Posted September 6, 2013
Environmental groups recently filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, asking the court to stop the use of genetically engineered (GE) crops and certain pesticides in wildlife refuges in Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa. The complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief is available here.
The plaintiffs, the Center for Food Safety, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Sierra Club, and Beyond Pesticides, challenge the planting of GE crops and the use of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which are harmful to bees and other pollinators. According to Ron Meador of the MinnPost, land within the refuges has been “cultivated under cooperative arrangements between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and private farmers.” The use of GE crops and new insecticides “has triggered a series of lawsuits, which argue narrowly that the FWS has failed to meet legal requirements for reviewing the environmental impact of such practices before permitting them – and more broadly, that because of their persistence and other special characteristics, they have no place in areas set aside for protection as a wildlife habitat.” The MinnPost article is available here.
This lawsuit alleges that the FWS entered into contracts with private farmers without the required environmental analysis in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and the Refuge Improvement Act (RIA).
The subjects of the lawsuit are wildlife refuges in the FWS’s Midwest Region 3: the Detroit Lakes Wetland Management District (WMD) in northwestern Minnesota; the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) near Carbondale, Ill.; the Swan Lake NWR near Sumner, Mo.; and the Iowa WMD. According to the complaint, row crops “are usually cultivated for three to five years on farmland acquired by Region 3 before it is restored to natural habitat” and “GE corn and soybeans” are “typically the only crops planted during the last two years before farmland is restored to natural habitat.”
The plaintiffs argue that the use of GE crops (“Roundup Ready” technology) creates herbicide-resistant “superweeds” and “gene flow” resulting in “transgenic contamination of related conventional or organic cultivars or wild species with potentially hazardous or simply unwanted genetically engineered content.” Plaintiffs also argue that nenicotinoids, insecticides “designed to be carried throughout a plant’s tissues,” have “been show to adversely impact more than just managed honeybees – they also impact native bees and beneficial insects, which are critical to supporting pollination services.”
The plaintiffs have had previous success in challenging the “approval of genetically engineered plantings on two wildlife refuges in Delaware” which forced the FWS “to end such plantings in its 12-states Northeastern region” according to an article by the Environmental News Service, available here. In November of 2012, the plaintiffs successfully “halted cultivation” of GE crops “on 25 refuges across eight states in the Southeast.”
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