Biotech industry goes to court to fight Hawaii's GMO and pesticide restriction bill

Saturday, January 25, 2014 by: PF Louis
Tags: biotech industry, Hawaii, GMO legislation

(NaturalNews) Anti-GMO activists and Kauai County council members in Hawaii had to dig in as Kauai mayor Bernard Carvalho made a plea to not override his veto of Bill 2491. That's a bill that would monitor and restrict GMO planting and pesticide use in that county. The council got the necessary votes to overturn Carvalho's veto, and now Bill 2491 is set to go into law August 16, 2014.

But the biotech industry isn't letting up. Syngenta Seeds, Pioneer Hi-Bred and Agrigenetic have sued the county of Kauai in Federal Court to block the bill from going into effect. Kauai is not part of the Big Island, or main island, of the Hawaiian Islands. It's a medium-sized island at the end of a westward string of islands comprising the state of Hawaii.

The bill calls for biotech companies to disclose what pesticides they are spraying, where and in what quantities. Strategic buffer zones are required by this law wherever spraying does occur.

Farmers will be required to report any GMO crops that they grow, and a third-party examiner will be used by the county to determine if the pesticides used are causing environmental harm or creating health hazards. Bill 2491 also calls for the power to fine or jail employees of biotech companies for any violations. Yes!

This bill is very basic common sense and not nearly as severe as other nations that have banned GMOs. Even advocates of the bill admit that it's a first step and by no means the final word on resisting the biotech industry's war on world health. It's considered a local victory that will hopefully inspire more resistance. So what's the problem?

What the bad guys say in their Federal court lawsuit

Precedence has demonstrate that it's difficult for good guys to win in Federal Court. Here's the essence of the bad guys' lawsuit: Their complaint assures that there are no dangers from GMO planting and the use of specific pesticides has been safety tested by these industries extensively.

Extensively, by them? How's that done with fast track allowances guaranteed by our federal government? The whole point of fast tracking is minimal safety testing to hurry products into the marketplace.

Then there are complaints from the bad guys about how there are already laws in place to ensure that everything they do will be safe. So why would activists and county council members go through the trouble if this were true?

It only appears true because the mainstream media, at best, considers it a controversy between "food industry science" and paranoid health nuts or borderline eco-terrorists.

Here's an excerpt from the biotech complaint: The bill also imposes unwarranted and burdensome disclosure requirements relating to pesticide usage and GM crops that compromise plaintiffs' confidential commercial information and unnecessarily expose plaintiffs to risks of corporate espionage, vandalism and environmental terrorism. (Emphasis added.)

Therein lies the core complaint. Herbicide and pesticide manufacturers don't want to completely reveal what's in their chemicals. For example, the active ingredient glyphosate has been analyzed and approved by regulatory agencies as safe with limited exposure. But that safety is within short-term limited exposure.

Inert (inactive) ingredients that are meant to increase the effectiveness of active ingredients like glyphosate are considered commercial trade secrets that corporations are allowed to keep secret regardless of public health concerns. Corporate rights trump health and human rights.

Long-term effects have not been studied for the potential of mammal tissue accrual, sort of like the way fluoride is ignored. More importantly, only glyphosate was tested as the active ingredient while the inert chemicals and/or the combination of glyphosate and inert chemicals were ignored.

An earlier study by the same research team with Seralini but with a different lead author used state of the art instrumentation to isolate ingredients in glyphosate based herbicides with proprietary formulas and determined that the inert ingredients used as "adjuvants" to boost plants' absorption of glyphosate are a major sources of toxicity.

Here's the paper from the French team's findings, which include Seralini but with a different lead author. It broke through Monsanto's secret Roundup recipe using state of the art spectrum analysis to determine the chemicals used.

That paper was titled "Ethoxylated adjuvants of glyphosate based herbicides are active principles of human cell toxicity" (http://gmoseralini.org).

It called for a long term mammal test using Roundup, which became the controversial rats with large tumors study.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.courthousenews.com

http://www.civilbeat.com

http://www.brecorder.com