PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE ANDINSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION

6th EU Framework Programme for Research and Technology

Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynskiwith Maria Kousis and Yannis Volakakis

Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation [PAGANINI]Contract No. CIT2-CT-2004-505791 . Deliverable Number 16

Work Package 6 _ GM Food

THE ROLE OF PARTICIPATIONIN A TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSY

Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation [PAGANINI]

Contract No. CIT2-CT-2004-505791 . Deliverable Number 16

WORK PACKAGE 6 _ GM FOOD

THE ROLE OF PARTICIPATION

IN A TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSY

Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski

with Maria Kousis and Yannis Volakakis

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The Paganini Project

Focussing on selected key areas of the 6th EU Framework Programme for Research and Technology, PAGANINI investigates the ways in which participatory practices contribute to problem solving in a number of highly contentious fields of EU governance. PAGANINI looks at a particular dynamic cluster of policy areas concerned with what we call “the politics of life”: medicine, health, food, energy, and environment. Under “politics of life” we refer to dimensions of life that are only to a limited extent under human control - or where the public has good reasons to suspect that there are serious limitations to socio-political control and steering. At the same time, “politics of life” areas are strongly connected to normative, moral and value-based factors, such as a sense of responsibility towards the non-human nature, future generations and/or one‟s own body. In these areas traditional mechanisms of governance can be seen to hamper policymaking and much institutional experimentation has been taking place. The overall objective of the proposed research is

to analyse how fields of governance related to the “politics of life” constitute a new and particular challenge for citizen participation and the generation of active trust

to illuminate how citizens‟ participation in key areas of European research and technology policy that are connected to the “politics of life” can be made more effective and appropriate,

to investigate the changing role of civic participation in the context of multi-level governance in the European Union,

to contribute to institutional re-design in a the emerging European “politics of life”.

Work package 6 – GM-Food: the role of participation in a techno-

scientific controversy

The WP will examine the role played by public participation in the regulation of agricultural biotechnology in Europe. In particular it aims:

to understand the development of the social controversy over the use of agricultural biotechnology in Europe;

to identify, categorise and assess existing and emerging participatory practices in Europe, and assess the way in which they have succeeded in generating innovative governance and active trust, with attention to the „inclusiveness‟ of participation in terms of gender, age, class and ethnicity;

to analyse tensions and conflicts between emergent participatory governance practices at the national level and transnational bodies such as the EU and WTO; and

to draw out implications for the effective design of participatory institutions.

This report

This report is the final report of work package 6.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ 3 Executive summary .......................................................................................................... 4 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 10

2. The context: the gene and competing European imperatives ..................................... 13 2.1 – The meaning of the gene ......................................................................................... 13

2.2 – The meanings of GM ............................................................................................... 15 2.3 – Competing European imperatives ............................................................................. 20

The innovatory imperative............................................................................................ 21 The precautionary imperative ....................................................................................... 27 3. The GM controversy in Europe: the narrative .............................................................. 35

3.1 Europe ..................................................................................................................... 35

The establishment of the EU regulatory framework for GMOs ............................................ 35 Consents and discontents ............................................................................................. 38 The call for labelling .................................................................................................... 41 Public unrest, institutional void, bans and moratoria ........................................................ 46 Changes to the regulatory frame work ........................................................................... 51

3.2. Greece .................................................................................................................... 58 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 58

Phase I. The beginning of institutional innovation: formation of concern and initiatives about GMOs, early-late nineties .................................................................................... 60 Phase II. The moratorium, GMO infiltration, and participatory governance, late nineties to 2004 .......................................................................................................... 68 Phase III: Coexistence, GM-free Balkans, and institutional innovation, 2004 and beyond ...................................................................................................................... 78

3.3. The United Kingdom ................................................................................................. 90

Phase I: The arrival of GM food and crops, 1996-1998 ..................................................... 90 Phase II: Institutional innovation, 1998-9 ...................................................................... 92 Phase III, AEBC and GM Nation, 2000-2004 ................................................................. 101

4. The politics of life in the GM controversy .......................................................................... 115 4.1 - Europe as a technological zone ............................................................................... 115 4.2 - The DRD: governing GMOs as a special category. Life, pollution and technology ........... 116

4.3 - Institutional ambiguity and the transition from risk to uncertainty ............................... 117

4.4 - The innovation of the new regime of coexistence: From (nation) states to (global) markets, from scientific governance to consumer choice. ................................................... 119 4.5 - Science and its others: spaces, separations and orderings in the governance of GMOs .......................................................................................................................... 121 4.6 - Spaces, separations and reorderings in the UK ......................................................... 126

5. Performing publics and participation ........................................................................ 132

6. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 145 Glossary of acronyms ................................................................................................... 151 Key EU directives, regulations and guidelines .............................................................. 152 Interviews .................................................................................................................... 155 References ................................................................................................................... 160

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Acknowledgments

This report was written by Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski with Maria Kousis

and Yannis Volakakis. Kousis and Volakakis researched the Greek case study, were the

lead authors of section 3.2, and commented on drafts of the other sections.

The UK team is grateful for the generous cooperation of those who agreed to be

interviewed for the project. The Greek team also gratefully acknowledges the assistance

of interviewees and informants from state agencies (especially I. Hondropoulos from

YPEHODE and K. Anagnostou from YPAAT), NGOs (especially M. Pispini from

Greenpeace and K. Mpalias, legal advisor of Greenpeace), universities, members of

bioethics committees and other fora.

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Executive summary

This report is about the conflict over Genetically Modified Organisms in food and

agriculture between 1990 and 2006. It looks at the dynamics of this conflict within the

European Union and two of its member states which had contrasting responses, Greece

and Great Britain. This „Battle over GMOs‟ has been one of the sharpest so far in the

„biotech revolution‟ threatening to derail the new technology. It thus provides an

important case for the exploration of the key themes that the PAGANINI Project takes

as its focus – the destabilising potential of the „politics of life‟ and the role of

participation in the governance of such contentious policy areas. This report therefore

explores the patterns of participation and governance, of regulation and contestation in

the GMO controversy. Its conclusions may be summarised as follows:

