This past January, the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced the deregulation of petunia varieties, designated as A1-DFR, developed using genetic engineering to produce orange flowers. That decision, which determined the A1-DFR petunia variety is unlikely to pose a plant pest risk to agricultural crops or other plants in the U.S., came four years after the petunias from Westhoff Flowers were voluntary removed from commerce.
So what’s the back story behind the process that went into both decisions? A recent op-ed on the Genetic Literacy Project website by Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, attributed much of the problem to bureaucratic red tape.
According to Miller, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute and founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology, none of the hoops these varieties went through “would be required for new varieties of petunias created with less precise, less predictable, conventional (that is, pre-molecular) techniques of genetic modification, as has been done by plant breeders and home gardeners for centuries.”
“Regulators have long acknowledged that there’s no plausible expectation of harm to human health, animals or the environment from the chrysanthemums or petunias,” Miller contends. “They were targeted simply because they were created with highly precise molecular genetic engineering techniques, which requires a permit for their field testing and commercialization.”
Check out Miller’s full article here.