For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page and our Millions Against Monsanto page.

The agricultural biotech industry — well, let’s call it what it really is: the chemical industry — has gone on the offensive as never before with a set of slippery policy riders to the House Farm Bill. It’s a new low even for an industry that has spent years and tens of millions of lobbying dollars trying to dismantle the basic safeguards that stand between a regulated, healthy food supply and the profit margins chemical industry executives pine for. If passed, these riders would undermine the few laws that are currently in place to protect farmers’ rights, our health and our environment from the many adverse impacts of genetically engineered (GE) crops.

So as the Agriculture Committee marks-up its draft bill today in the House, the question is, will Congress let the chemical industry write its own rules?

Deliberately buried in the House Agriculture Committee’s voluminous discussion draft of the 2012 Farm Bill, these significant changes to the Plant Protection Act (PPA) — one of the few statues that regulate GE crops — will counter the gains that have been made to protect our food supply and the farmers who grow it. The provisions (Sections 10011, 10013 and 10014) would force the rushed commercialization of GE crops, create a backdoor approval for Dow’s “Agent Orange” corn and eliminate any meaningful review of the impacts of these novel crops.