On October 30, the Oregon Biopharm Ad Hoc Committee met for the final time to hash out the final wording of its recommendations. Attached is the Oregonian's newspaper article.

The committee, made up equally of agriculture and public health people, had many spirited discussions and disagreements over the past year on what policies to recommend and what wording to use. Their goal was to come up with consensus recommendations for the governor.

My quick analysis -

Where the committee fell short:

1. It didn't include industrial crops.

2. It didn't take into account environmental harm.

3. It didn't require either the use of only non-food crops and/or restricting growing to the indoors in contained, controlled environments.

4. It felt that the safety of biopharm crops could adequately be determined before clinical trials were held.

Committee recommendations that are steps going forward:

1. The public be involved in the permit approval of any biopharm application.

2. BOTH the director of the Dept. of Agriculture and Dept. of Health have veto power over a permit approval and the state is actively involved in regulating the crops. (If nothing else, every committee member discovered the federal government has done an abysmal job of regulation.) 3. State personnel be given previously confidential information, including genes, drugs, and specific locations of proposed permit plantings.

4. Biopharm companies must be fully insured for growing outdoor food crops.

5. Outdoor growing of biopharm food crops is strongly discouraged.

There are two aspects of the recommendations that must be written into a bill for the 2007 legislature - getting confidential information from APHIS and requiring the biotech companies to pay fees to cover the costs of Oregon regulation. This will take some doing and a lot will depend on how the bill is written, who gets elected governor, and the make-up of the legislature.

Other recommendations can be written into rules without legislation. It hasn't been determined yet when this will take place, but it probably will be following the legislative session. This is every bit as important as the bill.

As always, the devil is in the details. We've come a long way, but we have another full year to go to see how this all pans out.