When he finally became President in 1988, Bush and his Vice
President Dan Quayle moved swiftly to implement an agenda giving
unregulated free-rein to Monsanto and other major GMO com-panies. Bush decided it was time to make public the regulatory
framework which he had negotiated a few years earlier behind
closed doors.
Vice President Quayle, as head of Bush's Council on
Competitiveness, announced that "biotech products will receive
the same oversight as other products:' and "not be hampered by
unnecessary regulation."l On May 26, 1992, Vice President Dan
Quayle proclaimed the Bush administration's new policy on bio-engineered food.
"The reforms we announce today will speed up and simplify
the process of bringing better agricultural products, developed
through biotech, to consumers, food processors and farmers,"
Mr. Quayle told executives and reporters. "We will ensure that
biotech products will receive the same oversight as other products,
instead of being hampered by unnecessary regulation:'2 Pandora's
Box had been opened by the Bush-Quayle Administration.
Indeed, not one single new regulatory law governing biotech or
GMO products was passed then or later, despite repeated efforts
by concerned Congressmen that such laws were urgently needed to
regulate unknown risks and possible health dangers from the
genetic engineering of foods.
The framework that Bush put in place was simple. In line with the
expressed wishes of the biotech industry, the US Government would
regard genetic engineering of plants and foods or animals as merely
a simple extension of traditional animal or plant breeding.
Further clearing the path for Monsanto and company, the Bush
Administration decided that traditional agencies, such as the US
Department of Agriculture, the EPA, the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
were competent to evaluate the risks of GMO products.3 They
determined that no special agency was needed to oversee the rev-olutionary new field. Furthermore, the responsibilities for the four
different agencies were kept intentionally vague.