Carl Remick wrote:
>
> [Ah, the glories of public-private partnership! From today's NY Times.]
>
> Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a Debacle
>
> By Kurt Eichenwald, Gina Kolata and Melody Petersen
>
> In late 1986, four executives of the Monsanto Company, the leader in
> agricultural biotechnology, paid a visit to Vice President George Bush at
> the White House to make an unusual pitch.
>
> Although the Reagan administration had been championing deregulation across
> multiple industries, Monsanto had a different idea: the company wanted its
> new technology, genetically modified food, to be governed by rules issued in
> Washington — and wanted the White House to champion the idea.
>
> "There were no products at the time," Leonard Guarraia, a former Monsanto
> executive who attended the Bush meeting, recalled in a recent interview.
> "But we bugged him for regulation. We told him that we have to be
> regulated."
>
> Government guidelines, the executives reasoned, would reassure a public that
> was growing skittish about the safety of this radical new science. Without
> such controls, they feared, consumers might become so wary they could doom
> the multibillion-dollar gamble that the industry was taking in its efforts
> to redesign plants using genes from other organisms — including other
> species.
>
> In the weeks and months that followed, the White House complied, working
> behind the scenes to help Monsanto — long a political power with deep
> connections in Washington — get the regulations that it wanted.
>
> It was an outcome that would be repeated, again and again, through three
> administrations. What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto — and,
> by extension, the biotechnology industry — got. If the company's strategy
> demanded regulations, rules favored by the industry were adopted. And when
> the company abruptly decided that it needed to throw off the regulations and
> speed its foods to market, the White House quickly ushered through an
> unusually generous policy of self-policing.
>
> Even longtime Washington hands said that the control this nascent industry
> exerted over its own regulatory destiny — through the Environmental
> Protection Agency, the Agriculture Department and ultimately the Food and
> Drug Administration — was astonishing.
>
> "In this area, the U.S. government agencies have done exactly what big
> agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do," said Dr. Henry
> Miller, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, who was
> responsible for biotechnology issues at the Food and Drug Administration
> from 1979 to 1994.
>
> The outcome, at least according to some fans of the technology? "Food
> biotech is dead," Dr. Miller said. "The potential now is an infinitesimal
> fraction of what most observers had hoped it would be."
>
> [Full text:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/business/25FOOD.html?pagewanted=all]
>
> Carl
>
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