Article
from
Journal of Risk Research
Introduction
The trans-Atlantic controversy that erupted in 1999 between proponents and opponents of genetically modified (GM) crops has been framed in sharply dualistic terms more appropriate to a Manichean than a modernist worldview: as a conflict between enlightenment and reaction, rationality and superstition, science and ignorance, trust and skepticism, free trade and protectionism. In their essay on GM crops in the European Union (EU), Levidow, Carr and Wield offer a welcome move away from such stark oppositions. Looking back upon the regulatory conflicts over GM crops in Europe, they suggest that we should regard the EU''s precautionary approach not as unscientific obstructionism but as a framework for learning in the face of uncertainty. Policy innovations that have arguably enhanced the environment for learning in the EU include market-stage precautions, reorganization of expert committees, and labelling proposals.
These measures, the authors observe, have altered the relationship between regulation and commercialization. Instead of providing a once-for-all green light for bringing products to market, as in the classic command-and-control model of regulation, precaution creates a series of negotiated steps with specific hurdles to be overcome at each stage. Commercialization thus becomes, in the precautionary framework, an evolutionary process rather than a single defining moment. Equally important perhaps, the responsibility for certifying the technology as ''safe'' becomes more decentralized, not only in time, but also, potentially, across a wider range of protagonists possessing different relevant knowledges.
This interpretation of the precautionary approach suggests a useful way to redraw the terms of debate between the United States and Europe with regard to GM crops. Unlike Europe, the US opted as early as the mid-1980s to regulate these products on the basis of risks defined in straightforwardly biophysical terms. Regulators concluded in most cases that GM crops posed no risks substantially different in kind from nonGM crops, and hence that there was no need for special restrictions on marketing them. Historically, this approach produced a more permissive environment for the introduction of GM crops and aroused relatively, little public concern, but that state of affairs seems likely to change as US consumers become increasingly sensitized to the multitude of questions surrounding agricultural biotechnology. As the pros and cons of GM crops are discussed anew in both the US and Europe, there is an unlooked-for opportunity to replace political posturing with analysis, and to compare in earnest how effectively the risk-based and precautionary approaches delineate and cope with problems of uncertainty. We can ask whether these two frameworks represent radically divergent philosophies of control, or whether there are complementarities between them that can be exploited to enhance democratic supervision of biotechnology.
It is worth recalling, to begin with, that US risk-based regulation was itself the result of a much-needed precautionary turn in environmental policy during the 1960s. Before that time, both common law and statutory obligations focused primarily on mitigating demonstrable environmental damage or, at best, preventing harm that was deemed ''imminent'' (Jasanoff, 1995a). By the 1970s, both courts and legislatures agreed that environmental action should not have to wait until science had provided uncontested proof that harm would occur. Indeed, evidence accumulated that, in high-stakes policy arenas, consensus over science would not develop until underlying normative conflicts (for example, over the appropriate standard of proof) were satisfactorily resolved. Risk rather than harm became the trigger for policy interventions; formal, largely quantitative methodologies were devised to assess risks from a wide variety of hazardous industrial activities.
Throughout the 1970s, the US generally stayed ahead of European nations in identifying and controlling environmental pollutants, both old and new, on the basis of quantitative risk assessments. In the process, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) earned a reputation for too much caution, leading to alleged over-regulation (Landy et al., 1990; Breyer, 1993). How, then, did Europe emerge as the regulatory culture that is more conspicuously worried about the uncertainties surrounding GM crops - indeed, as the place where the very need for this new technology is under challenge?
