This is a very revealing article. Usually, GM lobbyists want us all to believe that the onward march of GM crops across the globe is utterly inevitable. The leading biotech lobbyists who wrote this piece tell a very different story. They describe an atrophying industry sunk in a "public policy miasma" that's "severe, worsening, and seemingly intractable."

The lobbyists are Greg Conko, of the Monsanto-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute - a co-founder of CS Prakash's AgBioWorld, and Henry I Miller of the Hoover Institution, who's also an 'adjunct scholar' at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a director of the pro-industry American Council on Science and Health and a director of the equally pro-industry Consumer Alert. Miller was also part of the pro-GM/anti-organic 'No More Scares' group with Michael Fumento (now in trouble over monies from Monsanto) and Steven Milloy (a former Monsanto-employed lobbyist). Oh yes, and Miller was once an official at the Food and Drug Administration in a number of posts involved with biotechnology.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=84

While most people regard GMOs as massively over-hyped and seriously under-regulated, largely thanks to the efforts of the biotech industry and their US government backers. Conko and Miller see it exactly contrariwise - GM crops for them are "Overregulated and Underappreciated" and for them it's the GM companies and the US authorities who are to blame for all the unnecessary red tape.

Despite this bizarre starting point, Miller and Conko give - from their outrageously contrarian perspective - a more honest account than usual of how the biotech industry is running into the sand. Here's the part of their article that went out on CS Prakash's AgBioView.
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From AgBioView November 10 2006

Agricultural Biotechnology: Overregulated and Underappreciated Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko, Issues in Science & Technology (Winter 2005), Excerpt below. Full article at http://www.issues.org/21.2/miller.html

Curiously, instead of steadfastly demanding scientifically sound, risk-based regulation, some corporations have risked their own long-term best interests, as well as those of consumers, by lobbying for excessive and discriminatory government regulation in order to gain short-term advantages. From the earliest stages of the agbiotech industry, those firms hoped that superfluous regulation would act as a type of government stamp of approval for their products, and they knew that the time and expense engendered by overregulation would also act as a barrier to market entry by smaller competitors.

Those companies, which include Monsanto, DuPont-owned Pioneer Hi-Bred, and Ciba-Geigy (now reorganized as Syngenta), still seem not to understand the ripple effect of overly restrictive regulations that are based on, and reinforce, the false premise that there is something uniquely worrisome and risky about the use of recombinant DNA techniques.

The consequences of this unwise, unwarranted regulatory policy are not subtle. Consider, for example, a recent decision by Harvest Plus, an alliance of public-sector and charitable organizations devoted to producing and disseminating staple crops rich in such micronutrients as iron, zinc, and vitamin A. According to its director, the group has decided that although it will continue to investigate the potential for biotechnology to raise the level of nutrients in target crops above what can be accomplished with conventional breeding, "there is no plan for Harvest Plus to disseminate [gene-spliced] crops, because of the high and difficult-to-predict costs of meeting regulatory requirements in countries where laws are already in place, and because many countries as yet do not have regulatory structures."

And in May 2004, Monsanto announced that it was shelving plans to sell a recombinant DNA-modified wheat variety, attributing the decision to changed market conditions. However, that decision was forced on the company by the reluctance of farmers to plant the variety and of food processors to use it as an ingredient: factors that are directly related to the discriminatory overregulation of the new biotechnology in important export markets.

Monsanto also announced in May that it has abandoned plans to introduce its recombinant canola into Australia, after concerns about exportability led several Australian states to ban commercial planting and, in some cases, even field trials.

Other companies have explicitly acknowledged giving up plans to work on certain agbiotech applications because of excessive regulations. After receiving tentative approval in spring 2004 from the British government for commercial cultivation of a recombinant maize variety, Bayer CropScience decided not to sell it because the imposition of additional regulatory hurdles would delay commercialization for several more years.

And in June 2004, Bayer followed Monsanto's lead in suspending plans to commercialize its gene-spliced canola in Australia until its state governments "provide clear and consistent guidelines for a path forward."

Another manifestation of the unfavorable and costly regulatory milieu is the sharp decline in efforts to apply recombinant DNA technology to fruits and vegetables, the markets for which are minuscule compared to crops such as corn and soybeans.

Consequently, the number of field trials in the United States involving gene-spliced horticulture crops plunged from approximately 120 in 1999 to about 20 in 2003.

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