Abstract
As genetically modified (GM) products approach the market stage, the UK government and agro-food industry have faced a suspicious or hostile public. Since 1998 many retail chains have undertaken to exclude any GM-derived ingredients from their own-brand lines. This commercial blockage has intensified pressures for greater precaution, even for a moratorium on cultivating GM crops. Political protest has led to strategies for precautionary commercialization. Government and industry have cooperated to plan a “managed development” of GM crops. Across the agricultural supply chain, industry has devised voluntary guidelines to ensure segregation of GM crops and to limit the spread of GM herbicide-tolerance. In particular UK regulators seek to test the risk that broad-spectrum herbicide sprays could damage wildlife habitats; they have broadened the advisory expertise accordingly. These measures open up the precautionary content to further debate, at both national and EU levels. Market-stage precautions establish a means to test claims that GM crops are environmentally-friendly products. By translating public concerns into broader risk-assessment criteria, the UK procedure involves critics in potentially influencing standards of scientific evidence and environmental harm. This social process has become a prerequisite for legitimizing commercial use.
Highlights
The government's conservation agencies have advocated a careful "science-based approach", with more research and enforceable safeguards before permitting commercial use [31]. Such science involves value judgements about the basis for comparing genetically modified (GM) with non-GM crops, given that the herbicide effects vary with the cropprotection method [26, 32, 33]
It was intended to advise government on "setting the general direction for the role of GMOs in agriculture, defining which impacts will and will not be acceptable, and identifying the potential for biotechnology to contribute to sustainable agricultural practices" [37, 38]
The Novel Food Regulation provides a simplified procedure for products which are claimed to have "substantial equivalence" with a familiar non-GM counterpart (EC, 1997)
Summary
For science-related policy in general, the government has been advised that "Openness will stimulate greater critical discussion of the scientific basis of policy proposals and bring to bear any conflicting scientific evidence which may have been overlooked [and] could in itself avoid greater controversy in the longer run" [1]. The government's conservation agencies have advocated a careful "science-based approach", with more research and enforceable safeguards before permitting commercial use [31] Such science involves value judgements about the basis for comparing GM with non-GM crops, given that the herbicide effects vary with the cropprotection method [26, 32, 33]. It was intended to advise government on "setting the general direction for the role of GMOs in agriculture, defining which impacts will and will not be acceptable, and identifying the potential for biotechnology to contribute to sustainable agricultural practices" [37, 38] Interpreted broadly, this remit would mean debating the environmental norms which underlie risk assessment, market-stage precautions and crop R&D priorities
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