December 24, 2006
Frankenfoods Part II - Who’s Protecting Our Food Supply?
Following up on yesterday’s post regarding the contamination of the US rice supply by an unapproved genetically engineered rice, here’s a quote from ‘Food Safety Now!’, the Autumn 2006 newsletter of The Center for Food Safety.
‘The rice contamination is but one in a string of incidents putting USDA’s ability to regulate and properly oversee GE crops under scrutiny. In December of 2005, the USDA’s own Inspector General issued a scathing report detailing numerous violations of agency rules in regulating genetically engineered crop field trials. USDA officials did not know the locations of many field trials it was charged with regulating, and did not conduct required inspections of others. As recently as August, a federal district judge in Hawaii ruled that USDA violated two federal laws in granting permits to grow experimental drug-producing genetically engineered crops in Hawaii. In his decision, the judge said USDA acted in “utter disregard” of the Endangered Species Act.’
US food safety authorities have taken no action to protect consumers or farmers from the boitech industry’s contamination threats. To read more from The Center for Food Safety, head on over to their website.
Technorati Tags: health, nutrition, food safety, food contamination, frankenfoods, genetically engineered crops, pharma crops, USDA
2 Comments »
December 24, 2006
Schiller Thurkettle said:
The December 2005 USDA Inspector General report also said it was outdated when issued, as the problems it had identified had been fixed by the date of issuance.
The genes in the GM rice have been approved for years. The “unapproved” version of rice with those genes is now approved.
The Hawaii incident involved a bureaucratic paper foul-up. Nobody got hurt.
Food safety authorities have taken lots of steps regarding what you call “contamination.” You just have to take the trouble to look up the regulations.
December 24, 2006
Joe said:
What I call contamination and you call “contamination” is the possibility of GE crops cross-pollinating with regular crops. Seems like a reasonable definition that requires no quotation marks to me.
Your argument that the unapproved variety is now “approved” illustrates the crux of the problem. The USDA is saying to biotech companies that if they fail to put the proper safeguards in place to ensure that experimental crops don’t cross-pollinate with regular crops, there’s no problem. The USDA will come in later and take care of it for them. In a regulatory sense, anyway. If only they could reverse the actual contamination. Anyway, the USDA seems to have a similar relationship with agriculture biotechnology firms to the FDA’s with the pharmaceutical industry - which is not good for the health of consumers.
I’m glad nobody got hurt from the Hawaii incident. That doesn’t mean we’ll be as lucky next time. A paperwork snafu as the cause of what the judge called ‘utter disregard’ seems quite a stretch, but I’ll take your word for it.
Yeh, there are regulations. Eight different federal agencies regulate biotechnology using 12 different statutes or laws written long before genetically engineered food became a reality. I can look those laws up all day, but it’s not going to make them effective. We need laws that specifically address these crops, and we need agencies with the desire to enforce those laws.