The conflict over GM was structured by two contradictory imperatives, built

into the European Union’s original GMO regulatory framework of the 1990

Deliberate Release Directive (DRD): On the one hand there was an imperative to

foster a climate of innovation and economic growth, while on the other, an

imperative to address the precautionary concerns around the potential impact of

these innovations on health and the environment. Thus while being committed to

the free movement of GMOs within European space, the DRD created a special

regulatory category of the GMO, with each variety needing to go through a process

of approval before gaining admission to this space. This regulatory category bore the

cultural charge of dealing with „life‟ remade as a technology, a commodity and as a

potential form of pollution. It was therefore entangled in questions of both eco-

social complexity and uncertainty and also in popular conceptions of natural and

social order. However, having highlighted these precautionary concerns, the 1990

DRD then made no provisions for post-release monitoring, labelling or traceability

of these products once admitted into the European regulatory space. This tension

shaped the dynamics of the ensuing conflict within the EU, creating a regulatory void

that drew in new participants and which allowed various parties including food

retailers, nature conservation bodies and member states to demand a moratorium and

push for a new round of regulation. The Deliberate Release Directive‟s delineation of

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the GMO as a separate category of regulatory object had the further consequence of

bringing into being the opposite category of „non-GM‟. This latter category was to

create new opportunities for parallel, „quality‟ bio-economic strategies, as individual

farmers, regions and even whole countries such as Austria and Greece sought to gain

added value by appropriating this opposing „non-GM‟ category. This development

has the potential to alter the innovatory imperative by opening up new paths of

innovation, challenging a linear view of progress that demands rDNA engineering for

an intensive agri-industrial model.

Different patterns of contestation, participation and governance were manifest

in different member states: The two national case studies in this report, Greece

and Britain exemplified two divergent responses by to the political crisis over GMOs.

One response was to ban GM varieties from the member states territory, allowed as a

temporary measure under a special article of the Deliberate Release Directive. Greece

was one of seven EU member states following this path, which in addition to its

leadership in the late 1990‟s of calls for the EU wide moratorium, made it

representative of the more GM sceptical position within the Union. The UK

government, on the other hand, represented a more pro-GM stance amongst

member states, with its attempt at the managed release of GMOs into society and the

environment. These two responses lead to different dynamics of the controversies in

the two countries. In Greece, the prime discourse and practice was of „defending‟

national borders from GM „contamination‟ – and this was to an extent shared by

both opponents of GM and the state. In Britain, however, the situation was much

more polarised, with government and industry attempts to release GMOs provoking

more intense and widespread resistance and new forms of participation in new kinds

of arenas. Consequently the UK government found itself engaging in a large-scale

public participation exercise called GM Nation; no such formal participatory

arrangement was found in Greece. However, rather than representing the emergence

of some new, normalised regime of participatory and deliberative governance, GM

Nation provides an example of mass participation momentarily employed as a crisis-

management tool. The outlines of a possible new GM regulatory regime can be

traced, although such a regime is more marked by the enrolment of market-based

rationales rather than deliberative participatory ones. In observing these contrasting

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patterns between Britain and Greece, a pattern of national and post-national

regulatory modes and responses to GMOs clearly emerges. While Greece exemplifies

a struggle that is still largely organised around national boundaries, in the UK the

battle lines began to shift to follow new contours that flow within and beyond nation

states, between GM and Non-GM fields and along supermarket shelves.

In its controlled introduction into the European Union, the GMO was

performed as a regulatory object by dividing science from politics. Dominant

expert based regulatory discourses and practices have tried to constitute the GMO as

a purely technical object of regulation, attempting to strip it from its intrinsic social

and cultural dimensions. Nevertheless the new technology‟s introduction became

deeply re-entangled in these, with the public controversy bringing forward contested

meanings which could not be managed within purified technocratic discourses and

regulatory spaces with any legitimacy. Thus we see some attempts at the

improvisation of new institutions and spaces where „other‟ discourses and criteria

defined as „ethical‟, „social‟, „cultural‟ or „political‟ were permitted a voice. Yet new

questions then emerge about the relations between these realms of „science‟ and its

„others‟, of their division of labour and relative status within the regulatory hierarchy.

These emerged at their sharpest in the Britain, as the Greek governmental ban on

GM varieties both softened its domestic conflict and deployed scientific discourses

within the European arena that aligned with and masked its economic, cultural and

political „others‟. In the intensity of the British contest, a pattern of bifurcation

emerged, with the government supplementing ACRE (its traditional narrowly science

based expert GM advisory body) with a new advisory commission on the „wider

issues‟ called the AEBC that included more diverse forms of expertise and

knowledge, including social scientists. Furthermore, these bodies draw their authority

from two parallel public experiments crucial to the performance of the UK

controversy – ACRE from the Farm Scale Evaluations and the AEBC from GM

Nation. This institutional bifurcation attempts to keep nature and society separate, to

ensure that the public will only deliberate on values, rather than on facts – a dynamic

which is further strengthened by the timing of GM Nation to finish before the

publication of the results of the Farm Scale Evaluations. The separation also serves

to leave conventional technocratic modes of governance intact, with the classical

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modern apex of the executive power of the state remaining as the ultimate decision-

making power, the point at which the separate information feeds from the different

regulatory experiments can be combined.

Public engagement exercises are characterised by battles over the multiple,

overlapping and shifting definitions of the public. The open meetings of GM

Nation attracted specialist „engaged publics‟ around the issue. Those worried about

the „representativeness‟ of these „engaged publics‟ counterpoised them to a „silent

majority‟ or „general public‟ defined by ambivalence and disengagement and

constructed by focus groups or opinion polls. These different publics are deployed

by different parties to the controversy. However, rather than attempting to bypass

„engaged publics‟ as unrepresentative, these should be considered a valid part of the

decision making process as knowledgeable and legitimate actors.

The battle over GM helped to precipitate a transformation of the regulatory

regime towards one of ‘coexistence’ which may in turn form a new

battleground. The GM battle resulted in an „epistemological stalemate‟ where within

the traditional regulatory discourse of risk neither side could conclusively prove

either the safety or harmfulness of the technology. Thus the language of „coexistence‟

was evoked. This shift in regulatory regime occurred along a number of different

dimensions: from (nation) states to (global) markets, from discourses of safety to

those around consumer choice, and from the calculation of risk to the management

of uncertainty. Firstly, the regulatory membrane was moved away from the national

border, and instead began to follow new contours within and through nation states,

between labelled products on supermarket shelves, and between GM and non-GM

crops in fields. Secondly, the transformation involved the dethronement of

positivistic „centres of calculation‟ by relativistic tropes of consumer sovereignty,

forcing the former to relinquish their unquestioned primacy and instead occupy a

terrain where different rationales jostle for position. Thirdly, instead of GM

governance being the preserve of state-appointed experts, pronouncing definitively

on calculable and specific risks, now uncertainty intensifies, associated with a

proliferation of voices which are ostensibly left to be managed by the market. This is

the regime of coexistence, which declares its welcome to a plurality of agricultures –

GM, organic and conventional – within the European Union. However, this new

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regime becomes a further battleground: on the one hand it is possible that

coexistence regulations could be used to stifle the new technology; on the other hand

the release of GM crops into agro-ecosystems with the inevitable processes of gene

flow might serve to carry the new technology into a position of dominance.

