Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
crusade, see Gawande, 2007) and the system design of health care (Gaba,
2000, Roberts, Madsen, & Van Stralen, 2005; Singer et al., 2003; Gaba,
Singer, & Rosen, 2007; Singer et al., 2007) might give ideas to GM
agribusiness.
Plan
In the first section of this chapter, GM crop growing is compared with
more traditional industries concerned historically with safety paradigms.
Is there any parallel to be drawn between GM farming and for exam-
ple the nuclear industry or the chemical industry? A similar attempt
had been made by Fahlbruch, Wilpert, and Vincent (2000) in their dis-
cussion of the transposition of traditional approaches to safety in the
field of medicine. These authors concluded that medicine could import
many safety policies and principles already in place in the nuclear indus-
try or the aviation industry, such as event analysis, systematic reporting
of near misses, comprehensive human factors training for employees of
all ranks and safety culture surveys to determine the level of appropria-
tion of safety principles by the workforce at large. In the context of GM
crop growing, the implementation of safety policies of this kind could for
instance prevent the contamination of conventional crops and minimize
environmental impacts. Also, the design of “safety barriers” (which will
be further detailed in the remainder of the chapter), a classic approach
from the safety science toolbox, might help restore public trust and con-
fidence with regard to the consumer's ability to maintain free choice.
It might also be paramount in limiting liability costs in the event of
contamination.
In a second section, we will present the various properties of the
implicit safety model of GM crop growing. As it is clear from the
various contributions in this volume, early experiments of GM crops
made choices (or refrained from making choices) about safety that have
strongly influenced the framing of safety issues in the context of GM crop
growing.
