The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 681

issue may be the rational response. Second, there is also likely some extent to which
there is a premium that European consumers are willing to pay to reduce the risk to
which they perceive themselves to be exposed. These perceptions and the relative risk
aversion of European consumers have reasonable groundings. Yet, we must be clear that
they largely derive from the public debate that has been informed by other groups who
have their own interests in the matter, including activists, industry, and farmers, as well
as being shaped by the public's recent experience with regulators' inefficacy at mitigating
food-related risks like bovine spongiform encephalopathy and foot-and-mouth disease.
It has been widely noted that European consumers have less confidence in their food
safety regulators and, conversely, that environmental activists and Green political par-
ties enjoy greater credibility in Europe than they do in the United States.
However, the dynamics of how the perceptions of European consumers developed
over time are far more complex and nuanced than conventional accounts often suggest.
European activist organizations have utilized the issue of food biotechnology to engage
in a contest with European regulators for legitimacy according to the logic of how such
organizations survive and advance. Changes in media coverage in Europe were largely
driven by the campaigns of activist organizations pursuing such a strategy. Analysis of
early media coverage of biotech foods in the U.S. and Europe (Gaskell et al. 1999) indi-
cates that the volume and content of press accounts were roughly comparable through
about 1990. Thereafter, the quantity of coverage increased in the European press relative
to the United States. New narratives emerged in the European public debate encom-
passing two major themes. One maintained that biotech crops do not serve consumer
interests, ignoring the effect that a cost-reducing agricultural technology tends to have
in reducing consumer food prices, where welfare impact on developed economies, espe-
cially in Europe, is very small in contrast to developing economies where consumers
might spend more than 50 percent of their income on food consumption (Paarlberg,
2008). The other theme has been to hold up GM technology as a symbol of the negative
effects of globalization, characterizing it as an “American” technology that is antigreen
and pitted, in some sense, against a European way of life.
In conclusion, the ban of biotech food in Europe does not appear to be simply a cri-
sis of consumer acceptance but rather a convergence of the influence of several distinct
economic interest groups within Europe, each with self-interests in slowing or stopping
the introduction of biotechnologies into European and global markets. To summarize,
we argue that U.S. academic scientists and companies since the 1970s held a relative
advantage in biotech innovation that, by the mid-1990s, began to threaten the market
dominance of European corporations in agricultural pest-control markets. The interests
of the European chemical industry concurred with the interests of other groups that
stood to gain from restricting biotechnology, and European chemical corporations did
not need to be proactive in their opposition. First, since any new technology of this sort
requires a new regulatory regime to be implemented, all the incumbent industry needed
to do was to abstain from advocating for the implementation of a new policy. Without
an effective champion, policy formation stalled. Second, given that activist groups were
already highly motivated for their own reasons, all the incumbent industry needed to