GM Food on Trial by Les Levidow Susan Carr

Author:Les Levidow, Susan Carr [Les Levidow, Susan Carr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Industries, General, Agribusiness, Law, Land Use, Science, Biotechnology, Life Sciences, Genetics & Genomics, Social Science, Sociology, Technology & Engineering, Food Science, Chemistry & Biotechnology
ISBN: 9781135237813
Google: msiOAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-12-04T05:40:57+00:00

6

Scaling Up GM Crops, Testing Commercial Operators

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1990s GM crops have undergone experimental field trials for several purposes—to demonstrate that GM crops were being kept safe, while also testing them for evidence of safety if grown commercially. Often disputes arose over whether the experiments had adequate control measures to protect the environment, a rigorous design for yielding meaningful scientific results and a legitimate societal purpose (see Chapter 5). At the same time, GM crops underwent informal-symbolic trials of their status: agbiotech was variously cast as an environmentally friendly improvement in plant breeding, or as a risk-management problem, or as a pollutant per se (see Chapter 3).

Those multi-level trials converged in regulatory conflicts over the appropriate basis for commercial authorisation. From the late 1990s onwards, such conflicts intensified—over what potential effects must be tested and managed, what experiments could simulate them, what control measures could reliably prevent them and how responsibility would be assigned. This chapter analyses conflicts over whether or how GM products could be safely scaled up from field trials to commercial use.

In particular the chapter discusses the following questions:

• How did the agbiotech controversy extend the risks for which GM products should be kept on trial?

• How were commercial contexts anticipated, simulated and tested?

• How did regulatory procedures extend the responsibility of commercial operators?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.