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1. Introduction

When genetically modified (GM) crops first made their entrance into global markets,

agro-ecosystems and public consciousness in 1996, their full and normalised integration

into European food and farming seemed imminent. Approval for the new crop varieties

was being granted under the GM regulatory system that had been established by the EU

with the 1990/220 Deliberate Release Directive. Protests and criticism seemed in the

past, and the bio-industry and their supporters in governments felt confident in their

proposals for liberalising what they already saw as an overly restrictive and precautionary

deliberate release directive.

However, behind the scenes, the European GM regulatory framework had been the site

of almost continuous conflict since the first „consents‟ for the release of GM plants into

the European environment had been applied for. Then, as the actual prospect of the new

technology entering fields and foodstuffs grew nearer, it encountered growing public

controversy and rejection around Europe. As well as finding expression in protests,

debates, referenda and the media, this controversy also found expression within the

increasingly politicised areas of consumerism and science. Thus supermarkets, facing a

collapse in consumer confidence already accelerated by the BSE crisis, found themselves

on the frontline of a cultural-political battle over trust, and demanded GM labelling,

declaring their products to „GM free‟ (and thus even finding a novel way to add value).

At the same time, industry and governments experienced the erosion of the authority of

a singular „science‟, finding themselves operating in an increasingly pluralised epistemic

polity and having to compete for trust in a knowledge market with NGOs and others.

„Outsiders‟, ranging from dissident scientists to farmers, gardeners and alternative

networks around food, health and the environment, were now contesting official

judgments. Questions of gene flow, antibiotic resistance or pollen movement suddenly

became part of a new currency in public political debate.

In this situation (described as a „meltdown‟ of confidence), member states and sections

of the EU apparatus began a strategic retreat, while at the time searching for a way to

stabilise the situation and regain the initiative. On the one hand they would remain within

the discourses of „sound science‟ required by the neo-liberal regulatory systems of the

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WTO and the EU. On the other hand they had to find a new political language and

architecture to address public concerns. This formed a tension at the heart of many

responses by member states and EU institutions when attempting to govern the GM

issue. The narrowly reductionist frameworks of the EU and the WTO could neither

legitimate the crops nor illuminate the barriers and problems their passage faced, for the

GM debate involved complex mixtures of science, culture, politics and economics that

extended far beyond the narrow framings of the regulatory system. As the new

technology became entangled in contestation and controversy, it became clear that

technocratic elites would not be able to legitimately manage the introduction and

governance of GMOs alone, raising the question of how new technologies are to be

governed, and what the role of the public in this might be.

The development and deployment of GM crops raised enormous questions – implicit in

the shape of the technology and the networks sustaining it – questions for example about

the relationship people want to have with their food, each other, other species or the

environment These vast cultural, political and ethical questions about what kind of

nature and what kind of society we want to live in all found themselves closed off,

resolved in a particular way by the „bio-industrial complex‟ that surrounded the

production, regulation and governance of GM crops.

Into this void stepped an array of actors including subpolitical networks around food,

health and agricultural biodiversity who began to find a voice, challenging the existing

expert based system of the Directive. In this context, various member states along with

the European Commission began to search for ways to manage this rupture of

legitimacy. This report examines the responses of two member states in particular,

Britain and Greece, and the novel practices these states and societies began to develop to

attempt to manage this crisis. Greece, with a strongly anti-GM population and a

government with little outward enthusiasm for agricultural biotechnology, was one of

five member states to impose national bans on GMOs invoking „Article 16‟ of the

Directive, and the leader of the related group which pushed the EU-wide de facto

moratorium on new consents. The UK on the other hand, as one of the most pro-GM

member states, was reluctant to go down this path of national bans. Instead, it attempted

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to proceed with the deployment of GM agriculture, but in the face of mounting social

resistance and wider unease and was forced to embark on a series of institutional

manoeuvres, including a series of public experiments and debates. Because of the

national ban in Greece for most of the period, the situation between the government and

civil society was less polarised, and thus the patterns of public engagement and

institutional innovation were different. Thus these two different initial responses, either a

national ban and EU ban or an attempted managed introduction of the technology

provided very different terrains of struggle on which the attempted governance of

GMOs was played out. We analyse the changing patterns of regulation within the EU,

the reworking of the distinction between „GM‟ and „non-GM‟, the shifting significance of

national boundaries in the spatial organisation of this distinction, and the transition

towards a regime of „coexistence‟.

In analysing these patterns of governance and participation of technoscientific

innovation, we pay attention to possible transformations of „classical modernity‟ and high

modernist statecraft (Scott 1998). Crudely, such classical modernist forms correspond to

the nationally organised formations of capital and society that reached their zenith in the

middle years of the twentieth century. Associated with this form are centralised and

technocratic modes of governance with scientific expertise privileged over public

participation and playing the key role in regulation, especially in areas of science policy

and high-tech ventures. This analysis is also informed by Latour‟s (1993) observations of

the purifications at work in the „modernist constitution‟, with its separations of „nature‟

from „society‟ and „science‟ from „politics‟. These categories form certain discourses and

spaces within which the governance of technoscience is performed. We examine the

patterns of regulation and their performance within these discursive spaces and also the

constructions of the „public‟ which these spaces permit and exclude from the process.

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2. The context: the gene and competing European

imperatives

2.1 – The meaning of the gene

At the centre of the battle over GM food and crops stands „the gene‟ as one of the great

iconic and ideologically potent symbols of the age. In 1953 Watson and Crick had

invoked terms such as „the secret of life‟ to describe their success in understanding the

structure of DNA. In the ensuing projects of molecular biology and genetic engineering

such portentous language has simultaneously evoked both hope and anxiety in equal

measure from different quarters. The concept of „the gene‟ and a genetic „code‟ form a

significant presence within our culture, with stories and legends about the power of

biotechnology simultaneously animating bio-industrialists and their social movement

opponents alike.

