmer. that is the problem (and their strategy) they want to take ownership of all the seed everywhere.
Note that the farmer won, sort of, on appeal to the supreme court.
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/decisioncomments.htm
he did not have to pay, but the court ruled that a company’s patent will take precedence over the rights of farmer’s to save and reuse their seed.
GottaGetOffTheGrid is right. Frankensteins’s monster is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is Frankenstein and pro-corporate courts and governments.
GottaGetOffTheGrid - You are citing exactly one case, decided by the Supreme Court in favor of the farmer, which regardless of the facts shows that the courts will protect farmers from this kind of abuse. I do not doubt also that many farmers do attempt to avoid royalty payments for which they are legally liable, and that the seed companies will continue to seek to intimidate or force farmers into paying their royalties, in some cases unjustly. This is, once again, not an argument against genetic engineering itself on grounds of efficacy, safety or environmental impact.
Like the nuclear power advocates, GM fans expect to make lots of money by growing more soy, corn for bio-fuels and for rising populations regardless of consequences. Here are some consequences that have received little consideration:
The Coral-List communications on “What can scientists do?” about human-caused global changes affecting corals have focused entirely on CO2 buildup and the resulting increased global warming, decreased aragonite saturation levels (lower pH of seawater), and rising sea level. Of course the increased CO2 is a very serious problem, but scleractinian corals have survived this stress several times in the past while the sudden global buildup of fixed nitrogen is probably unprecedented.
Further, changes in the physical environment such as CO2 buildup over geological time have been aimlessly up and down while the buildup of fixed nitrogen may cause a progressive arms race in both ecology and evolution in directions that favor algae and heterotrophs to the detriment of symbiotic photosynthetic holobionts.
Scleractinians have been around for over 220 million years, but for long periods during this time, the CO2 was at high levels in the atmosphere and the aragonite saturation levels were low. Coral reefs were prevalent in the mid Mesozoic, but from the later Jurassic and throughout the Cretaceous, while the hermatypic scleractinian corals increased in diversity, the development of coral reefs became less prevalent (Hallock 1997).
The global warming, the decreased aragonite saturation levels, and extreme sea level rise in the later Mesozoic were probably resulting from abundant CO2 output by extensive submarine volcanism with the relatively rapid rifting and movements of continental plates (Hallock 1997). The finishing blow came with the CO2 from the Deccan Traps continental volcanic mantle plume 500,000 km2 in area and 2,000 m thick.
The atmosphere in the Upper Cretaceous is estimated to have had 4 times the concentration of CO2 as in the atmosphere today. The sea level rose to over 200 m higher than it is today and only 18 to 20 % of the surface of Earth was above seawater. Polar waters were generally warmer than 20 deg. C during the middle Cretaceous (Jenkyns et al. 2004).
As the saturation level of aragonite decreased, the scleractinian reefs gave way to reefs of rudist bivalves, whose shells were predominantly calcite. Scleractinian reefs disappeared from the geological record well before the end of the Cretaceous (Copper 1994), remained absent throughout the Paleocene, and did not reappear until the Eocene.
Although coral reefs were gone for over 10 million years, fossils indicate that Heliopora, Stephanocoenia, Madracis, Astreopora, Goniopora, Porites, Siderastrea, Cycloseris, Oculina, Dichocoenia, Hydnophora, Cladocora, Diploastrea, Diploria, Favia, Leptoria, Heteropsammia and others had survived during this long absence of coral reefs (Wells 1956, Veron and Kelly 1988, Paulay 1997).
Kleypas et al. (2001) suggest that times favorable for reef growth have been only 10% of the past few million years. The past few centuries that we humans have experienced were abnormally favorable for reef growth. “Like obesity, a massive reef accumulation may be the result of remaining stationary too long under good conditions” (Buddemeier and Kinzie 1998).
