Bill Clinton and Al Gore made high-profile appearances at last week's National Oceans Conference in Monterey, California. Their solutions to environmental challenges consisted, as usual, of hollow rhetoric and more federal spending, while we need more scientific and sensible government policies. The Clinton EPA's policy towards agricultural biotechnology is a case in point.
There is currently a massive ad campaign in the San Francisco area intended to reduce the use of agricultural chemicals such as pesticides, which run off directly into the bay. Its slogan is, "Have you oversprayed your garden?" Well, if chemicals pollute the bay, you have the EPA to thank.
The agency's decision to introduce Draconian regulation of an entire class of negligible-risk, environmentally friendly products -- crop and garden plants produced with the new biotechnology -- has outraged the scientific community and virtually eliminated commercial R&D.
Building on a succession of anti-biotechnology policies beginning in the mid-1980's, the EPA turned its sights several years ago on what was once one of biotechnology's most promising applications. The agency announced a policy in November 1994 that requires case by case regulatory review as PESTICIDES of an entire category of products that had not previously been thought to require regulation at all: crop and garden plants genetically modified for enhanced pest-resistance -- the ability to resist insects, viruses, bacteria, and fungi.
The EPA's new policy ignores that plant varieties have long been selected by nature and bred by humans for improved resistance to external threats to the plants' inherent survival and productivity, including predators and environmental stresses. All plants contain resistance traits, or they would not survive. Thus, the issue is not one of the presence or absence of pesticidal properties, but one of degree.
It is ironic that the EPA is heaping discriminatory regulatory burdens on plants which have the potential to make many chemical pesticides obsolete -- and which are likely to be far less environmentally hazardous and more publicly acceptable than the manufacture and spraying of chemicals.
Plant breeders, farmers and consumers possess extensive experience with crops and foods that have been genetically modified for pest resistance. Using techniques that pre-date gene-splicing, in recent decades scientists have transferred genes widely across natural breeding boundaries, markedly increasing agricultural productivity. Most often, plant breeders have sought resistance to commercially important plant pests, such as insects and bacteria in tomato, and viruses and fungi in potato. These "genetically engineered" plants — which require NO GOVERNMENTAL EVALUATIONS OF ANY KIND -- are what we buy at the local supermarket.
It is noteworthy that last major crop epidemic occurred in the United States in 1970, when a fungus causing a disease called Southern corn leaf blight claimed approximately 15 per cent of the corn crop, costing farmers 20 billion metric tons worth about a billion dollars. For several years, most of the corn in the U.S. had been grown from hybrid lines that contained so-called "Texas cytoplasm male sterility" (the extensive use of male sterility obviates the need to remove plants' tassels by hand, in order to eliminate pollen production). Unknown to plant breeders, the hybrid strain was not only unable to form pollen but was more sensitive to the fungus. When genetic changes are introduced with more precise gene-splicing, by contrast, the number of genes moved or altered is small, and the predictability of the final plant is greater. The possibility of untoward or unexpected events — new sensitivity to pests, the "jumping" of genes to other plants, increases in natural toxins or changes in taste or cooking qualities, for example — is much less than with older hybridization techniques.
The EPA's assault on plant varieties crafted with the new biotechnology is so potentially damaging and outside scientific norms that it has stimulated unprecedented action by the scientific community. In August 1996, eleven major scientific societies representing more than 80,000 biologists and food professionals published a report which excoriated the EPA's proposal. It observed that, contrary to the EPA's approach, the safety of a new substance synthesized by a plant depends on the biological actions of the substance, the amount present and whether it's in the portion of the plant that will be eaten, rather than on the fact that it's intended to protect against a plant pest.
The societies' report warned that if the EPA policy were implemented, it would:
- Discourage the development of new pest-resistant crops, thereby prolonging and increasing the use of synthetic chemical pesticides;
- Increase the regulatory burden for developers of pest-resistant crops, while also increasing federal and state bureaucracy;
- Limit the use of biotechnology to those few, larger developers who can pay the inflated regulatory costs; and
- Handicap the United States in competition for international markets because new pest-resistant varieties (as well as products derived from them) must be identified as containing "pesticides." (And imagine the appeal of a can of fruit salad or jar of peanut butter prominently labeled, "CONTAINS PESTICIDES.")
The scientific societies' report garnered enough attention from members of Congress to induce the EPA to hold a workshop on the proposed regulation in July 1997. But EPA officials were intractable and resentful. They were there to pronounce, not to learn, and promised the final rule by the end of calendar 1997. Sources within the EPA confirm that the regulation is now ready to be published. This latest regulatory iniquity, encouraged by EPA chief Carol Browner (with the active collaboration of Vice-President Gore and his staff), would actually regulate new varieties of plants like tomatoes, apples and marigolds MORE STRINGENTLY than chemicals similar to DDT or the nerve gas sarin.
The EPA's "plant-pesticide" policy already has discouraged the application of the new biotechnology to enhance agricultural productivity and reduce the use of agricultural chemicals. Farmers, consumers and the environment will pay the price.
Dr. Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View (R.G. Landes Co., 1997).
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