How About Letting Drug Dealers and Sex Offenders Regulated Themselves?

If you liked the self-regulation that let Wall Street and big banks bring the global economy to the brink of collapse, you'll love the self-regulation that lets Monsanto destroy the global food supply.

Mike Ludwig at Truthout:

For years, biotech agriculture opponents have accused regulators of working too closely with big biotech firms when deregulating genetically engineered (GE) crops. Now, their worst fears could be coming true: under a new two-year pilot program at the USDA, regulators are training the world's biggest biotech firms, including Monsanto, BASF and Syngenta, to conduct environmental reviews of their own transgenic seed products as part of the government's deregulation process.

This would eliminate a critical level of oversight for the production of GE crops. Regulators are also testing new cost-sharing agreements that allow biotech firms to help pay private contractors to prepare mandatory environmental statements on GE plants the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is considering deregulating.

SNIP

Genetically engineered and modified crops continue to cause controversy across the globe, but in America they are a fact of life. The Obama and Bush administrations have actively promoted biotech agriculture both at home and abroad. Countries like China, Argentina and Brazil have also embraced biotech agriculture. Regulators in European countries - including crucial trade partners like France and Spain - have been much more cautious and, in some cases, even hostile toward the industry. GE crops are banned in Hungary and Peru, and earlier this year officials in Hungary destroyed 1,000 acres of corn containing Monsanto transgenes. The US, however, continues to allow big biotech companies to cultivate considerable power and influence and, as the letters uncovered by FOIA reveal, top regulators are ready to meet their demands.

"The USDA regards its own regulatory system as a rubber stamp," Freese said after reading the letters. "At least at the upper levels, there's always been this presumption that [GE crops] must be approved."

Read the whole thing.

If genetically-modified organisms were self-contained, existing next to natural organisms without affecting them, the only issue would be ensuring that proper labeling informs consumers about the food they are buying.

But the fact is that GMO plants and animals eliminate their natural counterparts, infecting and taking them over, so that soon there will be no alternatives to GMO food. And then it will be too late to regulate it.