Dennis Gonsalves, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center in Hilo, Hawaii, and professor emeritus of plant pathology at Cornell [...] admitted at the WSWS conference that Japan’s regulatory approval process is “tough,” but it is not “political.” Hawaiian papaya growers won Japan’s approval to export papaya there. Japan will begin accepting transgenic papaya this year, Gonsalves said, because the Hawaiians provided all the information and scientific data Japan required.