Food and environmental groups are renewing calls for the Agriculture Department “to adopt a slower, more stringent approval process” for genetically engineered crops, says USA Today. They are motivated by two cases since May 2013 of unapproved varieties of GE wheat growing in the wild. The newspaper quotes Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety, a biotech skeptic, as saying, “I’d like to say it was surprising that these events happened, but it’s not, really. It’s become the norm, rather than the exception.” The center has called for a moratorium on field tests.
The United States is the world leader in growing GE crops, which came on market in 1996. Almost all of U.S. corn, soybeans and upland cotton is a GE strain. During fiscal 2014, USDA approved field tests of more than 500 crops on as many as 11,300 sites. It says there were 11 incidents of noncompliance with regulations, none of them major, said USA Today. A USDA administrator told the newspaper that current regulations are “more than sufficient.” The consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest told USA Today the government “needs to be more transparent about how many inspections it conducts, how those inspections are targeted and what they find.”