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Roundup Ready Sugar Beet Update
As many of you know by now, Organic Seed Alliance, Center for Food Safety, Sierra Club, and High Mowing Seeds initiated a lawsuit in January of 2008 challenging the deregulation of herbicide-tolerant “Roundup Ready” sugar beets by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). (See this link for original news story.)
Since that time there have been flurries of articles and editorials in publications throughout the country as well as calls for boycotts of companies who plan on using the sugar from these plants. Our lawyers at Earthjustice and Center for Food Safety have been busy gathering information and declarations from farmers and plaintiffs describing the impact to the release of this GMO sugar beet. We’re learning that the process involved in these suits is slow and complicated and we are very grateful to the Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice for their legal work on behalf of OSA and the farmers with whom we work.
It seems that Monsanto and Syngenta do not trust that lawyers from the USDA can argue the case without the support of their hired guns. In April these two seed companies along with Beta Seed and several sugar beet associations filed a motion to intervene in the case because of their financial interests in the case. Monsanto is the largest seed company in the world and Syngenta the third largest. I’d guess they spend as much on patent lawyers, patent infringement lawyers, and trade-related lawyers as the USDA-APHIS has in their total budget. These companies are as much law firms as they are seed-chemical research firms. They like to grow patents to harvest profits from royalties, and they don’t care whose economy or environment they step on in to bring in their yield.
Our lawyers filed an opposition to this intervention, pointing out that our challenge is not directed at these companies, but rather at a regulatory process that we believe was flawed and incomplete. The hearing is scheduled for June 6. We’ll keep you updated.
Also in this newsletter read Frank Morton’s piece on how the RR sugar beet will impact farmers like him. By Matthew Dillon, OSA
Back to June 2008 Newsletter
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