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Another day, another bunch of old, white guys complaining about their neighbors screwing up their property – except this time, it’s quite warranted.
A new survey from Food & Water Watch has found that over 80 percent of organic farmers across the country are worried about how genetically modified crops in nearby fields are affecting their own. These farmers have incurred significant financial losses due to GMO contamination and the measures taken in attempts to prevent it.
It turns out that keeping organic crops and GMOs sufficiently separate is not cheap. To create a “buffer zone” around their fields, as required by USDA organic standards, the farmers surveyed said they set aside a median of five acres at a median cost of $2,500 per year. In some instances, the cost was more than $20,000 per year.
Organic farmers have also begun to delay planting, so that their crops won’t pollinate at the same time as neighboring GMOs and risk having their gene pool sullied. This results in further losses of about $5,300 a year for corn crops, and $3,300 for soybeans.
And even with these precautions, one-third of farmers are still seeing problems caused by GMO contamination, with more than half of them reporting that they’ve had crops rejected by buyers because of it. The median cost of each rejected load, which contains approximately 1,000 bushels, is $4,500.
To the typical organic farmer, these losses are no heirloom fingerling potatoes. They’re a significant percentage of their incomes.
It’s not all about the Benjamins, either. Animosity between organic and conventional farmers has noticeably mounted. The report notes:
The survey asked farmers if they had any non-monetary costs from the threat of GMO contamination. Several responses described strain between GMO and non-GMO farmers. One farmer wrote that, “…every time I walk into the local co-op they grit their teeth.” Others wrote that “conventional farming neighbors do not respect us,” that non-organic “neighbors feel that our farm is a thorn in their sides or a nuisance,” and that they “are considered to be a problem to them because we are not GMO like the rest of them.” Some relationships have gotten so strained that “neighbors get bent out of shape” when approached about GMO issues, and “some neighbors will no longer tell us what they plant.”
Food & Water Watch was inspired to conduct its survey after sustainable agriculture advocates across the country were disappointed by a 2012 report on the same topic from a USDA biotech advisory committee. That group, which was heavily loaded with Big Ag interests, declined to make any policy recommendations that would help stop GMO contamination of non-GMO fields and was widely attacked by organic farming groups.
“Can’t we all just get along?” is proving to be an unrealistic approach for an increasingly divided farming sector. Here’s hoping the USDA catches on to that soon.
Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology
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Get off my lawn! Organic farmers just can’t get along with GMO-growing neighbors
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Canadian officials ventured into uncharted legal and ecological waters when they approved the cultivation and export of genetically engineered salmon eggs last year. And now environmental groups have sued the government, claiming the approval illegally disregarded the potential for the transgenic fish to become an invasive species.
Quick background: AquaBounty Technologies Inc. has developed Atlantic salmon that grow more quickly than their natural cousins, thanks to the presence of DNA from Chinook salmon and from an eel-like fish called the ocean pout. The company wants to cultivate eggs for this AquAdvantage salmon on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, hatch the eggs and grow the salmon in Panama, then export the meat to the U.S. Approval from the U.S. government is still pending.
Some environmentalists worry that the GMO fish will escape, breed, and outcompete wild species. Under Canadian law, an invasive species can be defined as “toxic” in the environment. Three Canadian nonprofits are claiming that definition of “toxic” could apply to the AquAdvantage salmon and their eggs. Here’s the crux of their legal argument, as described by Global News:
“Our concern is basically, we don’t think they’ve done the due diligence to assess the toxicity of the eggs,” said Susanna Fuller, marine conservation coordinator with the [Ecology Action Centre].
“There is no evidence that the ministers, as part of their Section 108 Toxicity Assessment, considered any data from a test conducted to determine AquAdvantage salmon’s pathogenicity, toxicity or invasiveness as required under paragraph 5(a) of Schedule 5 of the Regulations,” reads the notice of application.
Fuller is also concerned about the lack of public consultation.
Environmentalists in the U.S., where the federal government could approve the sale of the GMO salmon this year, have been quick to voice their support for the legal challenge up north. “This case is an important step in preserving native salmon populations and the environment from an unwanted, untested, novel threat,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director for Center for Food Safety. “The short-sighted and unlawful approval by Canadian officials must be addressed.”
Source
Halifax environmental group files lawsuit against federal government, Global News
Groups Sue Canadian Government Over GE Salmon, Center for Food Safety
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Maine on Thursday became the second state in the nation to require food manufacturers to put labels on products containing genetically modified ingredients — sort of.