But whether or not the corals are in danger of extinction, humans will suffer when reef growth ceases or slows. With sea level rising at the same time as the pH of surface waters decreases, reefs are likely to drown and as sea level rises, reefs will not provide protection of coastal areas against storm waves and shoreline erosion, nor the habitat and topographic complexity that provides abundant fisheries stocks. Since corals have a heritage of extreme fluctuations in atmospheric CO2, they might have inherited the capacity to survive this next coming round.
In contrast, the doubling of fixed nitrogen on Earth in the past few decades by use of fossil fuels (Vitousek et al. 1997) is unprecedented. The production of CO2 is generally an easy downhill byproduct of the burning of materials created by photosynthesis, whether by metabolism of biota or through the use of fossil fuels. The ups and downs of global atmospheric CO2 because of volcanism and use of photosynthetic products are natural. But nitrogen fixation by combination of nitrogen with hydrogen, oxygen, or carbon is an expensive energy-consuming uphill process.
Our industrial production of food is replacing agricultural production by subsidizing traditional solar energy with the use of fossil fuels to produce fertilizers by fixing nitrogen (Pollan 2006). By using fossil fuels, we are compounding the climate-change problem by adding more CO2 as well as N2O to provide the greenhouse effect as we produce fertilizer. Nitrous oxide has 296 times more influence on global warming than the same per mass unit of carbon dioxide.
Fritz Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920 for inventing the method of using fossil fuels to fix nitrogen because this procedure was “the most important invention of the 20th century” (Pollan 2006). Carl Bosch estimated that two of every five humans on Earth would not exist at this time if not for this invention.
Mainland China constructed thirteen massive fertilizer factories which are considered to have prevented starvation. But with a subsidy from fossil fuels, high yield became the driving force and “time is money, and yield is everything” (Pollan 2006).
With subsidies, efficiency and frugal use of resources means little. “Every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between and quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it” and the federal treasury now spends up to $5 billion a year subsidizing cheap corn (Pollan 2006). With fossil fuel subsidy, the farmers do not need to risk erring on the side of too little fertilizer, and so they waste much of the fertilizer they buy by providing far more than is needed.
This excess of nitrates and phosphates drain into the rivers. In the 1990s, the Mississippi carried 10 times the nitrates and phosphates that it did in the 1960s (Hallock et al. 1993). The load might be substantially more these days.
By fertilizing algae (phytoplankton), the excess fertilizer has created at least 146 large-scale dead zones in coastal oceans of the world in which fishes and crustaceans and other animals suffocate from oxygen depletion. The dead zone south of Louisiana, fertilized by the Mississippi, occasionally gets to be as large as the area of Massachusetts.
The identity of the limiting nutrient is a complicated story, but whether it is N, P, Fe, Si, C or others, these large-scale dead zones are associated with fertilizers from industrial nitrogen-fixation. With surplus nutrients, time and yield are everything, and survival in competition for space by efficiency with recycling loses in a major way.
This is especially true for coral reefs. Coral holobionts are excellent at living in oligotrophic situations because of efficiency and recycling, but surplus nutrients from upwelling and runoff favor profligate growth and biomass accumulation, both to the detriment of the individual coral recruit (Birkeland 1977) and at the level of geographic patterns of community structure and ecosystem processes of coral reefs (Birkeland 1988, 1997).
Geerat Vermeij (1995) perceives surplus nutrients as favoring major evolutionary innovations. John Taylor also (1997) discusses evolutionary implications of different regimes of nutrient input. Under conditions of surplus nutrients, profligate yield would favor rapid growth of algae and heterotrophic benthic animals over efficient recycling of nutrients by autotrophic holobionts.
So why is this of interest? This pattern might provide insight into why the reefs of American Samoa are so resilient compared to those in the tropical western Atlantic. The corals on American Samoa have been subjected to overfishing of herbivorous fishes (Page 1998, Craig and Green 2005), scarcity of urchins (Birkeland 1989), hurricanes, bleaching, crown-of-thorns outbreaks, pollution, sediment, yet they continually rebound with vigor (Birkeland et al. 2008).
