The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 701

principle” (Devos et al. 2009). In the United States, the “chips fall” quite differently. The
prevailing sentiment of US lawmakers is that those farmers adopting the new tech-
nologies should not be unduly burdened with regulation, as they, too, have the “right
to choose.” Yet, for large, public cross-contamination disputes, such as the “Starlink”
corn debacle and the ProdiGene vaccine fiasco,41 technology providers have been held
accountable for damages sustained.
Co-existence Policy—the European
Union versus the United States
Key issues that coexistence policies are aimed to address revolve around ensuring
and preserving non-GM crop genetic identity and seed purity, traceability along
the commodity chain, labeling to enable and ensure consumer choice, and deter-
mining liability and compensation in cases where economic harm has been alleged
(CEC 2001).
Government regulations aimed at protecting the ability of non-GM and organic pro-
ducers to produce GM-free crops, and protect them from the adventitious presence of
GM crops along the commodity supply chain, are not in place in the United States cur-
rently. Threats to the organic “brand” by GM contamination are perceived as so acute
that the organic industry has taken it upon itself to police its own practices and supply
chains, at its own expense.42 In fact, the industry would prefer that the government sim-
ply stay out of it.43
In contrast, the European Union (EU) has made significant progress in grappling
with co-existence issues—not without considerable and continuing controversy
(Levidow and Boschert 2008). Consumers in the EU had already been sensitized to GM
crops as a “manifestation of American imperialist science” and were having none of it.
Anti-biotech activists pressured the EU into a de facto moratorium on planting GM
crops, even in violation of WTO rules.44 In response, the EU spent 81 million euros on
intensive, replicated research trials to examine the environmental effects of GM crops
in a range of agro-ecologies (Firbank et al. 2003). These farm-scale trials found that the
herbicide tolerant crops tested could inadvertently reduce populations of song birds due
to the efficient control of weed species, whose seeds are a major food source for these
hedge-row dwelling bird species (Chamberlain et al 2007). No other risks to wildlife or
ecosystem integrity were identified. Despite these findings, public sentiment demanded
a more measured approach, which has resulted in a series of policy statements and
reviews that aim to enable co-existence between farmers choosing to use GM maize
and organic producers. Likewise, the Swiss national research program on “Benefits and
Risks of the Deliberate Release of Genetically Modified Plants” (NRP 59) studied the
environmental, economic, and social impacts of GM crops in field trials over a five-year
period. They concluded that plant biotechnology did not pose risks to human health or