Global planting of biotech crops grew 8 percent last year, to a record high of 395 million total acres, according to the latest report from Clive James at the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). Despite the many regulatory hurdles that governments around the world have erected to the approval and adoption of biotech crop varieties, when farmers have the opportunity to plant them, they do. Last year, more than 16 and a half million farmers grew biotech crops in 29 different countries.
What’s particularly noteworthy is that, while activists try to portray biotechnology as a rich industrial world tool, the bulk of recent growth in biotech crop adoption has come among relatively resource-poor farmers in less developed and newly industrialized countries. The United States has, since the first biotech crop introductions back in the early 1990s, grown the largest number of acreage planted with biotech varieties. But, while annual acreage increases in countries like the U.S. and Canada is starting to flatten a bit, the most robust growth has come from Brazil, India, and China. LDCs and NICs now grow about half of the world’s total biotech crop acreage. In China alone, roughly 7 million poor farmers grow biotech crops on an average of just one and a quarter acres.
On a related note, in this short video, former Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter discusses the role that advanced technologies have played in making U.S. agriculture a vibrant and productive contributor to the global economy.
I didn’t have a chance to write about it then, but a few weeks back the Food and Drug Administration denied a citizen petition submitted by environmental activists asking the agency to forbid the “sub-therapeutic” use of certain antibiotics in food animals. The petition — initially filed in 2005, and fundamentally identical to one submitted in 1999 and rejected in 2001 — argued that using antibiotics for growth promotion, rather than to treat infected animals, contributes to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten human health.
The issue is a complicated one, with serious implications for medical treatment and consumer well-being more broadly. We know that development by human pathogens of resistance to medically important antibiotics poses serious public health concerns. And, although a clear link between animal antibiotics use and human disease has not been proven, there are good theoretical reasons to believe, and some real world evidence suggesting, that it does — or at least could — occur.
Nevertheless, I would still argue that FDA made the right call, but for an incomplete reason. In response to both the 1999 and 2005 petitions, the agency essentially said that going through the formal legal process to revoke the approvals for a drug is intensive, time consuming, and a poor use of FDA resources. And because the agency already monitors the development of resistance and has both nominally voluntary and explicitly mandatory programs in place to restrict uses that may pose realistic threats to human health, FDA argued that beginning the revocation process isn’t worth it.
I would further argue, though, that the agency simply does not have sufficient information on which to base a decision to revoke the approvals in question, but that it should begin a less formal investigation to shed some light on the matter. The agency has never before compared the risks that arise from animal antibiotics uses to those that would arise from restricting them. But doing so should be mandatory before any bans or further restrictions are put in place.
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Regulatory war has been waged against another job-creating sector of the American economy. The U.S. Department of Labor has set forth new proposals restricting children under the age of 16 that are not children of the farmers from working in the agriculture industry. Should the DOL really be confident enough with the reduced unemployment rate from 9 percent to 8.6 percent to comfortably cut job opportunities for the prospective future farmers of America?
Current labor laws allow children under 16 to work when they aren’t in school. Children of farmers may be employed by their parents at any age at any time in any occupation on a farm owned or operated by their parents. But many children work on farms that are either owned by a grandparent, uncle or aunt. Also, if parents do not have full ownership of the property on which they farm, the exemption would not apply. Many agricultural producers also lease land to graze cattle or to harvest more acres. This being a common practice for family farms, it would be unreasonable and inefficient for children to be able to work on certain acres that are owned by the family and not be able to work on others that are leased by the family.
Jobs are being yanked out of young Americans’ hands that are ready and willing to work. These new proposals hinder a child under the age of 16 from participating in most agricultural activities that are essential in modern agriculture. They are restricted from working in pesticide handling, timber operations, manure pits, and storage bins, or working on ladders that are over six feet high. They are prohibited from handling “power-driven equipment” and operating tractors. Youths would be banned from being hired to brand, vaccinate, castrate, or treat animals, as well as herd animals on horseback. Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg, Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, states:
Hiring a neighbor, nephew, or niece to help with branding is a common practice on ranches and provides valuable experience to learn animal behavior and understand at a young age how to safely deal with livestock. Additionally, any youth wanting to see veterinary medicine in practice would be prevented from doing so under this proposal, including a veterinarian’s own children accompanying him or her to a farm or ranch. As with other sections in this proposal, this would discourage young people from taking an interest in ranching and veterinary medicine, and would be detrimental to the future to those industries.
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The infamous “secret farm bill,” negotiated by the leadership of the agriculture committees with little transparency and discussion, will not pass as part of the debt-reduction “supercommittee” recommendations, since discussions between Democrats and Republicans in the committee broke down. This means that the covert farm bill will not enjoy fast-track approval in Congress.
