Field Testing of New GE Crops Slows in the USA

JUNE 15, 2001

Fewer signs of support for genetically altered crops
Efforts to bring such foods to the market appear to wane a bit, a national
consumer group says.

By Laurent Belsie (belsiel@csps.com)
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

ST. LOUIS

After years of dramatic growth, field tests of genetically modified crops
have hit a plateau - and may even be declining. Meanwhile, companies and
research organizations are increasingly shielding those tests from public
view.

These findings - in a new report from the US Public Interest Research Group
- suggest that biotechnology companies are slowing their efforts to
commercialize the controversial technology. The national coalition of state
public-advocacy groups, based in Washington, along with many other consumer
and environmental groups, is calling for a stop to field tests and
commercialization of bioengineered crops until they can be thoroughly and
independently tested for their impact on human health and the environment.

"It is clear that USDA [the US Department of Agriculture] has generally
served as a rubber stamp for applications to conduct field tests,"
concludes the report released yesterday. The department has rejected only 4
percent of all applications.

For the first time since field testing started in the 1980s, the number of
such tests has declined for two years in a row. After peaking at 1,086 in
1998, the number of approved permits and notifications for field tests fell
slightly to 931 last year, according to the report. The top states where
testing has occurred are Hawaii, Illinois, and Iowa.

Any slowdown in commercialization has not had much effect on public
research, biotech critics and supporters agree. For example, Bob Zeigler,
director of the plant biotechnology center at Kansas State University in
Manhattan, Kan., has seen no slowdown at his institution. It takes years of
research before a crop gets to the field-test stage, he points out. So
while commercialization may have reached a plateau, the pipeline is full of
new engineered crops that will be ready to hit the fields in the next few
years.

The controversy boils down to this question: How menacing do foods become
when a couple of their genes - in a long string of genetic code - are
altered? Until now, the federal government has generally sided with
industry, which has argued the techniques should come under the same
scrutiny as traditional plant breeding, which also alters the genetic
makeup of plants. But critics contend that the technology's ability to
introduce exotic genes into plants - which traditional breeding could never
do - requires a much higher level of testing.

"We see this system of oversight at this point as fundamentally flawed,"
says Richard Caplan, author of the report.

Increasingly, biotech companies are keeping details of their tests under
wraps. As late as 1989, all genes involved in field tests were publicly
disclosed, the report found. By last year, two-thirds of the field-tested
crops contained genes labeled "confidential business information." So
regulators, but not the public, knew which genes were being used in the
environment.

The practice extends beyond corporations anxious to protect trade secrets.
Universities are also putting field tests under wraps, according to the
report, though many biotech researchers oppose such secrecy. "Most of the
scientific community would always prefer maximum disclosure and openness,"
says Dr. Zeigler at Kansas State University. "Free exchange and access to
information is critical to progress."