There have been several sugarbeet industry responses to the RR lawsuit filed by Organic Seed Alliance, Center For Food Safety, and Sierra Club.
First, an interview: Five Minutes With Luther Markwart, American Sugarbeet Growers
And along the same lines these comments from the American Association of Subarbeet.Please read the excellent public comments at the end of that article.
The one thing that I continue to see is a denial of how this technology impacts pre-existing rural economies/farmers/companies. These large commodity groups and their gene giant partners refuse to see that their acts/products can result in the loss of “freedom to operate” for farmers with an already existing market(non-gmo Beta vulgaris seed crops). They don’t want to pay for contamination testing, losses due to contamination, or even recognize that these seed grower’s products have value. And with seed the value is exponential – not only a value to the seed growers, but to the farmers who rely on seed free of contamination.
But then we get called “selfish”?
That was one of the nasty labels thrown out in a posting on Truth About Trade & Technology. It’s difficult to not respond with a volley of schoolyard name calling and an emotional rant such as was done by the TATT poster Noel Kjesbo. I’m not sure calling people “dishonest” and “selfish” without backing it up is an indicator of “truth” as much as it is juvenile and slanderous.
For the record Noel, Organic Seed Alliance has no links to Greenpeace (as you claim), nor are we an activist group. And, I challenge you to logically prove your slanderous statements (“fradulent”, “dishonest”, “hiding behind misleading names”, etc)
In any case, I would like to point my dear readers to Frank Morton’s (Wild Garden Seed) well reasoned response. Well done Frank.
FRANK’S RESPONSE:
As a farmer, seedsman, plant breeder, and member of the Isolation Pinning Rules Committee of Oregon’s Willamette Valley Specialty Seeds Association, I have another agricultural perspective to offer this author and his audience.
Our Valley produces virtually all of the sugar beet seed for our United States. It also produces some table beet seed and a huge percentage of the Swiss chard seed that ends up in the fresh salad trade from California to Maine and other markets overseas. We also grow seed for much of the world’s Brassica veg crops, cabbage, kale, broccoli, turnips and their kin. We think we matter as much as your sugar beet farmers in the Red River Valley, and we think our high value specialty seed trade with the Pacific Rim and the EU is a big deal. But this is all dependent on seed quality, and for us in our sensitive markets, seed quality means genetic purity–both for trueness to type, and freedom from transgenic contamination. Our buyers do not want GMOs in our seed whether you care (or we care) or not. Transgenes from Roundup Ready sugar beets or oilseed canola in our Swiss chard or Chinese cabbage will not be accepted by our overseas customers any more than they will by our organic seed customers in California. That’s the truth about trade that is obvious from my window.
What your folks see as a great blessing (may improve yields 10% I hear from the company that stands to gain the most) could hereabouts destroy the value of conventional seedsmen’s crops downwind of GMO plantings of sugar beets, canola, corn, or whatever the next transgenic specialty crop may be. BT-broccoli, RR-radish, onion, spinach–all of these are potential trade disasters waiting to happen to my happy valley, now 95% stocked with Roundup Ready sugar beets, brought in secretly over three years without any notification to neighbors, fellow seedfolks, or the seed association, until after planting of the third year.
This valley isn’t big enough to provide certainty of genetic isolation between GE-sugar beets and conventional beets and Swiss chard. Such certainty would require more than 6 miles of isolation distance between transgenic and conventional fields, according to the sugar beet industry’s own research. The Pinning Isolation Rules of the seed association provide for 3 miles of isolation, and these are the new rules, made in full cognizance (for the first time) that GMOs were among us. To provide the 6 miles necessary to keep conventional beets and Swiss chard transgene-free, sugar beet isolations would need to expand against their conventional neighbors, and due to production seniority, would push other producers out of the valley entirely. In other words, to protect the conventional beet/chard industry, it would be disappeared. That might seem fair in someone’s version of the truth, but not the guys I know.
None of these issues related to genetic contamination of world class seed production zones like ours were taken into account by USDA/APHIS, the Oregon Dept. of Agriculture, or my own WVSSA members that visited this suprise upon us about one year ago. Since these would have been the guardians of the public and commercial intrests at hand, and since none of this was in fact considered when USDA/APHIS deregulated GE-beets (nor when they began to planted in Oregon), it seems entirely reasonable to me that we specialty seedfolk have been infringed upon in more ways than one, and a Judge ought to have a look at the situation. Maybe our author and “the company that has the most to gain” would prefer to have their day in a Missouri Court to argue before a Judge, but my grief is happening well west of there, and I’m happy with our justice system in this regard.
This is no different than the Roundup Ready Alfalfa case. One company assumed it could ride in and transgenically contaminate everyone producing alfalfa–regardless of the market consequences–and get away with it. Alfalfa seed and forage farmers showed them different, and that company is paying a price for assuming it can push its heavy weight around any farming sector. RR-Alfalfa is a flawed technology put back in its box where it belongs. RR-beets are the same kind of buffalo bull, likely to cross the fence and make little beefalos where they are not the intended kind of cow.
I would think any farmer that knows the truth when he sees it would be able to understand this; milking beefalos will not do for the dairyman.
When biotech can manage to keep its pretties at home where they have a value to someone, and when biotech is proud enough of its work that it will label it, then maybe they will have a place in free and fair trade. As long as biotechnology has the potential to destroy the neighborhood’s product values by blowing on the wind, I think biotech has offered up a flawed device.
You think mine is a dangerous idea?
