Full article available from the Frasier Institute here.
The first Earth Day celebration, conceived by then-US Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), was held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a consciousness-raising experience organized, appropriately, at the grassroots level. Now, however, Earth Day offers little more than an opportunity for environmental alarmists to gain media attention, dispense anti-technology tirades, and pressure government regulators for more stringent regulation.
Government officials have been only too glad to oblige, often citing “public concerns” as the reason for “precautionary” regulation. The new biotechnology—also known as gene-splicing or genetic modification (GM)—offers a good example. For over two decades regulators around the world have crafted a patchwork of misguided rules and regulations specific to the most precise and predictable techniques of biotechnology. Their risk-averse, precautionary approach conflicts with the widely held scientific consensus that the new biotechnology is an extension, or refinement, of less precise technologies long used for similar purposes: except for wild berries, all of the grains, fruits, and vegetables in Canadian, American, and European diets are derived from plants genetically improved by one technique or another.
Regulatory regimes specific to gene-splicing have sharply inflated the costs of research and development and inhibited its application to many classes of agricultural products, including those—such as plants that grow with less water and smaller amounts of agricultural chemicals, and that promote no-till farming—that are extraordinarily environment-friendly.
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