The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is responsible for evaluating potential environmental impacts of field tests of genetically engineered crops, either through permit or notification. The permit process requires a risk assessment and an environmental impact assessment before a field test, as well as potentially requiring environmental data from the field trials themselves. However, a study of the data from field trials found that in the vast majority of cases, important ecological issues weren't even addressed. Indeed, it appears that very few quantitative studies were done either prior to obtaining a permit or during the field test itself. We also recommend that EPA develop a plan for assessing the ecological risks of commercial-scale releases.
New legislation is needed in order to prevent undesirable ecological effects.
Such legislation should require actual field data on the probability of gene flow from engineered crops either to non-engineered crops of the same variety or to wild weedy relatives. Furthermore, EPA should be required to look at the effects of engineered plants on non-target organisms. Research in Switzerland, for example, has shown that green lacewing larvae, a major predator of corn pests, were adversely affected when they ate moth larvae that had fed on Bt-corn compared to those fed on nontransgenic corn. Finally, EPA should be mandated to look at the potential ecological effects posed by all genetically engineered organisms, and to require a full health and environmental review for animals, such as transgenic fish, that are not covered at all by the present patchwork of regulations. Michael Hansen is a Research Associate at Consumers Union's Consumer Policy Institute .