The EPA's bad orange

By Henry Miller Copyright 1998 Washington Times December 31, 1998

Unwise, unscientific, government regulation causes all kinds of mischief and misery. Literally like a cold blast in the face, that realization came to Californians during Christmas week. Farmers throughout the state were shivering from both fear and the bitter cold after frigid arctic air descended on the state at the beginning of the citrus harvest. A vast acreage of oranges, lemons and other crops is threatened, with the citrus losses amounting to more than $600 million in the first few days.

The techniques available to limit the frost damage are pathetically low-tech. They include burning smudge pots, which produce warm smoke; running wind machines to move the frigid air; and spraying water on the plants to form an insulating coat of ice. The only possible high-tech solution, a clever application of biotechnology, was frozen out by federal regulators.

In the early 1980s scientists at the University of California and in the orange industry tried a new approach to limiting frost damage. They knew that a harmless bacterium which normally lives on many plants contains an "icenucleation" protein that promotes frost damage to plants. (In the presence of the bacterium, therefore, ice forms more readily - that is, at higher temperatures.) The scientists sought to produce a variant of the bacterium that lacked the ice-nucleation protein, reasoning that spraying this variant bacterium (dubbed "ice-minus") on plants might prevent frost damage by displacing the common, ice-promoting kind.

Using very precise biotechnology techniques called "gene splicing," the researchers removed the gene for the ice nucleation protein and planned field tests of the ice-minus bacteria.

Then the government stepped in, and that was the beginning of the end. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classified as a pesticide the obviously innocuous ice-minus bacteria, which were to be tested in northern California on small, fenced-off plots of potatoes and strawberries. The regulators reasoned that the naturally-occurring, ubiquitous, ice-plus bacterium is a "pest" because its ice-nucleation protein promotes ice crystal formation. Therefore, other bacteria intended to displace it would be a "pesticide." This is the kind of convoluted reasoning that could lead EPA to regulate outdoor trash cans as a pesticide because litter is an environmental pest.

At the time, scientists inside and outside the EPA were unanimous about the safety of the test. (As an official at the Food and Drug Administration at the time, I wrote my agency's opinion, which emphasized the high degree of safety and the potential importance of the product). Nonetheless, the field trial was subjected to an extraordinary, lengthy and burdensome review just because the organism was gene-spliced.

It is noteworthy that experiments using bacteria with identical traits but constructed with older, cruder techniques require no governmental review of any kind. (When tested on less than 10 acres, both chemical pesticides and bacteria that aren't gene-spliced are completely exempt from regulation). Nor is the government involved in the use of large numbers of the "ice-plus" organisms in snow-making at ski resorts.

Even after the EPA finally granted its approval for testing the ice-minus microorganisms in the field, the agency conducted elaborate, intrusive and unnecessary monitoring of the field trials.

While the ice-minus bacteria proved safe and effective at preventing frost damage, further research was discouraged by the combination of onerous government regulation, the inflated expense of doing the experiments and the prospect of huge downstream costs of pesticide registration. The product was never commercialized, and plants cultivated for food and fiber throughout much of the nation remain vulnerable to frost damage.

Largely agricultural Tulare County in the Central Valley has lost at least 85 percent of its citrus crop. By Christmas eve, wholesale prices of smaller navel oranges in Los Angeles had quadrupled from two days before. Growers and industry representatives say that the situation in California is even worse than the catastrophic 1990 freeze, which caused about $800 million in damage to agriculture and resulted in the layoff of 12,000 citrus industry workers, including pickers, packers, harvesters and sales people.

The EPA's treatment of the frost-protection organism is a microcosm of how errant, irresponsible regulators wreak misery on average Americans. The pity is that they are seldom held accountable.

Henry Miller is a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View."

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