The announcement this week by McCain Foods that its New Brunswick-based plant starting next year will no longer buy genetically altered potatoes brings the genetic-engineering debate to Maine forcefully. McCain’s decision, like many other processors who sell internationally, is, in part, the unexpected result of a legislative shortcut that will cost American farmers plenty in the long run.

Genetic engineering in foods is different from the tinkering that farmers have been doing with crops for millennia: Until recently, the breeding and seed selection done in the name of bigger ears of corn or juicier tomatoes had at least the possibility of taking place in nature. But genetic engineering takes, for instance, that juicy tomato and adds a fish gene to increase its cold tolerance. Or, in the case of potatoes, the engineering inserts a protein that wards off the Colorado potato beetle. You don’t often see that sort of mating in nature.

Food producers argue these significant changes not only are safe, but will result in more and more healthful food. Maybe. But what’s missing is the science to back up the claim. Even Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman conceded earlier this year that the mega tests needed to ensure that the food was safe were wanting. His comments came, interestingly, not because the secretary is a big fan of testing but for the same reason McCain’s made its announcement: The market, particularly in Europe and Asia, has spoken and it is not saying kind things about GE foods. The secretary knows that biotechnology firms must demonstrate that their seeds are safe or suffer large losses in the near future.

Pushing for testing nearly a decade after the engineered foods were introduced may seem like an odd way to do business; it isn’t, however, if you take into account the behavior of the Council on Competitiveness.

The council, begun in the last 1980s by Vice President Dan Quayle, attempted to make life easier for U.S. industry by devising special regulatory relief to some industries, including biotechnology. In 1992, that relief included a policy from the Food and Drug Administration that allowed genetically engineered foods into the marketplace not under the normal standard that required new food additives to be established as safe before being introduced to the public, but to fall under the easier provision of being generally recognized as safe and therefore exempt of pre-market testing.

Turns out that what the industry generally recognized as safe many in the public did not. With protests worldwide, a stack of tests done before the foods were sold would be a handy bit of evidence right now and could calm concerns in this country’s trading partners. No doubt the major manufacturers of genetically engineered foods are doing those tests right now, and, depending on the results, they might help some.

McCain’s cannot be blamed for following the demand of the market. Consumers should be able to feel confident that the food they buy is safe. The shortcut handed out by the FDA in ’92 is turning out to be the long way around for the biotechnology industry.