Epa Inflicts Blight On Common Sense

“Plant a radish, get a radish

Never any doubt

That’s why I love vegetables

You know what you’re about”

- From “The Fantasticks”

Unfortunately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t seem to love vegetables or know what its own regulation is about.

For more than a decade, EPA’s regulation of biotechnology has conflicted with scientific consensus, ignored genuine considerations of risk and inhibited production of environment-friendly products.

The agency has reserved special scrutiny for the most precise and predictable method for generating genetic improvement, a breakthrough known as recombinant DNA or gene-splicing.

The result is that whole sectors of U.S. industry - especially pesticides and the cleanup of toxic wastes - are virtually off-limits to the new biotechnology.

More recently, the EPA has began a process that will require case-by-case regulatory review of an entire category of products that never required regulation at all: Plants genetically modified with the new biotechnology for enhanced pest resistance.

The EPA’S proposal ignores the fact that plant varieties have long been selected by nature and bred by humans for improved resistance to external threats to their survival and productivity.

These threats include insects, diseases 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.

In recent decades, plant breeders seeking to rid their potatoes of fungi and their tomatoes of bacteria and worms have turned to geneticengineering techniques that predate the new biotechnology. This kind of produce is found at the local supermarket and the farm stand.

From the first tests in the field to the consumer’s plate, these products did not require governmental evaluations of any kind.

It is ironic that EPA is heaping regulatory burdens on the new biotechnology just as it confronts what the journal Science has called a “bumper crop of disease-resistance genes” that may be “the biggest thing since the discovery of chlorophyll.”

Genetic improvement of crops has the potential to make many chemical pesticides obsolete.

The EPA’S proposal to regulate plants whose pest resistance has been enhanced by the new techniques is so potentially damaging - and outside scientific norms - that it stimulated unprecedented action by the scientific community.

Eleven major scientific societies, representing more than 80,000 biologists and food experts, convened a meeting in January of this year to draft a report opposing the policy.

Released Aug. 1, the report warns of a number of negative consequences for agriculture and consumers if the EPA policy is implemented:

Development of new pest-resistant crops would be discouraged, prolonging the use of synthetic chemical pesticides.

Regulatory burden and costs would increase on those who develop pest-resistant varieties of crops.

If pest-resistant products had to be identified as containing their own “pesticides,” as U.S. policy would dictate, the United States would have trouble competing for international markets.

These negative impacts on U.S. research and development represent your tax dollars at work.

The EPA should know that federal oversight has to be based on scientific principles and that it “should focus on high-probability risk rather than hypothetical or unrecognizable risk.”

This latest regulatory foray by the EPA, developed in collaboration with Vice President Al Gore, is particularly gratuitous, unscientific and bizarre.

It would regulate new varieties of tomatoes, apples and marigolds more stringently than it would chemicals similar to DDT, malathion or sarin.

The EPA’s policy will discourage the application of a powerful technology that will allow crop and garden plants to be grown with fewer chemicals. It will irreparably damage U.S. agriculture and biotechnology. Farmers and consumers will be the big losers.

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