Posted
December 12, 2005

Seedy Business: Plant Preemption Bills Stalking State Capitals

Biotech giants throw their weight around to stop local communities from restricting use of GMO crops and products.

One of the under-reported issues in 2005 was the orchestrated attempt by the ag biotech industry to pass state-level laws to prevent local governments from taking action to regulate or restrict genetically modified crops. Here’s a textbook case of how corporations are winning laws to promote their interests, while threatening democracy and dissent.

If the Gene Giants get their way, local and county governments across the United States will lose the right to regulate genetically modified plants and trees. Bills seeking to override local authority over plants and seeds spread like invasive species in 15 state legislatures in 2005 – and a dozen states have already signed the bills into law. [For an updated list of states where bills have been proposed or passed into law, go to: http://www.environmentalcommons.org/gmo-tracker.html]

The preemption bills aim to prevent towns, counties or cities from passing any ordinance, regulation or resolution to restrict genetically modified (GM) crops or any other plants. These aren’t homegrown initiatives, but a nationwide campaign orchestrated by the Farm Bureau and the biotech industry to muzzle citizen concerns about GM plants. The Gene Giants want to stop citizen initiatives like those passed in three California counties last year that prohibited cultivation of GM crops. Industry wants to squelch resolutions like those passed in nearly 100 New England towns that support limits on biotech crops.

Whether you’re for or against genetically modified crops, the preemption bills represent an anti-democratic process to take control away from local communities. The same tactic has been used by the tobacco industry to circumvent local smoking ordinances. In North Carolina, the hog industry won similar legislation to prohibit local communities from keeping out corporate hog farms. Now the Gene Giants are trying to eliminate options for local authority over GM crops.

Why might local governments take action to restrict GM crops?

Unintended gene flow from genetically modified plants is unavoidable, and that raises potential concerns for local communities. The organic food market is the fastest growing segment of the farm economy, but organic farmers risk losing organic certification and markets if genetically modified DNA contaminates their fields. Currently there is no liability provision for organic farmers to seek damages from the companies that produce GM seed. Local governments should have the ability to protect growers who worry about contamination from GM plants.

Citizens in many states are concerned about a new generation of GM plants – so-called “pharma crops” that are engineered to yield drugs for use in human and veterinary medicines. Ventria Bioscience, for example, is now growing rice engineered with synthetic human genes (to produce artificial human milk proteins) in North Carolina. Farmers, food companies and environmentalists in California and Missouri rejected Ventria’s plans to grow GM “pharma rice” because of concerns that the genetically altered pharma rice could cross-pollinate with conventional rice, thus contaminating the food supply.

Because of its concerns about the spread of pharma rice genes, mega-brewery Anheuser Busch threatened to boycott Missouri’s entire rice crop if Ventria’s GM rice was tested there. Shunned in Missouri and California, Ventria Bioscience won a permit from the US Department of Agriculture to grow up to 70 acres of GM pharma rice in eastern North Carolina. If a plant preemption bill passes in your state, local communities would have no authority to regulate GM pharma crops.

The biotech industry and federal regulators have repeatedly failed to contain and control genetically modified organisms. The science journal Nature revealed last March that Syngenta had inadvertently sold an unapproved strain of GM corn to US farmers for a period of four years. During that period approximately 146,000 tons of the illegal corn was marketed as animal feed and corn flour in the US, Europe and Asia. Syngenta informed the federal authorities about the illegal corn in late 2004, but the public and unsuspecting farmers were in the dark until four months later. To keep out the unlicensed strain, the European Union threatened to boycott US corn imports valued at $347 million. As usual, farmers are left holding the bag. (Syngenta was let off with a fine.)

It’s not the first time that illegal GM corn has entered the food supply. In 2000, genetically modified Starlink corn, approved only for use as animal feed, was found in taco shells and caused a nationwide recall of dozens of food products containing yellow corn.

Eliminating options for local authority over plants/seeds is risky business. Ag biotech is controlled by five multinational Gene Giants, the world’s largest seed and agrochemical companies: Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow. Monsanto’s GM seed technology accounted for about 90% of the total worldwide area devoted to GM crops last year. Seed industry concentration means fewer choices for farmers and consumers, and unacceptable levels of monopoly control over the world’s seed supply. For all these reasons, towns and communities must preserve options for local regulation of plants and public debate of GM crops and trees.