12 CapitalPress.com December 25, 2015 Amalgamated produces 20 percent of the nation’s beet sugar SUGAR from Page 1 chairman of Snake River Sug- ar Cooperative, which con- trols Idaho-based Amalgam- ated Sugar. “I think it would be wrong to characterize Her- shey’s decision as well-rea- soned.” Cerminara said his compa- ny now offers chocolate kiss- es and candy bars made with non-GMO cane sugar in the U.S., as well as a small selec- tion of organic, artisan choco- late products. But Cerminara empha- sized his company’s products have always been safe and high-quality, even when they were made with sugar from GMO beets. “The international scien- tific community, including the U.S. American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, Health Can- ada, the National Academy of Science and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations have all examined the health and envi- ronmental safety of plant bio- technology,” Cerminara said. “These organizations have concluded that these technol- ogies are safe for human con- sumption.” John O’Connell/Capital Press Sugar beets are scooped at a beet piling area in Rupert, Idaho. The future of sugar In 2003, when his compa- ny was first investigating the potential benefits of biotech- nology, Grant was accepted for an Eisenhower Fellow- ship, a program honoring for- mer President Dwight Eisen- hower by promoting global dialogue. For his project, Grant headed to Europe to inves- tigate why residents of the continent held such negative attitudes about biotechnology. Grant concluded Europe had “an authority vacuum” in food regulation, and the pub- lic was more apt to trust activ- ists who sought to “stir things up” than regulators. By contrast, the U.S. beet sugar industry rapidly adopt- ed GMO technology, which offered improved weed con- trol with less labor and the use of fewer chemicals. “We really needed some new tools to control weeds in beets,” Grant said. “Other- wise, I was going to get out of the business because what we had at the time was complete- ly ineffective.” Amalgamated processes sugar from 183,000 acres of beets in Idaho, Oregon and Washington, producing 20 percent of the nation’s beet sugar and 12 percent of the total U.S. domestic sugar sup- ply. In 2006, Amalgamated planted test plots of GMO sugar beets. The following season, the company made its first commercial planting, Courtesy of The Hershey Co. Hershey’s chocolate kisses are manufactured. The company re- cently moved away from using sugar produced with biotechnology. under a government permit. Now, all of Amalgamated’s sugar beet acres are GMO. Grant said his company sources cane sugar from the global market to meet the needs of customers requiring non-GMO certified sugar. But he’s confident most U.S. con- sumers believe in the safety of GMO technology, and vows Amalgamated will never re- turn to conventional sugar beet production. “This company will go out of business before they go back to conventional,” Grant said. Minnesota-based Ameri- can Crystal Sugar — which raises 400,000 acres of sugar beets and produces 11 million tons of refined sugar per year — won’t raise any sugar for the conventional market in the next year or two, CEO David Berg said. Berg said a single grower within the company some- times still plants convention- al beet seed because he’s had “competitive results,” but his beets are mixed in with the piles of GMO beets. Though Berg believes GMO beets are proven safe and the opposi- tion is emotionally driven, he won’t rule out the possibility of producing some non-GMO sugar a few years from now. He said his staff is spending more time on analyzing the non-GMO market than a cou- ple of years ago, but convert- ing acres back to conventional production remains a remote possibility. “It’s something we have to assess,” Berg said. “The mar- ket will dictate what we do.” GMO-free, organic sugar Jack Roney, an economist with the American Sugar Al- liance, estimates less than 2 percent of the U.S. sugar supply is organic. The country’s total or- ganic sugar consumption is roughly 140,000 tons per year, the bulk of which is im- ported cane sugar. A single company, Florida Crystals, accounts for all of the domes- tic organic sugar production, raising 9,000 tons per year of organic cane, Roney said. Florida Crystals officials could not be reached for comment, but their website advertises that they remain “America’s first and only producer of certified organic sugars,” and that their prod- ucts are “not just sweet, but they’re also sweet to the en- vironment.” Roney said Florida Crys- tals hasn’t increased its acre- age — despite a hefty organic premium and a strong organ- ic sugar growth trend — be- cause of high production costs. “I’m not hearing about any big efforts by American producers to go into organ- ic,” Roney said. “In devel- oping countries, it’s kind of easier to do organic because they can’t afford herbicides or pesticides.” There’s no GMO sugar cane on the market, though cane faces strong disease pressure, adding to the chal- lenge of raising it organical- ly. According to the Organic Trade Association’s 2015 Or- ganic Industry Survey, organ- ic sweetener sales reached $200 million in 2014, and an- nual growth has been steady at 15 percent. OTA spokes- woman Maggie McNeil said beets haven’t been certified as