How about this for an additional Millennium Goal: Stop genocide-by-regulation by UN bureaucrats.

Finally, this sort of charade is exceedingly destructive to public sector research and development: Unscientific, overly burdensome regulation has raised costs to levels that "exclude the public sector, the academic community, from using their skills to improve crops," according to Dr. Roger Beachy, the director of the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. In effect, Codex and other UN regulatory initiatives have created a level playing field that is hip-deep in muck, a disadvantage to the best, brightest and richest in the field -- namely, American academics and companies.

The Codex deliberations are also disastrous politically. Unscientific, unduly burdensome Codex standards for biotech foods compromise hopes of World Trade Organization relief from protectionist policies in Europe and elsewhere. Codex standards provide cover for unfair trade practices, because with them in place, a country that wishes to block trade in gene-spliced foods for any reason can defend against charges of unfair trade practices simply by remonstrating that it's deferring to Codex.

So why is the United States going along with this travesty? At a meeting of our delegation, the representatives of USDA, EPA and FDA offered the following rationales: Because virtually every other country has in place irrational, unscientific regulation, we must, too; and anyway, we're really addressing trade, not scientific, issues. Most important, they said, American industry demands that we play along.

It is true that U.S. industry (dozens of whose lobbyists attended the Codex task force meeting, either as part of the U.S. delegation or as independent NGOs) reluctantly endorses the Codex process. Paul Green, from the Washington-based North American Grain Export Grain Association, seemed to represent the consensus of American industry, "We're trying to make the best of a lose-lose situation." But encouraging bad regulation is like eating your seed corn: a short-term expedient, a long-term catastrophe.

As a scientist, policy wonk, former federal regulator and taxpayer, I find the United States's complicity in this corrupt UN-based activity profoundly disturbing. American officials now regularly participate in and encourage these anti-scientific debacles, and the United States provides 22 percent of the base budget of the UN. Moreover, at this Codex task force meeting, U.S. officials tried (with little success, fortunately) to cozy up to their counterparts in the European Community delegation; on regulatory issues, that is tantamount to the Department of Justice collaborating with the Mafia on the implementation of the Federal Witness Protection Program.

John Bolton and Condi Rice take note: Thanks in large part to flawed public policy, agbiotech already is moribund in the U.S. (and international) public sector, little better in industry, and dead and buried in the developing world. It's time to stop the hemorrhaging. The United States should cut off funding and all other assistance to foreign governments, United Nations agencies, and other international bodies that implement, collude, or cooperate in any way with unscientific policies. Flagrantly unscientific regulation should become the "third rail" of American foreign policy.

U.S. government delegates to international bodies such as Codex, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Health Organization, United Nations Environment Program and UNESCO should be directed to defend rational, science-based policies, and to work to dismantle politically motivated, unscientific restrictions.