Enlarge image i Farmers harvest a sugar beet crop in Gilcrest, Colo.
Farmers harvest a sugar beet crop in Gilcrest, Colo.
Tucked inside a quick - term funding measure that Congress accredited Thursday is a provision that critics are denouncing as a "Monsanto Safety Act."
The so- named "biotech rider" was incorporated in legislation that won ultimate approval from the Home, keeping away from a shutdown of the federal government on March 27, when the recent funding was set to expire. The provision was slipped into the legislation anonymously. It explicitly grants the U.S. Division of Agriculture the authority to override a judicial ruling stopping the planting of a genetically modified crop.
On the face of it, that sounds fairly bad. And when environmental and organic farming groups acquired wind of it earlier this month, they mounted a campaign urging voters to get in touch with and e-mail their senators and voice their outrage above the provision, which they denounced as a "giveaway to genetically engineered seed companies " and even an act of "fascism." Also dismayed was Montana Democrat Jon Tester, the Senate's lone active farmer, who had offered an amendment to strike the provision from the funding resolution.
The provision "tells USDA to disregard any judicial ruling relating to the planting of genetically modified crops," Tester explained in remarks ready for delivery on the Senate floor final week.
But a closer look at the language of the provision suggests it may possibly not be granting the USDA any powers it does not already have.
" It truly is not clear that this provision radically changes the powers USDA has beneath the law," Greg Jaffe, director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, tells The Salt.
If you read the provision closely ( it can be on page 78, Sec. 735, of this PDF), you are going to see that it authorizes the USDA to grant " short-term " permission for GMO crops to be planted, even if a judge has ruled that this kind of crops were not effectively approved, only when the needed environmental testimonials are finished. That is an authority that the USDA has, in reality, by now exercised in the past.
Back in 2010, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the USDA had accredited genetically modified sugar beets for industrial planting without adequately assessing their probable environmental impact. The ruling proficiently banned future plantings of GMO sugar beets which manufactured up most of the country's crop and raised the specter of a sugar shortage.
So two giant biotech seed producers Monsanto and Germany's KWS petitioned the USDA to concern a "partial deregulation": Basically, farmers received the go-ahead to maintain planting the beets until finally the USDA's environmental evaluation of the crop was complete.
At the time, the USDA's selection infuriated environmental groups and the organic marketplace. So it is straightforward to see why these same groups now take umbrage at an act of Congress that appears to encourage the USDA to approve first, assess later on when it comes to GMO crops concerned in a legal dispute.
Says Jaffe: "It plainly is a solid statement from Congress that USDA really should work out people powers, possibly in far more situations than they might otherwise do it."
But not like controversial biotech language inserted into the farm bill last 12 months that never produced it into law, Jaffe notes, the newly enacted provision does not seek to restrict the government's capability to carry out environmental testimonials of biotech crops.
And for opponents of the new biotech rider, there's this silver lining: Like the rest of the stopgap funding legislation, it expires in six months.
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