Gov. Paul LePage (R) signed “An Act To Protect Maine Food Consumers’ Right To Know about Genetically Engineered Food,” which mandates the following:
any food or seed stock offered for retail sale that is genetically engineered must be accompanied by a conspicuous disclosure that states “Produced with Genetic Engineering.”
The law would also prevent any products containing GMOs from being labeled as “natural.” That should seem obvious, but big food manufacturers are currently pressuring the federal government to allow them to use such labels on genetically modified foods.
But Maine’s new law has a catch, similar to the catch in a GMO-labeling law passed in Connecticut last month. The Maine law won’t take effect until at least five nearby states adopt similar rules. That’s because the states are unwilling to go it alone in the courts against Big Ag and Big Food. The Kennebec Journal reports:
Proponents of the bill said the provision would quell concerns about an almost-certain lawsuit by industry groups and Monsanto, which vowed to challenge the laws in Maine and Connecticut on the basis that they violate the free speech and interstate commerce provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
Maine Attorney General Janet Mills told lawmakers last year that the bill was almost certain to face a legal challenge, and said she could not guarantee that her office could defend its constitutionality.
The Journal reports that the bill “brought together such factions as libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats, creating strong support.”
It did more than that: It got approval from “America’s craziest governor,” as Politico called LePage this week, “a man who can make even the most hot-headed conservative talk radio hosts seem reasonable.”
We’ll let you decide whether that’s a good or bad omen for the GMO-labeling movement.
Source
LePage signs bill to label genetically modified food, Kennebec Journal
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Over the weekend, listservs, blogs, and Twitter feeds lit up with reactions to Amy Harmon’s New York Times deep dive into the politics behind a partial ban on growing genetically modified crops on Hawaii’s main island. The fuss obscured a much more significant development that occurred with little fanfare (and no Times attention) on Friday, when the US Department of Agriculture took a giant step toward approving a controversial new crop promoted by Dow Agrosciences, that could significantly ramp up the chemical war on weeds being waged in the Midwest’s corn and soybean fields. Since the ’90s, the widespread use of corn and soy crops genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide Roundup has led more weeds to resist that chemical. Farmers have responded by using even more chemicals, as this Food and Water Watch chart shows.
Food and Water Watch
Dow’s new product promises to fix that problem. The company is peddling corn and soy seeds engineered to withstand not just Roundup, but also an older and much more toxic herbicide called 2,4-D. In a Jan. 3 press release, the company noted that “an astonishing 86 percent of corn, soybean and cotton growers in the South have herbicide-resistant or hard-to-control weeds on their farms,” as do more than 61 percent of farms in the Midwest. “Growers need new tools now to address this challenge,” Dow insisted.
Use of 2,4-D—the less toxic half of the infamous Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange—had been dwindling for years, but the rise of Roundup-resistant superweeds has revived it.
Food and Water Watch
Farmers have been using it to “burn down” superweed-ridden fields before the spring planting of corn and soybeans. But if Dow gets its way, they’ll be able to resort to it even after the crops emerge. Dow has downplayed the concern that the new products will lead weeds to develop resistance to 2,4-D. But in a 2011 paper (abstract here), weed experts from Penn State—hardly a hotbed of anti-GMO activism—concluded that chances are “actually quite high” that Dow’s new product will unleash a new plague of super-duperweeds that resist both Roundup and 2,4-D. (I laid out the details of their argument in this post.) Here’s their model for how the new product would affect herbicide application rates on soybeans. Note how they project that glyphosate (Roundup) use will hold steady, but that “other herbicides,” mostly 2,4-D, will spike—meaning a windfall for Dow but nothing good for the environment.
From “Navigating a Critical Juncture for Sustainable Weed Management,” by David A. Mortensen, et all, in Bioscience, January 2012.
The USDA, which oversees the introduction of new GMO crops, appeared set to green-light Dow’s new wonderseeds at the end of 2012. But in May of last year, after a firestorm of criticism from environmental groups, the department slowed down the process, announcing in a press release it had decided that release of the novel products “may significantly affect the quality of the human environment,” and that a thorough environmental impact statement (EIS) was necessary before such a decision could be made.
