Approval of GM Crops Illegal, US Federal Courts Rule
The courts said it three times so it must be true Prof. Joe Cummins and Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
In a surprising development that may well stump the further approval of GMOs, Federal Courts in the US have ruled against the Department of Agriculture (USDA) in three successive cases for failing to carry out proper environment impact assessment, making the original approvals of GM crops illegal.
It has been twelve years since the world's first GM crop, the Flav Savr tomato, was commercially approved, and hundreds more GM varieties were granted deregulation status. The global area of GM crops has reached 102 million hectares, according to industry sources <1>, though this has been strongly contested around the world <2> ( Global GM Crops Area Exaggerated , SiS 33)
The first case was on drug-producing GM crops. A federal district judge in Hawaii ruled in August 2006 that the USDA violated the Endangered Species Act as well as the National Environmental Policy Act in allowing drug-producing GM crops to be cultivated throughout Hawaii, and failing to conduct even preliminary investigations on environmental impact prior to the approval of planting. The plaintiffs were the Center for Food Safety, KAHEA (The Hawaiian Environmental Alliance) , Friends of the Earth, and the Pesticide Action Network, North America. The defendants were the US Secretary of Agriculture and administrators of the USDA. From 2001 to 2003, four companies, ProdiGene, Monsanto, Hawaii Agriculture Research Center (HARC), and Garst Seed, were allowed to plant corn and sugarcane genetically modified to produce experimental pharmaceutical products such as vaccines, hormones, cancer fighting agents and other proteins that are still under development and hence not yet approved.
The plaintiffs argued that USDA/APHIS broke the law in issuing these permits. Because these crops produce pharmaceutical products that are still at the experimental stage of development, their effect on Hawaii's ecosystem (especially Hawaii's 329 endangered and threatened species) is unknown. The experimental crops could cross-pollinate with existing food crops, and contaminate the food supply. Animals feeding on the crops would also become unwitting carriers of pharmaceutical products, causing even more widespread dissemination of these experimental drugs.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Approval_of_GM_Crops_Illegal.php
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