[Carry_Okie]

I grow a crop of Heirloom vegetables across the road from your GM vegetables. Eventually, my Heirloom vegetables are cross pollinated by your GM vegetables. And eventually the seed from my Heirloom vegetables becomes impotent like your GM vegetables. I don't have options other than acquire higher costs to feed my family.

This is merely an argument pointing out the need for spatial offsets. The supplier and users of the GMO would need to purchase said use by contract as part of the cost associated with deriving the benefit; else said benefit simply isn't worth the cost. That way, differences in terrain and local weather patterns, for example, could be taken into account for how far that pollen would travel and what the containment measures might be with regard to the degree of risk those particular genes may pose.

Look, I'm not new to this argument. I wrote about it in my first book dealing with markets in managing environmental risks. If you think having regulators decide these things justly and efficiently is the way to go, we have a fundamental disagreement because political influence over the latter is easily bought. My point is that the types of modifications would be considerably different if those producing and consuming the product had to interlalize the costs of managing the risks they pose.

[pyx]

If you think having regulators decide these things justly and efficiently is the way to go, we have a fundamental disagreement because political influence over the latter is easily bought.

Let me attempt to be reasonably clear. The VERY LAST people in the world I would want to decide these sorts of things would be regulators.

However, as you yourself have stated, the argument about "spatial offsets" (your term) and the associated cost/benefits as well as who actually pays is, in my opinion, far from settled.