Dive Brief:
- The Hawaii County Council is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to file legal action to overturn a judge's order that struck down the county's recent ban on GMO agriculture.
- The council voted in November to ban GMO farming, but a federal judge said the county had no legal right to do so.
- The battle in Hawaii County is not to be confused with the one in Maui County, where voters in November approved a measure to ban GMO crops. Monsanto has filed a lawsuit to block implementation of that law.
Dive Insight:
Of all the fights over GMOs in all the places they happen, there's a particular poignancy to what's happening in Hawaii. Here's why: the island paradise is the only state that a) grows a lot of GMO food (papaya), and b) has a large vocal, anti-GMO segment of the population. When the anti-GMO forces triumph in Hawaii, it's not hard to imagine a time a decade or so in the future when anti-GMO sentiment would carry the day in Iowa or Missouri.
And as we have noted before, the nature of the debate in Hawaii, more than any of the other debates in any of the other places, has made clear that facts are hard to come by in the GMO battle.