Imagine a democratic government adopting a legislation that would instruct its own Agriculture Department “to ignore any judicial rulings that block the planting of crops that the court determines to be illegal”(according to Senator Jon Tester from Montana).
In essence, this is what the US Congress has done by adopting a small clause (Section 735) inside the agriculture budget.
The signing by President Obama of this legislation will effectively bar US federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of genetically engineered (GE) crops even if they failed to be approved by the government’s own weak approval process and no matter what the health or environmental consequences might be.
Groups have rightly called this legislation the ‘Monsanto Protection Act‘ as it enables Monsanto and other companies to continue to sell GE seeds even when declared illegal by the courts.