The worldwide value of the market for agricultural chemicals is about US$40 billion a year. There are undoubtedly conflicts of economic interest behind ongoing public positions and campaigns, which stresses even further that information needs to be made available to society based upon the most reliable scientific evidence.

If national academies of science had played a more prominent role in the risk assessment process prior to the release of transgenic plants, perhaps the biotechnology community would have had more in its hand to show to society.

What, then, is the agenda for the future? The fact that substantial acreage has already been planted to transgenic crops does not mean that science no longer has an important role to play. In fact, its role has grown. We need good science-based rules to monitor and evaluate genetically engineered crops at the commercial level, as much as we needed the biosafety rules developed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1970s.

Some agencies in the US have exercised a practice of deregulating transgenic crops once they become commercial. According to this principle, the commercial release of transgenic plants is treated very much like that of conventional non-transgenic plants. Brazil, however, has taken a different route. I was President of the National Biosafety Commission (which includes 16 leading experts on transgenic crops) for three years. After we decided to release the Roundup Ready soybean (which in fact has not yet happened for legal reasons), we formalized an agenda to monitor commercial plantings of this soybean for five years. We do not expect these beans to harm the environment, but we want to know how their planting effects large areas. If the amount of herbicide used is reduced quantitatively and qualitatively, it is possible that beneficial environmental consequences may be observed.

We will collect soil samples of populations of microorganisms (particularly nitrogen fixing ones and mycorrhiza), to compare those living under this technology to the alternative non-transgenic system. We will monitor the behavior of weeds to see if any new species develop resistance to glyphosate. We will analyze soybean plants for herbicide residue since glyphosate is now used as a post-emergence herbicide. Finally, we will sample insect populations, including pollinators and pests, to see if any anomalous behavior occurs.

Although they have been planted for five years now, Roundup Ready soybeans have never been monitored at the commercial level. The National Biosafety Commission believes that transgenic plants should be monitored at the commercial level and this not yet happened. We believe this is a role that science can play on a case by case basis.

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