Judge says GM grass broke the law

Agriculture - Trials of genetically modified crops cannot be approved without weighing risks, the ruling says

The federal government broke environmental laws in allowing a genetically modified grass seed to be planted near Madras without weighing potential harm, a judge has ruled.

The implications of the ruling, made public Tuesday, reach far beyond Oregon's borders. The Washington, D.C., judge ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to process any new field trials of biotech crops without first considering environmental effects.

About 1,000 such trials are conducted annually.

The Madras-area seed was harvested in 2003 for Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. and Monsanto Co., which are hoping to market the creeping bentgrass strain to golf courses. The grass has been engineered to resist the popular herbicide Roundup, allowing course managers to kill weeds and annual bluegrass without affecting the GM bentgrass.

The grass-seed crop has been in storage since, while Scotts and Monsanto wait for federal approvals that would allow the seed to be marketed.

In the meantime, two separate studies have shown that pollen from the GM grass traveled as far as 13 miles, escaping a buffer area and allowing the modified grass to cross with conventional relatives.

Those studies heightened fears that the modified grass will proliferate in the wild, plaintiff Lesley Adams said.

"We're really concerned about the potential genetic contamination of public lands and wild grasses," said Adams, outreach coordinator for the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, an Ashland-based, nonprofit conservation organization

As a practical matter, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr.'s ruling doesn't change what he called "arbitrary and capricious agency action" in Madras. But attorney Joseph Mendelson -- whose nonprofit, the Center for Food Safety, filed the suit -- hopes that agricultural officials will change their practices.

Andrea McNally, a spokeswoman for the arm of the agriculture department that oversees GM crops, said it had changed procedures in recent years to "better document how we comply" with environmental laws. She said the department had not decided whether to appeal the judge's decision.

This week's ruling mirrors that of a federal judge's decision in an unrelated case last year. In that case, the judge said the agriculture department repeatedly violated environmental-protection laws in allowing companies to plant biopharming crops in Hawaii.

Biopharming refers to crops that have been genetically engineered to make vaccines and medicines.

Alex Pulaski, 503-221-8516; alexpulaski@news.oregonian.com