During the campaign, President-elect Trump questioned whether certain regulations were sensible, and in its transition to power the new administration is poised to refine or eliminate many of them. The costs and benefits of many regulations are alarmingly unbalanced, and reducing the regulatory burden judiciously could be good news not only for consumers, but also for a number of R&D sectors ….
Plant biotechnology, also known as genetic engineering (the production of “GMOs”), is one.
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…[T]he cost of discovery, development, and regulatory authorization of a new trait introduced via genetic engineering between 2008 and 2012 averaged $136 million…. That is far more than the costs for plants with identical traits but made with inferior genetic techniques.
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While a handful of huge agribusiness companies are able to cope with and have benefitted from excessive regulation, agricultural scientists and smaller companies have become discouraged by the excessively burdensome regulatory costs. The result has been a brake on agricultural innovation….
It is long past time to revise the federal government’s approach to the products of molecular genetic engineering. We need to introduce regimes that are scientifically defensible and risk-based rather than focused on the use of certain techniques. …
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Drain The Regulatory Swamp, Let Agriculture Bloom