Food Safety and Consumer Choice Policy

A gricultural biotechnology has the potential to help address a wide range of public health, nutritional, agricultural, and environmental problems in developed and developing countries, as described in a wide variety of scientific (NRC 1985), government (Glickman 1999), industry (Council for Biotechnology Information n.d.), and international (Persley and Lantin 2000; FAO 2003) sources. Despite this potential, the commercialization of the first generation of crops based on these technologies has met with concern and protests from consumer and public interest groups (Consumer's Union n.d.), environmental groups (NRDC 2000), and some governments (EC 2000) and scientists (Union of Concerned Scientists n.d.). This conflict has grown to such proportions that it has resulted in the banning or slowing of the commercialization or use of these products in some countries (Economist 1999), disrupted the distribution of food aid in drought-stricken southern Africa (Economist 2002), reduced U.S. exports of major commodities (Economist 2000), affected the value of Wall Street stocks for major agricultural biotechnology companies (Financial Times 2000), and become a major issue of contention in the regulation of international trade (Financial Times 2003). Many of the proponents of agricultural biotechnology have suggested that the issue should be resolved through the application of sound science (Prakash and Bruhn 2000) and that it would be unethical to ban the use of or inhibit the potential benefits associated with this technology for addressing serious problems related to public health, nutrition, poverty, and the environment (Leisinger 2000; Pinstrup-Andersen and Schioler 2000). Many of the critics have called into question the adequacy of the scientific knowledge (Wolfenbarger and Phifer 2000; Clark and Lehman 2001) about this technology, questioned its benefits and raised concerns