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The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is to set up a biotechnology advisory committee made up of scientists, farmers, industry groups, environmentalists and members of the public. The move has been made partly in the hope that it may head off the kind of controversy over genetically modified (GM) foods that has raged recently in Europe.

Glickman: ‘let's win over our opponents’. Credit: AP/BRIAN HENDRICKSON

The department plans to begin soliciting nominations for members this week. The agriculture secretary, Dan Glickman, who announced the new committee in March, will select 25 people representing a range of viewpoints. According to Michael Schechtman of the USDA, who will be the panel's executive secretary, the committee will be expected to meet a maximum of four times a year.

Environmentalists have praised USDA's new willingness to listen to public concern about agricultural biotechnology. While cautioning that the committee's goals are “still a little unclear”, Rebecca Goldburg of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York says that it represents “a real change”.

“I think Glickman has been gaining an understanding that he and industry cannot talk this problem away,” says Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists. USDA, along with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration, has regulatory responsibility for GM foods.

Glickman appears to have backed away recently from what some have characterized as unabashed ‘boosterism’ about GM crops. “We can't force these new genetically engineered food products down consumers’ throats,” he said in April at a commencement ceremony at Purdue University, Indiana. “Dismissing the scepticism that's out there is not only arrogant, it's also a bad business strategy,” he added.

Regarding the decision by some British supermarket chains to ban GM foods, the secretary said that such organizations needed “a little bit of educating, but I don't think we can just sit here and berate them”.

He struck a similar tone before the World Agricultural Congress in St Louis in May, saying: “Americans are more willing to see science as a force for progress⃛ while Europeans may be more cautious, more concerned perhaps about even the theoretical possibility of risk.”

But the USDA panel's membership may be contentious, if a recent fight over the composition of a National Academy of Sciences committee on pesticide-resistant GM plants is an indication of how polarized the debate has become (see Nature 399, 7; 1999).

Attempts to bring all the ‘stakeholders’ around the same table can backfire badly, as in the case of a 50-member panel formed by the EPA, at the request of the vice-president, Al Gore, to discuss pesticides in food. In April, seven environmental groups walked out of the Tolerance Reassessment Advisory Committee, claiming that it was dominated by agricultural and chemical interests.

The EPA is holding public meetings this summer to discuss pest-resistance management plans for GM crops.

But there has been little progress on a proposal to raise GM crops as a trade issue at a meeting of G8 nations this summer, which some in Congress have been pushing (Nature 399, 287; 1999).