1.Region's farmers not confident in GMO safeguards
2.USDA has fined Monsanto for five regulatory lapses
3.Amid uproar over escaped GMO wheat, Monsanto tests more strains
EXTRACT: "USDA has approved more than 70 experimental trials of GE wheat in Montana," Hubbard said. "These trials included not just the Roundup Ready trait found in Oregon, but other traits as well -- many of which are identified as trade secrets, so the agriculture community wouldn’t even know what to look for. We know that if any of these traits escaped and currently exist in Montana’s wheat seed, crops, and the environment, they are unapproved traits that are rejected by export customers, and therefore a threat to Montana’s agricultural economy." (item 1)
TAKE ACTION: Stop GM crop trials: USDA has once again failed to protect farmers and the food supply from GM crop contamination
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1.Region's farmers not confident in GMO safeguards
Tom Lutey
Billings Gazette, June 8 2013
http://bit.ly/ZClVhw
Farmers in Montana and North Dakota say neither the government nor agri-giant Monsanto have done enough to safeguard wheat fields from genetically modified crop contamination.
The comments come one week after federal officials announced that an Oregon farmer had discovered unauthorized, genetically modified white wheat in a fallow field, which he had sprayed with glyphosate, a Monsanto-created herbicide marketed as Roundup. The herbicide should have killed the wheat, but didn’t.
Tests revealed the rogue wheat had the genetic trait for Roundup resistance. Monsanto, in partnership with universities in several states, including Montana, developed genetically engineered Roundup Ready wheat more than a decade ago. The test plots, which numbered 100, were staged in secret locations across 16 states. The grain was supposed to be destroyed, and was never approved for commercial planting. Foreign buyers of U.S. grain forbid purchases of genetically modified wheat.
Now farmers in states where Roundup Ready wheat experiments were conducted are worried about contamination.
“We want to have these spots identified where the growing has been done,” said Daryl Lassila, Montana Organic Association chairman.
Montana farmers have never known whether they were on the other side of a wire fence from Roundup Ready test plots, which were ended a decade ago. In 2003, Monsanto offered journalists a tour of its Montana fields on the condition that the exact location remain a secret. The Billings Gazette reported the test plot’s location as Gallatin County, which was as specific as details provided under the Freedom of Information Act.
Tests in neighboring North Dakota were just as vague, said Todd Leake, who farms 1,000 acres of wheat near Emerado, N.D. Monsanto is now conducting new tests on genetically modified wheat in North Dakota under the same cloak of secrecy, Leake said. Inquirers are told the locations must remain a secret to prevent terrorism. Monsanto, which owns a Bozeman-based wheat development company, didn't respond to a request for comment last week.
“Yeah, I’m concerned,” Leake said. “Obviously Monsanto has demonstrated their genetically modified material can be released into the environment and if it can happen in Oregon, it can happen in North Dakota.”
Leake is a non-organic-wheat farmer, but his purity issues are the same as Lassila’s because conventional wheat with unauthorized genetically modified traits is worthless.
When the U.S. Animal Plant Health Inspection Service revealed the Oregon genetically modified wheat discovery, Japan immediately canceled plans to buy 25,000 tons of white wheat from the Pacific Northwest. South Korea did the same, as major wheat states like Montana and North Dakota watched nervously.
Montana wheat sales totaled $1.7 billion in 2012 and 80 percent of that wheat sold to foreign buyers. Japan and South Korea were Montana's biggest customers, according to the state Wheat and Barley Committee.
However, the backlash to Oregon's corrupted wheat discovery was limited to white wheat and specifically white wheat raised in the Pacific Northwest. Montana's exports, which are hard red wheat varieties, were unaffected, a stroke of luck not only for the Treasure State, but also for the United States, economist Vince Smith told The Gazette shortly after the Oregon announcement.
"The U.S. actually exports very little soft white wheat in the first place and in the second place, we raise very little soft white wheat in Montana," Smith said.
White wheat accounted for 21 percent of U.S. wheat exports in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Most U.S. white wheat is used in American baked goods, where there's been no noticeable sales backlash to Oregon's genetically modified wheat discovery.
There has been demand for federal government action. Leake is a member of the multistate Western Organization of Resource Councils, which is based in Billings.
WORC urged the U.S. Senate to add genetically modified food-labeling requirements to the 2013 farm bill last week before cloture came Thursday. The group also supported an amendment by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., to support classical plant-breeding research, which also didn't make the cut. Tester, an organic-wheat farmer from Big Sandy, said Oregon’s unauthorized Roundup Ready wheat discovery proves that more research safeguards are needed over genetically modified organisms.
“This release of GMO wheat is a perfect example of why we must develop a better system of controls as companies look to commercialize new, man-made crops,” Tester said in a statement to The Gazette. He ended the week encouraging supporters to petition for GMO food labels. “We need stronger safety standards to protect traditional farmers from being hurt by the release of unapproved GMO crops.”
Leake testified before Congress in 2007 about the need for tighter regulations of GMO crops. He said the controls for which he lobbied were added to the 2008 farm bill but have never been put to use by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That the unauthorized Oregon wheat was discovered accidentally by a farmer, not by regulators, illustrates the problem with controlling genetically engineered research, said Kristina Hubbard, of the Organic Seed Alliance.