Now the new farm bill negotiations will be made public, and the new bill, expected to be based on the “secret” one, will probably face stiff opposition from both Republicans and Democrats. The contents of that farm bill, negotiated by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), are still a mystery. They did not release the full details of their negotiations, even to their own committee members.
The Hill reported that the secret bill eliminated lump sum direct payments to farmers (which in some cases meant that farmers who didn’t produce agricultural goods still received them) and replaced them with a “revenue based supplement to traditional crop insurance.” This type of insurance system would reduce the cost of farm bill programs when prices are sufficiently high. However, if prices fall below a certain threshold, taxpayers will pay for this insurance and costs can rise significantly. Ultimately, this program amounts to a privatization of gains (if prices are good, farmers keep all profits) and a socialization of losses (if crop prices are low, taxpayers are on the hook for federal insurance).
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The Hill reports that a new “secret Farm Bill” will be included with the super committee’s debt deal. As The Hill points out, legislators are “using the super committee to avoid what would be a more public, election-year debate in 2012, when the current farm bill expires and new legislation would be scheduled for writing.”
As mentioned on OpenMarket before, this presents a big moral hazard problem. Legislators are using the secrecy and lack of accountability present in super committee deliberations and adding legislation beneficial only to narrow sectors of the economy. In the farm bill’s case, the super committee asked members of the Agriculture Committee to come up with $23 billion in cuts by November 1, and although the deadline has passed, the Agriculture Committee is still working on the proposal. Beyond these details, information is difficult to obtain.
Under “normal” farm bill negotiations, input from farmers, communities and advocacy groups would be accounted for, and negotiations would be made public. With the super committee, the bill is being negotiated behind closed doors, and would be passed as part of the debt reduction deal, not as a stand-alone bill.
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Twenty-nine years ago tomorrow, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Eli Lilly’s and Genentech’s Humulin, making it the first ever fully approved product of recombinant DNA, or what we now call modern molecular biotechnology. Humulin was the first biosynthetic human insulin, produced by splicing the human gene that codes for insulin production into a harmless microbe. Previously, diabetics who needed supplemental insulin used bovine or porcine insulin that was purified from the pancreases of cows and pigs. They worked reasonably well, but were not perfect analogues of human insulin. With the introduction of Humulin they could now take actual human insulin, which improved the treatment’s safety and efficacy.
According to The New York Times, my friend and colleague “Dr. Henry Miller, the medical officer in charge of Humulin at the F.D.A., said the development was a major step forward in the ”scientific and commercial viability of’” recombinant DNA techniques. ”We have now come of age,” Dr. Miller said.”
Since 1982, biotechnology has revolutionized the practice of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. Over the past 29 years, some 200 or so biotech medicines have been approved in the United States, with roughly 900 more now being developed to treat more than 100 diseases ranging from cancers and infectious diseases to autoimmune disorders and cardiovascular diseases.
Unfortunately, while food biotechnology has the same potential, it has not fared nearly as well. A broad scientific consensus has concluded that rDNA technology (known variously as gene splicing, genetic engineering, and genetic modification) is merely an extension, or refinement, of less-precise breeding techniques that scientists have long used for similar purposes, but it’s use has been hobbled by vast over-regulation in the U.S. and around the world — a phenomenon I have written about at length elsewhere. So, let’s celebrate the tremendous success of the medical biotechnology industry, but let us not forget how government has nearly strangled food biotechnology in its crib.
Recently, ActionAid USA and CEI filed a correction request under the Data Quality Act targeting misleading claims made by the EPA regarding the effects of ethanol mandates and subsidies, claims that have obscured how government policies have contributed to world hunger, malnutrition, disease, and death. This legal request, which was filed shortly before World Food Day, can be found here.
According to one recent study, ethanol diversion to fuel has caused nearly 200,000 excess deaths annually. Marie Brill, Senior Policy Analyst at ActionAid USA, stated: “High and volatile prices are already causing misery. The real price of a typical global food basket is up nearly 50% over the last year. With poor people in developing countries spending between 50-80% of their income on food, it is no surprise that 44 million people fell into extreme poverty from June 2010-February 2011 because of high food prices. The big surprise is that the EPA still fails to acknowledge the human impact of the Renewable Fuel Standard and still refuses to cite the plethora of reports that reveal the significant role of biofuels in global food price volatility.” According to Sam Kazman, CEI general counsel: “EPA’s refusal to address this issue has gone on long enough, and there isn’t a more appropriate time for the agency to change its approach than in the wake of World Food Day.”
