Last week, Tom Vilsack , Secretary of US Department of Agriculture, announced a grant worth $136 million to several universities and private companies in the Pacific Northwest, to help develop a Northwest ‘biofuels’ industry. It is the single largest grant awarded by USDA.
The grant will help promote several projects, including the development of “fast growing poplars” that could mature and yield returns within a few years. The University of Washington will be planting 400,000 acres of these poplars across the Northwest.According to an article in the Western Farm Press, entitled, “Pacific Northwest Forests Offer Biomass Bounty” the grant will also give a half million dollars to Oregon State University, for conducting research into genetically engineered trees that would help in energy production. At present, most of the research into GE trees at OSU is based on poplar.
Thus, the main purpose of the grant seems to be developing genetically-engineered trees that would serve the purpose of bioenergy feedstock. However, as yet in the US, growing of GE trees on a commercial, scale is still illegal. It is quite troubling to note that the grant is provided by USDA, the same organization that is relegated the duty of reviewing the applications for growing GE trees on a commercial scale.
Another troubling fact is that David Nothmann, the Vice President of Business and Product Development for GE tree company ArborGen, was nominated to be a part of Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in conjunction with the USDA.
It is thus obvious that the USDA shows an obvious conflict of interest, as far as GE trees are concerned. Hence, the petitions for the commercial release of GE trees would probably result in years of lawsuits to stop them.According to an article in Biomass Power & Thermal Magazine, this threat of lawsuits is “representing a tremendous deterrent to investment in [biotechnology], especially on the biomass side, where a lot of them are start-up companies. It’s making it very hard to get investments [when] you’re going to have to deal with [5-10 years of] litigation. It is creating a huge barrier.”
OSU research will not only be limited to GE trees, but will also include the study of forest health and hazard reduction. This could mean that research will be carried out to find the viability of beetle killed trees as woody biomass. However, according to Global Justice Ecology Project, the way fossil fuels are used in the US, they cannot be replaced by plants.
