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Monday, October 04, 2004

From Frankenfood to Frankencrops

there are some jarring points of tension, if not outright contradiction, between widespread planting of biopharm crops and the ongoing expectation of a safe and secure food supply. Biopharming frequently uses corn and other food crops as production vehicles, but these crops are emphatically not food and are not intended for human consumption. Biopharm crops therefore pose “a wholly different order” of environmental and human health risks. Despite the unique risks, biopharm crops have been tested in fields across the country under the same laissez-faire standards used for first-generation GM crops—with minimal and poorly enforced safety precautions based on physical containment. In the last decade, biotech companies and research universities have violated even those minimal safety precautions more than a hundred times. Because many of these open-air field tests of experimental biopharm crops take place in the corn belt, these violations put the food supply at a high risk for contamination.

Contamination of food crops with non-food, biopharm compounds is a serious threat to human safety and could result in rapid dissemination of non-food pharmaceutical or industrial compounds through the world food supply. There is no room for trial and error. Once contamination occurs it will be next to impossible to “uncontaminate” the food supply. Unfortunately, important safety issues have been sidelined in order to facilitate rapid growth of this nascent industry. First and foremost, there are readily available and far safer alternatives that could be used instead of food crops for biopharm production. But, because market forces diverge from the public’s interest on this point, those safer options have not been pursued. Without government action forcing innovation towards achieving public health ends, it is clear that these options will remain unexplored. At the very least, there should be a moratorium on field testing these crops until a host of health-related questions are answered.

Unfortunately, under the United States’ fractured regulatory system there is no way even to pose these questions with regard to biopharm crops, let alone to answer them. Part of the problem is that no regulatory agency has a clear statutory mandate to regulate biopharming. As a result, there are no coherent overarching government policies capable of ensuring that this new technology is safely explored and exploited.

The crisis is on our doorstep. According to some predictions, at least ten percent of United States agricultural lands will be devoted to biopharming by the end of the decade. Thousands of nonedible and potentially harmful compounds may soon be grown in corn fields throughout the country. Without detailed and enforceable standards for responsible use of this new technology, it is inevitable that these biopharm crops will contaminate crops destined for use as human food. The health risks from this consuming these adulterated foods could be serious.

Nevertheless, industry and governmental regulators have failed to impose obvious biological controls that would greatly protect the public’s safety, while still permitting exploitation of this technology. For example, biopharming ought not be done in food crops, or, at the very least, ought not be released into the open environment of an agricultural field (as opposed to being grown in a greenhouse) before basic research has demonstrated that there will be no negative health effects from consuming contaminated foods. Instead of adopting these sensible precautions, regulators have simply assumed that contamination can be avoided through use of physical containment measures. This wildly optimistic assumption is not shared by biopharm developers who admit that biopharm proteins will likely wind up in the food supply. Moreover, physical containment measures have not shown much success in existing GM crops.