Another ‘Hidden’ Cost of Regulation Becomes Horribly Visible
At least it’s visible to those who know the history of the solution that would have prevented citrus freezes like the one that took place in California during the past week. That solution never came to market, which is why more people need to know the story of what Dr. Henry I. Miller at TCS Daily wrote about last Thursday:
Jack Frost taunted area farmers last week with blasts of arctic air that threatened several of central California’s major farming areas. The direct losses in citrus alone could approach a billion dollars.
Such climatic catastrophes are nothing new. A 1990 freeze in California caused about $800 million in damage to agriculture and resulted in the layoff of 12,000 citrus industry workers, including pickers, packers, harvesters and salespeople. A three-day freeze in 1998 destroyed 85 percent of the state’s citrus crop, a loss valued at $700 million. And in 2002, lettuce prices around the country went through the roof after an unseasonable frost struck the Arizona and California deserts.
Peaches, citrus and other crops are regularly threatened by frost in the Southeastern United States. Losses to American farmers are in the billions of dollars annually.
….. The only possible high-tech solution, a clever application of biotechnology, has been frozen out by federal regulators.
In the early 1980’s scientists at the University of California and in industry devised a new approach to limiting frost damage. They knew that a harmless bacterium which normally lives on many plants contains an “ice nucleation” protein that promotes frost damage. Therefore, they 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 with ice-minus bacteria.
Then the government stepped in, and that was the beginning of the end.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classified as a pesticide the obviously innocuous ice-minus bacterium, which was 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 absurd, convoluted reasoning that could lead EPA to regulate outdoor trash cans as a pesticide because litter is an environmental “pest.”
….. Although the ice-minus bacteria proved safe and effective at preventing frost damage in field trials, 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. As a result, the product was never commercialized, and plants cultivated for food and fiber throughout much of the nation remain vulnerable to frost damage. We have the EPA to thank for farmers’ livelihood in jeopardy, jobs lost, and inflated produce prices for consumers.
When will the EPA re-think its policies? Probably not before hell freezes over.
The nearly $1 billion in losses associated with California’s most recent citrus-freeze, the other events noted above, plus all of the other worthy improvements that would have made it to the market but for nanny-state overzealousness, don’t get included in the tallies that document the cost of government regulation (currently $8,000 annually per household; see UPDATE 2 at link). They should be.
