Promise of Agriculture Biotechnology Withering

"The biotechnology industry and its supporters have long proclaimed all the great things that genetically engineered (GE) crops will do for agriculture, consumers, and the environment in America and around the world. The first generation of products developed and commercialized in the 1990s have, in fact, been commercially successful in the United States and several other countries. Those GE crops – primarily insect-resistant corn and cotton and herbicide-tolerant corn, cotton, soybeans, and canola – have been found safe to humans and the environment. Indeed, they have benefitted the environment and farmers and have been widely adopted by farmers. However, the promise of additional benefits has not been realized. The “second generation” of crops, such as ones engineered to be salt-tolerant or to have enhanced nutritional qualities have still not gotten beyond the laboratory. Is agricultural biotechnology a growth industry with a steady stream of new products or one limited to marketing a few hugevolume commodity crops with narrow agronomic benefits?"

So states the executive summary of this report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest that analyzed existing publicly available regulatory information to determine whether development of new biotech products has been increasing, decreasing or remaining constant. CSPI also assessed how long it takes two federal regulatory agencies to complete their review of biotech crops so those products can be commercialized. The report continues:

"The study found that the number of biotech crops going through the regulatory review process decreased sharply between the last five years of the 1990s and the first five years of the 21st century. Furthermore, the products that the government reviewed between 2000 and 2004 were not “novel” because they involved engineering crops with the same or similar genes that were commercialized in the 1990s. Also, while the number of products to be reviewed by federal regulators declined by two thirds between 2000 and 2004, the time it took to receive a regulatory clearance doubled. Those unexplained trends should worry those who believe that agricultural biotechnology can be used safely and can benefit farmers, consumers, and the environment in the United States, other developed countries, and in developing countries. Public discourse is needed to understand what factors account for the trends and whether and how they can be reversed."