Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 567

decision-making, ethics, culture, and national identity. Eurobarometer surveys show
that the public support for GM food in France declined from 54 percent of the decided
public in 1996 to 35 percent in 1999 (Gaskel et al. 2006).
By 2000, GM food was stigmatized to such an extent that more food manufactur-
ers and retailers began to eliminate GMOs from their products, and even from feed for
their animal sources. France's largest feed supplier, Glon Sanders, launched GM-free
feed, and Carrefour decided to stop the use of GMOs in the feed for their animals.
In November 2000, when the Conseil d'Etat decided to end the suspension of Bt176,
Novartis announced that it would not commercialize it due to the lack of consumer con-
fidence. Direct actions to destroy field tests drew increasing public attention.
The French government's cautious and inclusive regulatory approaches became
firmly institutionalized during this period, and they generally persist today. The highly
politicized nature of the issue certainly contributed to the official turn to more vigilant
approaches to food safety matters, as the safety of GMOs as food became established
as a central area of policy concern, as seen with the key regulatory role of the AFSSA.
Ecological risks of engineered crops also remained significant in public discourse.
In May 2000, France became a signatory of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an
international agreement adopted in January 2000 to protect biodiversity from possi-
ble negative effects of “living modified organisms,” as did the European Union. France
also played a pivotal role in maintaining the EU moratorium, demanding more reli-
able and precise labeling and traceability standards and more tests on the long-term
safety of GM food. During the moratorium, the EU adopted increasingly restrictive
regulatory provisions. Labeling and traceability at all stages became mandatory, with a
threshold of 1 percent presence of GMOs. Following food safety scandals since the late
1990s—e.g., BSE, dioxins, contaminated Coca Cola, listeria—Europe incrementally
revamped its food regulatory system, emphasizing traceability of food, transparency of
decision-making, and incorporation of public concerns. With the establishment of the
European Food Safety Authority, the risk assessment of GMOs became more central-
ized at the EU level.
In April 2004, the EU introduced a new stringent regulatory framework to resume
GMO authorizations, ending its de facto moratorium, against which the United States,
Argentina, and Canada had brought a high-profile case to the WTO in May 2003. The
new framework accentuated the boundaries between GM and non-GM food, while
consolidating some of the previously separate segments of regulatory procedure into
a simpler one. It became possible for a developer to go through a single authorization
procedure for cultivation, food, and feed (the “one key, one door” principle). Stricter
labeling requirements covered not only products with traces of DNA and protein from
genetic modification, but also those without such traces if GM material was used in
their production. Labeling was exempt only for the accidental presence of GMOs below
0.9 percent.
GM food has remained highly contentious in France. According to the Eurobarometer,
public support for it in France declined from 35 percent in 1999, to 30 percent in 2002,
to 29 percent in 2005 (Gaskel et al. 2006). Organized direct actions to destroy field tests