The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 683

from biotechnology. The credibility of environmental groups, strength of the emergent
green movement in Europe, and the fact that the technology was American in a period
when America refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, did not make for favorable accep-
tance of the GMO. These factors contributed to a practical ban on agricultural biotech-
nology in 1998.
Different starting points in Europe and the United States thus resulted in different
paths of regulation of agricultural biotechnology. Historical divergences driven by
interests of powerful players have been important in path-dependent ways, and have
influenced interests of other countries in a global trading system. Nevertheless, our
analysis illustrates how new information may change perception of interests, and thus
political behavior. As knowledge about biotechnology changes, different groups update
their perceptions and sometimes convince others to change their preferences. Efforts to
modify regulation of GMOs in both the European Union and the United States are con-
tinuous; global mobilization likewise points in different directions in different nations
at different times. Agricultural biotechnology is little used in Africa, but intensely used
in Latin America (Paarlberg 2008). As the technology evolves, and economic situations
change, the fate of the technology may change, driven by a fluctuating mix of objective
conditions and subjective preferences. Continuous increases in food prices and scar-
city, breakthrough innovations and applications that make the technology more ben-
eficial to humans, or increased utilization of the technology in Asia, may lead Europe
to relax its restrictive regulations, for example. Reciprocally, a major catastrophe in the
United States, or development of plant-breeding technologies that can increase produc-
tivity and environmental sustainability without relying on genetic engineering may lead
to new restrictions on the technology in its historically strongest base. Though these
dynamics are in principle unpredictable, it is clear from the analysis of this chapter that
both interests and information require careful examination for a robust understanding
of biotechnology's spatial and temporal diffusion.
Notes
1. If N is an odd number, there is one median voter (the voter ordered at the middle spot).
If N is an even number, there are two voters in the middle of the order. In this case we will
define for our purposes the median voter as the (N/2)+1 voter.
2. In this case we have a transition from a voting equilibrium to a maximization of voters'
aggregate net benefit (Just, Hueth, and Schmitz, 2008).
3. Sexton and Zilberman (2011) find that the price reduction because of GM is, more or less,
of the same order of magnitude as the commodity price increase in corn and soybean
because of growing demand for production of biofuels. Consumers in the US suffered only
a 3% increase in the price of food because of biofuel, which suggests that the price reduc-
tion because of GM is, again, around 3%-4%.
4. This can be inferred from an approximately 30 to 40 percent increase in the price of grains
because of biofuel, which resulted in a 2 to 3 percent increase in the price of food to con-
sumers (Hochman et al., 2011).