Comment from Pollak, Jeannie

The USDA's regulatory framework for genetically engineered/genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is inadequate, outdated, and fails to reflect the full body of peer-reviewed scientific research, knowledge, and real-world experience accumulated since the first GMO crops were widely planted and commercialized in the mid-1990s. Specifically, USDA regulations for genetically modified plants have largely been a facade since the beginning, focusing on a single question before approving a GMO crop: Does it pose a plant pest risk to other plants? By focusing almost exclusively on this narrow question, USDA enacted a regulatory regime purposely designed to miss the bigger picture. The most widely planted GMO crops today are engineered to tolerate herbicides, and these crops are designed to be used with those chemicals. An herbicide-tolerant GMO seed is not planted in isolation—it is part of a system that drives herbicide use. Therefore, the scientifically sound question should be: does this GMO plant system pose a risk to other plants, animals, human health or the environment if grown as intended—with the herbicides? There have been countless documented cases of herbicide-tolerant crops causing damage to neighboring non-GMO and organic farms, orchards, home gardens, and native trees due to herbicide drift, as well as threats to human health, endangered species, pollinators, biodiversity and our environment. Dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton are prime examples of this. In recent years, there have been tens of thousands of dicamba-drift damage cases across the U.S. An estimated 5 million or more acres of non-target crops, backyard gardens, trees, and public spaces were injured by dicamba drift between 2016 and 2021. The USDA previously estimated that damage reached as much as 15 million acres of non-tolerant soybeans in 2018 alone. And by EPA's own admission, the damage has been significantly underreported. For crops engineered to withstand herbicides, the reliance on a single herbicide can lead to natural selection in the wild. Certain weeds develop immunity to the herbicide (e.g., glyphosate resistance), which then requires more aggressive, multiple-herbicide treatments that can drift to affect surrounding, non-tolerant vegetation, humans, wildlife and ecosystems. The herbicide-tolerant crops and the associated herbicides cannot be evaluated separately. It is a single system. Plant incorporated protectants (PIPs)—insecticides incorporated into plant DNA—have resulted in insect resistance. Just like chemical insecticides, target pests can rapidly develop evolutionary resistance to the plant-made pesticide, resulting in the use of more insecticide spraying. The genetically engineered PIPs, as well as the herbicides used on herbicide-tolerant crops, have been linked to human health harms including leaky gut, damage to the microbiome and immune system, cancer, reproductive and developmental harms as well as other adverse health impacts. Claims of substantial equivalence between GMO and Non-GMO have been disproven by peer-reviewed science. Today, genetic engineering in agriculture extends far beyond the herbicide-tolerant and insecticide-producing GMO crops that first entered the market. New techniques such as gene editing and synthetic biology come with the same risks and are being used to create an expanding array of genetically engineered plants, animals, and microbes for use in farming, food production, and environmental applications. Many of these organisms are entirely novel, yet they are often reviewed under regulatory frameworks that were developed decades ago and were never designed to address the unique risks and complexities of these emerging technologies. Deregulation and voluntary "non-regulatory solutions," as the USDA puts it, are not acceptable. The USDA must update and strengthen GMO regulations using all of the available independent peer-reviewed science and the decades of case studies showing harm.