Californians are in crisis mode. Is the cause drive-by shootings, tornados, or the mother of all quakes? Worse, much worse: Coffee prices are going through the roof. Starbucks has just raised prices again, pushing the cost of their decaf house blend to $10.65 a pound. And that's likely to be just the beginning.
Coffee futures prices in early June surpassed $3 a pound for the first time since mid-1977 in a market increasingly concerned about the potential for summer frosts in Brazil, the world's largest producer. Severe frosts there in 1994 damaged coffee trees, which generally take at least three years to resume good yields.
Oh, well, just an act of God, with no one to blame, right? Wrong.
High technology might have been able to mitigate frost damage, had U.S. regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency not discouraged R&D 15 years ago on an innovative biotechnology product.
In the early 1980's scientists at the University of California and in industry tried 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 to plants. The scientists sought to produce a variant of the bacterium that lacked the ice-nucleation protein. They reasoned that spraying this variant bacterium (dubbed "ice-minus))) might prevent frost damage by displacing the common ice-promoting kind.
Using very precise biotechnology techniques called recombinant DNA, or "gene splicing," the researchers excised the gene for the ice nucleation protein and planned field tests of the ice-minus bacteria. Government regulations were to pose insurmountable barriers to commercial development, however. The EPA classified as a pesticide the obviously innocuous ice-minus bacteria which were to be tested on small, fenced-off plots of potatoes and strawberries. The EPA 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 convoluted reasoning that could lead EPA to regulate outdoor trash cans as a pesticide because litter is an environmental pest.)
At the time, scientists within and outside the EPA were unanimous about the safety of the test. Nonetheless, the field trial was subjected to an extraordinary, lengthy and burdensome review just because the organism was gene-spliced, something that does not apply to bacteria with identical traits but constructed with older, cruder techniques.
And even after the EPA finally granted its approval for testing in the field, the agency conducted elaborate, intrusive and unnecessary monitoring of the field trials.
The ice-minus bacteria were safe and effective at preventing frost damage in field trials. But further research was discouraged by the combination of onerous government regulation, inflated expense of doing the experiments and the prospect of huge downstream costs of pesticide registration.
The product was never commercialized, one reason that the supply—and therefore, the price—of citrus, berries, coffee and other crops remains a hostage to the vagaries of killing frosts.
These effects of government policies should provide food for thought as you sip that increasingly pricey cup of java.
Henry Miller is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of "Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View."
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