Plant made pharmaceuticals bill aims to make Texas first (April. 2003).

by Dara Pollicoff

Consumers Union is working in support of a bill that would make Texas the first state in the nation to ban the use of genetic engineering of food crops to produce pharmaceutical products.

The measure -- HB 3387 by Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth -- would prohibit the use of food crops for the genetic engineering of drugs, industrial chemicals and other non-food materials into crops or livestock normally used as food or animal feed. The House Agriculture and Livestock Committee heard the bill in April and left it pending. However, Chairman Rick Hardcastle, R-Vernon, indicated the issue may be subjected to an interim study.

CU and other supporters of the legislation hope to make Texas a public safety leader in dealing with this quickly evolving technology and help channel the technology of Pharmaceutical-Made-Plants (PMP's) in the right direction.

"It's only going to take one incident to destroy confidence in the product and in the system," Reggie James, director of Consumers Union's Southwest Regional Office, told committee members. "It's not a matter of 'if' something will happen, it's a matter of 'when' something will happen."

Frito-Lay weighs in

Proper safeguards must be in place to protect not only the public, but the industry as well. "We have all the regulation we want but regulation is not going to stop an error," said Dr. Robert Drotman, an executive of Frito-Lay North America and chair of the National Food Processors Association's regulatory arm. "We strongly feel that U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations may not go far enough to protect the food supply from the possibility of inadvertent contamination. We need an absolute 100% assurance that the food supply will not become subject to the presence of medical biologics or industrial chemicals that are not intended to be in foods."

Two separate corn contamination incidents in Iowa and Nebraska demonstrate the potential danger of a promising technology lacking proper regulatory oversight. In Nebraska, a silo of soybean seeds was quarantined after being contaminated with corn engineered with a vaccine meant for hogs. In Iowa, 155 acres of corn were destroyed when pollen from pharmaceutical corn may have contaminated non-pharmaceutical corn growing in a field nearby.

Companies like Frito Lay that utilize corn products could suffer serious repercussions from incidents like these including product recalls, massive testing programs, product reformulations, lost sales, and brand name and category harm.

James noted that the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world. "I think it would be a shame to jeopardize people's perceptions of the food supply if something dangerous were to happen," he said. "When consumers buy food, they expect to buy food. When they buy medicine, they expect to buy medicine."

100 percent assurance

Because of potential risks of genetic engineering based drug development technologies, consumers may never get the opportunity to reap the therapeutic and low cost benefits of these plant manufactured pharmaceuticals. "The risk introduced into the food chain by having processed pharmaceuticals in food crops…by law, by practice, by common sense should never enter the food supply," said James. Advocates want 100 percent assurance that the food supply will not become subject to the presence of medical biologics or industrial chemicals that are not intended to be in foods.

James stressed to the committee that Consumers Union is in favor of plant made pharmaceuticals but noted that food or food products should be left out of the equation. "If something happens, it's going to hurt this technology, too," he said.

The U.S. Department of Health needs to take additional preventative measures to ensure sufficient protection for our food system, such as using pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals in non-food crops in tightly controlled conditions (preferably greenhouses) to reduce health and environmental risks. "I have less confidence in the control of agencies and the political pressures placed on them to do the job," said James. "We're not going to get the level of protection of funding as NASA, and that is a zero defect program. Yet we still have errors in NASA. When an error occurs, there will be catastrophic consequences."

The Grocery Manufacturers of America submitted the following comments to the Federal Drug Administrations in favor of this legislation: "The current U.S. regulatory framework does not inspire confidence among our collective members that these drugs and Chemical crops will remain isolated and confined and not contaminate the food supply."