GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS AND CROPS: AFRICA’S CHOICE 211


In 2010, the EU Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (2010, 16) produced yet another reassuring report on GMO safety:


The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies.


Skeptics who remain fearful sometimes respond that “absence of evidence


is not the same thing as evidence of absence.” Yet if you look for something for 15 years and fail to find it, that must surely be accepted as evidence of absence. It may not be proof that risks are absent, but proving something is absent (proving a negative) is known to be logically impossible. The explanation for Europe’s highly precautionary regulatory approach


toward GMOs goes beyond risks. It is a policy posture that reflects not a pres- ence of new risks for Europeans, but instead an absence, for most Europeans, of new benefits. The first generation of GM crops provided benefits to farm- ers, but almost no benefit at all to food consumers. The first generation of GM crops that came to the market in 1995–96 pro-


vided benefits mostly to farmers growing cotton, maize, and soybeans in the form of lower costs for the control of insects and weeds. Yet Europe does not have many cotton, maize, and soybean farmers, so the new technology had few champions. For the 99 percent of Europeans who were not maize, cotton, or soybean farmers, the new technology offered almost no direct benefit at all. For consumers in Europe, the new GM products did not taste any better, look any better, smell any better, prepare any better, or deliver any improved nutrition. Because the vast majority of Europeans saw little or no direct ben- efit from the technology, they felt they had nothing to lose by keeping it out of farm fields and out of their food supply. They welcomed a highly precaution- ary regulatory approach as one way to ensure that outcome. To demonstrate that it was a benefit calculation rather than a risk calcu-


lation that mattered most to Europeans in this case, look at the quite differ- ent way Europe regulates GMOs in medicine versus GMOs in agriculture. In the case of medical drugs, Europe does not hesitate to permit the commercial sale of medicines developed with genetic engineering. By 2006 the European Medicines Agency had actually approved 87 recombinant drugs, derived from GM bacteria or from the ovary cells of GM Chinese hamsters. Significantly, these drugs were not free from new risks; it had been learned from clinical


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