Congress bullish on ag biotech

A congressional report to be released Thursday afternoon concludes that foods derived from biotechnology are safe and that "much of the opposition to agricultural biotechnology is politically motivated, not scientifically based." The report will be released by Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Science Committee's subcommittee on basic research, and is based on three subcommittee hearings.

The report strongly endorses the basic tenet of U.S. biotech regulation - that regulation should be based on the risks posed by products, not on the technology used to produce them - and criticizes the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture for failing to strictly adhere to this principle. The report is critical of USDA plant pest regulations and proposed EPA plant pesticide regulations "that target selectively plants produced using biotechnology and apply substantive regulatory requirements to early stages of plant research and development." It states that these regulations "add greatly to the cost of developing new biotech plant varieties, harming both an emerging industry and the largely publicly-funded research base upon which it depends." The report calls on the agencies to revise the rules in ways that do not apply different requirements to plants derived from biotechnology or conventional breeding processes. ...