Social Interests
4.3 Conclusions
opment and integration agreement, even before it becomes ratified as an international treaty.
In fact, in many respects, it appears that the BSP came about more as a political compromise than as an actual attempt to establish an institutional structure for GM-crop regulations. The most contentious issues remain ‘provisional’ (unresolved) and the time-consuming rati- fication and implementation process could ensure its obsolescence. Its major contribution was the illusion that an international agreement blending the scientific- and social-rationality approaches and the eco- nomic and social perspectives had been achieved.
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were involved. The Director of Greenpeace, UK, Lord Melchett, justified the illegal action by essen- tially claiming that 10 years of legal protests did not result in regula- tory policies adopting Greenpeace’s belief system. This is a dangerous challenge to pluralism, which necessarily demands compromise and concession. It sets a dangerous precedent to justify illegal action because of the dissatisfaction that normative beliefs are not met in their entirety in the regulatory system. An example of the unwilling- ness or inability of Greenpeace to compromise was revealed in late 1999 at the Greenpeace Business Conference in London. Lord Melchett issued a challenge to the then Chairman and CEO of Monsanto, Bob Shapiro:
If Monsanto will stop developing GM crops, get out of producing pesticides and reject the idea of patenting life forms, Greenpeace will work enthusiastically with you . . . to produce a new Monsanto . . . We could create a genuine life sciences company based on ecological, organic, holistic principles.
(Greenpeace, 1999) In essence, this challenge is akin to asking Greenpeace to stop envi- ronmental advocacy.
Moreover, it is also reasonable to suggest that social-interest orga- nizations pursue their own self-interest in a manner that cannot be disentangled from the self-interest pursued by GM-crop developers, implying that caution must be exercised in assuming the altruism of such organizations. These organizations require membership to sur- vive.3In this sense, many of them are in competition with one another for members, and championing emotive issues through dramatic cam- paigns, or ‘picking good fights’, is an important method for sustaining public awareness of the organizations (Bode, 1998). Given the range of consumer concerns and the large and growing information gap between producers and consumers, there can be no doubt that GM crops is a good fight to pick, because particularly emotive arguments can be easily developed.
Finally, the rise of civil-society advocacy at the international level against the globalization of the international trading system has, in fact, created its own form of NGO globalization. In this case, an unde- mocratic and unaccountable foreign influence reaches deep into national policy competence and constrains the regulatory develop- ment and integration strategies that a nation can choose under the threat of mass protest. Indeed, this NGO globalization creates a domestic democratic deficit not unlike the democratic deficit that the
3It has been noted that in 1991 membership in Greenpeace was 4.8 million and in 1999 it had fallen to 2.5 million (Economist, 1998). The same article also notes that Greenpeace has considered the development of a Greenpeace eco-label.
organizations claim exists in the international trading regime. Given that most of these social-interest organizations would like to see the establishment of a strong international institution with as much power as, if not more power than, the WTO to enforce the social- rationality approach to environmental protection, it can hardly be said that they are anti-globalization.
This raises three important questions. First, despite the very pub- lic opposition to GM crops by many social organizations, do they really have significant influence in the regulatory development and integration strategies chosen by a jurisdiction? The answer is yes, and policy-makers ignore them at their peril. In the UK, Monsanto has admitted that the anti-GM campaign, which has been mostly por- trayed as an anti-Monsanto campaign, has been damaging to its busi- ness reputation and its share price (Independent, 1999q). As a result, the Monsanto President and Chairman made efforts to establish a dia- logue with the anti-GM campaigners. The interesting problem will be the willingness and ability of the social-interest organizations to com- promise their belief systems. Have they created such a public resis- tance that, when they realize there are benefits from GM crops, they will be unable to compromise? For instance, after a sustained cam- paign against the ‘technology’ of GM crops, Greenpeace had to soften its position in respect of the development of the GM vitamin A rice and to admit that certain applications were essentially positive (Telegraph, 10 February 2001). This was the first instance in which Greenpeace publicly distinguished between the technology per seand the application, management and distribution of the technology.
Moreover, this softening of the Greenpeace position supports the argu- ment for why regulatory development should be science-based and rules-based according to actual risk, rather than based on a reactive approach to assuaging public perceptions, unsubstantiated concerns and unsubstantiated risks.
Secondly, given the fact that in most cases it is not the technology but the application, management and distribution of the technology that are of concern, what would have happened if the first GM crops were developed by supporters of organic farming in a public research institute designed to employ the technology to assist the sustainable development needs of less developed countries, rather than by multi- national corporations targeting intensive agricultural farmers in devel- oped countries? It is a question worth considering. Given the application focus of these interests, it is reasonable to argue that, if the initial commercializations were different, so too would be the reaction of many of the current opponents. As mentioned previously, a proto- type credit card made by Monsanto from plant fibres was initially regarded as an environmentally sustainable solution to the problem of petroleum-based plastics.
Thirdly, although there has been a considerable range of organiza- tions united in opposition to GM crops, is this unity of opposition sustainable in the medium to long term? For instance, consumer orga- nizations are in support of higher domestic food-safety and environ- mental-protection standards. Social-development organizations want better access to developed markets for the exports from less developed countries. Yet setting income-elastic food-safety and environmental protection standards in developed markets could prohibitively bar the exports of these countries. The incompatibility of all of these organi- zations lends credence to the argument that they have chosen GM crops because of its easily exploitable emotive characteristics.
In summary, the examination of the opposition to GM crops from consumer, environmental and social-development organizations reveals several interesting results. First, it is not the GM crops per se that are the source of dissatisfaction. Rather, they are rejected because the initially commercialized applications are produced for an agro- nomic system and by multinational corporations who play by the WTO’s trade rules, which contravene the belief systems of the social- interest organizations. Secondly, in the short to medium term, the opposition to GM crops is formidable and neither government regula- tors nor industry can ignore it. Thirdly, the current unity of opposi- tion to GM crops among various organizations with incompatible objectives does not appear sustainable in the long term as the GM- crop applications move from a homogeneous focus on input traits to a focus on output traits and novel products with a different balance of benefits and burdens for the consumer. Fourthly, it appears that the opposition to GM crops, resulting in calls for greater regulatory over- sight and weaker intellectual-property protection is, in fact, having the effect of increasing the concentration of agricultural life-science firms – that is, multinational firms are forced into greater concentra- tion in order to deal with the effects of stringent regulatory oversight and unclear intellectual-property protection rules.
Therefore, the development and integration strategies for GM reg- ulations must focus to some degree on the application, management and distribution concerns advocated by the social-interest organiza- tions regardless of whether or not there is a scientific justification for the concerns. The challenge, of course, is identifying the appropriate degree of focus.
Regulatory Development and Integration
Given that economic and social interests support very divergent approaches to regulatory development and regulatory integration, establishing a regulatory development and integration approach must be understood as a political exercise of balancing technological progress with technological precaution. The objective of this chapter is to analyse the development of genetically modified (GM)-crop regu- lations in order to identify the sources of regulatory instability and the prospects and limits of regulatory integration. Essentially, in this chapter, a conceptual model for determining a jurisdiction’s regulatory