Playing God in the Garden - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html?pagewanted=5
Un article de 1998 : la #FDA compte sur la bonne volonté des Monsanto pour évaluer l’innocuité des #OGM, alors que les #Monsanto affirment que leur boulot à eux est de faire du #profit et seulement de faire du profit.
At the F.D.A., I was referred to James Maryanski, who oversees biotech food at the agency. I began by asking him why the F.D.A. didn’t consider Bt a food additive. Under F.D.A. law, any novel substance added to a food must — unless it is ’’generally regarded as safe’’ (’’GRAS,’’ in F.D.A. parlance) — be thoroughly tested and if it changes the product in any way, must be labeled.
’’That’s easy,’’ Maryanski said. ’’Bt is a pesticide, so it’s exempt’’ from F.D.A. regulation. That is, even though a Bt potato is plainly a food, for the purposes of Federal regulation it is not a food but a pesticide and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the E.P.A.
Yet even in the case of those biotech crops over which the F.D.A. does have jurisdiction, I learned that F.D.A. regulation of biotech food has been largely voluntary since 1992 , when Vice President Dan Quayle issued regulatory guidelines for the industry as part of the Bush Administration’s campaign for ’’regulatory relief.’’
(...)
I thought about Maryanski’s candid and wondrous explanations the next time I met Phil Angell [Monsanto’s director of corporate communications], who again cited the critical role of the F.D.A. in assuring Americans that biotech food is safe. But this time he went even further. ’’Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food,’’ he said. ’’Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job.’ ’