Nature / 11 May 2000 / COLIN MACILWAIN
[WASHINGTON] The Clinton administration has announced a series of
regulatory changes and research proposals intended to shore up public
confidence in the government's supervision of genetically modified (GM) food.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will in future require companies
that wish to introduce any new transgenic food to provide notice and
supporting scientific research 120 days in advance. This information will
then be placed on the Internet for public inspection. At present, companies
submit this information on a voluntary basis, and it is not automatically
made available to the public.
The FDA will also develop guidelines for the voluntary labelling of GM
food, and will permit producers of food containing no GM organisms to label
it as such.
But the changes, which were announced last week by the White House in
conjunction with the FDA, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), did not include any mandatory
requirement for the labelling of GM foods.
Although widely expected, this omission led most environmental groups to
reject the changes, which they branded as cosmetic. Farming and industry
groups, meanwhile, warmly welcomed the announcement. The National Corn
Growers Association, which represents most large maize farmers, said the
changes matched its own policy and position, as stated during public
hearings conducted by the FDA last autumn (see Nature 402, 571 ; 2000).
Farmers and the agricultural biotechnology industry have been pressing the
government to make such changes, in the hope that they will strengthen US
public confidence in GM food. GM foods are already ubiquitous in the food
chain in the United States, where around half of this year's soybean crop
and one-third of the maize will be transgenic.
The industry is concerned that European rejection of the technology will
spill over into the United States, where GM crops were introduced after
extensive scientific review but minimal public debate.
The USDA, FDA and EPA also pledged to coordinate their research programmes
on the safety and risk assessment of agricultural biotechnology, although
the amount of additional money to be made available for this was not
specified. The USDA also said it will create standards to certify the
various testing procedures that are availa- ble to establish whether foods
contain GM organisms.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council of
Environmental Quality said that they would conduct a further six-month
study on the regulation of agricultural biotechnology. Under a
long-standing arrangement, the FDA, EPA and USDA share responsibility for
this regulation, depending on the intended function of the genetic
modification.
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