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Written by Truth About Trade & Technology
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Thursday, 18 February 2010 02:09 |
Forbes
Henry Miller
February 12, 2010
Forbes
Henry Miller
February 12, 2010
www.forbes.com
Michelle Obama on Tuesday unveiled her "Let’s Move" campaign to control the national epidemic of childhood obesity. It's yet another example of the administration's approach to almost every problem: Get the government to solve it.
Obesity in kids is worrisome. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity affects 12.4% of children ages 2 to 5, 17% of those ages 6 to 11 and 17.6% of those ages 12-19. It takes a toll on the joints and is associated with high blood pressure, abnormal lipid patterns and Type 2 diabetes--risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
The First Lady’s recipe calls for reshaping the diet and exercise habits of American kids--everything from the composition of their school lunches to the measurements their health care professionals take. Conspicuously absent from the initiative are the beneficial effects that could be wrought--at no cost--by minor tweaks of federal regulatory policies.
What kinds of tweaks? For starters, changes that make fresh fruits and vegetables cheaper and more available to greater numbers of consumers. The problem is that federal regulation prevents the kind of innovation that could give us higher yields and lower prices. For more than 20 years USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has imposed unscientific, excessive and hugely expensive field test design for plants crafted with the most precise and predictable techniques of genetic engineering. As a result, field trials with these plants are 10-20 times as expensive as experiments with virtually identical plants modified with conventional techniques; therefore, only a fraction of important plants developed in university and corporate laboratories ever make it into field trials. (And far fewer still make it to the supermarket.)
Moreover, USDA does not permit genetically engineered plants to be used in organic farming. The EPA is even worse. It imposes excessive and unscientific regulation on crop and garden plants genetically engineered with state-of-the-art techniques to enhance pest or disease resistance. The EPA considers such plants to be pesticides and subjects them to even more stringent regulation than the deadly poisons used to kill vermin, viruses or bacteria.
At the same time, plants engineered with less precise and predictable techniques are exempt from EPA review, no matter what danger they may pose to human health or the environment. This EPA policy is so illogical and potentially damaging that 11 major scientific societies representing more than 80,000 biologists and food professionals published an analysis that excoriated the EPA's approach.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/12/weight-obesity-government-health-opinions-contributors-henry-miller.html?partner=email
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