Lies, Damn Lies And Genetic Engineering

The big agribusiness companies have achieved regulatory capture of government agenciesbut not in the way that many people think. At the urging of industry, since the 1980s federal agencies have over-regulated genetically engineered plants, animals and microorganismsat great cost to U.S.-based R&D and, ultimately, to consumers.

Its no secret that although the Internet has vastly enriched our lives in many respects, it has downsidesless interpersonal interaction, more anonymous snarkiness, online harassment and even cyber-stalking.

The net has also made it difficult to stop or correct the promulgation of misinformation, as I have learned to my dismay: A valid observation I made to a New York Times reporter for a 2001 article on the regulation of genetic engineering has been repeatedly taken out of context and misrepresented by activists. It continues to appear anewstill out of context and misconstrued13 years later.

Here is the portion of the original article that is often quoted on anti-genetic engineering websites (such as here and here):

Even longtime Washington hands said that the control this nascent [agbiotech] industry exerted over its own regulatory destinythrough the Environmental Protection Agency, the Agriculture Department and ultimately the Food and Drug Administrationwas astonishing. In this area, the U.S. government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do, said Dr. Henry Miller, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, who was responsible for biotechnology issues at the Food and Drug Administration from 1979 to 1994.

Sounds like a Eureka! moment, right? A former senior regulatorrevealing an egregious example of what economists call regulatory captureagencies that were created to act in the public interest instead advancing the interests of the industry or sector they oversee by implementing too-lenient regulation. (Economics Nobel Laureate George Stigler developed this concept.) Thats what activistsand even somejournalists who failed to do their homeworkwould have you believe.

That excerpt has been misrepresented to imply that companies applying the molecular techniques of genetic engineering to agriculture (the exemplar of which was, and is, Monsanto) wanted, and got, less regulatory scrutiny than was warranted, possibly putting consumers and the environment at risk.

Actually, my statement was intended to convey exactly the opposite, as was clear from verbiage in the article that preceded the passage quoted above:

Although the Reagan administration had been championing deregulation across multiple industries, Monsanto had a different idea: the company wanted its new technology, genetically modified food, to be governed by rules issued in Washingtonand wanted the White House to champion the idea. There were no products at the time, Leonard Guarraia, a former Monsanto executive who attended the [Vice President George H.W.] Bush meeting, recalled in a recent interview. But we bugged him for regulation. We told him that we have to be regulated.

The genetically improved varieties that had been crafted for centuries with older, less precise, less predictable techniques of genetic modification neither needed nor received any government review or imprimatur for field trials or commercialization. Butfor its new varieties crafted with state-of-the art molecular techniques, the big agribusiness companies wanted sui generis regulatory requirements that would be far in excess of what scientific considerations and the principles of sound regulation dictated. And as the Times article related, [T]he White House complied, working behind the scenes to help Monsantolong a political power with deep connections in Washingtonget the regulations that it wanted.

Read the original:
Lies, Damn Lies And Genetic Engineering