Judge Rules Against USDA

A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that the USDA allowed the commercialization of a certain strain of genetically-modified sugar beets without adequately completing the proper steps to do so. According to the judge, the USDA never prepared an environmental impact statement for the sugar beets, which many critics have worried would have a large impact on all sugar beet production.
 
Sugar beets, which are grown on around 1.4 million acres of U.S. farms, are used to create much of the sugar that this country uses. While many farmers only began planting the genetically-modified sugar beets in 2008, several critics have expressed their concern since then about the possibility of the modified beets passing the genes along to conventional beets through cross pollination.
 
This is not the first time that the USDA has been found guilty of not adequately completing the process of approving commercialization for new crops. In 2007, a judge halted the planting of a genetically-modified strain of alfalfa seeds, a crop for which the USDA is still working to create a passable environmental impact statement.

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