February 29, 2000 / National Post / Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko
These are tough times for agricultural and food biotechnology, but its
government regulators are active and thriving. That reciprocal relationship
is no coincidence.
In Europe, there is widespread public and political opposition to importing
grains grown from gene-spliced seeds. Governments have imposed moratoria on
commercial-scale cultivation of plants. Gene-spliced foods have been
banished by major supermarket chains. Vandalization of field trials by
environmental activists is commonplace United States as well, regulators have imposed strict, unscientific rules on
agricultural and food research that hinder new product development.
But the regulatory coup de grace has just been delivered by the United
Nations. Last month, under the umbrella of the 1992 Biodiversity Treaty,
agreement was reached in Montreal on a UN-sponsored "biosafety protocol"
that is, regulations agricultural products developed with gene-splicing techniques. Six major
agricultural exporting countries known as the Miami Group and the United States their farmers rely extensively on gene-spliced crop plants and export them
widely. In the words of Tim Galvin, a U.S. negotiator, "no deal is better
than a bad one."
If only they had stuck to that principle. Walking away from this
anti-competitive, anti-consumer agreement would have been preferable to the
result: an arbitrary, one-size-fits-all regulatory system for gene-spliced
products based solely on the way they're developed, and regardless of how
safe or dangerous individual products may be. It's tantamount to imposing a
punitive tax on certain cars, solely because they've been made on an
assembly line, or on certain fruits because they've been machine-picked.
EU official John Richardson admitted on U.S. television that European
policies are dictated not by science but by politicians' perceptions of the
wishes of voters, ensuring that European regulation will be a capricious and
moving target. Unnecessary and unpredictable regulation invariably
discourages use of a technology, so this situation is a sure prescription
for disaster. The regulations will deprive scientists, farmers and food
companies of new research tools, and consumers of additional choices in the
marketplace.
Recently, more than 1,000 scientists from around the world signed a
declaration supporting the use of agricultural biotechnology, reflecting the
widespread scientific consensus that the regulation of gene-splicing should
be based on the biological characteristics of individual products, not on
the methods used to develop them. And, notwithstanding opposition from
anti-biotech activists, tens of thousands of food products from gene-spliced
organisms have been marketed and consumed routinely and safely for more than
15 years. But gene-splicing's ideological opponents UN Even a cursory examination of the protocol shows that the agreement has less
to do with legitimate concerns about the environment and more to do with
trade protectionism and anti-science fearmongering. The regulations are
based on the "precautionary principle," the simplistic and simple-minded
conviction that every new technology should be proven absolutely safe before
people can use it. An ounce of prevention is certainly desirable, but the
precautionary principle erects an almost insurmountable barrier against new
products because nothing can be proved totally safe standard demanded by anti-technology extremists.
Focusing only on the possibility that new products may pose theoretical
risks, the precautionary principle necessarily ignores that new products
often reduce or eliminate very real existing risks. More than one billion
people in the world now live on less than a dollar a day, and hundreds of
millions are severely malnourished. Gene-splicing can significantly increase
the availability and reduce the price of foods by making crop plants more
productive and dependent on fewer inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides.
Scientists are also using gene-splicing to improve the nutritional value of
foods, adding essential vitamins and minerals to basic staple crops.
Applying the precautionary principle to these advances will exact a
substantial human toll.
If the precautionary principle had been applied decades ago to innovations
like polio vaccines or antibiotics, regulators might have prevented the
occasionally dangerous side effects of those products. But that precaution
would have come at the expense of millions of lives lost to infectious
diseases. Biotechnology is newly burdened with an ill-defined global
regulatory process that permits overly risk-averse, incompetent or corrupt
regulators to hide behind the precautionary principle. In this way, what
George Orwell called "vague fears and horrible imaginings" can be elevated
above scientific evaluation, even when the products in question are
obviously safe and will benefit the environment and human health.
Such harmful regulation could easily have been opposed on principle. But the
Miami Group nations ultimately capitulated. They were more interested in
striking a deal that would appease both the environmental movement and the
agribusiness industry. Under the deal, food crops intended for processing,
such as raw corn, soybeans and canola are still subject to unscientific
regulatory hurdles but are exempt from the debilitating case-by-case
approval mechanism that governs other products.
In protecting some U.S. and Canadian farmers, however, the Miami group
sacrificed the interests of academic researchers, small and innovative
companies, and consumers. Now, corn and soybean farmers, for example, will
know ahead of time whether a shipment of their grains will be accepted
overseas, but a new variety of iron-fortified rice to be field-tested at a
university field station or a pest-resistant strain of millet to be grown by
village farmers will be delayed by (gratuitous) regulatory reviews.
Corruption and unnecessary red tape will dog these products, from the
cultivation of the first seed to their appearance on consumers' tables.
What was needed, but sorely lacking, in Montreal was the political will to
insist upon policies that make scientific sense and protect consumer choice.
The only winners from these new rules are government regulators, who will
enjoy newfound power and resources, and anti-science extremists, who have
succeeded in reducing the new biotechnology to a mere shadow of its
potential. Those who negotiated this agreement have made a mockery of free
trade and, in a moral if not legal sense, committed crimes against humanity.
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