GMO Ground Zero: Hawaii’s Victory Over Monsanto and Friends [1]

By Jack Adam Weber L.Ac., Dipl. C.H.

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

On February 4, 2015 the attorney representing Monsanto and other “agricultural and biotech groups” showed up at our County Council meeting here on the Big Island of Hawai’i. She was here to sabotage our GMO ban [2], which was heroically passed on a glorious December 5, 2013. As expected, once this legislation was passed, the big biotech companies sued our county, just as they do every other county and state that tries to interfere with their poisonous profiteering.

As a result of that lawsuit, on November 27 of last year, US Magistrate Judge Barry Kurren overturned the GMO ban. Judge Kurren’s reasoning was that State law pre-empts County law in this case, and that lawmakers had intended the State, not the County, to have broad control over agricultural concerns on all Hawaiian islands.

Word is that Judge Kurren’s decision is unjustified, and that he bent the interpretation of the law as widely as he could to disavow our ban. Here is Earthjustice’s lead attorney Paul Achitoff discussing the issue with Hawaii’s council members.