US District Court Tells Monsanto to Beat It With Their GE Sugar Beets--"Environmental Harm" Cited

Monsanto loses a round and judge orders the entire crop to be destroyed. (Applause!)

Tom Vilsack, USDA Secretary and Monsanto goon approved this, surprise, probably during one of the many closed door "negotiations" that have been going on between Monsanto and the USDA. This is the same idiot who rushed to judgment and fired Shirley Sherrod before he knew the facts, who supports ethanol despite the fact that it's proven to be too costly and problematic to be viable, and drives up the cost of food, and it was nothing more than a corporate shell game for special interests. Some even say he is against black farmers.

He's a problem child and an extremely poor choice for the USDA. 

But not if you're Monsanto.

This issue of the GE Sugar beets has been written about before and questions were previously raised about the legality of the plantings that occurred this past fall without any public notice or comment;

These GE beets have been altered so that they can tolerate being sprayed with Monsanto’s (NYSE: MON) herbicide Roundup.

The unprecedented permitting process for a commercially-grown genetically engineered crop was initiated without public notice and comment or any environmental review, according to environmental law firm Earthjustice, which said the agency last week met with companies involved and invested in promoting the gene-altered crop.

And now we have a judge who gets it and makes the right call, but we'll have to wait and see if it stands. Secretary Vilsack is a formidable foe, so is Monsanto and they've wasted no time in beginning the appeal of Judge White's ruling.

 (Monsanto's defenders are busy in the comment forums)

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A federal judge has ordered what is believed to be the first-ever destruction of a genetically modified crop in the United States, saying that the altered sugar beets were planted illegally.

US District Judge Jeffrey White in California granted a preliminary injunction Tuesday sought by the Center for Food Safety and other groups, which contended that the Monsanto-produced sugar beet crops were planted without proper environmental review.

Paul Achitoff of Earthjustice, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the US Department of Agriculture, which was named as the defendant for issuing the permits "thumbed its nose at the judicial system and the public by allowing this crop to be grown without any environmental review."

Read more here

Another recent story about the psyops of Monsnato's propaganda machine and blatant lies (do they we cannot fact-check things?) planted in a piece that ran in the November issue of New Scientist entitled "Vatican Scientists Urge Support For Engineered Crops" turned out to be less than truthful.

The Vatican came out on December 1 and rebuffed the article's claims without mincing words on the issue, but remaining neutral to an expected degree and saying they have not endorsed one way or the other in essence. However, one fact that was reported in the Vatican Newspaper L'Osservatore Romano does nothing to bolster the Monsanto claims of we'll feed the world if you let us shove our GM food down your throats;

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, said earlier this year that it was not a coincidence that in 2009 the use of genetically modified food crops grew by 13 percent in developing countries and that GM crops covered almost half of the world's total arable land. And yet "the number of hungry people in the world has for the first time reached 1 billion people," the paper said.

Standby for some ridiculous spin to follow that one.

Monsanto will always be associated with the Anniston, Alabama PCB case and has worked very hard to shed the "ghosts of its past" (spun off into Solutia) and then changed again, through mergers, Monsanto with Upjohn and Pharmacia creating Pharmacia which owns 85% of Monsanto and created an agricultural subsidiary. Spin-offs and mergers, the list may surprise you.

It sounds confusing and that's the whole idea with this diabolical company. 
Read more here: Chronology of Monsanto's Evolution and (Supposed) Extinction from the Environmental Working Group.

Documentary The Future of Food 

"Genetic engineering of food crops is as controversial today as ever, as many of the large agro corporations that use this technology position themselves as the answer to the world food crisis and further consolidate the seed supply. The Future of Food continues to be a key tool used by activists and educators who call for increased attention to this issue."

The film was released in 2004, but it's still being shown to audiences worldwide and it remains relevant, maybe even more so with the current debate over the dangerously close to becoming law SB 510.