“This chance incident reinforces the inability to contain GE crops and the inadequacy of current U.S. policy,” said Hubbard, who works out of Missoula. “Every state that has had GE wheat trials should be demanding a rigorous and transparent investigation into how this occurred and how prevalent contamination might be, especially at the seed level.”
The unidentified Oregon farmer who discovered the unauthorized wheat turned it over to Oregon State University officials April 30. OSU forwarded the sample along with its test results to the U.S. Animal Plant Health Inspection Service on May 3. More than a month later, the public doesn’t know how the wheat turned up in a field never used for GMO research.
The farmer’s attorney, Tim Bernasek, confirmed Wednesday that one of the soft white winter wheat varieties planted by the farmer came from Bozeman-based Westbred, which Monsanto purchased in 2009 for $45 million. The variety was identified as WB 528. The other white winter wheat variety, Rod, was developed by Washington State University. It isn’t known whether either variety somehow acquired the Roundup Ready trait.
Monsanto has said the Oregon discovery was probably an isolated incident. APHIS has repeatedly assured buyers and consumers that the Roundup Ready products pose no health risks. Roundup Ready traits have been declared safe by the federal government in corn, soybeans and sugar beet crops, to name a few. But without federal approval and acceptance by foreign buyers, Roundup Ready wheat is a liability.
"USDA has approved more than 70 experimental trials of GE wheat in Montana," Hubbard said. "These trials included not just the Roundup Ready trait found in Oregon, but other traits as well -- many of which are identified as trade secrets, so the agriculture community wouldn’t even know what to look for. We know that if any of these traits escaped and currently exist in Montana’s wheat seed, crops, and the environment, they are unapproved traits that are rejected by export customers, and therefore a threat to Montana’s agricultural economy."
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2.USDA has fined Monsanto $62,000 for five regulatory lapses
MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press, June 4 2013
http://www.capitalpress.com/content/mp-monsanto-noncompliance-060513
The Monsanto Co. has been cited for noncompliance with USDA biotechnology regulations five times since the mid-1990s, resulting in about $62,000 in penalties, records show.
Most recently, the company agreed to pay a fine of nearly $19,000 in 2010 for allowing less than an acre of restricted biotech cotton to be harvested along with the 54 acres of an approved transgenic variety.
The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service also said Monsanto failed to timely notify the agency of the accidental or unauthorized release.
Prior to that incident, in 2001 Monsanto had to pay a $12,500 penalty for failing to check for biotech corn volunteers at a field trial, allowing the plants to release pollen to commercial corn grown in the field the following year.
According to USDA, the incident was reported by "consultants and other field workers" but Monsanto "failed to take immediate action or report the situation" to the agency.
That same year, the company paid a $25,000 penalty for not following permit conditions for border rows in a cotton field.
In 1998, Monsanto paid a $2,500 penalty for planting several biotech crop field trials without notifying the USDA and moving the regulated material without telling the agency.
The previous year, the company paid a $3,300 fine for not monitoring a former field site for biotech canola volunteers and not notifying APHIS within 24 hours after the lapse was detected, as required.
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3.Amid uproar over escaped GMO wheat, Monsanto tests more strains
Carey Gillam
Reuters, June 4 2013
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/04/us-usa-wheat-monsanto-idUSBRE95319X20130604
While regulators probe the discovery of an experimental genetically modified wheat long thought abandoned by biotech seed developer Monsanto Co, the company has a new line of field experiments on biotech wheat underway.
The company is no longer pursuing the same "Roundup Ready" spring wheat it designed more than a decade ago to tolerate dousings of its Roundup weedkiller, which is the strain found in a wheat field in Oregon in April. But it is developing similar strains that are genetically altered for herbicide tolerance as well as other traits, according to the company and regulatory filings.
"Our work in wheat is focused on helping improve wheat productivity, including breeding, biotechnology, and improved agronomic practices," said Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles in a statement.
The company's near-term focus is on breeding better varieties, which in the long term could serve as the foundation for new biotechnology traits, he said.
New biotech wheat from Monsanto is at least a decade away from commercial approval, he said. But the company has conducted small-scale, entry level field trials in North Dakota testing some biotechnology pipeline projects.
This year, Monsanto is pursuing both a new glyphosate-tolerant project - glyphosate is the main ingredient in Roundup herbicide - and a separate herbicide-tolerant project that is designed to make wheat tolerant of multiple herbicides, including dicamba.
Monsanto's biotech wheat work was thrown into the spotlight last week when the U.S. Department of Agriculture revealed the discovery of Monsanto's experimental, unapproved Roundup Ready wheat in a farm field in Oregon. Since then, Asian buyers have backed away from U.S. purchases and the U.S. wheat industry is worried that if any of the biotech wheat is discovered in export shipments, billions of dollars of exports could be rejected.
Monsanto said it last field-tested the Roundup Ready wheat in 2005 and that it does not know why it would be growing this spring.
Quarles would not say if the company was changing its field testing protocols in light of the issues with the wheat found in Oregon, but said that its biotech field testing is done under "strict regulatory oversight and under confined and tightly-controlled conditions."
(Reporting By Carey Gillam; Editing by Bernard Orr)