Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
with their environment and the necessity to address current agricultural
practices. So far the safety evaluation of GM products had been con-
ducted without consideration for farmers and growers. Moreover, pro-
ducers claimed that it was their responsibility, their turf, to watch over
such a safety issue, if any. Interestingly enough, a similar claim has always
been made by the nuclear industry, for instance, when asked how it goes
about contracting practices during maintenance outages. Even in heavily
regulated industries, some domains are beyond the reach of regulators.
TheDisseminationIssue,Outcrossing,ComminglingError:
TheHiddenFlawintheSafetyModelofGMProduction
Finally, ten years ago the safety assessment of GMOs was forced to
incorporate the dissemination issue. In Europe, the controversy over
such problems emerged in the mid-1990s, when the Belgian firm, Plant
Genetic System (GPS), sought authorization by the British authority for
its rapeseed, in 1994. It was only then that biovigilance appeared as a
major part of the safety assessment of GMOs.
This rather late emergence is rooted first, as we explained earlier, in
the predominance of molecular biologists in the early stages of the eval-
uation process and second, in the type of experiments that had taken
place up until that point. Furthermore, it seems traditional biomolecu-
lar experts considered that agronomic practices were outside their com-
petency, scope, and mandate. Mostly, they were used to implement-
ing biological containment, that is “pollen proof” tunnels, and limiting
interaction with other fields, as pillars of their safety protection pol-
icy. For small-scale experiments, these protection measures seemed ade-
quate. However, transposing these measures and techniques to large
fields seemed rather unrealistic.
This narrow vision of safety, linked only to the product, with no con-
sideration for its environment nor for the production system involved,
strongly influenced the fate of GM crop growing safety management. In
the early 1990s, market authorizations seemed far away for experts and
their model of reference was still the lab, with its biological containment
