Activists, Industry Have Stake in Regulation of Genetically Modified Foods

Mistrust of genetically modified foods is due more to people's lack of faith in the federal regulatory process than to their fear of the crops themselves.

So says Gregory N. Mandel, assistant professor at Albany Law School in Albany, NY. He calls on private industry, activist organizations and representatives of the public to jointly develop guidelines for improving the regulation of genetically engineered products.

Most people lack the ability to assess the quality of competing scientific claims, so they turn to stories about problems with genetic engineering for their views on the topic, he believes.

"This is not surprising," Mandel says. "Scholars have determined that the manner in which people construct reality is based strongly on stories they have heard."

And what they hear about genetic engineering centers on two incidents: StarLink Corn and monarch butterflies.

Genetically modified StarLink corn was approved as animal feed but not for humans, because of fears that it contained proteins that might produce allergic reactions in some people. Some StarLink corn got into the human food supply, however, leading to a recall of more than 300 food products. This happened, Mandel says, because the nation's agricultural system is not equipped to segregate human food crops from animal crops.

"The bottom line was that anyone familiar with the U.S. agricultural system would have recognized that contamination was inevitable, but the StarLink corn nevertheless had been approved."

In the case of the monarch butterflies, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that corn fields planted with Bt crops--one quarter of the nation's 73 million acres of corn--would not significantly harm the insects. That was because there were few milkweed plants near the cornfields and the amount of Bt-pollen that might land on milkweed was below levels toxic to butterflies. Milkweed is the monarch butterfly's favorite food. University studies, however, showed that the Bt-pollen would be enough to kill some monarch butterfly larvae. It seems that the EPA had considered the impact of Bt on the butterflies themselves but not on their larvae.

Mandel points out that regulatory errors are a central feature of many stories about genetically modified products. For that reason, he argues, both private industry and activists for human health and the environment should be able to agree on the need to come up with guidelines for better regulation of the crops.

"This proposal offers all stakeholders potential benefits," he says. "For activists it would mean working to protect their chief areas of concern: human health and the environment. For industry, regulatory advances could help streamline the regulatory process, reduce the risk of future problems and increase public trust in the regulatory system."

An effort to write effective regulations for genetically modified crops will only succeed, Mandel warns, if a third group--the public--is also represented on the panel by trustworthy people without interest in either the private industry or activist camps.

He proposes this "confidence building measure" as a first significant step toward creating trust in the regulatory system for genetically modified foods.

"Public confidence in the regulatory system is critical to the success of the biotechnology industry," he states.

Mandel has written a paper outlining his views titled "Building Confidence through Teamwork on Regulatory Proposals." He also presented his proposal in December at Arizona State University's Genetically Modifed Foods Conference.