Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 565

two others from his Farmers' Confederation, France's second largest farmer union, were
arrested in January after leading over a hundred farmers in tampering with Novartis's
GM corn. This development not only drew much media attention to biotechnology
food, but it also brought together various opposition activists. A joint campaign against
GMOs was quickly launched by the Farmers' Confederation and several environmental
and consumer organizations. At the trial in February, opposition leaders from some of
these organizations testified to support the activists. The alternative globalization activ-
ist Vandana Shiva from India showed support in the audience. Bové argued that GM
food symbolized the dominance of market concerns, and associated it with American
hormone-treated beef, both imposed on European consumers and farmers by the World
Trade Organization and multinational corporations.
At that point, the French government had a moderate stance, authorizing GMOs
while introducing more cautious and less technocratic approaches. While particularly
cautious about ecological risks of rDNA crops, the government was still invested in the
future of this technology and sought to establish a practical framework that reconciled
its promises and the public's risk concerns. In February 1998, in approving varieties of
Bt176 corn for cultivation (the first European country to do so), the French govern-
ment also announced launching a system to monitor the corn's environmental effects.
A new advisory body consisted of not only scientific experts and government officials,
but also representatives from opposition groups such as Greenpeace and the Farmers'
Confederation. Furthermore, the government abstained from EU votes on authorizing
three lines of GM corn on the basis of the lack of consumer acceptance and effective
labeling regulations, rather than risk concerns (Marris et al. 2004).
At the time, public debates did not necessarily entail outright opposition to agricul-
tural biotechnology as such. For instance, the highly publicized “Citizens' Conference,”
held in June at the National Assembly, produced a final report that was neither clearly
pro- nor anti-GM food, with moderate recommendations. In this governmental attempt
to be more inclusive, a panel of fourteen citizens faced scientific experts and civil soci-
ety representatives—from Monsanto and Novartis to Greenpeace and the Farmers'
Confederation—and debated GM food. The report discussed potential ecological and
food safety risks and called for more open decision-making processes and consumer
choice via labeling and traceability (Marris and Joly 1999).
Meanwhile, opposition intensified, highlighting issues of food safety and consumer
choice. European anti-GMO activists began to effectively capitalize on the height-
ened public awareness of food safety, as well as the structural dependence of biotech-
nology firms on food processors and retailers, the industries particularly vulnerable
to consumer perceptions (Schurman 2004; Schurman and Munro 2009). In France,
Greenpeace France especially made its mark, with its direct actions in supermarkets and
“black list” of products that contained GMOs. By late 1998 the idea that GMOs consti-
tuted a food safety issue became powerful enough to prompt Danon to decide not to use
GMOs in their products for Europe; Nestle and Uniliver quickly followed.
In this context, the official French position on GMOs grew more cautious. In
September 1998, the Conseil d'Etat made a controversial decision to suspend the