organic, partly due to a “chemically intensive” refin- ing process. She said that as refined sugar has come under in- creasing scrutiny there’s been growth in organic sweetener options such as honey and agave. The major sweetener veri- fied by the Non-GMO Project is cane sugar, said Executive Director Megan Westgate. “We do not yet have a beet sugar that is Non-GMO Proj- ect verified,” Westgate said. In the past year, she said the non-GMO category of candy, chocolate, desserts and sweeteners has increased from 153 brands and 780 project-verified products to 238 brands and 1,402 prod- ucts in 2015. The snack foods and bars category, which also requires a variety of sweeten- ers, grew from 2,080 products to 3,103 products during the same period, she said. “Consumer demand for transparency is at an all-time high and shows no sign of diminishing,” Westgate said. “With this shift in demand to non-GMO sweeteners, it will become increasingly more important for supply to meet demand.” Thom King, founder and CEO of Portland-based Ste- viva Ingredients, believes his company’s specialization in natural, low-calorie sweeten- ers makes it ideally suited for the future. “We experience triple-digit growth year over year,” King said. His company fills 60 per- cent of the U.S. market for stevia, a sweetener considered safe for people with diabetes derived from a plant native to South America. Coca-Co- la now makes a low-calorie soda with a blend of cane sugar and stevia, he said. He also produces sweetener from an Asian melon called monk fruit. King believes his products provide a more healthful alter- native to sugar, but he sees no benefit to choosing GMO-free cane sugar over beet sugar. “If you’re using GMO to increase crop yield to feed the world and the net effect is fin- ished goods that have no trace of GMO, I’m not sure anyone could support that being a bad idea,” King said. Environmental claims In the case of sugar, Grant argues consumers who seek organic and GMO-free prod- ucts are doing the environ- ment a disservice. On behalf of Amalgam- ated, Grant signed a report compiled by the American Sugarbeet Growers Associa- tion documenting 25 reasons GMO sugar beets are ecologi- cally superior to conventional beets — including that they require fewer and safer herbi- cides and less fuel to grow. The report was offered as public comment to the Na- tional Academy of Sciences, which will soon take a posi- tion on GMO crops. Grant further reasons that consumers can fight global warming by avoiding organic sugar. Grant said most organ- ic sugar consumed in the U.S. comes from cane-producing countries where rain forests are often cleared for crop land. “Does it make sense to slash and burn the rain for- ests in Brazil to bring organic sugar here and put American beet farmers out of business, in spite of the fact that they’re producing in an environmen- tally sustainable manner?” Grant asked. He also believes there’s too little accountability to be confident foreign suppliers in “markets where you can buy a paper trail” are meeting U.S. organic standards. A few years ago, the ma- jor beet companies conduct- ed a demonstration, testing finished GMO beet sugar from several plants against cane sugar to prove there’s no chemical difference. The sam- ples were indistinguishable on the molecular level. Grant said only at the atomic level can the products be differen- tiated — by a single carbon isotope distinguishing a grass, sugar cane, from a root, sugar beet. Grant said current sugar prices are “reasonably prof- itable,” and in the long term, he sees the market share only growing for GMO beet sugar. Beet growers, who used to produce less sugar per acre than cane farmers, have seen their trend-line yield gains double since the advent of GMO sugar, while cane yields have been declining. “You take that out 10 years and beet sugar in the U.S. will be by dramatic margins the most cost-effective sug- ar produced anywhere in the world,” Grant said. Despite the growing niche for organic and GMO-free sugar, Grant said Amalgam- ated has a market for all of the sugar it can produce and has invested $155 million in the past four years to re- move production bottlenecks and boost its output. With sugar prices up, he antici- pates the sugar beet indus- try’s next step will be to build new processing capacity. “We believe in the end sci- ence will prevail,” Grant said. “We are just on the edge of what this technology can real- ly bring.” Extreme drought conditions are almost gone in Idaho, snowpack levels way above normal DROUGHT from Page 1 The snowpack can use all the help it can get consider- ing that much of the winter is expected to be dominated by El Nino, whose southern storms usually bring high- er-than-normal temperatures and snow levels. The federal Climate Pre- diction Center envisions cooler-than-normal tempera- tures and below-average pre- cipitation throughout much of the West over the next two weeks, with El Nino’s high rainfall amounts in the south- ern United States taking hold in early 2016. Whatever happens be- tween now and New Year’s Day, snow levels are sure to be better than they were on Dec. 30, 2014, when the De- partment of Water Resourc- es’ first manual snow survey near Echo Summit found a snow-water equivalent of 4 inches, or 33 percent of av- erage. In Oregon, the percent- age