PERSPECTIVE ON AGRICULTURE : Biotechnology Goes Down on the Farm : The confirmation hearings for Glickman as secretary should explore the department’s science-based policies.
Dan Glickman, the secretary of agriculture-designate, will soon face confirmation hearings before the Senate Agriculture Committee. High on the committee’s agenda should be biotechnology--a jewel in the crown of American industry, but the bete noire of USDA policies.
If confirmed, Glickman will oversee ossified USDA bureaucrats and their unscientific, anti-farmer and anti-consumer policies. What he intends to do about them deserves close questioning--and Glickman, a Kansan who served on the House Agriculture Committee, had better have the right answers.
The primary architect of the USDA’s biotech regulatory policy is Terry Medley, a lawyer with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, who has long defied scientific principles when it comes to regulating biotechnology.
For example, in 1987, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the risks are the same whether an organism is modified by gene splicing or some other method. The National Research Council agreed. But this scientific verdict threatened the entrenched bureaucracy’s gravy train, so Medley and other policy-makers simply ignored it. Instead, they adopted new regulations that singled out the most precise state-of-the-art techniques for extra scrutiny.
These policies discourage the use of state-of the-art genetic techniques by requiring burdensome government evaluations of experiments--even in the face of compelling evidence of the near-impossibility that a benign organism would be transformed into a pest. Such an outcome would be as likely as making the family cat a man-eater by giving it a single gene from a lion. Field trials of regulated organisms or even the simple act of transporting them from one university to another now face a federal permitting process that involves comprehensive, costly environmental assessments. To date, all of the more than 1,800 USDA biotechnology permits have been for organisms of negligible risk--and all have added significantly to the costs of researching and developing new products.
Medley is not alone on USDA’s scientific low road. His disdain for science and his regulatory fervor are shared by other high-ranking USDA officials. One is newly arrived from the Food and Drug Administration where he masterminded for unnecessary requirements on the use of state-of-the-art food-production techniques. The result: The basic tenet of 15 years of successful science-based regulation--that policies should be based on actual risk--was reversed.
Then there is USDA’s Office of Agricultural Biotechnology, careening far outside the scientific and regulatory mainstream. It has a budget of more than $600,000 but no real job to do. Director Alvin Young and his staff commonly target longstanding research categories for which there has never been a perceived need for federal regulation, and then come up with regulations for them.
The problem, as Marxists would say, is with the system, not the people. The self-interest of people in government often causes them to behave in a way that is contrary to the interests of the rest of us. Bureaucrats are rewarded not for doing what is best for consumers--but for commanding larger bureaucracies and budgets.
Glickman, who has never managed anything even remotely the size of USDA, must take on that self-interest and trim back the miscreants. At his confirmation hearings, he should be able to provide not only the broad strokes, but also the fine print--and the committee should demand to see it.
