Biopharming Rules Broken

The lawsuit began in 2003 when several environmental groups sued USDA for allowing Monsanto and other companies to conduct "biopharming" field trials on four Hawaiian islands. One company had modified corn plants to produce experimental vaccines for HIV and Hepatitis B, for example, and another had engineered sugarcane to yield cancer-fighting compounds. The Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group in Washington D.C., and others charged, in part, that USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) broke the law by not considering the potential impacts of the biopharmaceutical crops on endangered species. On 10 August, J. Michael Seabright, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii agreed, citing the agency's "utter disregard for this simple investigation requirement." The decision "makes clear that the agency can't take these shortcuts," says Jonathan Adler of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio. "It will make permitting more time consuming and costly, but I don't see this is as a fatal blow or insurmountable hurdle" for biopharming field trials. Next week, Seabright will hear arguments for a moratorium on field trials while APHIS reviews its biopharming permit program. (Twelve experimental biopharming crops have been planted in the U.S. this year.) In the meantime, Paul Achitoff, a plaintiff representing the Oakland, California-based advocacy group Earthjustice, says the ruling puts APHIS on notice that ignoring the environmental impacts of biopharm genetically modified crops makes it "a sitting duck for future lawsuits." Erik Stokstad "Link":[http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/815/2]

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