Nina Federoff, who served as the science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton until 2010, takes on the Obama administration in an Op-Ed that appeared in The New York Times titles, “Engineering Food for All.”
Now a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, Federoff writes that while the Obama administration has made food security a priority, it has enacted excessive regulations on innovation that, in the past, opened the door for the development of fertilizers, pesticides and even seeds that, along with innovations in farm machinery, “all increased the amount of food that can be grown on each acre of land by as much as 10 times in the last 100 years.” She feels that this pace of growth in crop yield must continue in order to feed an ever-growing global population that is, at the same time, demanding more environmentally damaging food products.
Federoff laments how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Agriculture have been empowered to create a “regulatory thicket” that limits innovation on genetically modified crops, which she describes as both relatively harmless and essential to ensuring food security.
Read more about Dr. Federoff’s call for the government to streamline or end regulations that she feels limit innovations that can aid in ensuring food security.
Posted by Michael Lucivero.
