Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
15 Public Acceptance of GM Plants
Joachim Scholderer 1 * and Wim Verbeke 2
1 Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences,
Department of Business Administration, Aarhus, Denmark;
2 Ghent University, Faculty of Bio-Science Engineering,
Department of Agricultural Economics, Ghent, Belgium
15.1 Introduction
Verbeke, 2012). Although certain NGOs
have made every ef ort to keep the value
debate alive and export it to other regions of
the world, this has never really succeeded
(Aerni and Bernauer, 2005). On the one
hand, this can be considered good news for
everybody who plans to research, or invest
in, GM crop production systems. On the
other hand, the acreage covered by trans-
genic crops continues to be disproportionally
low in Europe (James, 2011), the region in
the world where the debate was led most
destructively. We believe that much can be
learned from this. h is chapter sheds light
on the mechanics of what we, in the title, so
innocuously call 'public acceptance'.
There were times when genetically modii ed
(GM) plants were a much-contested issue. In
the early days of genetic engineering - the
1970s and early 1980s - the acceptability of
the new technology was debated mainly
among scientists themselves (e.g. Berg,
1974) and mainly in terms of laboratory
safety. Most countries issued best-practice
guidelines at the time to ensure that
potential biohazards were contained safely
in the laboratory. h e situation changed in
the mid-1980s, when the i rst GM organisms
were tested outside the laboratory. Non-
governmental organizations entered the
debate and gradually changed its nature,
reframing it in terms of environmental risk,
bioethics and the precautionary principle. In
the European Union (EU), the debate became
more heated throughout the 1990s, largely
proportional to the commercial success of
pest-resistant and herbicide-tolerant crops,
and culminated in a 5-year moratorium on
the approval of new transgenic cultivars that
lasted from 1999 to 2004 (for details, see
Scholderer, 2005).
Since then, the regulatory framework in
Europe has been completely overhauled and
the value-laden debate of the 1990s has
been replaced by a rather more technical
discussion, focusing on good agricultural
practices that can ensure the coexistence
of GM with conventional and organic
crop production systems (Scholderer and
15.2 What Is Public Acceptance?
Public acceptance is a multi-layered concept:
who should be considered the public, and
what particular types of action or inaction
should be taken as indicators of acceptance?
In public relations, the line of work that is
concerned professionally with the public
acceptance of commercial and political
issues, it is customary to refer to 'publics' in
the plural rather than to 'public' in the
singular. A public is understood as a group of
persons or organizations that have an
interest or stake in an issue (hence the
modern expression 'stakeholder'), and these
interests or stakes are assumed to vary
between dif erent publics. In the context of
 
 
 
 
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