On June 21 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s injunction that had prohibited farmers from planting Roundup Ready alfalfa for the past three years. In a narrow 7-1 majority opinion in the case of Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, the Court found only that the U.S. District Court in San Francisco overstepped its bounds in 2007 when it issued a broad nationwide injunction against planting the crop without considering a proposed partial deregulation proposed by the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

“The District Court abused its discretion in enjoining APHIS from effecting a partial deregulation and in prohibiting the possibility of planting in accordance with the terms of such a deregulation,” Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion. “Given those errors, this Court need not express any view on whether injunctive relief of some kind was available to respondents on the record before us. Nor does the Court address the question whether the District Court was required to conduct an evidentiary hearing before entering the relief at issue here.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, the only dissenter, argued that based on strong evidence before the district court as to GM alfalfa’s possible spread to other crops, and the fact that APHIS had deregulated the crop without filing an Environmental Impact Statement as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, “the court had been well within its discretion and “did the best it could.”

Justice Stephen Breyer did not participate in the case. His brother, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, had issued the 2007 injunction when environmental groups and individual organic alfalfa farmers sued USDA claiming the agency’s decision to grant deregulated status to Monsanto’s GM alfalfa violated the National Environmental Policy Act. After finding a violation, the lower court stopped the planting and sale of most GM alfalfa.

Monsanto filed an appeal to the original injunction to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled 2-1 against the company. A request for a rehearing was denied in June 2009. In October 2009, Monsanto filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the injunction should not have been imposed without an evidentiary hearing. In its petition, Monsanto also argued that APHIS’ proposed actions would have reduced the likelihood of cross-pollination to less than one percent.

The case will now go back to the District Court and ultimately to the USDA to determine appropriate regulation of genetically modified alfalfa, which could allow further planting while the agency completes an Environmental Impact Statement.
Six senators from states with a significant organic farming industry sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to urge him to prohibit the sale of GM alfalfa, saying that it posed a significant threat to the organic dairies. About 23 million acres of land are devoted to alfalfa in the United States. Before the 2007 injunction, 5,500 growers planted the biotech seed on 236,000 acres nationwide, according to Monsanto.

In a similar case in March, the U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco refused to immediately ban planting Monsanto’s genetically modified sugar beets but he warned growers that they should make every effort going forward to grow conventional seed because it was possible he could ban planting the GM beets at a later date pending an environmental review.