A couple of days ago, Talking Points Memo’s Jim Kozubek reported that the Food and Drug Administration had finally decided to approve AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon for human consumption, and that the “evaluation is now under review at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.” I’d seen the TPM article, but didn’t write about it at the time because premature reports of FDA being on the brink of approval have been filtering out through the media for several years now. (I filmed a TV interview for Fox News’s “Your World With Neil Cavuto” way back in 2005, when it looked like an approval was right around the corner, for example. And I talked about it again on John Stossel’s show last year.) But a friend of mine asked today why an FDA approval decision would have to get a second look from the White House, so I thought that would be worth discussing.
As the TPM article mentions, the AquaBounty salmon has been hugely controversial. Wild Atlantic salmon grow to full adult size in about three years, in part because they only grow six or seven months per year. As water temperatures decline in the late autumn months, a genetic switch turns turns off the gene that produces growth hormone, so the salmon can conserve energy through the winter. Energy conservation isn’t as big a problem for farmed fish, though, because they have easy access to food all year and little exposure to predators. So, AquaBounty engineered Atlantic salmon with a promoter (the genetic switch) from an Arctic fish called the ocean pout, attached to the growth hormone gene from Pacific Chinook salmon. And, voila! The engineered salmon grows year round and reaches normal adult size in about 18 months, lowering the cost of raising them and lowering the price of fish in grocery stores. Here’s the packet of scientific information FDA prepared for its scientific advisory committee last year.
Environmentalists don’t like it, of course. In part because ocean pen-raised farmed fish are known to occasionally escape into the wild, meaning the AquaBounty salmon could theoretically interbreed with wild salmon, with potential impacts on the wild gene pool. And in part because they just don’t like biotechnology. To address the arguably legitimate concerns, the AquaBounty salmon will only be raised in contained, inland pools, not open water pens, and they”ll be farmed only in Panama, where, if they do escape, the ambient water temperatures will be too high for them to survive. AquaBounty also uses two other breeding techniques that, with a 98 percent degree of certainty, produces only female fish that have been rendered infertile. So, even if they were to escape and survive, nearly all of them would be incapable of successfully mating with wild fish. Also, because the AquaBounty fish will be searching for food during the early spring months when wild Atlantic salmon are breeding, it turns out that the engineered fish have an extraordinarily low mating instinct. (Insert ribald, ex-wife joke here.)
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The Environmental Working Group seems to exist for no other reason than to scare consumers away from the products of modern technology — and to advertise on behalf of the organic food and natural products industries. Since 1993, the group has been terrorizing America about everything from apples to the zinc-oxide used in some sunscreens, and practically everything in between. And since 1995, it’s been publishing an annual “Dirty Dozen” list of fruits and vegetables the organization claims have dangerously high levels of pesticides.
When this year’s Dirty Dozen list was published in June, EWG president Ken Cook wrote that:
“Though buying organic is always the best choice, we know that sometimes people do not have access to that produce or cannot afford it.” … “Our guide helps consumers concerned about pesticides to make better choices among conventional produce, and lets them know which fruits and vegetables they may want to buy organic.”
And when last year’s study was published, an EWG press release claimed that “consumers can lower their pesticide consumption by nearly four-fifths by avoiding conventionally grown varieties of the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables.”
The fact of the matter is, the mere presence of a substance doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s present at a dangerous level. Because farmers the world over use pesticides to increase their productivity, there’s going to be trace levels of pesticides in the food we eat. And, frankly, since we don’t live in a Lake Wobegon world, where everything is better than average, some product or another has to measure highest in pesticide residues. Cleverly, EWG rarely says directly that the levels of pesticides they measure are dangerous, but they know they can count on most consumers and the media to infer that conclusion. [click to continue…]
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article highlights another reason why farm subsidies need to be put to rest.
Land prices are way up and so are bank deposits, as high corn and soybean prices mean local farmers are making the most money in their lives. At Sloan Implement, which sells John Deere tractors, “This could be our best year ever,” says chief executive Tom Sloan.
CEI has blogged about the archaic subsidy program before. With the budget crisis looming, Congress had a reason to cut the tax squandering program. It looks like the current economic outlook for the farming industry simply adds fuel to the fire.
What’s the reason for agriculture’s new found fortune?
The global grain markets shifted in 2006 when Washington began to require that the oil industry mix billions of gallons of corn-derived ethanol with gasoline annually. Around the same time, rising numbers of middle-class consumers in emerging economies such as China began seeking more grain-fed meat and milk, boosting demand for soybeans, pork and, most recently, corn from the U.S.
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