What have been some of the effects of regulating GMO crops?
I have watched the development of GM crops for the past ten years, and have general knowledge about the regulations and what they have meant to producers in the United States. I do not have direct knowledge about compliance rates, international legal aspects of GMO regulation, or other things that you may need to ask others about. The introduction of GM crops and the imposition of novel regulations brought two sets of issues to crop producers in the U.S. First, there was the imposition of a set of novel rules relating to how these crops (maize, in particular, but now cotton as well) must be planted and managed to slow the development of insect resistance to the biotech products they contained. The product so regulated was the plant-produced insecticide made in GM plants by the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene, for control of lepidopteran (now including coleopteran) insect pests. This rule was imposed by the US EPA as a condition for allowing registration of the GM crops. The EPA does n
