The New Dark Age

According to a GMO-boosterish article in the Telegraph, “Britain’s first genetically-edited (GE) foods will be on supermarket shelves in the new year as a result of Brexit freedoms. Crops which have been genetically edited to be tastier, longer-lasting and healthier will now be legally sold in England for the first time under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023.”The article says that among these products are “bread with less cancer-causing chemicals, longer-lasting strawberries and bananas, sweeter tasting lettuce and disease-resistant potatoes”. What it doesn’t say is that not only are hardly any of them ready for commercialisation, but none of them are necessary or even desirable. They certainly won’t provide any better solution to our food and farming problems than the non-GM solutions already available. GMWatch

For years, pesticide manufacturer Bayer has battled thousands of lawsuits claiming that its weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. Now, the Republican-controlled Congress could deliver the company a crucial victory. A provision tucked into a government spending bill could shield Bayer and other pesticides makers from billions of dollars in payouts to plaintiffs. The proposal follows intense lobbying by Bayer and other industry interests over the past year. But it has sparked outrage from a new force in Washington: followers of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. If Republican lawmakers vote for the spending bill in its current form, “they are going to face the wrath of MAHA in the midterm elections”, said Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer known as the Food Babe to her 2.3 million Instagram followers. Among MAHA influencers, glyphosate, the key ingredient in certain formulations of Roundup, is so singularly spurned that the activist Kelly Ryerson goes by “the Glyphosate Girl” on social media. In recent weeks, Ryerson has urged her nearly 84,000 Instagram followers to call lawmakers about the proposal. “Giving immunity to chemical manufacturers? That’s insanity,” Ms Ryerson said. “And I think that a lot of these Republican congresspeople don’t really even understand what the language means because they’re being sold a bag of goods from Bayer.” New York Times

State regulators are considering forgiving millions of dollars in unpaid fines on Arkansas farmers who have used the controversial and highly destructive herbicide dicamba in ways that violate state pesticide policy. The penalties are related to hundreds of cases dating back to 2017, when the Arkansas Department of Agriculture — which is responsible for enforcing regulations on the use of dicamba and other pesticides — began receiving a large number of complaints about dicamba “drift” damaging other farmers’ crops and other vegetation. The Arkansas State Plant Board, which hears such cases, couldn’t keep up with the volume. Now the state Agriculture Department wants to sweep the violations under the rug and not even try to collect the fines they’ve said farmers owe the state. In a a memo, the US EPA said it “would not support blanket dismissal of outstanding enforcement cases”. But the memo also noted they couldn’t stop the state from doing it. Arkansas Times

The New Zealand First party has said that the Gene Technology Bill in its current form has gone far beyond the safety protections envisaged and they didn’t it want to destabilise the organics businesses and the wider agricultural sector. “This is a pleasing position that NZ First has taken and shows that they are listening to the public concerns,” said Claire Bleakley, president of GE Free NZ. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has now introduced some immediate amendments to address public concerns. They have been tasked with setting up a new sector committee. Representatives from Organic Aotearoa New Zealand (OANZ) have been appointed. But Bleakley warned: “It is too late to involve affected parties by tinkering around the edges of the defective Gene Technology Bill… [The bill] has to be stopped.” GE Free NZ

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