The House version of the 2026 Farm Bill would completely deregulate a category of genetically modified organisms the industry calls “plant-incorporated protectants.” These are crops that are genetically engineered to produce their own pesticides.
These pesticides aren’t on your food, they are your food!
Pesticide-producing GMOs include Bt crops, which are responsible for the engineered Cry1Ab toxin showing up in the blood of 8 out of 10 newborns.
They also include the scary new gene-silencing GMOs in crops like Bayer-Monsanto’s SmartStax corn. This corn isn’t just genetically modified, it’s engineered to genetically modify the insects that feed on it. Who knows what it’s doing to us!
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress Not to Deregulate Pesticide-Producing GMOs!
The scariest new GMOs are pesticide-producing crops where the insect-killing action is RNAi.
The RNA in “RNAi” refers to living cells’ ribonucleic acid. RNA carries instructions from DNA to ribosomes for protein synthesis. The “i” in RNAi stands for “interfering.” RNAi “plant-incorporated protectants” are engineered to deliver double-stranded RNA to a plant pest to “silence” a target gene in that insect.
In 2023, U.S. farmers started growing SmartStax corn, an RNA interfering corn variety that targets Western corn rootworm by disrupting expression of its Snf7 gene. When the Snf7 gene is blocked, proteins can’t move across cell membranes and the rootworm dies.
The trouble is, RNAi GMOs is that the RNAi doesn’t always just silence the target gene, but can interfere with other genes—not only in the insect, but in other organisms—and scientists don’t know why. They haven’t figured out which RNAi sequences trigger off-targeting.
Looking for off-target effects isn’t something companies like Bayer-Monsanto do. There’s no business reason to explore unintended consequences and the regulatory agencies don’t require them to do so.
Friends of the Earth says that one potential off-target effect that should have been investigated before people started eating these GMOs is how these genetically engineered interfering RNAs interact with the human body.
Scientists are only just now beginning to understand how some of the naturally occurring interfering RNAs in our food regulate our genes. An RNAi found in rice was observed to silence a liver gene involved in cholesterol metabolism, but virtually nothing is known about the untold number of other interfering RNAs that we consume through rice, corn, barley, tomatoes, soybeans, wheat, cabbage, grapes, and carrots. It would have been nice for humanity to get a chance to figure out how what we eat determines which genes are expressed before genetic engineers went messing around with all of this!
We know from research into the use of interfering RNAs as a medical intervention, that RNAi causes immune reactions in the body, triggering dangerous inflammatory responses. RNAi GMOs’ double-stranded RNA structure fits the Pathogen-Associated Molecular Pattern. As Sayer Ji puts it in his article, “The Invisible GMO,” “When the immune system detects a PAMP, it doesn’t pause to sequence it or identify its source. It responds: shutting down protein synthesis, degrading cellular RNA, triggering interferon, and, in severe or sustained cases, initiating cell death.”
The safety assessment for SmartStax corn that Monsanto submitted to the EPA didn’t assess how genetically engineered RNAis in our food might regulate our genes or trigger immunotoxicity via the Pathogen-Associated Molecular Pattern pathway.
The EPA assumed (probably incorrectly) that the human gastrointestinal tract provides barriers to absorption that would prevent double-stranded RNA from reaching the bloodstream, but newborn infants don’t have these gut barriers gastrointestinal problems can also cause gut permeability in adults. The EPA didn’t require Monsanto to consider these populations.
In addition to dietary exposure, the EPA should have considered the inhalation of double-stranded RNA expressed in corn pollen, which can be carried by the wind up to a half-mile away.
With 20 to 30 percent of the 86 million acres of GMO corn now carrying RNAi traits, our health is already being impacted.
If Congress deregulates pesticide-producing GMOs, things will only get worse and we’ll never know what hit us.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress Not to Deregulate Pesticide-Producing GMOs!