Crustose coralline algae are prevalent and macroalgae are not. Sponges such as Dysidea herbacea that host photosynthetic symbionts are prevalent and dominate large areas of reef, while heterotrophic Stylotella sp. are scarce and diminutive. Likewise, the colonial tunicate Diplosoma similis, with photosynthetic symbionts, covers large areas at the bases of corals, while the heterotrophic tunicates are scarce. American Samoan reefs possibly have resilience partially because they are distant from the massive fixed nitrogen and fertilizer runoff of continental areas, whereas nearly all of the Caribbean is close to continents.
A respectable diversity of coral disease can be found in American Samoa (Work and Rameyer 2002), but they have not been found to take over the corals as they have in the Caribbean (Aronson and Precht 2001). Experiments by Bruno et al. (2003) suggest a hypothesis that input of fixed nitrogen in the western Atlantic in recent decades might contribute to the vulnerability of corals.
In response to the question “What can scientists do?”, we should educate or warn the public that subsidizing production in unnatural ways can be unsustainable and will possibly lead to system collapse and to future conflict.
The government subsidies for use of fossil fuels to increase industrial food production (Pollan 2006) and for harvesting fisheries resources when the reproductive stock is too low to sustain the fishery (Iudicello et al. 1999) do not take into account the future consequences. We may be building a human population beyond carrying capacity, subsidized by finite fossil fuels rather than by practically infinite solar radiation alone.
Agricultural food production was based on efficiency and free nitrogen fixation by alternating corn production which depleted nitrogen from the soil with soy bean, alfalfa, or other legume production which fixed nitrogen “for free” (by infinite solar radiation). Industrial food production bypassed this slow process by pouring fossil fuel into the process, thereby encouraging profligate application of fixed nitrogen into the system, and eventually unprecedented input into marine environments. This global fossil fuel subsidy of production of fixed nitrogen is favorable to the traits of algae and heterotrophic organisms, and not corals.
Ezeflyer: I think that is the longest post you have ever done. Hit a nerve? Well done and very informative.
Mark: Go AWAY!!!
Key word - biodiversity. When Monsanto sugar beats take over, what are we going to do when some pathegen wipes out that cultivar? OOPS……Potato famine? Hummmm…..
Mark Abram, the company paid pumper said:
“Contamination” involves a violation of the magical concept that the “organic” crops, whose commercial profitability is threatened by such a perceived violation, possess a kind of goodness bestowed by Mother Nature and still inhering in them due to their inviolate nature. This magical goodness persists due to our adherence to the prescribed rituals of Organic farming, even after ten thousand years of human agriculture and active genetic modification (beyond recognition) of these crops from their wild ancestors.”
Pac sez: This is complete deception by Mark Abram. What he omits, in order to make you feel dumb, is the fact that in “ten thousand years of human agriculture and active genetic modification” only genes closely related to the plant in question were combined together.
THAT IS NOT WHAT MONSANTO IS DOING.
NONE of that natural modification in Ag history to which Abrams refers involved the reckless Monsanto/Dow/Dupont gene splicing between disparate orders, families, and phylums of the entire tree of life. Drug/pesticide spliced crops like this Frankenbeet where not done by conventional cross-breeding of closely related plants or animals like a donkey and a horse which produces an dorked up offspring called a Mule (which is sterile.) This mad science involves grabbing the genes of molds, fungus, and posionous animal and plant substances that have never been together in history all just to improve chemical company profits and nothing else. A side benefit to them is that the poor farmer is soon going to be up to his eyeballs in superweeds that only respond to more massive spraying of Roundup and nothing else.
Very profitable.
Bye Bye rivers.
Bye Bye colon helper bacteria. Hope you enjoy being sick.
Herbicides are completely unnecessary. Weeds are easily controlled with companion planting. The beets are planted with grasses and other companion food crops that keep the weeds out. There are of course various fundamental advantages to companion planting - pathogen control, soil health, and general ecosystem health.
