Author: Erin Elizabeth

This is good news! On Friday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued its decisions on whether federal and Hawai’i state laws preempt Hawai’i counties’ authority to regulate genetically engineered crops and pesticide use. They ruled that federal law, specifically the ‘Plant Protection Act’ DOES NOT prohibit states and counties from passing local laws to regulate and ban commercially-grown GE crops. With its decision, the court recognized the potential harm to non-GE farmers crops AND the environment. However, the other ruling was that under Hawai’i law, counties and municipalities cannot regulate GE crops (like other states do)...

Quaker Oats customers in California and New York customers have filed a lawsuit against the company, due to their allegation that their oatmeal may contain traces of the pesticide glyphosate. The lawsuit was filed after a test was done to analyze the ingredients of Quaker Oats Quick 1-Minute oatmeal, by an independent lab in California. Researchers used liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, a procedure often used by medical and chemical labs for drug research. They found unwanted traces of the chemical in some of the Quaker Oats products. The sample they tested contained traces of glyphosate, and although the amounts discovered...