USDA Greenlights Monsanto's Utterly Useless New GMO Corn

—By Tom Philpott

| Mon Jan. 23, 2012 1:15 PM PST

 

You've got to keep an eye on US regulatory agencies in the second half of December. That's when watchdog journalists like me tend to take time off—and regulators like to sneak gifts to the industries they're supposed to be regulating. This year, I was alert enough to detect this gift from the FDA to the meat industry; but the USDA caught me napping. The agency made two momentous announcements on GMO crops, neither of which got much media scrutiny. It deregulated Monsanto's so-called drought-tolerant corn, and it prepared to deregulate Dow's corn engineered to withstand the herbicides 2,4-D and dicamba. More on the later this week.


The drought-tolerant corn decision, which came down on Dec. 21, was momentous occasion, because it marked the first deregulation of a GMO crop with a "complex" trait. What I mean by that is, the other GMOs on the market have simple, one-gene traits: a gene that confers resistance to a particular herbicide, like Monsanto's Roundup Ready seed or a gene that expresses the toxic-to-bugs properties of the bacteria Bt, as in Monsanto's Bt seed. But a plant's use of water is a complex process involving several genes; there's no single "drought tolerant" gene. Generating such traits in plants that succeed in field conditions has been considerably more tricky for the agrichemical giants than than simple traits.
 

And indeed, Monsanto has staked huge PR capital on its ability to do just that. In a famous 2008 press release, the company declared it would "double yield in its three core crops of corn, soybeans and cotton by 2030, compared to a base year of  2000," using patented seeds that will simultaneously "reduce by one-third the amount of key resources required to grow crops." It placed complex traits like drought tolerance at the center of its effort,  promising seeds that would "result in more production per unit of land, and reduced use of energy, fertilizer and water per unit produced."

The drought-tolerant corn the USDA signed off on in December is the first approved crop of that kind. The trouble is, it doesn't work very well. The USDA acknowledged as much in its Nov. 11 Final Environmental Assessment of the crop. It makes clear that the product's "drought tolerance" extends only to "moderate" drought conditions, and it has the same "minimum water requirements" as conventional corn.

And then it drops this bombshell, citing Monsanto's own field tests:    READ MORE