The idea that behind the multiplicity of all living beings lays a universal „code‟ that we

might be able to read has deep roots. The historian of molecular biology Lily Kay notes

how 17th century scientists appropriated earlier Christian traditions to propose that

nature was a book written by God – a „Book of nature‟ that could be read by scientists.

She argues that: „[i]n a vision reminiscent of the genetic code and the human genome

projects, the Book of Nature in the seventeenth century awaited “decoding” by the

experimental investigator equipped with an “ideal language”„ (Kay 1999). Kay traces this

move through some key figures in the scientific revolution, such as Bacon, Descartes,

Galileo and Leibniz. Thus even from the 17th century the „scientific revolution‟ offered

the idea that the world, with all its complexity, could nevertheless be reduced to an

essential nature, the discovery of the laws of which would offer prediction and control.

However, while the disciplines associated with the industrial age – physics and chemistry

– seemed able to work within this model, the study of living beings or „natural history‟

was seen as „merely descriptive‟, lacking generalizing concepts and therefore below the

level of „proper science‟. The path towards such a powerful generalising concept would

not begin until the early nineteenth century, with the transformation of natural history

into biology and the emergence of the concept of „life itself‟ as an abstract quality that

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underlay the variety of living beings. Thus Foucault would famously argue that „Up to the

end of the eighteenth century life does not exist: only living beings‟ (1970). To Darwin‟s

concern with the origin and transformations of species would be added a focus on the

transmission of heredity marked by the utilisation of Mendel‟s work. Finally with the

description of DNA structure in the mid-twentieth century biology could rise in prestige,

only now possessing adequate levels of abstraction and generalisation (Lewontin, 1997;

115). As Evelyn Fox Keller explains:

In the mid twentieth century, biology became a „mature science‟, that is to say, it

succeeded, finally, in breaking through the formidable barrier of „life‟ that had

heretofore precluded it from fully joining the mechanico-reductive tradition of

the physical sciences (Keller 1992, 113).

This deeply rooted cultural legacy of reductionism meant that long before Crick and

Watson‟s 1953 description of DNA, scientists had been searching for elementary and

particulate units of heredity. The language of „the gene‟ can be traced back to De Vries,

in his 1889 work which used the term „pangens‟, drawing on still earlier concepts such as

Weismann‟s „determinants‟ and Darwin‟s „gemmules‟. The term „gene‟ itself was coined in

1909 by Johannsen taking the last syllable of De Vries‟ „pangen‟ (Keller 2000). This itself

had its origin in the Greek genos – which itself means „origin‟. In the languages of modern

English and biology it becomes merged in meaning with the Latin for „kind‟ or „type‟ –

genus. Thus the word carries a long heritage of cultural meaning, which helped it

eventually to become the generalising concept in biology.

Therefore, from the very origins of the project of molecular biology in the early 20th

century, these concepts proved attractive to powerful forces in society.

There is seductive empowerment in a scientific ideology in which the

complexities of the highest levels can be fully controlled by mastering the

simplicity of the lowest. The rise of molecular biology then, represented the

selection and promotion of a particular kind of science: one whose form and

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content best fitted with the wider dominating patterns of knowing and doing

(Kay 1993: 17, 18).

Thus molecular biology held the promise of reaching beneath the apparent complexity

and multiplicity of the world to lay bare its essential code, which once revealed would

offer a powerful universal lever of instrumental control. This trope was employed by

T.H. Morgan, who, when setting up the influential new Cal-Tech biology division in

1928, declared in his section on Study and Research in Biology in the Bulletin of the California

Institute of Technology, that:

„It is with a desire to lay emphasis on the fundamental principles underlying the

life processes in animals and plants that an effort will be made to bring together

in a single group, men whose common interests are the discovery of the unity of

the phenomena of living organisms rather than in the investigation of their

manifold diversities‟ (quoted in Kay, 1993, 92).

In the late 1960s the Crick and Watson 1953 story started to gain wider cultural

significance, and after the advent of genetic engineering in 1973, and molecular biology‟s

subsequent increased status, the gene and the genetic acquired an even more potent

status within the economic and technoscientific imaginary as a lever of power.

2.2 – The meanings of GM

We have seen above that the whole project of molecular biology was deeply conditioned

by cultural traditions stretching back before the Enlightenment. Even before

appropriated by corporations, the idea of the genetic contained specific cultural meanings

allied to reductionist forms of power and control. This meant that Cohen and Boyer‟s

announcement in the early 1970s of rDNA splicing was received with an extraordinary

and intertwined mixture of hope and horror. This is well illustrated by the story behind

the first partnership between science and venture capital at the beginnings of the biotech

revolution. One of the first responses of the molecular biologists to their own creation

was to call the Asilomar Conference in February 1975 to examine the possible hazards of

their work. One unanticipated effect of this conference was that it then publicised the

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new technology to many, including the first bio-entrepreneur, Swanson, the young

venture capitalist who with Boyer as a partner was to set up Genetech, the first biotech

success.

For industry and government, rDNA technology fitted the perceived need for „high tech‟

innovation, seen as crucial for the advanced economies to keep ahead of growing global

competition from the newly industrialising countries (Jessop 2002: 127). The adoption of

the new biotechnologies by chemical corporations from the 1970s can be seen as part of

this long-term shift away from bulk commodity production towards ever more value-

added, knowledge intensive products. 1973 saw three events that were hugely influential

in setting the chemicals industry on this course: the publication of the first papers on

rDNA engineering; the OPEC oil shock; and the banning of DDT in the USA. These

last two events illustrate the crisis in which the petro-chemical complex found itself,

confronted by growing ecological regulation and a perceived need to move away from oil

dependence. The new biological technologies suggested a new material basis for

capitalism – „back to nature‟, but a modernised, recombinant nature. These developments

thus marked the beginnings of what is now coming to be called the „knowledge based

bio-economy‟: knowledge-based, to escape the competition accompanying globalisation;

and bio-based, to escape the growing eco-social contradictions of the petro-chemical

complex.

