Regulations?
Currently, the use of GM seed is virtually unregulated in the U.S. where the corporate owners of these “seeds” have received judicial protection to such a degree that their market dominance controls a substantial percentage of our food production. This is reflected in numerous Supreme Court decisions and the recent oral arguments for Bowman v. Monsanto Co., where the Court seemed to favor the position that a patent infringement claim can be maintained against a farmer who bought and used GM seeds from a grain elevator containing unlabeled seeds from other farmers.
Here in the U.S., no labeling requirement exists so enlightened consumers might know if food items contain GMOs. A push for labeling of food sold in retail outlets would lead to informed consumerism and promote the general awareness of the overwhelming prevalence of GMOs in our food supply. Such labeling is not a foreign concept. Over the past few decades, we as a society have become dependent on the information gleaned from calorie and nutritional value labels placed our foodstuffs. The need, desire, and use of these labels are founded on the principle that we want to know what is in our food. Food created through the use of GMOs should not—and cannot—be held to a lesser standard. Labeling is the first step to societal awareness of the contamination of our food supply, and only through this awareness will change follow.
Surely uncontaminated food should be seen as crucial to our survival just like clean air and water, which we have only recently begun to protect. The widespread use of GM seeds has reduced biodiversity and made all crops more vulnerable to climate fluctuations, thus endangering the global food supply. Enforcing control of these patented devices has cut off recourse to ancient and proven farming methods for sustenance, and by controlling both GM seeds and access to conventional and organic seeds, prices for seed and food have risen worldwide.
“At the present time, there is a massive disconnect between the sometimes lofty rhetoric from those championing biotechnology as the proven path toward global food security and what is actually happening on farms in the U.S. that have grown dependent on [GM] seeds and are now dealing with the consequences,” said Charles Benbrook, author of The Magnitude and Impacts of the Biotech and Organic Seed Price Premium. With increasing world population and the greater pressure on world food supplies, manipulation and control of seeds cannot be justified.
Evans is an attorney with Burr & Forman LLP (Birmingham, Ala.). She can be reached at 205-458-5461 or [email protected].
NOTE: Reference materials from a number of publically available sources, including The Farmer to Farmer Campaign on a Genetic Engineering and The International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, Manifesto on the Future of Seeds, were used in research for this piece.
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