of the state in extreme drought dropped to 46 per- cent from 59 percent. The percentage of the state in some level of drought de- clined to 88 percent from 90 percent. There is significant snow in the Cascades, the Blue Mountains, the Wallowas and the Siskiyou. In contrast to last year, 2015 is ending with healthy snowpacks across Oregon — in some cases, snowpacks are more than double the average level. The statewide snowpack is at 175 percent of average, but the Harney, Malheur and Owyhee basins in southeast Oregon all have levels above 220 percent of average. There are currently no basins in Oregon with be- low average snowpacks. The Hood, Sandy and Lower De- schutes basin in northwest Or- egon has the lowest snowpack level, but it still clocks in at a respectable 107 percent of average. Rain also has been more than adequate across with state, with precipitation lev- els ranging from 129 percent of average to 160 percent of average. To compare, the statewide snowpack level was 60 per- cent of average at this point in 2014 and would fall even further in the ensuing months and into spring. Back then, southeast Or- egon basins were the only ones above average but they also severely diminished over time. Extreme drought con- ditions are almost gone in Idaho, dropping to 1 percent from 8 percent the week be- fore, according to the drought monitor. Extreme conditions in Idaho peaked at 29 percent of the state in August and Sep- tember. Snowpack levels in Ida- ho are way above normal in many basins and well ahead of where they were this time last year. Snowpack in the Bruneau basin in southwestern Idaho was 224 percent of normal on Dec. 23, according to Natural Resources Conservation Ser- vice Snotel sites. Snowpack levels in the Northern Pan- handle region were at 102 per- cent of normal and they were at 99 percent of normal in the Spokane River basin. In West and southwest Ida- ho, snowpack in the Weiser basin was 193 percent of nor- mal, and it was 168 and 167 percent of normal in the Pay- ette and Boise basins, respec- tively. In East Idaho, snow- pack levels in the Snake River basin above Palisades were at 106 percent of normal. Water managers said it’s a good start to the season but the snow needs to continue falling because most reser- voirs ended the 2015 season with less carryover water than they did in 2014. “We’re very thankful for this precipitation and just hope it hangs on,” said Pay- ette River System Watermas- ter Ron Shurtleff. Reporters Don Jenkins, Tim Headren, Sean Ellis and Mateusz Perkowski contribut- ed to this report. Biotech proponents have opposed disclosure requirements because of fears of vandalism GMO from Page 1 The plaintiffs also agreed to stop seeking $4.2 million in compensation for the re- moval of their alfalfa crops, which are “Roundup Ready” varieties resistant to glypho- sate herbicides. Other growers of geneti- cally engineered alfalfa can “opt in” to the settlement by submitting sworn documents identifying where their crops are grown, either with satel- lite data or other geographic information, within 30 days of the deal’s approval. The information will be submitted to attorneys rep- resenting biotech critics who intervened in the case and the data would be covered by an “attorneys eyes only” protective order. Biotech proponents have opposed disclosure require- ments, such as a bill pro- posed during the 2015 leg- islative session in Oregon, because of fears of vandal- ism. In 2013, two fields of genetically engineered sug- ar beets were destroyed in Jackson County, which the Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion called a crime of “eco- nomic sabotage.” Ron Bjork, president of the Jackson County Farm Bureau, said some farmers may forgo submitting the sworn document and simply phase out their biotech alfal- fa fields within the allotted time. “I don’t know if they will give it to them or not. It’s up to every farmer to make their own decision,” he said. Bjork noted that Jackson County doesn’t have dedi- cated agricultural experts or a laboratory to test whether crops are genetically modified organisms. Before county authorities could even try to verify that a GMO crop is being grown, they’d likely first have to get a complaint and then obtain a search warrant, he said. “The question is who is going to go out and enforce it,” Bjork said. Devin Huseby, an attor- ney for Jackson County, said no decisions have been made about the enforcement about the county’s ordinance. “It would be total specu- lation whether people are go- ing to come forward or not,” Huseby said. The ordinance is now in ef- fect and biotech growers who don’t submit field information are “flagrantly violating the law,” said George Kimbrell, attorney for the Center For Food Safety, a non-profit that intervened in the case to sup- port the ban. Kimbrell said the most important aspect of the settle- ment is that the “right to farm” ruling won’t be challenged, rather than whether farmers will follow the disclosure re- quirement. “People don’t follow the law sometimes, but that’s at their own risk,” he said. Shannon Armstrong, attor- ney for the plaintiffs, said the deal sought to protect farmers’ privacy as much as possible. “We’re just thrilled other farmers of Roundup Ready alfalfa will be able to opt in to this settlement agreement,” she said.