Sugar beets in this country are produced by 10,000 farmers growing beets on an average of 110 acres each. These are the people who will be impacted by the ruling. NYtimes quoted the head of a sugar beet processing company saying they’ve been accepting the beets since they came on the market and it’s been “a big non-event” as far as consumer acceptance. Which makes sense considering that sugar is almost pure sucrose (which means there’s basically no protein, encoded by transgenes or otherwise in the product), and the sort of people who seem most upset about gmos arent going to be buying a lot of processed sugar (organic or otherwise).
So the people who are impacted are people living in sugar beet producing states (especially Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Idaho) who are facing the risk of exposure to more toxic herbicides from switching sugar beets back to conventional agriculture, and the ten-thousand sugar beet farmers who today don’t know if they’ll be able to purchase the herbicide resistant seed next year, and may still not be allowed to sell the crop they currently have growing, depending on what remidies Judge White decides to impose.