Environmental Law: Federal Standard Applies to Protective Orders for Trade Secrets

The Commonwealth Court has adopted the federal standard for requests for protective orders covering trade secrets, which requires a party seeking discovery to show it has a compelling need to obtain the information that outweighs the potential harm of disclosure.

Environmental Review to Delay Two Engineered Crops

The department said on Friday that it had made the decision after determining that approval of the crops “may significantly affect the quality of the human environment.”

The crops in question are Dow Chemical’s corn and soybeans that would be resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D and Monsanto’s dicamba-resistant cotton and soybeans.

Many farmers say they would welcome the new crops because it would give them a way to kill the rapidly growing number of weeds that have become resistant to their main herbicide — Roundup, known generically as glyphosate. Most of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States are genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate, allowing farmers to spray the chemical to kill weeds without hurting the crops.

But opponents all say that approval of the crops would spur big increases in the use of 2,4-D and dicamba, which they say are more damaging to the environment and possibly human health than glyphosate.

Some fruit and vegetable growers and canners have been concerned that their crops would be damaged by 2,4-D or dicamba drifting over from nearby corn or soybean farms. The Agriculture Department said Friday that both chemicals had “been safely and widely used across the country since the 1960s.”

The department had already prepared shorter environmental assessments on two of the Dow crops and put them out for public comment. It did not say how long the more complete environmental impact statements would take, though past experience suggests it could be 15 months to more than two years.

Dow had initially hoped to have its 2,4-D-resistant corn on the market this year, though it then pushed it back to 2014. On Friday, it said approval was now not likely until 2015. It had not expected its soybeans to be ready for market until 2015 anyway.

Monsanto, which called the Agriculture Department decision “unexpected,” had been hoping to start selling its soybeans in 2014 and cotton in 2015.

The department was likely to be sued had it not taken the new course.

The federal approvals of genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets were rescinded by a federal judge a few years ago. The judge, in response to lawsuits filed by the Center for Food Safety, said the Agriculture Department had not adequately considered the environmental impacts.

Still, the department said on Friday that, under its regulatory authority, the decision on whether to approve the crops would rest solely on whether they are plant pests. That raised questions about what influence, if any, the environmental impact statements would have.

One environmental group, the Pesticide Action Network, applauded the delay. “Farmers across the country have been voicing their growing worries about these seeds, which have been designed to be used with toxic drift-prone herbicides,” Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist, said in a statement.

However, she said the fact that the approval decision would be based solely on the plant pest risk rather than the overall environmental impact “illustrates gaping flaws in our regulatory system.”

The Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group representing biotech crop developers, said the decision set a bad precedent.

These crops “have already been subjected to multiple delays in the approval system,” Cathleen Enright, executive vice president for food and agriculture, said in a statement. “No new scientific issues about potential risks have been raised.”

Dow and Monsanto said they would cooperate with the Agriculture Department and use the extra time to better prepare for the introduction of the crops.

“Glyphosate-resistant and hard-to-control weeds have spread across our nation’s farmland,” Dow said in a statement. “Twenty-five states are now affected and the number of new acres infested in 2012 increased by 50 percent over the previous year. These adverse trends will continue without new state-of-the-art solutions like the Enlist Weed Control System.”

Enlist is Dow’s name for the crops resistant to 2,4-D and the accompanying herbicide.

Cost of Environmental Degradation in China Is Growing

The statistic came from a study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, which is part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

The figure of $230 billion, or 1.54 trillion renminbi, is based on costs arising from pollution and damage to the ecosystem, the price that China is paying for its rapid industrialization.

“This cuts to the heart of China’s economic challenge: how to transform from the explosive growth of the past 30 years to the sustainable growth of the next 30 years,” said Alistair Thornton, a China economist at the research firm IHS Global Insight. “Digging a hole and filling it back in again gives you G.D.P. growth. It doesn’t give you economic value. A lot of the activity in China over the last few years has been digging holes to fill them back in again — anything from bailing out failing solar companies to ignoring the ‘externalities’ of economic growth.”

And the costs could be even higher than the ministry’s estimate, he said. The $230 billion figure is incomplete because the researchers did not have a full set of data. Making such calculations is “notoriously difficult,” Mr. Thornton said.

The 2010 figure was reported on Monday by a newspaper associated with the ministry, and so far only partial results of the study are available. In 2006, the ministry began releasing an estimate of the cost of environmental degradation. The ministry has issued statistics only intermittently, though its original goal was to do the calculation — what it called “green G.D.P.” — annually.

The rapidly eroding environment across the country has become an issue of paramount concern to many Chinese. In January, outrage boiled over as air pollution in north China reached record levels, well beyond what Western environmental agencies consider hazardous. The public fury forced propaganda officials to allow official Chinese news organizations to report more candidly on the pollution.

Chinese state-owned enterprises in the oil and power industries have consistently blocked efforts by pro-environment government officials to impose policies that would alleviate the pollution.

There have also been constant concerns over water and soil pollution. The discovery of at least 16,000 dead pigs in rivers that supply drinking water to Shanghai has ignited alarm there. This week, China Central Television reported that farmers in a village in Henan Province were using wastewater from a paper mill to grow wheat. But one farmer said they would not dare to eat the wheat themselves. It is sold outside the village, perhaps ending up in cities, while the farmers grow their own wheat with well water.

The Beijing government on Thursday released details of a three-year plan that is aimed at curbing various forms of pollution, according to a report on Friday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper. The report quoted Wang Anshun, Beijing’s mayor, as saying that sewage treatment, garbage incineration and forestry development would cost at least $16 billion.

In 2006, the environmental ministry said the cost of environmental degradation in 2004 was more than $62 billion, or 3.05 percent of G.D.P. In 2010, it released partial results for 2008 that totaled about $185 billion, or 3.9 percent of G.D.P. Several foreign scholars have criticized the methods by which Chinese researchers have reached those numbers, saying some crucial measures of environmental degradation are not included in the calculations.

There is consensus now that China’s decades of double-digit economic growth exacted an enormous environmental cost. But growth remains the priority; the Communist Party’s legitimacy is based largely on rapidly expanding the economy, and China officially estimates that its G.D.P., which was $8.3 trillion in 2012, will grow at a rate of 7.5 percent this year and at an average of 7 percent in the five-year plan that runs to 2015. A Deutsche Bank report released last month said the current growth policies would lead to a continuing steep decline of the environment for the next decade, especially given the expected coal consumption and boom in automobile sales.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.