Summit Assesses Risks Linked to Biotech Gains

Prospecting, piracy, private eyes: The buzzwords negotiators are using at an international summit this week suggest intrigue and danger. Even the meeting’s backdrop--the exotic old Caribbean pirate port of Cartagena, Colombia--adds to the atmosphere.

But instead of weapons or precious metals, experts from 174 nations are debating how to regulate trade in gene-engineered potatoes, cotton, grains and trees.

The United Nations-backed summit represents the first global attempt to reduce the risks that laboratory-designed species might pose to public health and to the environment.

For 20 years, biotech companies have been genetically manipulating plants and animals to make them more attractive--redder, juicier tomatoes, for example--speed their growth or make them more resistant to disease.

These new combinations could increase the food supply and reduce the need for hazardous farm chemicals. But opponents fear the unintended consequences of messing with nature.

One fear is that genes inserted in crops to give them certain favorable traits--resistance to herbicides, for example--might jump to surrounding wild plants. Some weeds have already become impervious to weedkillers in this way.

These plants, animals and microbes are commercial products as much as they are life forms, and the rights are tightly held by a small and shrinking group of multinational companies. Policing these rights is also on the agenda at the conference.

Biotech industry leaders contend their products are already subject to stringent safety standards.

The United States is taking part in the summit but cannot vote on the protocol, because the Senate has not ratified the U.N.-sponsored biodiversity agreement negotiated in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.