A Hole in the Regulation of GMOs that Kudzu Could Fit Through - The Equation

The audacity of biotech borders on insanity. Check out this article on Scotts/Miracle Gro company's new GMO grass. This article appears on the Union of Concerned Scientist's web pages:

A little-noticed, almost nonchalant, article in the Columbus Dispatch last week portends substantial environmental and economic mischief.

Kudzu enveloping a Mississippi environment. It is not on the federal noxious weed list. USDA photo by Peggy Greb.

The article notes that Scotts Company is going forward with plans to commercialize GMO Kentucky bluegrass. Mentioned in passing was that this grass, engineered for resistance to the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), is not regulated by USDA, and that company employees will begin planting the grass at their homes.

What was that? Historically, unapproved GMO crops have been grown only in controlled plots, regulated and monitored by USDA (leave aside that these are not adequately regulated either). So why are Scotts employees allowed to grow this grass in an uncontrolled environment?

We have to go back to two little-noted decisions by USDA in July of 2011 to understand this. First, the USDA denied a petition from the Center for Food Safety to regulate the GMO bluegrass as a noxious weed under the Plant Protection Act of 2000 (PPA), despite fitting the agency’s criteria.

Second, USDA decided that because the genes used to make the GMO grass did not come from known plant pests (e.g., plant pathogens), and did not use a plant pest to introduce the genes into the grass, it would not be regulated as a possible plant pest. To grasp the importance of this, it must be understood that virtually every previous GMO plant or crop has been regulated as a possible plant pest.

These two decisions mean that the GMO bluegrass will not be regulated by USDA, and hence can be grown freely, even though it has not gone through the typical regulatory process. This has implications far beyond the specific case of GMO bluegrass.

In the earlier days of genetic engineering, the large majority of engineered crops contained genes or parts of genes from plant pests (such as from plant viruses), or used a modified bacterial pathogen (called Agrobacterium) to introduce the genes into plants.

But in most cases, it is now easy to avoid these constraints, as Scotts did. The use of pest genes as a reason to regulate GMOs was always unsupportable scientifically. Many genes from pathogens are no more (or less) harmful than genes from non-pathogens. But because our GMO regulations are based on inadequate laws already in existence in the 1980s, the agencies were left trying to fit a regulatory square peg into a statutory round hole, and came up with the pest-gene ruse.

Read entire article here:

A Hole in the Regulation of GMOs that Kudzu Could Fit Through - The Equation