Ironic that the USDA would see the "economic" problem as unimportant, or less important (anyway) than their erroneous evaluation of the ecological issues.

Wasn't the neocon stance that we couldn't do anything about global warming because it would be "bad for business?"

Unfortunate that so many still see economy and ecology as inevitably at odds, rather than creating solutions that win in both areas.

I am looking forward to the day when organic and GMO foods can live together peacefully (albeit far enough away so that the winds can't contaminate). I am sick of the "frankenfood" criers who believe that GMOs are inherently evil, but I also can't believe the hubris of Monsanto et. al. who try to push forward the idea that GMO is all good and will be the savior of humanity.

I think organic and GMO are not inherently at odds. It is the current state of each movement that make them so. The GMO pushers are, by and large in the developed world at least, driven by greed with no thought on how their (business) practices affect the world. The organic movement, on the other hand is far too splintered to really effect change on the way GMOs are pushed on the world. Is the organic movement promoting health, the environment, local farming? Is it anti-big business, or just another big business itself? Is its goal to convert the world to organics, or to preach to the converted? Ask 10 pro-organic people, and you'll get 12 answers.

I appreciate your in depth analysis on this subject.

The USDA is inherently compromised in regulatory issues. Part of its mission is to promote the farmer. Hence, it cannot provide unbiased regulation on GMO or anything else. As many have said before we need an independent food (and feed) safety agency. USDA is at cross purposes and can't function well in any of its roles as a result.

FunGal

This is not a situation that I think can be compromised away. One one side, you have farmers who want to use this genetically modified crop. On the other, you have people who want their crops totally uncontaminated. In between, you have the wind, blowing pollen from one field to another. No amount of "compensation" will satisfy the organic growers, who simply want to continue to grow their pure crops. And I doubt that anything is going to stop agribusiness from entering this new realm of genetically modified crops. An EIS will slow things down, but I don't really see how it can find a compromise that will suit anybody. The two sides are simply at odds.

That said, I don't think the major issue here should be contamination of organic crops, or even the health effects of using genetically modified crops. They can fairly easily run tests to determine if the crops are safe, and organic farmers have been dealing with contamination from nearby crop-dusters for quite a while. The biggest issues are ones that our government environmental impact analysis process is totally unequipped to deal with: How will releasing human-modified genes effect the environment? Are we going to end up with pesticide resistant weeds? Will there be massive insect deaths as some weird side-effect of this technology? What are the long term effects? Nobody could have guessed when the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk that someday somebody would fly airplanes into buildings in an act of terrorism. I think we can safely say that we would have move forward with aviation if we had known, since the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Every innovation comes with unknown risks and benefits. I'd like to have people at least trying to study the effects of genetic modification of crops before we implement their growth in an large-scale manner.

I really think that the organic movement needs to reconsider its stance on GMOs. Why is the organic movement against the idea of GMO? What exactly about GMOs makes it incongruous with organic? Is it just "scary"? Is it the politics of the word? If we could find a GMO variant of, say, corn that requires no pesticides and *really* is safe for the environment (however you define safe) and is cheap to produce by small farmers, should the organic industry go wild over this?

Before I get too far on this, I have to say that I (almost) completely agree with what jebldmm is saying. Many of the GMO pushers are acting immorally and not in the best interest of the country or the world. They are advocating for crops that are potentially unsafe to the environment. They are advocating for lower regulations on these potentially unsafe crops. They are undermining local economies with monopolistic practices. Etc.

However, GMOs are here to stay. The GMO world of the future will either be one where wild strains of GMO crops run rampant and destroy local ecosystems (this is bad!), or a world where GMO crops are used only after much testing and safety controls are in place and only when they are shown to be substantially better than alternatives (this is good!).

If things continue the way they are going with GMO pushers going full steam ahead, and organic pushers trying for a complete block, we will end up in a bad world. To prevent this, we need more testing of GMOs and this idea has to be adopted by the organics industry.

I appreciate Andrew Leonard's keeping us abreast of developments relating to GMOs. It's a valuable public service. That said, I've got to quibble with the following paragraph from his recent coverage:

Denmark's rules will not satisfy the anti-GM activist or organic farmer who demands 100 percent purity or believes that inserting a gene from one species of plant or animal into another is a crime against nature. But for those of us who can live with a little imperfection in our lives, the rules, from a distance, seem like a pragmatic, sensible attempt to balance competing interests and come up with a fair solution for all.

Apparently Mr. Leonard really believes that it's possible to be "a little bit pregnant." The organic movement grew, well, organically, from the bottom up and not from the top down. How organic came to be defined was not dictated from a conference room or a government study, so it's interesting now that the government actually has stepped in to define what it means, and now that big business sees it as a lucrative market, that people feel free to weigh in on how "organic" should be defined. And, of course, those who wish to keep to the original intent and standards of organic are perceived as just being luddites or unreasonable quacks by those who are far more pragmatic and sensible and willing to redefine organic standards for ... lacking a better word at the moment ... the "organic community."

Let me be clear about my view of GMOs. I think every university in the country should have labs devoted to unraveling the secrets of and understanding our world's genetic makeup in all of its glorious complexity. And perhaps what is learned there can be translated into targeted medicines, understanding the intricacies of ecosystems, etc. The academy and its cohorts in industry should learn all that they can. But, I would draw the line at the lab door with respect to genetically modifying organisms for release into the environment. Oh well, the first Bush administration crossed that line under the unscientific rubric of "substantial equivalence" and encouraged the business community and the money-hungry university patent licensing apparatus to waste no time looking back or to adhere to any precautionary principles. Regulation of GMOs was allowed to fall between the cracks, being considered by the Food and Drug Administration to be a pesticide-related decision best handled by the EPA and considered by the EPA to be a food-related issue. How convenient. Testing on the part of industry was and has been voluntary, so that when they say that "No tests have shown that X causes Y or Z" one should not assume that any test of that scenario has been conducted at all.

So, yes, we're technologically capable of producing GMOs and after much trial and error and crapshooting coming up with an acceptable (on the surface) result, but as with nuclear technologies, the danger lies in how such technology is applied. No one knows yet, including the scientists who have created them, what the long-term consequences will be of having already allowed the planting of hundreds of millions of acres of these utterly new biotechnologies. People wrongly assume, because genetic modification takes place on a micro-scale, that it is precise both in its application and in its results. And there are conflicting studies regarding the supposed benefits (i.e. presumed reduced chemical inputs and higher crop yields) of planting the crops that have so far been greenlighted. On the other hand, a multi-decade study conducted in part by the Rodale Institute confirms the many benefits of organic production.

If your neighbor's house is painted, you should have the right to assume that your house's color will not be impacted regardless of the wind conditions. Sadly, the highest court in Canada negated such a right in the Percy Schmeiser case because the "housepainter" was a multinational conglomerate seeking to protect intellectual property that the conglomerate apparently bears no responsibility for once their product is released into the environment. Let's hope that our highest court does not follow suit. (It would be interesting to know how much of a buffer area that multinational conglomerate requires around its own fields to ensure their genetic integrity while growing its own GMO seed for sale.) So, yes, GMOs are here to stay and they will surely touch every biological area of our lives (and rightly so with respect to lab-produced pharmaceuticals), but be careful what you wish for.