Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Conclusion
The food-safety aspect of genetic engineering of crops developed quite differently in
three major industrial nations by the early 2000s. In France, environmentalists played a
crucial role in politicizing GM food first; their mobilization, coupled with the post-BSE
consumer climate of distrust in state authorities, helped raise the salience of risks to
food safety. Debates over GM food subsequently expanded and intensified, as the cate-
gory became increasingly stigmatized. This prompted the French government to take on
more cautious regulatory approaches to food safety and labeling, as well as to ecological
and even social implications—including French agriculture and ways of life.
In Japan, it was consumer groups that politicized GM food, beginning with demands
for labeling on the basis of food-safety concerns. Their mobilization successfully
resulted in new mandatory assessment and labeling, and it raised as well the general
political salience of GM food, which facilitated the introduction of more stringent reg-
ulation of the ecological risks of biotech crops. However, Japan's dependence on food
imports restrained policy change because of official concern with practical difficulties
that could arise from stringent regulation. Consequently, a narrow focus on consump-
tion risks in the debate allowed officials to institute regulatory approaches considerably
less stringent than those of the EU and France.
In the United States, despite widespread prevalence of rDNA plants and food prod-
ucts, there was no highly politicized awareness of “GM food.” Contestation over
“GMOs” on ethical and ecological grounds did surface early on, but the political base of
opposition was limited and the debate remained focused on risk, where mainstream sci-
ence sided with supporters of the technology. Opposition never led to a powerful united
movement comparable to its counterpart in France or Japan. Consequently, the US reg-
ulatory framework continued to reject the idea of GMOs as a distinct category, institut-
ing a global rift around trade and science. The United States—like Argentina and other
exporters of biotech crops—refused to sign the Cartagena Protocol, precisely because its
regulatory policy denied the existence of the very category. Instead, a policy of “substan-
tial equivalence” and insistence on “science-based policy” prevailed.
Comparison of these three cases illustrates how divergent patterns of food safety reg-
ulation cannot be reduced to political conflicts, cultural norms, scientific debates, or
historical events only. Different configurations of these factors shaped shared under-
standings of GM food as a category: the construction of this category itself was political
(Herring 2010), and so was denial of this category. Furthermore, development of mean-
ings beyond food safety mattered greatly in determining outcomes. The Larsson shows
how “organic” means different things to different political actors, and in the same way
“biotech food” means different things to different actors. Attending to these multiple
dimensions—rather than treating the politics of GM food as a fixed, uniform, and insu-
lated domain—facilitates an understanding of national divergence in the food-safety
dimension of regulating products of genetic engineering.
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