Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
consumer markets and can exercise almost
unlimited power over the rest of the value
chain. From the point of view of a retailer, a
good product is one that has high proi t
margins and is frequently bought. Neither
of these characteristics favour products with
transgenic ingredients: conventional substi-
tutes are available for every transgenic
ingredient that has to be labelled (in
countries where labelling regulations exist),
and typically also at a price that would not
really inl uence the retailer's margin from
the end product. In other words, retailers
have no positive incentive to sell products
with transgenic ingredients that have to be
labelled. And in the absence of a positive
incentive, the presence of a business risk -
however small it may be - will already be an
exclusion criterion.
And that business risk exists. Retailers in
Europe were made painfully aware of this in
September 1998 (for historical details, see
Scholderer, 2005): on the same day the EU
regulation on novel foods and food ingredi-
ents entered into force in Germany, Nestlé
launched their US product, Butteri nger
®
,
as a test case, clearly labelled as containing
GM ingredients. h e environmental pressure
group, Greenpeace, responded immediately
with a major campaign, picketing stores in
several German cities where the product was
sold and orchestrating global media cover-
age. After just 1 week, most major European
retailers had declared that they would not
sell any GM foods until their safety had been
proven and until consumers actively
demanded that they should be sold.
Although Greenpeace continued this cam-
paign for many years (and boldly documented
it; see Holbach and Keenan, 2005), the
market for labelled GM foods has ef ectively
been dead in Europe since September 1998.
h e situation continues unabated: no
retailer in their right mind will risk a
Greenpeace blockade of their stores.
an excellent case to demonstrate the twisted
realities that coexist, side by side, in the world
of lobbies and pressure groups. Although the
immediate cause of the disappearance of GM
foods from European supermarket shelves
was a threat campaign, levelled by a highly
organized and hierarchically structured
pressure group (Greenpeace) against the
European retail sector, every interest group
created their own historical narratives and
myths in the aftermath of the events,
explaining the disappearance of GM foods in
arbitrary ways that were consistent with their
policies and appeared to legitimize them. h e
most common of these narratives is that 'con-
sumer rejection' (not the store blockade
arranged by Greenpeace) prompted European
retailers to take the products of the shelves.
h is is interesting insofar as, already at
that time, the available empirical evidence
indicated that consumer choices in real
shopping situations were largely unaf ected
by the presence or absence of GM labels on
consumer products. And curiously enough,
it seems that even the pro-GM lobbies began
to believe this narrative. Arguably, the policy
that would have served their interests best
at the time would have been the widespread
introduction of very stringent labelling
regimes: if virtually all consumer products in
all retail stores carried 'may contain
genetically modii ed ingredients' labels,
anti-GM campaigners would have been
unable to focus their resources on particular
products or retail stores, and their campaigns
would most likely have dissipated. Instead,
pro-GM lobbies across the globe fought
desperately against the introduction of any
form of labelling regime (in many countries
even successfully), alienating potential co-
operation partners and inadvertently
creating an image of gene technology as
something clandestine, something that
needed to be hidden.
h e political sphere really did not do any
better. In hindsight, it appears that at some
point in the second half of the 1990s,
political and administrative elites began to
confuse the general public with the
images
of
the general public that the various lobbies
and pressure groups created for them. As a
result, gene technology became a priority on
and Lobbying
h e events surrounding the Butteri nger
®
launch in Germany in September 1998 are
