Why Breed Distrust?

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Brief Article

In January, the Food and Drug Administration released its revised regulations for foods produced using biotechnology. The new regs were a bit more onerous than what had come before, but not nearly enough to satisfy some pressure groups in Washington. One such group, the Consumer Federation of America, released a new 258-page report, Breeding Distrust: An Assessment and Recommendations for Improving the Regulation of Plant Derived Genetically Modified Foods. The report calls for the U.S. to model its biotech regulations on those developed by the European Union and Brazil--not generally considered hotbeds for technological innovation.

"Both the EU and Brazil have adopted process-oriented regulatory programs aimed at all GM [genetically modified] organisms," the report notes. "The laws in the EU and Brazil broadly encompass all GM foods because they include all GM organisms within their scope.

The FDA specifically rejected the EU and Brazilian models in 1992, declaring that whether a food is safe depends on what's in it, not how it's made. It further declared that "in most cases, the substances expected to become components of food as a result of genetic modification of a plant will be the same as or substantially similar to substances commonly found in food, such as proteins, fats, oils and carbohydrates." Decoding the regulation-speak, this means the agency won't regulate those substances any more stringently than it does conventionally produced foods. It would require more regulatory...