Farming News - US farmers to resume growing GM beet to prevent sugar shortage

US farmers to resume growing GM beet to prevent sugar shortage

The Department of Agriculture said on Friday that American farmers could resume growing genetically engineered sugar beets that had been barred by a federal judge.

image expired

“The decision is a win for consumers,” said Duane Grant, a beet farmer in Rupert, Idaho, and chairman of the farmer-owned Snake River Sugar Company. “It assures a full beet crop will be planted in 2011.”

But environmental groups and organic farmers were dismayed by the decision.

More than half of the nation's granulated sugar has in recent years come from beet plants genetically modified in the same way as most of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the U.S. The other half comes from sugar cane.

The beets, which are grown extensively around the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, have a Monsanto Co. gene that gives them immunity to glyphosate-based weedkiller, which the St. Louis biotechnology company sells as Roundup herbicide.

The genetically engineered beets accounted for more than 90 percent of the sugar beets grown last year.

But in August, in response to a lawsuit filed by environmental groups and organic farmers, a federal district court judge in San Francisco revoked the approval of the beets.

The judge, Jeffrey S. White, said the Agriculture Department had to prepare an environmental impact statement assessing the effects of the biotech crop. His biggest concern was that the genetically engineered trait could spread to organic sugar beet crops or to other crops like Swiss chard and red table beets.

Sugar-beet processors say there aren't enough traditional seeds around for farmers to plant this spring. A study conducted for the sugar industry predicted that U.S. sugar production would plunge 20% if the judge's ban stays in place.

That prediction alarmed food companies because a big drop in the U.S. sugar-beet crop would raise their sugar costs, which already have climbed sharply in recent years, thanks partly to booming demand and partly to weather problems in some sugar-growing regions of the world. The price of sugar has nearly tripled over the past two years.

As a result, the Agriculture Department was under pressure to allow the genetically engineered beets to be grown — and to do so in time for the spring planting season — even though it did not expect to finish the environmental impact statement until May 2012.

The solution announced Friday was an interim “partial deregulation” of the beets that will hold until the impact statement is done and a final decision made. The partial deregulation was requested by the two companies that developed the crop, Monsanto and KWS, a German seed company.

Farmer-owned sugar processing companies will enter into compliance agreements with the government covering their growers. The agreements will spell out the measures that must be taken to prevent the genetically engineered traits from spreading. Farmers’ fields will be subject to inspection.

For seed production, growers will need permits and will be kept from growing such seeds within four miles of other sugar beet, table beet or chard seed fields.

Paul Achitoff, the lead counsel for the groups that sued the Agriculture Department, said the conditions imposed on the growers were no different from what was now done voluntarily and would not prevent the spread of the biotech trait.

“It’s just window dressing,” said Mr. Achitoff, who is with the group Earthjustice.

He said the groups would ask the court to block the Agriculture Department’s decision from being put into effect. One obstacle they could face, however, is that the Supreme Court, in a decision last year concerning genetically engineered alfalfa, said the Agriculture Department had the authority to grant partial deregulation.

Friday’s decision is the second in less than two weeks favorable to agricultural biotechnology companies and farmers who grow the genetically engineered crops.

Last week, the Agriculture Department allowed farmers to resume growing genetically engineered Roundup-resistant alfalfa without restrictions. In doing so, it pulled back from a proposal to restrict where the biotech alfalfa could be grown so as to prevent genetically engineered material from spreading to organic alfalfa.

Sugar beets are a fairly small crop, planted on a little over one million acres, mainly in northern states, and worth somewhat more than $1 billion. Beets account for roughly half of the American sugar supply, with the rest coming from sugar cane.

World sugar prices are extremely high now because of weather problems and poor output in Brazil and Australia. That would have made it more difficult and expensive to import sugar to make up for any shortfall of American production.

Source New York Times