Sugar Beet Beatdown: Engineered Varieties Banned

[BridgeTheGap]

A federal judge says sugar beet farmers can't plant genetically engineered varieties next year, and those farmers, who produce half of America's sugar, now are in a bind. Many of them say they cannot go back to the way they used to work because they don't own those tools anymore and there aren't enough conventional seeds to go around.

The genetically engineered sugar beets, called "Roundup Ready" beets, can survive doses of the herbicide Roundup. That makes it easier for farmers to control weeds — they simply spray Roundup (or chemically equivalent herbicides) over their fields, and the weeds die while sugar beet plants thrive.

When sugar beet growers switched to the new varieties two years ago, they did not expect legal problems. Roundup Ready soybeans and corn, approved a decade earlier, cover millions of acres of American farmland, and those crops had received exactly the same government approval.

But in recent years, environmental lawyers such as George Kimbrell, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Food Safety, have rolled out a new line of legal attack against genetically engineered foods.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129891767+&sc=fb&cc=fp+

[WhiteTara]

1. Yeah! A victory for the humans and plants

living on Earth!

[fasttense]

2. It's not as if real natural beets are all the hard to grow.

I plant them all year long. They grow so easily in almost any soil or temperature. Yes there are weeds but the weeds don't seem to stop them much anyway. I'm surprised they needed to engineer them into monsters crops.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. A little spark of light in the midst of the darkness.... good news.