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The UK regulatory system on GMOs: Expanding the debate?

Agricultural biotechnology was for a long time defined in the UK as a purely scientific issue. Debate and concern that was not based on scientific evidence was dismissed as irrational, or at best irrelevant, 1 and this narrow framework for decision making went along with a resistance to public involvement. This was very much in line with the UK's fairly opaque approach to decision making in technical or scientific policy areas more generally. It would however have been difficult for such an overtly narrow approach to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to survive the media and public discussion of the issue in the late 1990s. In the UK as elsewhere, developments in agricultural biotechnology provoked unusual levels of public concern at this time, and major food retailers and processors began to avoid GM produce. Some sort of response was required of government. In 1999 an agreement was reached between government and the industry body, SCIMAC (the Supply Chain Initiative on Modified Agricultural Crops), that there would be no commercial cultivation of GM crops pending completion of certain scientific trials (relating specifically to the impact of the crop management regimes related to four different GM crops on farmland biodiversity). This 'moratorium' ran parallel with the EU-wide moratorium on authorisations of GMOs, which the UK government did not formally support. The UK moratorium had an explicitly scientific starting and end point: it was based on concern expressed by, among others, the government's advisor on biodiversity issues, English Nature, that GM herbicide-tolerant crops could have harmful effects on farmland biodiversity, 2 and was a temporary decision, pending the completion of further scientific investigation. However, this narrowly scientific 'precautionary' approach also created some time for more broadly based public discussion of the issues. 2 Agricultural biotechnology policy in the UK now recognises (at least in principle) the importance of public values and public participation. This shift of approach, or at least of rhetoric, reflects, and even exemplifies, more general changes in the UK approach to risk regulation. Whilst it would be overly simplistic to explain evolution of thinking on risk by reference to one, or even a few, specific events, the discovery of a link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or 'mad cow disease') in cattle and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) in human beings is a notorious episode in the regulation of risk in the UK. Government communication on the issue had emphasised reassurance, focussing …