Agricultural Biotechnology: Overregulated and Underappreciated; The Pursuit of an Integrated Action Plan, Including Regulatory Reform, Will Help the United States and the World Reap Enormous Benefits That Now Are Thwarted‪.‬

The application of recombinant DNA technology, or gene splicing, to agriculture and food production, once highly touted as having huge public health and commercial potential, has been paradoxically disappointing. Although the gains in scientific knowledge have been stunning, commercial returns from two decades of R & D have been meager. Although the cultivation of recombinant DNA-modified crops, first introduced in 1995, now exceeds 100 million acres, and such crops are grown by 7 million farmers in 18 countries, their total cultivation remains but a small fraction of what is possible. Moreover, fully 99 percent of the crops are grown in only six countries--the United States, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, China, and South Africa--and virtually all the worldwide acreage is devoted to only four commodity crops: soybeans, corn, cotton, and canola. Attempts to expand "agbiotech" to additional crops, genetic traits, and countries have met resistance from the public, activists, and governments. The costs in time and money to negotiate regulatory hurdles make it uneconomical to apply molecular biotechnology to any but the most widely grown crops. Even in the best of circumstances--that is, where no bans or moratoriums are in place and products are able to reach the market--R & D costs are prohibitive. In the United States, for example, the costs of performing a field trial of a recombinant plant are 10 to 20 times that of the same trial with a virtually identical plant that was crafted with conventional techniques, and regulatory expenditures to commercialize a plant can run tens of millions dollars more than for a conventionally modified crop. In other words, regulation imposes a huge punitive tax on a superior technology.