Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 572

Through these developments, food safety and labeling dominated and eclipsed such
issues as ecological risks and ethical and cultural implications. Key opposition actors
were consumer groups; environmental groups like Greenpeace Japan and the Friends of
the Earth Japan, whose European counterparts played a key role in successful opposi-
tion to GM food in Europe, were not yet involved. Although many core opposition actors
like the No! GMO Campaign were concerned about a wide range of issues, including
ecological consequences, sustainability of agriculture, and corporate dominance, they
highlighted consumption risks and labeling given the backdrop of high-profile scandals
concerning food safety and government oversight, such as E. coli O157 poisonings. In
particular, the demand for labeling powerfully unified diverse civil society groups with
different stances toward GM food and led to the successful mobilization of consumers
(Sato 2007). At the same time, however, the narrow problematization of GM food as an
issue of consumption risks, coupled with the government concerns for the food supply,
allowed more lenient regulatory requirements than EU or French ones. The government
still considered GM food a great promise, and it sought to regulate consumption risks
and labeling in a manner that would build consumer confidence in GM food, but without
disrupting Japan's food supply or constraining domestic food distributors and biotech
companies too much.
Beyond Food Safety and Labeling: GM Rice and the
Cartagena Protocol
By 2000, most private projects to develop commercially viable GM crops had been sus-
pended, but the Japanese government continued its push, and many public research
facilities, national or prefectural, carried on their GM crop R&D projects, among
which GM rice was the most prevalent (Kayukawa 2000). In late 2000, the No! GMO
Campaign kicked off a campaign for GM rice, and three cooperative unions launched
a network to oppose biotech rice. In addition to the political salience of both GM food
and general food safety issues, the anti-GM rice movement also capitalized on the sig-
nificance of rice as a symbol of national identity (see Ohnuki-Tierney 1993 for a look
at rice and Japanese identity). Invoking rice as the most significant staple and a root of
Japanese culture, and rice paddies as a site for traditional local practices and a unique
ecosystem—in addition to food safety—the movement steadily gained public support.
By April 2001 it collected more than 170,000 anti-GM rice petitions, and submitted
them to the MAFF to call for a ban on the importation or production of biotech rice.
Targeting the GM rice of Aichi Prefecture, developed in collaboration with Monsanto
and the closest to commercialization in Japan at the time, the campaign held rallies
in the Aichi capital, Nagoya, in 2002. After receiving 580,000 opposition petitions in
November, Aichi announced in December that it would give up the commercialization
of its GM rice. This opposition strategy that targeted specific research projects and test
sites, often with local mobilization actions, spread and helped curb R&D efforts at the
prefecture level.