Germany's newly elected coalition government, comprising the left-of-center Social Democrat Party (SPD) and the Green Party, has announced its policies. "Science and education politics will play an important role for the new government," claims Edelgard Bulmahn (SPD), the new minister for science and education. However, some observers worry that US perception of the Greens as antibiotechnology, combined with the coalition's hazy announcements regarding biotechnology will damage overseas investor confidence in an industrial sector that the previous German government endeavored to nurture and stimulate over the past few years.

The new agreement between the two partners in the coalition took nearly a month to reach after the German election in September. The agreement clearly states that "education and science are our answers to the challenges of the next century." And during its election campaign, the SPD made it clear it would continue with the biotechnology policies formulated by the outgoing Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and carry on funding such CDU biotechnology research programs as the human and plant genome projects. Bulmahn, keen to continue with competitions as a way of promoting biotechnology growth, also says she wants more contests like the 1996 BioRegio (Nat. Biotechnol. 15:943, 1997), pioneered by Jürgen Rüttgers, the former CDU Minister of Science.

However, some fear that the SPD's Green coalition partners could be detrimental to both Bulmahn's position and Germany's nascent biotechnology industry. "US investors and companies have recently shown some hesitation toward investing in German biotechnology," says Rüdiger Hermann, a lawyer at Gaedertz (a law firm in Frankfurt am Main), and a consultant to a number of German and US biotechnology firms. "The Green Party is often seen by American investors as an environmental organization that boycotts biotechnology and therefore appears to be an unreliable political partner."

Predictably, it is the food and agriculture biotechnology sector, already generally less accepted by the German public than medical biotechnology, that looks as if it will be most affected by the coalition agreement. The new government, which has made a clear distinction between the medical and agricultural applications of biotechnology, has announced that it will increase risk assessments for new biotechnology developments in food and agriculture. "We have to place new emphasis on long-term monitoring of possible risks posed by the introduction of genetically modified crops and foods," says Wolf-Michael Catenhusen, the new parliamentary state secretary at the Ministry of Education and Science (Bulmahn's deputy).

Catenhusen, who was also the chairman of the parliamentary committee that dealt with this issue from 1987 to 1994, does not think increased risk assessments will discourage foreign investors, saying that similar precautions are being taken in other European countries. "Great Britain has just set up a new commission to deal with these risk-assessment issues," he points out.

However, it is not clear how the new assessments in Germany will work, who will be most affected, or whether the standards will be in line with similar USDA regulations. Although he acknowledges that "this kind of research is a task for academia," Catenhusen says that industry cooperation is necessary, but that "we do not want to burden small start-up biotech companies."

Although critical of the ambiguity of the coalition announcement, Hermann thinks that if increased risk assessments become too burdensome, companies will simply conduct biotechnology trials in other countries such as Switzerland, which he says is far more biotechnology-business friendly.

The issue of labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is also somewhat murky. The previous German government passed a new law in the summer allowing labeling of foods that are GMO-free and not made with the aid of modern biotechnology (Nat. Biotechnol. 16:712, 1998). Although companies question aspects of the regulation, such as contamination thresholds, the new government seems intent on implementing the new law as quickly as possible. "We have to take the sensibilities of consumers into account," says Catenhusen. "We do not want to stop GMOs in food, but we do want to provide more scientific information [about them]." However, he is unable to say who will be responsible for providing this information, saying only that "[It] cannot be done by industry alone."

Another fuzzy area is the new government's desire to place more emphasis on ethical issues concerning biotechnology. In June, the CDU government decided to establish a reference center for bioethics in Bonn, similar to the Kennedy Institute in Washington, DC. Although Catenhusen says he favors further research in bioethics, he hesitates in answering questions regarding government funding for this field. "We have to have more discussions with different groups such as the churches or consumer organizations and associations for the disabled," he says evasively.

Hermann thinks this lack of clarity in the new government's policies will concern investors. "If the new government does not want to make potential investors uncertain," he says, "it will need to take a clear stand soon and come up with some hard facts."