Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 563

bolstered—rather than competed with—one another, together intensifying its stigma
not only as a product, but also as a process of production and a societal program. This
stigmatization, through which the already institutionalized category of GM food
became more salient, significantly affected how French authorities pursued and further
institutionalized stringent approaches in various aspects of GM food, including food
safety assessment (Sato 2013).
From State Support to the First Opposition
Until the late 1990s, the French government maintained fairly hands-off and
industry-friendly regulatory approaches to agricultural biotechnology. Furthermore, as
a country with advanced molecular biology and a major agricultural exporter, France
invested heavily in research and development in this field at public research institutes
like the National Institute of the Agronomic Research (INRA). The Biomolecular
Engineering Commission (Commission du Génie Biomoléculaire, or CGB), an expert
committee created in 1986 under the Ministry of Agriculture, not only evaluated the
risks of this new technology, but it also strove to ensure the growth and competitive-
ness of the domestic research and industry. In this favorable context, French researchers
made considerable strides. For instance, in 1987, INRA researchers conducted two of
the world's first field trials of GM plants. By the early 1990s, France had hosted more
GMO field trials than any other country except for the United States (Kahn 1996).
Concerns about biohazard and ecological risks were occasionally raised by Parliament
members and environmentalists, but the government upheld the research- and
industry-friendly policy paradigm (Kemph 2003). Meanwhile, much of the GMO regu-
latory framework was unified in the early 1990s at the European Community level to
facilitate regional innovation and competitiveness in the field (Bradley 1998). With such
domestic and European policy development, the idea that GMOs constitute a distinct
category became further institutionalized in France. However, this was not necessar-
ily a restrictive stance: though subject to unique regulatory requirements, products of
biotechnology were also held to deserve special governmental backing and investment.
Furthermore, the safety evaluation of a new GMO was nonbinding.
In the mid-1990s, France remained among the world's forerunners in development
of biotechnology and leading hosts for field trials. It was environmentalists such as
the Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace France, and Écoropa that began to inquire into
GMOs' ecological implications and eventually became the first visible opposition force
in France. Significantly, they capitalized on the general European climate of height-
ened awareness about food safety issues and the public skepticism toward the regula-
tory authorities that followed BSE and other regulatory crises (Vogel 2003; Schurman
2004). The shocking news that BSE had killed humans broke out in May 1996, only two
months after the first EU approval of GM crops—American biotech giant Monsanto's
herbicide-resistant soybeans. Quickly after this news, Écoropa announced an appeal
for a moratorium on GMOs, with the support of well-established scientists. The arrival