20 April 2000

EPA Denies Petition Seeking to Halt Use of Biotech Crops

Says use of Bt crops safe for people and the environment

By Jim Fuller
Washington File Science Writer

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has denied a petition by Greenpeace International and other environmental groups seeking to halt the use of crops genetically engineered to produce the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) -- a toxin that repels many insects.

An EPA spokesman announced that the agency denied the petition on April 19 after affirming the scientific and legal foundation for its current regulatory approach for various Bt plant pesticides registered for use in potatoes, corn and cotton. The plants must be registered under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodentcide Act (FIFRA) before they can be used.

"Before a biotechnology product can be approved, EPA conducts an extensive scientific evaluation to ensure that use of the product will be safe for people and the environment," the spokesman said. "EPA registered Bt plant pesticides for use in varieties of corn, cotton and potatoes in the mid-1990s."

He added that EPA will continue to ensure that sound decisions are made with regard to Bt crops through the use of sound science, an open and transparent process, stakeholder involvement and consultations with other government agencies.

"EPA will continue to review biotechnology products in order to ensure the protection of public health and environment, based on the most rigorous science," he said.

In denying the petition, EPA also responded to a lawsuit filed on February 18, 1999, by Greenpeace, other environmental groups and a coalition of organic farmers asking a U.S. District Court to order the agency to withdraw the pesticide registrations.

In the petition -- filed in September 1997 -- and the lawsuit, Greenpeace and the other parties appealed for EPA to take several actions: to declare that all genetically-engineered plants that express the pesticide Bt cause an unreasonable adverse effect on the environment; to cancel the registrations of the plants made under FIFRA; and not to undertake any new registration procedures for crop plants that express Bt.

The complainants expressed concern that using the pesticide in genetically-altered plants poses environmental risks that will change the ecological balance. They claim that Bt crops will cross-pollinate with neighboring fields and that widespread plantings of the crops will hasten the development of insect resistance to Bt-containing plants and undermine organic farmers who rely on Bt-based sprays as an emergency pest control.

"We can no longer sit idly by," said Joseph Mendelson, legal director for the Center for Food Safety. "EPA has shown a blatant disregard for federal law and its own regulations by approving Bt crops without fully assessing their environmental safety."

An EPA spokesman defended the agency's decision to register Bt crops, saying the agency "carefully makes sure that the biotech products we review fully comply with all legal requirements designed to ensure that they are environmentally sound and environmentally beneficial. We believe the actions we've taken with regard to Bt will be sustained against this legal challenge." The lawsuit is still being adjudicated.

Bt is actually a soil bacterium that produces toxins to kill insects. It has been used for years as a spray by farmers and gardeners who like the fact that it kills insects while remaining nontoxic to mammals. Through genetic engineering, Bt can now be inserted into the DNA of corn and other plants to make them noxious to specific insect pests. DNA, or Deoxyribonucleic Acid, is the molecule that encodes genetic information.

Bt cotton, for example, is genetically engineered to control budworms and bollworms, and Bt corn is engineered to provide protection against the European corn borer -- which causes an estimated $1,000 million a year in damage. The use of Bt cotton and Bt corn allows farmers to till less and use fewer pesticides.

In 1998, Bt corn was planted on as much as 7 million of the nearly 32 million corn hectares in the United States, and Bt cotton was grown on about 1 million hectares of the 5.3 million hectares planted nationwide.

Three separate federal agencies are involved in the regulation of biotech products. While the EPA reviews the safety of pesticidal proteins in these products, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reviews biotech seeds, crops in the field and animals for slaughter, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviews foods produced from crops, animals and fish that are the products of biotech processes.

All foods and processed foods in the United States, including foods from bioengineered plants, have to comply with all the provisions of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, including provisions covering safety and labeling. Under U.S. law, biotech foods are not commercialized unless they meet the same rigorous standards as their traditional counterparts.

According to an EPA spokesman, under the safety guidelines imposed by the regulatory agencies, thousands of field tests have been conducted with genetically engineered crops since the mid-1980s, and there has been no known cases of harm to humans or the environment resulting from the development and use of these plants.