Revealing test crop sites
would invite vandalism

Recent letters to the editor have praised Judge David Ezra's recent federal court ruling ordering the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reveal the locations in Hawaii of genetically modified test crops engineered to produce drugs or industrial chemicals. The writers promote a so-called need by the public to evaluate the test sites for safety. Evidently the public, and certain groups with an anti-GMO agenda, are completely unaware of the permitting process that gives the public nine different opportunities to express opinions during the process required by the USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Food and Drug Administration also performs an evaluation of such experiments that is made prior to any biotech test-plot plantings. Perhaps the public might review, if they really have a desire to know, the evaluation and permitting requirements for the biotech industry at the government Web sites listed at the end of this column. From the information on these Web sites, the public might better substantiate whether these agencies are knowledgeable in regulating the biotech industry.

Just how the knowledge of the location of biotech test plots will benefit the public after all this government scrutiny is beyond imagination. There is clear evidence, however, that making the locations of the test plot public invites trouble. Consider the following:

>> On Jan. 29, 2002, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) claimed responsibility for a $250,000 arson fire at the University of Minnesota's Microbial and Plant Genomics Research Center and claimed responsibility for the sabotage of construction equipment at a biotech plant being built for Jackson Labs in Fairfield, Maine.

>> On May 21, 2001, ELF burned an office and a fleet of 13 trucks at Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie, Ore. They simultaneously burned down the office of Toby Bradshaw, a biology professor at the University of Washington. Total damages for both sites exceeded $5 million.

>> On May 9 and 10, 2000, on Kauai, a group calling themselves the "Menehune" destroyed thousands of dollars of research plots at Novartis Company in Kekaha and the University of Hawaii Agricultural Resource Center in upper Lihue.

With all this anti-GMO speech-making, we still have not seen any scientific evidence presented by any person or group illustrating any human or environmental harm from genetically engineered crops, which have been around for 10-plus years. All we get is, "look out, the sky is falling, the sky is falling." If so, then show us some proof.