Excellent investigative piece about
"pharm" crops and government oversight.
GMO experiments receive questionable
oversight
9/7/2014
(edited)
At a secret location among the vineyards of California's Central
Coast, a plot of genetically engineered corn is producing proteins for
industrial and pharmaceutical uses, including an experimental vaccine
for hepatitis B.
The altered corn is growing with federal approval 100 feet from a
steelhead stream in San Luis Obispo County, in designated critical
habitat for the threatened California red-legged frog.
Agriculture Department inspectors have
reported two "incidents" at the site, including conventional
corn sprouting in a 50-foot fallow zone, but the findings did not rise
to the level of a fine or even to a formal notice of noncompliance for
the company that planted it, Applied Biotechnology Institute
Inc.
Details of Applied Biotechnology's
inspections and hundreds of other field trials with GM plants were
obtained by Hearst Newspapers under Freedom of Information laws. The
inspection reports and other Agriculture Department records present a
picture of vast, swiftly expanding outdoor experimentation and
industry-friendly oversight of those experiments.
The founder and president of Applied
Biotechnology, John Howard, previously founded another company that
was permanently banned from trials of GMOs after creating such
contaminated messes in the Midwest that a half-million bushels of
soybeans and more than 150 acres of corn had to be
destroyed.
The outdoor tests are at the leading edge
of a technological revolution based on reordering the building blocks
of life. The advent of GMOs has spawned global debate and protest over
issues of consumer safety and the uncertain effects of altered genes
on the environment.
Among the findings of a Hearst Newspapers
investigation:
-- Minimal penalties. The Agriculture Department issued just two civil
penalties for field trials since 2010 despite sending out nearly 200
notices of noncompliance - incidents from paperwork violations to lost
seeds to modified plants sprouting where they shouldn't.
-- Monsanto mistakes. The Missouri biotech giant received at least 35
notices of noncompliance from 2010 through 2013, more than any other
company. In 2010, the company paid a civil penalty for accidentally
ginning experimental cotton in Texas two years earlier, an error that
led to unapproved cottonseed meal and hulls being consumed by Texas
livestock and exported to Mexico for animal feed. Monsanto blamed
human error.
-- Natural perils. Dozens of times, heavy rains washed out or
otherwise damaged test plots, raising the specter of unwanted
dispersal of GMOs. Animals pose other threats. Birds, insects and
larger animals don't distinguish between gene-altered crops and
conventional varieties.
APHIS says it has approved nearly 20,000
field-trial permits, covering an estimated 100,000 plantings of
gene-altered crops.
Once GMO crops become commercialized, no
government agency tracks them. That underscores the importance of
monitoring field trials, particularly with crops like alfalfa and
canola, and grasses with sexually compatible wild
relatives.
Monsanto, which reported $14 billion in
revenue last year, says it has conducted roughly 26,000 field trials
in the U.S. since 1990. As the company observes on its website,
"We do experience occasional deviations from internal and APHIS
standards."
APHIS' handling of field trials has drawn
criticism from scientists and from other federal agencies. In 2008,
the Government Accountability Office, citing "controversy and
financial harm" from a half-dozen unauthorized releases,
recommended more robust monitoring of field trials.
In May, APHIS granted Applied
Biotechnology's request for a confined release of genetically
engineered corn designed to produce 22 pharmaceutical and industrial
molecules. The government is allowing the company to keep some of them
confidential.
As for the steelhead trout, APHIS
acknowledged "potential for a small amount of genetically
engineered pollen to drift into the stream" but concluded that
because of the minimal exposure and lack of toxicity, it would have no
effect.
Applied Biotechnology Institute set up ProdiGene and Howard carried
the title of chief scientific officer.
In 2002, the USDA disclosed that corn
plants from ProdiGene's field test a year earlier in Nebraska were
sprouting in a field of soybeans planted at the site.
In 2004, the USDA found that oats growing
alongside one of the company's test corn sites in Nebraska had been
baled for animal feed. In addition, engineered corn was sprouting in a
nearby sorghum field.
In 2007, ProdiGene received a modest
$3,500 fine and agreed that neither it nor "its successors in
interest" would ever again apply to the USDA for permission to
introduce GMOs into the environment.
Despite his claim that he left his
executive position with the company in 2002, Howard remained a
director of ProdiGene until 2007, according to the Texas secretary of
state's records. Howard still owns "lots of shares" in the
company, he said.
APHIS skirted the question of whether the
California company's GMO releases should be allowed given the 2007
agreement, responding that it has issued permits to Applied
Biotechnology Institute "for a variety of genetically engineered
organisms, including products developed by
ProdiGene."
But Greg Jaffe, a lawyer with the Center
for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C., advocacy
group, suggests that the agreement has been "technically violated
given that Applied Biotechnology Institute is selling ProdiGene's main
product and ProdiGene personnel are doing the same thing in the new
company."
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