Then on Friday, the USDA reversed itself—it released the draft of the promised EIS, and in it, the department recommended that Dow’s 2,4-D-ready crops be unleashed upon the land. Once the draft is published in the Federal Register on Jan. 10, there will be a 45-day public comment period, after which the USDA will make its final decision. At this point, approval seems imminent—probably in time for the 2015 growing season, as Dow suggested in its press release reacting to the news.
Why did the USDA switch from “may significantly affect the quality of the human environment” to a meek call for deregulation? As the USDA itself admits in its Friday press release, the department ultimately assesses new GMO crops through an extremely narrow lens: whether or not they act as a “pest” to other plants—that is, they’ll withhold approval only if the crops themselves, and not the herbicide tsunami and upsurge in resistant weeds they seem set to bring forth, pose a threat to other plants. And Dow’s new corn and soy crops don’t cross that line, the USDA claims. I explained the tortured history and logic behind the USDA’s “plant pest” test in this 2011 post. Long story short: it’s an antiquated, fictional standard that doesn’t allow for much actual regulation.
US farmers planted about 170 million acres of corn and soy in 2013—a combined land mass roughly equal to the footprint of Texas. Every year, upwards of 80 percent of it is now engineered to resist Monsanto’s Roundup. It’s chilling to imagine that Dow’s 2,4-D-ready products might soon enjoy a similar range.
Given the USDA’s regulatory impotence in the face of such a specter, perhaps the Hawaiian activists who pushed for that ban aren’t quite as daft as The New York Times portrayed them in its recent piece. The big biotech companies don’t operate on the island that imposed the partial ban on GMOs. But as another New York Times piece, this one from 2011, shows, they do operate on other islands within the state—using them as a testing ground for novel crops and a place to grow out GMO seeds, taking advantage of the warm climate that allows several crops per year. According to The Times, GMO seeds are now bigger business in Hawaii than tropical stapes like coffee, sugar cane, and pineapples—and the GMO/agrichemical giants have “have stepped into the leading, and sometimes domineering role, once played by the islands’ sugar barons.” As for Dow, it cops to having field-tested its 2,4-D-ready corn there.
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Is this normal hay or a freak Monsanto strain? The lines have getting blurry, and the government doesn’t care.
The federal government has refused to take any action in response to a Monsanto variety of alfalfa ending up in a Washington farmer’s supposedly GMO-free crop.
The farmer’s harvest was rejected for export because tests showed it was tainted with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready variety. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture just considers contamination like that to be the new normal. From Reuters:
Crop experts have warned that the confirmation of contamination threatens U.S. sales of alfalfa feedstock to many Asia nations who reject GMOs, and some are encouraging farmers to test every bag of seed they buy before they plant.
But USDA said the detection of Monsanto Co’s patented Roundup Ready herbicide-tolerant trait in the Washington farmer’s non-GMO alfalfa crop should be addressed by the marketplace and not the government.
“The agriculture industry has approaches to minimize their occurrence and manage them when they occur,” the [USDA] statement said.
Washington agriculture officials also don’t see what the big deal is. They tested the farmer’s fodder and told the feds it contained a “low-level” presence of a genetically engineered trait, but said it was “within ranges acceptable to much of the marketplace.”
Source
USDA will not take action in case of GMO alfalfa contamination, Reuters
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Europeans who don’t want Monsanto’s GMO crops on their land can rejoice.
Monsanto has pretty much given up any hope (at least for now) of selling its genetically engineered seeds for corn, sugar beets, and other crops in Europe, where opposition to GMO food is overwhelming.
Monsanto Co. said Thursday it will largely drop its bid to grow some of its genetically modified crops in Europe.
The world’s largest seed-maker has nine pending applications with the European Commission, the executive body for the European Union. A spokesman said the company plans to withdraw eight of those applications.
The requests “have been going nowhere fast for several years,” said Brandon Mitchener, a spokesman for the St. Louis-based company’s European entity. “There’s no end in sight … due to political obstructionism.”
The European Union’s stubborn resistance to transgenic crops stands in stark contrast to the welcome mat rolled out by American lawmakers for agro-giants and their most controversial products. From the BBC:
The company said it would now concentrate on growing its conventional seeds business in Europe.
It will also look to get EU approval to import its genetically modified crop varieties from the US and South America into Europe.
In 2012, Germany’s BASF halted the development of genetically modified crops in Europe and moved its European research operations in this area to the US.
Welcome home, corporate industrial science.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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