and after discussing the Just Really Big Corn more with the person in question, I have some more information about the offending Really Big Corn (the pic is coming up dont worry):
-for those who are new to Exactly How Fucked Up Corn Is, corn, or Zea mays, is comprised of many varieties (called ‘landraces’) native to central and south america. They were first bred by the native peoples in the region from an ancient grass called Teosinte that’s still around today. theyre really fucked up. i cant talk about it here but trust me there’s a reason some people devote their entire lives to studying it
-the lab in question is a maize genomics lab, and does a lot of work with these landraces. sometimes this work involves bringing various kinds up to their lab at my university in Iowa to grow in test plots for experiments. you can see where this is going
-so the supercorn itself. the supercorn in question is actually a collection of a few different landraces from the valleys of mexico and south america. they are naturally taller than what we would consider ‘normal’ corn in their native environment, but like corn generally is when brought to Iowa, they’re really fucking happy here and are a little bit taller than their natural height to show for it (we get longer days here then they get where they’re from, resulting in the plant getting slightly different growth signals, so on so forth)
-i got the height wrong in the tags on the original post. my friend is 5 foot 7, not 5 foot 5. this corn is over 20 feet (6 meters) tall. they were grown from seed in this test plot. she says the stalks are as thick as bamboo to compensate for the sheer height. behold the image that’s haunted me for literally months:
im still working on that paper on government regulations of GMO crops and its just…..really fascinating. i feel like i just….wasn’t very well informed about exactly how these plants interact with environment and with people before, although ive heard vague arguments about legality and possible dangers one way or the other tossed back and forth a lot. the regulation in a legal sense is done by USDA APHIS under title 7, chapter 104 (the Plant Protection Act), and it’s very messy and very interesting. for example, i’ve heard a lot about the ‘intellectual property’ legal case with Monstanto, but i just learned about the supreme court case Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, which concerns the actual regulation of some of these products.
background: the issue in this case is if GMO crops could cross pollinate with non-GMO crops and introduce those genes inadvertently into nearby wild/organic populations. this is a big factor of what people mean when they say ‘GMO crops could hurt the environment’ (wether or not it could actually cause harm is another thing that kind of is on a more case-by-case basis with the gene involved and stuff).
from there:
1. if you are a company wanting to mass-produce ur GMO crop, then u put that crop through years of development and then contact USDA APHIS, who sends people out to put it through it’s paces and make sure that it’s not going to fuck anything up/hurt people. usually by this point the company is 600% sure that it’s safe, because the entire regulatory process costs a lot of money and you don’t want to put just any old crop through that just to have it fail.
2. again, USDA APHIS runs under title 7 chapter 104, which classifies GMOs as ‘plant pests’ (this wording gives APHIS the legal jurisdiction to screen them like they do). BUT because of the technical meaning of ‘plant pest’ in another law, a GMO is only a GMO if it contains DNA from another organism. so if you take DNA from the same plant and move it around/modify it, you can petition USDA APHIS to declassify it as a plant pest,meaning that the particular crop becomes completely deregulated and can just kinda….do whatever, get planted whatever, etc and is completely out of the jurisdiction of the department. (it should be noted that this is kind of viewed as a loophole, because one of the concerns about genetic engineering is that by moving genes around the genome, you could accidentally insert it into another gene and break it’s function, causing unintentional adverse affects.)
3. this wording also means that USDA APHIS also has to abide by NEPTA, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which states that if APHIS gets petitioned to deregulate a crop, before they do anything they first have to do an environmental assessment of the crop that is wrapped up in a report saying ‘yea u good, because all our tests came back negative, ur plant is now Free’, ‘you are not allowed to grow this, because of x reasons, your plant must remain under our regulations’, or ‘you are allowed to grow this Wherever and do Whatever, but only in certain places where you can be sure x things won’t happen, if you grow it outside those zones then its back under our jurisdiction’. if USDA APHIS decides that it’s safe enough, they can allow the crop to enter deregulation before the environmental assessment is finished.
so it’s 2004, and Monstanto has an alfalfa crop variety that’s Roundup Ready (meaning that it’s resistant to their patented herbicide Roundup, and if you have it planted you can spray the field with that herbicide and kill everything but the crop. they have a few different kinds of crop like this but this case concerns their alfalfa variety). they decide ‘hey, lets go petition the USDA for our crop to be deregulated so we can do Whatever We Want with it’. the problem here is that alfalfa is open pollinated, meaning that it’s naturally pollinated insects…..that also pollinate other alfalfa nearby. alfalfa that may not be GMO. alfalfa that may, in fact, be organic…..which, by federal regulation, cannot be GMO. APHIS looked over the case and did an assessment and was like ‘yea sure sounds good’ and started the process of deregulating the crop.
organic farmers in california noticed this, and they were like ‘that’s not very cash money of u’. so in 2006, Geertson Seed Farm and a few other organic farms rallied together and went to the california district court and were like ‘we dont think APHIS’s environmental assessment was enough, and we think that they should conduct a more thorough investigation, and during that investigation they should stop the process of deregulating the crop’. the court was like ‘yea that sounds reasonable’, ordered APHIS to conduct a new investigation, and ordered that Monstanto would not be able to plant any more of that alfalfa until APHIS had finished said investigation. monstanto was like ‘can you just like, partially deregulate it so we can like, plant it in some places at least?’ and the court was like ‘No™’.
monsanto Did Not Like This. they appealed to the california appeal courts, who in 2013 also said No™, and they still Did Not Like This, so they appealed to the u.s. supreme court, who was like ‘yea ok you can plant it in some places until APHIS finishes the assessment, because Geertson Seed Farm didn’t actually like….have any harm done to them, and we’ve decided that they need to show harm before they can demand that it not be deregulated’. they also decided that cross-contamination between organic and GMO crops does not qualify as harm done to those crops, because ‘harm’ in the context of a ‘plant pest’ is widespread physical damage and destruction of other plants, and changing the genome of a plant like that is not physical damage, which is….a really interesting conclusion that brings up a lot of questions, tbh. i’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, like….this is pretty strictly adhering to just the damage imposed on plants, and doesn’t branch out to consider how cross contamination could impact organic farmers economically through potentially having their crops deemed non-organic do to no fault of their own. i also feel like this is one of those cases where it could have some Wild Ass implications if it ever comes up in a human or animal context, although i can’t say exactly what that might be.
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