Beyond that, the USDA cannot approve a new seed variety until it conducts an Environmental Assessment (EA). This is the point in the process where anti-biotech activists and lawyers do their best to gum up the works in hopes of generating a critical mass of negative public opinion.
By law, the EA must consider any and all factors relating to the “human environment,” which is very ambiguously defined, encompassing human health and leaving all kinds of legal openings for hostile groups to target. If a group such as the Center for Food Safety or the Institute of Responsible Technology or the Union of Concerned Scientists challenges the EA for not considering one issue or another, the assessment can be deemed insufficient and a new one must be ordered.
In fact, this has happened twice in recent years, with alfalfa and sugar beets. Alfalfa hay, a nutritious, easily digestible livestock feed, is an $8 billion a year business and country’s fourth-most-valuable crop. Monsanto makes GM alfalfa seeds, as part of the company’s Roundup Ready line. They are genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, the herbicide commercially known as Roundup.
[...]
After an exhaustive review, the USDA gave Roundup Ready Alfalfa the green light in 2005. But the Center for Food Safety contended that the government hadn’t adequately evaluated the potential environmental consequences. In 2007, in
Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, a federal court agreed with the Center for Food Safety, prohibiting Monsanto from selling Roundup Ready Alfalfa pending yet another assessment.
This was incredibly disruptive to thousands of farmers, who had planted alfalfa, which is a perennial crop so does not have to be reseeded each year. The legal status of a field of GM alfalfa planted legally after the USDA had deregulated GE alfalfa was suddenly changed under the court ruling. Farmers were being told that they had to follow a new set rules in handling their crop. For more than four years, they didn’t know if the technology was going to be available for their use. The confusion and patchwork of conflicting regulations, court decisions and labeling requirements dealt a sizable economic blow to one of the country’s most important export crops.
[...]
In 2010, the Center for Food Safety and some organic farmers who stood to gain by attacking conventional and GM crops
convinced a court on procedural grounds—there was no finding of environmental or health dangers—to void the five-year-old approval of transgenic sugar beet seeds. Despite no evidence of any potential harm, that November, a federal judge ordered the GE sugar beet seedlings—all but 5% of the nation’s beet crop—pulled from the ground, as required by law. If the decision had stood, it could have destroyed as much as
half of America’s granulated sugar production on purely technical grounds.
