Technological Revolution Meets Policy and the Market: Explaining Cross-National Differences in Agricultural Biotechnology Regulation

The development and marketing of agricultural biotechnology applications has led to controversies over whether and how to regulate this new technology. The European Union has imposed severe restrictions on agricultural biotechnology, particularly in terms of approval and labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food. The United States has maintained a far more permissive approval policy and has not required labeling. This article explains these differences in terms of the collective action capacity of consumer and producer interests and the institutional environment in which regulation has taken place. We find that the regulatory outcome in the EU can be traced back to NGOs' increased collective action capacity due to public outrage, an institutional environment favorable to biotech-critical NGO interests (multilevel regulatory policy-making), and a disintegration of the producer coalition due to NGO campaigns and differences in industrial structure. U.S. biotechnology politics has been dominated by a strong and cohesive coalition of pro-biotech up-and downstream producers and farmers. Because of lower public outrage and a less favorable institutional environment (centralized regulatory policy-making), biotech-critical NGOs in the U.S. have been largely excluded from agri-biotech policy-making.