The early years of genetic modification as a technology saw discourses of hope and grand

expectations typical of technologies in that stage of development, including the

circulation of apocryphal but potent stories of growing „pork chops on trees‟ (Charles,

2001). But technical limitations and the pressures of industrial investment cycles were to

result in rather more humble GM products. Thus, by the second half of the 1980s, and

years of basic research, the chemical corporations leading the shift towards

biotechnology began seeking a range of „blockbuster‟ products that would start to realise

the promise of rDNA technology and a return on their investment. There were other

products, for example bovine somatrophin (BST), but focus on herbicide and insect

resistant crops fitted in with Monsanto‟s existing interests around herbicides. The first

products were thus herbicide resistant (HR) GM crops, along with a related line of Bt

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crops with insect resistance. The first of these two groups of crops – HR – were

genetically modified to be resistant to certain proprietary brands of broad-spectrum

herbicides (Monsanto‟s „Roundup‟ and Aventis/Bayer‟s „Liberty‟) by their respective

corporations. The second kind – Bt – were rendered insecticidal through the transfer of

genes from the Bt bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. These two rDNA-spliced traits,

engineered into maize, soy, oilseed rape, beet and cotton, would be at the centre of the

regulatory conflict in the EU and around the world from the late 1990s.

The herbicide resistant products were the result of a particular techno-social matrix,

shaped in particular by two salient features. Firstly, herbicide resistance was relatively

simple and actually technically possible at the time, unlike most of the sensationalist

claims that had originally attracted corporate and venture capital to exploit rDNA

technology. (Earlier claims around yield, nutrition and nitrogen fixation can be

contrasted with the actual limitations of the reductionist paradigm and practice

surrounding rDNA „gene splicing‟ at the time.) Secondly, these herbicides were already a

central part of the techno-economic trajectory of the chemical corporations. The

chemical industry had moved into products like herbicides (and pharmaceuticals) in

1960s as a low volume, high „value added‟ solution to the maturing of global bulk

chemical markets. These two factors combined to produce GM HR crop technologies

like „Roundup Ready‟ and „Liberty Link‟. Likewise, the production of insect resistance

through Bt was possible within the reductionist technoscientific framework of the time,

and promised a new direction for the old agri-chemical sector, with high-value pesticidal

crop plants pointing to a way out from the increasing regulatory and technical limits

being encountered at the time.

The huge amounts invested in research and development amounted to a massive gamble.

The actors making such an investment, even with a long-term perspective, would still

require the completion of the accumulation cycle, and return on the investment. This

created the persistent pressure to drive to get the new technology accepted and into

markets and agro-ecosystems as quickly as possible. Such economic features form the

overall architecture of the dispute, necessarily building in a corporate and governmental

impatience with any call for precaution, popular participation, deliberation or

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legitimation. But this dispute would also have its own global geography: the corporate

„gene giants‟ and associated elements of the bio-industrial complex were generally

clustered in the advanced capitalist countries of the global north, especially north

America and north west Europe. Thus one dimension of the struggle has been around

ownership of genetic resources, „bio-prospecting‟, and resistance and sovereignty in the

global south. However, there have also been important struggles between the European

Union and the USA, both with advanced biotechnology centres but also both having

significantly different regulatory styles and political responses to GM agrifood.

Agricultural biotechnology was coded by industry with particular cultural meanings.

From the beginning, the new rDNA technology was suffuse with promethean promise,

billed as a dramatic decoding and remaking of „life itself‟ with potentially transformative

implications for humanity‟s relationship with the material world. For example, a repeated

claim was that agricultural biotechnology would offer a solution to hunger and ecological

crisis. In suggesting that the appropriate response to such global problems is the

production of hew commodifiable products rather than a new style of farming or new

forms of social relation it thus sought to represent environmental and global justice

issues as tractable to technical and economic solution.

For the European public, however, GM crops tended to be associated with very different

meanings – some specific to GM crops, some more generally associated with rDNA

technology. Many of these meanings draw on ideas, with deep cultural historical roots,

that „messing with nature‟ is likely to have bad consequences. Some draw on the potent

symbolic and material linkages which food has to „nature‟ and the environment, to bodies

and health, and to family and other social relationships. Others are grounded in arguably

realistic, historically and socially informed expectations about the nature of the actors

involved in the technology. Members of the public draw on past examples of

environmental and technological controversies such as those concerning nuclear power,

PCB‟s, pesticides, Dioxins and BSE in order to justify their expectation of technological

hubris, corporate greed, bureaucratic blindness or cover ups. Finally, yet other social

meanings concern issues of global justice, for example the threat of corporations

19

achieving monopoly power over the seeds used by developing world farmers through

intellectual property.

A clearer insight into the concerns of European publics about GM food and crops was

offered by the in-depth study on „Public Attitudes to Biotechnology in Europe‟ (PABE)

carried out for the European Commission between 1998 and 2000 by an interdisciplinary

research team from the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy and Germany. This

research, based upon 55 focus groups in the five participating countries revealed that

publics expressed very similar concerns about GMOs across member states. In order to

form and legitimate their opinions, participants drew on their own empirical knowledge

about the behaviour of plants, insects and animals, about human fallibility, and about the

past behaviour of institutions responsible for the development and regulation of the

technology. The participants expressed concerns about the motivations behind the

development of GMOs, about the lack of public consultation and information, about the

capacity of regulators to influence the behaviour of large corporations, and about who

would take responsibility for unforeseen future harm, and how (Marris et al. 2001).

There are also continual discursive manoeuvres around whether GM is a moment of

rupture or continuity. Around the technology itself, opponents tend to stress the former,

its radical novelty and possible danger, while proponents suggest the latter, emphasising

its familiarity and by implication safety. But often the same actors will use different fames

in different situations: Thus GM‟s proponents claim that the technology is radically novel

when they are seeking the interest of investors, and when it comes to fulfilling the

requirements of patent law. However they are more likely to claim the opposite – that it

is wholly familiar, and that GM products are „substantially equivalent‟ to their non-GM

counterparts – when it comes to risk assessment and regulation. Similarly, the alarm of

opponents has clearly been partly fuelled by the very promethean language of novelty

and genetic reductionism employed by proponents. But opponents can also draw on

registers of familiarity, yet in a different mode: a pessimistic familiarity which draws on

earlier techno-scientific controversies and environmental problems, not just around the

behaviour of pollutants, but also the behaviour of governments and other institutions;

GM thereby appears as another episode in the familiar history of environmental

20

catastrophes. Thus in the GM controversy there is a continual renegotiation of tropes of

familiarity and novelty, forming a dense and tense discursive matrix around the issue.

One possible regulatory response to this is to emphasise familiarity and safety, with no

need for special regulation (USA/OECD); another is the opposite, emphasising novelty

and danger, thus logically leading to an outright ban. However, given its competing twin

imperatives of innovation and precaution (see the next section), the EU regulatory

approach institutionalised a compromise, one which attempted to contain and harmonise

both poles of this dilemma.

