USDA Greenlights Monsanto's Utterly Useless New GMO Corn  | Mon
Jan. 23, 2012 1:15 PM GMT  You've got to keep an eye on US
regulatory agencies in the second half of December. That's when
watchdog journalists like me tend to take time off—and
regulators like to sneak gifts to the industries they're
supposed to be regulating. This year, I was alert enough to
detect this gift from the FDA to the meat industry; but the USDA
caught me napping. The agency made two momentous announcements
on GMO crops, neither of which got much media scrutiny. It
deregulated Monsanto's so-called drought-tolerant corn, and it
prepared to deregulate Dow's corn engineered to withstand the
herbicides 2,4-D and dicamba. More on the later this week.   The
drought-tolerant corn decision, which came down on Dec. 21, was
momentous occasion, because it marked the first deregulation of
a GMO crop with a "complex" trait. What I mean by that is, the
other GMOs on the market have simple, one-gene traits: a gene
that confers resistance to a partic