October 13,  2020

US pork council blames FDA for hampering utilisation of gene-editing tool for livestock's benefit

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) has blamed the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) early this month for stalling "the development of an emerging technology with tremendous promise for livestock agriculture, including improved animal care, production efficiency and environmental impact."

The council referred to the gene-editing tool, CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors, whose creators recently received a Nobel Prize award for their work. NPPC suggested that the FDA's  claim of "regulatory jurisdiction over gene edited livestock" has obstructed the utilisation of the technology for the benefit of livestock agriculture.

"The National Pork Producers Council has repeatedly called for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to be granted regulatory oversight of gene edited livestock. The USDA has the right experience and an established regulatory framework for gene edited plants that can easily be extended to livestock," said Howard Roth, president of NPPC.

"The FDA's regulatory land grab has caused American agriculture to fall behind in the global race to develop this technology as countries, such as China, continue to advance its development. The FDA's proposed regulatory framework is unjustifiably cumbersome, slow and prohibitively expensive. (The) Nobel Prize award serves notice: If we don't move oversight of gene edited livestock to the USDA, we will have ceded this promising technology to global competitors at the expense of American jobs and our nation's global agricultural leadership position."

Gene editing accelerates genetic improvement that would occur naturally over time by making changes to an animal's own genome, the NPPC said.

- NPPC