On the one hand, the EU approach suggested that GM was amenable to regulation

within the parameters of the existing scientifico-regulatory institutions. The act of

regulating GM implies that the technology is something familiar, broadly continuous with

past practices and comprehendible according to precedents, and that its risks can be

readily identified, assessed and calculated. Thus regulation itself is always to some extent

an attempt at the normalisation of the novelty and uncertainty associated with such a

technological change. Furthermore, boundaries are drawn around what counts as

relevant knowledge or expertise, and who holds it, thus serving to maintain both the

authority of the regulatory and political system and the broad momentum of the new

technology‟s introduction.

On the other hand, however, as we shall see in section 3, the EU established a specific

regulatory category of the GMO, based upon a recognition of the areas of uncertainty

surrounding the new technology, and thus requiring a temporary precautionary mode of

regulation. The establishment of such a specific regulatory category also has the effect of

establishing an ontological distinction between GM and non-GM, a distinction which in

itself will make this momentum vulnerable to derailment.

2.3 – Competing European imperatives

The emergence onto global markets in 1996 of this first generation of GM herbicide and

insect resistant crops would be marked by two important trends of the period. On the

21

one hand, GM crops arose as part of a global competitive drive towards perpetual

technological innovation, a process unsettling past social arrangements and producing

novel products, opportunities, hazards and uncertainties. This trend emerged as part of a

globalising neo-liberalism, manifest in the WTO, NAFTA and the EU and determined to

obliterate all „trade barriers‟ including national regulations around social and

environmental protection. On the other hand GM crops also arose alongside another

trend of precaution and environmental sustainability that were entering into regulatory

discourses and practices. These environmental-precautionary trends were present in

national and EU level policies as well as in global discourses around the Earth Summits

and associated agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the

Biosafety protocol. As we shall see, alongside this precautionary trend is an emerging

participatory one, where top down technocratic and expert systems of management and

governance find themselves supplemented and/or eroded by the importance of other

epistemic locations or points of view. Thus we have an apparent clash of imperatives –

between innovation and precaution - at the heart of much of the attempted introduction

and governance of GM crops. But before we analyse the patterns of metagovernance the

EU and its member states engage in to manage these conflicting imperatives, let us first

examine in more detail the policy backgrounds, discourses and forces at play at the EU

level and at Member State level.

The innovatory imperative

The emerging European Union is host to a relatively powerful complex of

biotechnological industrial and academic institutions. While this is a leading cluster of

global significance, it still lags behind the much larger sector in the USA, a concern that

forms a persistently prominent feature in EU governing discourses. Promoting the

emerging European biotechnology sector became one of the ways the emerging EU

could construct itself along with a specifically European scale of R&D intensive

industries. Much of the basic science had taken place in European universities, and many

of the leading pharmaceutical and agri-chemical corporations who had developed various

biotechnologies from GM agriculture to bio-medicines had European roots. These

included Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Proctor &

Gamble, and many more.

22

Galloux et al. describe the sector around 1998 as mainly concentrated in northern

European countries, with 182 in the UK, 105 in Germany, 102 in France, 68 in Sweden

and 48 in the Netherlands. It is important to note that this is taking the „biotechnology

sector‟ as a whole, which mainly consists of bio-medical and chemical applications, with

agricultural biotechnology playing a smaller role (Galloux et al, 1998; 177). The UK, as

represented in this survey, can therefore be said to have one of the most substantial

bioindustrial bases within the EU. On the other hand, the survey points towards an

uneven development and distribution of the bioindustries and bioresearch centres across

Europe. According to another study in the same volume „Greece has lagged behind other

European countries in biotechnology. The economy is largely service oriented, without a

recent strong tradition in scientific research‟ (Marouda-Chatjoulis 1998: 77). By contrast,

the UK had a relatively strong biotechnology sector at the time of our narrative.

However, none of the corporations specifically associated with herbicide resistant GM

crop technologies had their primary base in the UK. While the UK‟s universities,

institutes and corporations had played a leading role in the development of molecular

biology and plant biotechnology, by the time GM crops came to market and to the

centre of contention in 1996, a small cluster of transnational corporations based in the

USA and continental Europe, known as „the gene giants‟, owned the technology. Thus

the decision over whether to permit the commercial growing of GM crops was more of

„symbolic importance‟ for the „UK science base‟ as a whole, including medical and other

biotechnologies, and also for its strategy of building a „knowledge based economy‟ in

general. This stance also reflects the changes in the relationship between state and capital

within the globalising economy, with their complex web of interconnections between

corporations and governments. Thus in the 1990s the global „gene-giants‟ had substantial

investments in UK, along with labs, research centres, plant and an intimate network of

links with UK based companies, banks, universities and politicians. At the European

level, the GM debate was of much wider symbolic importance for the science base as a

whole, especially for the EU based bioindustries and their associations such as

Europabio, which form powerful lobbies within the EU policy world (Galloux et al

1998).

23

Despite, or even because of this, the conflict over GM crops has often been framed as a

transatlantic conflict between the US and the EU.1 Thus it was Monsanto‟s US grown

harvest of the first GM Soya in 1996 that sparked off the fin de siècle wave of controversy

and protest in the EU. However, by January 1997, the controversy also enveloped

Novartis (now Syngenta) and its Bt Maize, which was the first „European owned‟ GM

crop to receive EU marketing consent for import and cultivation (although both of these

had been harvested in the USA) . Austria immediately responded to this consent by being

the first EU member state to invoke Article 16 of the Deliberate Release Directive and

impose a national ban of Novartis‟s product. In response, powerful interests inside the

EU as well as from the USA and the WTO put pressure on the European Commission

to lift the various bans, blockages and moratoria. Indeed, it could be argued that the bio-

industrial complex forms a globalised network and lobbying force. Thus US firms

Monsanto, Dow and DuPont also are members of Europabio and many other EU

member state industry associations. Furthermore, as multinational corporations, most

bio-science companies have multiple national sections rooted in various countries.

The symbolic importance of biotechnology to the European Union‟s economic strategy

cannot be over-stressed. The EU‟s current strategic vision, known as the „Lisbon

Strategy‟ after the European Council‟s Lisbon meeting in 2000, declared that its „new

strategic goal for the next decade‟ was „[t]o become the most competitive and dynamic

knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with

more and better jobs and greater social cohesion‟ (Presidency Conclusions, Lisbon

European Council, 23 and 24 March 2000).2 Central to this strategy was to be policies to

promote research and development and the private appropriation of the flows of

knowledge from public scientific and academic networks, in order to promote high value

technoscientific innovation based production. In January 2002, the European

1 This will become particularly relevant in the comparison between Greece and the UK

below.

