NOW that鈥檚 how to negotiate. The Biosafety Protocol, agreed last Saturday in
Montreal and designed to control the international trade in genetically modified
organisms (GMOs), has left everyone a winner.
The US has ensured that its agricultural machine will not incur huge extra
costs, developing countries can say no to imports of GMOs, green groups claim to
have brought the biotech companies to heel, while the biotech industry says the
agreement assures its future growth. The huge gaps in how the protocol will be
put into practice have been largely ignored, but let鈥檚 play along for now.
A cynic might find more to trash. Think about priorities. The protocol is the
first major enforcement arm of the Biodiversity Convention, which was crafted at
the Earth Summit in 1992 as a way to save the real, large-scale loss of the
world鈥檚 species. How strange, then, that the signatories to the convention
should spend five years wrangling over the protocol and the entirely theoretical
threat from genetic modification
(see p 5).
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In the meantime, many of the world鈥檚 ecosystems are being overrun by
insidious invaders. Not GMOs, but entirely natural species that humans have
transplanted from their native homes to alien environments. Witness the American
jelly fish that killed the Black Sea鈥檚 fish stocks and the Asian mealy bug that
kills African crops. But, at the international level, these threats go largely
unaddressed.
A cynic might also charge that the operation of the protocol threatens to be
profoundly unscientific. Countries that want to ban imports of a genetically
modified organism do not need good scientific reasons. Rather, they will now be
able to invoke the 鈥減recautionary principle鈥�, which loosely speaking means you
can reject things that are worrying. Yet nobody knows what the phrase means
exactly.
But we are not cynics. The world is right to want to regulate this new
industry. There may be ecological and human health risks ahead. And there鈥檚 no
doubt that an industry with such huge potential for satisfying both human need
and greed could commit all manner of horrors along the way.
So, who should regulate it? Some say that decision making about
ill-understood risks to biodiversity should be left to technocrats who know
about these things. This notion is profoundly undemocratic. Such decisions must
be given to policy makers who are answerable to the public. And the science
should be on tap, not on top.
It is perhaps ordinary people who will win most from Saturday鈥檚 agreement:
they stand to gain much from GMOs. The popular view that GMOs are dangerous
emerged from a debate in which the environmental and health risks were horribly
hyped.
A global regulatory framework will establish ground rules, create some
confidence and allow sensible scientific discussion about what is safe and what
is not. For all its faults, the Biosafety Protocol has made a decent start.
