Measuring the Costs of Biosafety Regulation and the Potential Impacts on

The regulatory approval process for new biotech crop varieties is said to be unduly slow and expensive, presenting important barriers to development of new cropping technologies. To date, however, the private and social costs have not been analyzed or measured, let alone compared to alternatives. This paper reports initial findings from our research on the costs of regulatory compliance for biotech crops. We describe and document the regulatory requirements, and we provide estimates of representative compliance costs for key biotechnologies based on confidential data supplied by several major biotech companies