2 http://ue.eu.int/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/ec/00100-r1.en0.htm.

24

Commission adopted its Strategy for Europe on Life Sciences and Biotechnology. This located

biotechnology within the Lisbon Agenda and opens by proclaiming: „Life sciences and

biotechnology are widely recognised to be, after information technology, the next wave

of the knowledge-based economy, creating new opportunities for our societies and

economies‟ (European Commission 2002: 7).

However, the document quickly acknowledges that the life sciences and biotechnology

„also raise important policy and societal issues and have given rise to a broad public

debate‟ (ibid, p7). When it proceeds to discuss this debate, it later laments that it:

„focused narrowly on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and specific ethical

questions, on which public opinion has become polarised‟ (ibid: p 10). Most crucially, it

then points to important limits constraining how long such debate might be

accommodated within overall considerations of the „strategic vision‟:

Uncertainty about societal acceptance has contributed to detracting attention in

Europe from the factors that determine our capacity for innovation and

technology development and uptake. This has stifled our competitive position,

weakened our research capability and could limit our policy options in the longer

term (European Commission 2002).

The leading bodies of the European Union have to manage a series of competing

strategic imperatives that have shaped EU policies and institutions almost since their

inception. They are charged with promoting bioeconomic innovation, but at the same

time, as we shall see below, they are also committed to the precautionary principle and to

consider other divergent social and economic interests involved in the agrifood and

environmental sectors. In the case of GM, attempts to manage the conflicts between

these radically different policy imperatives result in the conflicts getting played out as

intra-EU battles.

Both the new technology and the emerging European institutions of governance had

grown together throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Surveying the

history of European biotechnology regulation in these formative decades, Jasanoff (2005:

69) describes this as a story of „co-production‟. The EU could find in the promotion and

25

regulation of biotechnology a specific role and purpose around which to further

construct itself. Jasanoff draws on Gottweis‟s earlier discussion of how various

„representations of biotechnology as a “European Project” cleared the way for … [the

EU‟s] entrance into the sphere of political action‟ (1998: 174) – in other words, how it

becomes a legitimate and therefore legitimating topic for such policy intervention. He

traces several „discursive codes‟ through which during these decades European

biotechnology programs found justification. These ranged from technological

competition with the USA; the restructuring of chemical, pharmaceutical, agricultural and

healthcare sectors; and changing global distributions of trade and raw material imports

into the EU. Still more of these „discursive codes‟ included the building of a „strong and

unified Europe‟ and the EU‟s ability to determine and manage potential risks of the new

technology (ibid: 174).

To Gottweis‟s original list of „discursive codes‟ we could add the strategy unveiled in

2005 as the „knowledge-based bio-economy‟ (KBBE). This attempts once again to

connect discourses around global competition and the necessity of high-tech, knowledge-

based bio-innovation with discourses around solutions to climate change, environmental

degradation and oil dependency. Thus the KBBE program finds itself bearing the

subtitle: „Transforming life sciences knowledge into new, sustainable, eco-efficient and

competitive products‟.3

Anxieties about innovation and competition, and in particular about Europe‟s capacity to

be a significant player in the development of the biosciences, became manifest across the

EU member states, albeit in an uneven way. In the UK in the 1980s certain problems and

barriers to technological innovation had been identified by the Thatcher government,

leading to a perceived need to dismantle corporatism and to move the focus of state

intervention away from import substitution and towards technological innovation for a

global market place (Gottweis 1998). This was the start of a long, still continuing

discourse of fear of global competition and the need to liberate technological innovation

in the UK. GM crops and biotechnology in general have come to be seen as a „frontier

3 http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/conferences/2005/kbb/index_en.html.

26

science‟, like information technology, the cutting edge of creating a „new economy‟. The

development of GM crops was thus seen as a key exemplar of this knowledge-based

strategy, their development involving the (private) appropriation of advanced (public,

university based) techno-scientific knowledges as added value. This was seen as vital in

order to stay in advance of newly industrialising countries. Thus the leaked minutes of

the meeting of UK Cabinet Office Ministerial Sub-Committee on Biotechnology

(SCI(BIO)) held on 10th February 2004, at which the decision was taken to permit the

commercial planting of GM crops after a long moratorium, spoke in terms of the

„symbolic importance of the decision for the Government‟s science policy and the UK

science base‟. This explains why the UK government was seen as so enthusiastically pro-

GM, even though the UK did not itself have a strong indigenous agricultural biotech

sector.

As a more „peripheral‟ EU economy, Greece occupies a different position, ranking lower

in most economic indicators within the EU. In terms of a technoscienfic knowledge

economic strategy, it ranks lowest among the EE 15 in terms of gross national

expenditure in research and technology, as well as in public expenditure in research and

development as a percent of the national budget. Private expenditure in research and

development are the second lowest (following Portugal), depicting serious setbacks in

innovations by Greek firms/enterprises (National Council of Competitiveness and

Development, 2004). The food production sector also occupies a different position, as

reflected in the absence of integrated sectoral policies and the lack of restructuring or

modernization of the agricultural sector. Subsequently, Greece is generally not a

producer but an importer of high technology innovations from the US and other

European countries. No biotech products have been developed or field-tested in Greece

(USDA 2005) and there have not been any major biotechnological companies working

within the Greek territory. In the nineties, while industrial production is still based on

low technology, slow progress is visible in corporate activity and in the macroeconomic

environment (Caloghirou and Zambarloukos, 2000, Zambarloukou 2004). Structural

adjustment, some convergence with the EU and privatizations are characteristics of this

period (Freire and Lobo, 2004).

27

Anxious about increasing global competition, the Greek state has made attempts to

restructure the economy: under both Socialist and Right wing governments privatisation

policies have steadily been implemented in all economic areas, while unions and

cooperatives have been losing state support. The government has also made weak efforts

since the early 1980s to support scientists in their research and to capitalise on

biotechnological breakthroughs. Even though PASOK created the Ministry of Research

and Technology, within a short period it was transformed into the General Secretariat of

Research and Technology belonging to the Ministry of Development. Biotechnology has

been one of its three priority areas. In 2001, the establishment of the National Council of

Competitiveness and Development (ESAA) aimed to delineate strategies to promote

national competitiveness, such as the development of collaborations between the

scientific and entrepreneurial communities (European Commission 2004).

