USDA to speed up its biotech approval process

The USDA is speeding up the process to get new biotech crops tested and deregulated for use by farmers.

Kevin Shea runs the USDA agency in charge of that process, which has been criticized in the past for being too slow. He told a congressional panel that the backlog for approvals has been rapidly reduced in the last two years.

There were 34 in the queue a couple of years ago, but now, Shea says "there are only six remaining and we're going to get those done, we think, by the end of this fiscal year".

"And so now we have the system in equilibrium-we can handle the amount that come in," he says. "And not only can we handle them, we can handle them quicker. It was taking us three to five years to do these things. We are now down to 15 to 18 months."

And Shea says the goal is to make 15 months the maximum time required for the deregulation process.