These age-old methods were displaced by capitalists who seek to build markets. They want to make people dependent on their comodities, like gasoline and herbicide, assuring the capitalists a reliable profit stream year after year. Building markets is a fatally flawed idea, and should be illegal, in the sense that it violates the assumptions underpinning capitalism, that the markets serve society’s better interests.
The idea was for consumers, not producers, to make informed demands. Obviously producers cannot judge any interest but their own.
The United States pioneered the systematic violation of the market fundamentals. The bankers suggested to the industrialists that they go out and convince the farmers to switch to the herbicide. That’s all there is to it. The same approach is used across all industrial sectors, to the devastation of the environment, and the society. People are effectively enslaved in all sectors.
The answer is, of course, total dismantling of the “laissez-faire” capitalist system, including the capitaist’s interference in public policy. The capitalists know it’s whole racket from end to end is facing its doom, mainly due to its mega-catastrophe - global warming - and the mega-implications.
Science does not understand earth process or anything close to maintaining a natural balance, it is as much at fault as anything in how ignorant people are of the earth they live on. Mark you suck!!!
Could someone please point to long-term studies showing that MON810 is safe for consumption and event Bt 11 it safe for consumption and each specific GM product on the market? No, I didn’t think so.
The FDA lets these products our on the bankrupt assertion that they have “substantial equivalence” - a notion that is based on the incorrect “central dogma” of genetics.
Take GM product A and tell me how many times the alien gene was inserted (because its usually not just once). Tell me what that insertion did to the host DNA’s genes, because it often damages or destroys the genes around it. Tell me what exactly what effect his has. Tell me exactly the effect the new gene order has. Tell me exactly how many alternate splicings there are for the new gene in the new environment. Tell me exactly how many alternate splicings there are now for the host genes that were altered by the insertion of the alien gene. Tell me the health effects of the new gene order. Tell me the health effects of any alternate splicings.
Let me give you the cheat sheet for that: We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know. And we don’t know.
Mark, love that straw man in your “argument” there.
Sick of hearing about the poor Canadian farmer that Monsanto sued for stealing seed. For heavens sake, he is 1000 acre farmer who sells seed, and he sprayed his crop with Roundup to select roundup-resistant seeds to sell as such to others. He’s a crook. He belongs in jail.
Second, who is responsible for keeping sweetcorn safe from indian corn planted on a neighbors property (which will produce reduced quality sweetcorn). In these cases, someone producing a specialty crop is responsible for maintaing a sufficient distance from pollen sources. However the sugar beet situation is idiotic - worrying about contaminating sugarbeets with sugarbeets. The only way to tell the crops apart is with analytical methods. There is no way to tell them apart in any nutritional or toxicological test. The difference is a matter of style (liberal flavor of the month).
Try actually reading about the Percy Schmeiser case before you post. If you bother to do that (you won’t, of course), you will find that the lawsuit did not claim he stole the seed, and the judge acknowledged in his ruling statement (available on the internet)that Schmeiser did not steal the seed.
Now I will leave you with your obsessive need to have the last word (i.e. I’m not coming back to this thread).
If you take a patented trait, select for that trait with a herbicide that normally kills the crop (canola), and then increase these seeds, then you are stealing. Just like if you copied a patented device and then made more of them for sale. In both cases you are stealing others patented ideas. This is no different from stealing conventional varieties that are protected. Technology providers can protect their investment in developing better products for 17 years. Patents encourage investment in technologies by providing the inventor a 17-year monopoly. This is the point of a patent system. Percy new exactly what he was doing - Stealing technology for profit. Now he found a new angle - get the anti-biotech folks to pay him to play the poor victim. Poor Percy - how will he tend his 1,000 acre farm while on tour?
he sprayed his crop with Roundup to select roundup-resistant seeds to sell as such to others.
No, he didn’t.