WASHINGTON, Dec. 14, 2016 - Seven months after its release,
the report by the National Academy of Sciences on “Genetically
Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects,” has failed to narrow the
divide between the consensus of scientists and evidence-based analysts that
biotech crops are safe and the many skeptics or outright denialists who see
theoretical dangers lurking in the newest technology.
While the study affirmed the safety of biotech crops that
are now on the market, Michael Rodemeyer, a member of the academies’ panel who
headed the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology in 2000-2005, believes that
it is not likely to do away with barriers to agricultural biotechnology. “I
don’t see the various viewpoints changing,” he said. “Frankly, it’s going to be
a cost of doing business for some time to come.”
Rodemeyer was one of several experts, including officials of
a dozen-plus scientific societies, who spoke last week at a day-long assessment
of the May 2016 report, billed by the academies as “the most up-to-date and
objective scientific assessment of GE crops available today.” Many speakers
echoed frustration that biotech believers have not convinced a doubting public.
“People want simple answers but we don’t have simple answers,”
said Rural Sociological Society President Doug Jackson-Smith of Ohio State.
Representatives of several societies were “scratching (their) heads about how
do we communicate with the public and policymakers,” said Fred Gould, the North
Carolina State University professor who chaired the committee that wrote the
report. While many people say, “Please, please, just give the public an answer”
as to whether GMO’s are safe or not, Gould said. “I’m not sure how we and scholars
and scientists address this. We are not used to it.”
Greg Jaffe, director of biotechnology at the Center for
Science in the Public Interest, said he was disappointed that the academies did
not recommend specific improvements in U.S. regulation of agricultural
biotechnology. “It would have had a lot more teeth if it proposed authority for
post-approval monitoring” of biotech crops after USDA allows their commercial
planting.
Rodemeyer pointed out that the report examined the different
biotech regulatory systems in the United States, the European Union, Brazil and
Canada that “represent very divergent approaches to regulation.” Some countries
consider not only technical safety but “much broader cultural and social
issues,” he said. “That divergence is not likely to go away soon,” causing
trade disputes.
Although the committee did not offer specific prescriptions
for U.S. regulation, it “recommended that we look more to Canada as a rational
system of regulation that focuses on novelty as a characteristic of new plants
to be regulated,” he said. Such a system would flag new features of a plant to
see whether it may pose a hazard, he added. “The idea is not necessarily to
prove safety but to prove that it is essentially as safe as its conventional
counterpart.”
More pointed criticism of the report came coincidentally in
a paper
published in the December issue of Nature
Biotechnology by Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution and Val Giddings of
the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Hoover was at FDA and
Giddings at USDA when the current biotech regulatory system was devised 30
years ago.
The report “contains far more equivocation than the data
justify,” they wrote, and “fails to offer U.S. policymakers clear, concise
conclusions and recommendations on the single most salient and critical policy
issue – the need for regulatory rationalization to make government oversight of
new plant varieties scientifically defensible and risk-based.”
“Most important, it muddies the debate about yields of GE
crops compared with ‘conventionally’ bred crops, gives undue credence and
prominence to views backed by paltry peer-reviewed evidence,” Miller and
Giddings asserted. The report also “provides precious little direction to
policymakers on how to recalibrate the regulatory framework to emphasize
science-based risk assessment and reduce discrimination against GE products
compared with non-GE products.”
The committee failed to recognize that current regulation
imposes “egregiously disproportionate constraints on GE products with lower
hazards and risk potential than those crafted with conventional genetic
modification techniques,” they wrote. “In other words, federal agencies have
created regulatory regimes in which risk is inversely related to the degree of
regulatory scrutiny.” They faulted the system for creating disincentives to
research, development, and innovation with “no benefits whatsoever in terms of
safety or improved sustainability.”
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