The monster of biotech regulation

Yet another case of big business using government to build barriers to innovative, new, and potentially commercially threatening business, aided and abbetted by paranoid radicals. Henry Miller and Gregory Conko point out that the biotech industry is now reaping what it helped sew. Excerpt:

Long before the first gene-spliced plants were ready for commercialization, a few agrochemical and biotechnology companies, led by Monsanto and Calgene and supported by BIO (and its precursors), approached policy-makers in the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s and asked that the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration create a regulatory framework specific to gene-spliced products.

The policies recommended by the biotechnology industry, predicated on the myth that there is something fundamentally novel and worrisome about gene- splicing techniques, were far more restrictive than could be justified on scientific grounds and often even more burdensome than proposals by regulators.

Ostensibly, the goal of these policies was to placate anti-biotech activists and provide reassurance to consumers that regulators had evaluated and cleared gene-spliced products, but the real motives were less benign. Industry representatives have admitted after the fact that the companies wanted excessive regulatory requirements to make biotech R&D too expensive for possible competitors such as start-ups and seed companies; in other words, regulatory expenses and delays would serve as a market-entry barrier.

The USDA and EPA in particular were glad to oblige industry, with draconian policies that focused specifically on and discriminated against plants and microorganisms crafted through gene splicing. As a result, a field trial on a gene-spliced organism today costs 10 to 20 times as much as the same trial with a plant that has virtually identical traits, but that has been modified with less precise and predictable conventional techniques.