The precautionary imperative

However, as well as these innovatory imperatives, the EU also had commitments to

protecting human health and the environment and subscribed to the precautionary

principle. These precautionary policy imperatives also found added impetus rooted in

deep trends in culture, economy and society: the same sort of structural social changes

that helped give rise to GM crops would thus also lay the ground for the forces resisting

them. In its late twentieth century search for new frontiers of accumulation, capital

would penetrate, dismember and commodify diverse aspects of the world at ever-deeper

levels. Thus social relationships and culture as well as science, ecologies, organisms,

would all have their features atomised, isolated and then recombined in ways optimised

for capital. The shift towards post-Fordist, knowledge-based economies would therefore

also help produce a set of increasingly individuated new subjectivities, contributing to the

increased reflexivity noted by, amongst others, Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992).

These increasingly individuated subjectivities would pervade and transform all sorts of

relationships of trust, authority and expertise. Importantly for the story of GM crops,

these would connect with discourses of consumer sovereignty and also of natural,

healthy food and individual self-improvement. The increasingly informational and

symbolic component of products noted by Lash & Urry (1994) and Klein (2000) forms a

28

significant feature of knowledge-based economies. While food has always had important

cultural and symbolic dimensions, the twist given to this by the accelerating processes of

commodification in the late twentieth century means food inhabits an especially highly

charged area. The historic processes of the industrialisation and commodification of food

production has increased the separation and alienation of people from knowledge of and

confidence in what they eat. Branding, labelling, packaging and the symbolic world of

advertising attempts to bridge this gap. Yet this distance can become a resonating

chamber for public doubts and anxieties about foodstuffs and wider issues. Furthermore,

a changing economy and rural structure has produced a „post-Fordist countryside‟, one

that in Europe is increasingly seen not as a place for the mass production of foodstuffs,

but also of aesthetics, leisure and biodiversity. This connects with a changing global

division of labour in agri-food production. While the resistance to GM food cannot be

reduced into these macro-economic changes, these changes do form an important base

underpinning and shaping the possibility of such resistance.

Another significant feature of these broad social changes was the emergence of the

environmental movement from the end of the 1960s onwards, with political groups and

movements springing up almost simultaneously in a number of industrialized countries,

bringing something of the radicalism of the student movement to the politics of

environmental protection and technology critique. By the end of the 1980s,

environmental mobilisations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were an

influential and seemingly permanent feature of „advanced‟ technological societies. The

rise of environmentalism, while not reducible into any simple meta-trend, can also be

associated with the production of new subjectivities, forming part of the shift from

Fordism to a knowledge economy. The conflict over GM can therefore be seen as

exacerbated by the combined and uneven development of the post-Fordist knowledge

economy. The emergence of green parties over this period will also become crucial later

on in shaping the response of member states and the European Parliament to GMOs.

This rise in environmental discourses began to enter the policy sphere of the EU and its

member states from the 1970s on. Throughout the development of the EU over many

29

years, Environmental policy gradually increased in importance.4 While the 1957 founding

Treaty of Rome contains no mention of environmental protection, defining the

institution as primarily about liberalising inter EU trade and promoting economic

growth, by the early 1970s rising environmental discourses started to impact on the

institutions agendas. When in 1972 the European heads of state met in Paris they thus

declared that „economic expansion is not an end in itself‟, mentioning the additional

importance of „quality of life‟ issues, particularly „intangible values‟ and „protecting the

environment‟ (Burchell and Lightfoot 2001: 35). That same year also saw the beginning

of the EU‟s series of Environmental Action Programmes. At this time, the market based

European institutions lagged behind the US in terms of Environmental protection.

However, from the early 1970s onward the environment became one of the EU‟s fastest

growing areas of policy making, although it would still not be listed as one of the

institutions common policies in the main treaties until the Single European Act of 1987.

Before 1987, environmental measures were based on Articles 94 and 308 of the Treaty of

Rome. These articles allowed for the issuing of extra directives by agreement of the

Council that were deemed necessary for the establishment or operation of the common

market. Thus from the start, environmental legislation had to fit within the overall

market based imperative of the EU. The original 1957 treaty allowed some exceptions to

trade liberalisation, its article 36 exempting some national measures justified by „the

protection of health and life of humans, animals or plants‟ along with the protection of

„public morality, public policy or public security‟, historic heritage and industrial or

commercial property. However, (in a sentence that mirrored the concerns of the parallel

international process of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which would

eventually become the World Trade Organisation), article 36 of the Treaty of Rome takes

the trouble to explicitly state that these exemptions should not be allowed to constitute a

disguised trade barrier.

4 In describing this history we shall use the words EU to also denote its antecedent forms

the EEC and the EC.

30

Exemptions to trade liberalization that were explicitly based upon „the environment‟

eventually surfaced in an important case before the European Court of Justice in 1985.

This judgment, relating to the Waste-Oils Directive, observed that „the principle of

freedom of trade is not to be viewed in absolute terms but is subject to certain limits‟,

limits which could be justified by the „objectives of general interest pursued by the

community‟. In the next paragraph the judgement states that „environmental protection‟

is „one of the community‟s essential objectives‟.5 This judgement therefore represented a

fundamental reinterpretation of the EU‟s mission, to include „environmental protection‟

as an „essential objective‟. However, this was not based upon any of the treaties that

updated the founding one of 1957, which did not mention the environment, but on the

ad-hoc practice established under its articles 94 and 308.

It has been noted that these pushes towards environmental policymaking were more of a

product of the drive for the EU-wide harmonisation of national laws and initiatives to

create a single market, rather than by a strategic shift towards environmental thinking

amongst the EU‟s political leaderships. Fear of distorting competition rather than of

environmental degradation was the key factor, thus giving moves at a national level

towards environmental legislation a significant impact at the European level (Judge 1993;

Burchell and Lightfoot 2001: 36). However, with the intensification of environmental

concern in the late 1980s, the EU began explicitly to act at a more strategic level, a shift

represented in a series of major acts of legislation from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.

The 1987 Single European Act (SEA) was the first major revision to the Treaty of Rome.

While mainly centred on trade harmonisation, preparations for closer political

cooperation and significant institutional changes, this act also for the first time enshrined

environmental objectives as a „Policy of the Community‟, therefore officially granting

5 European Court Reports 1985, page 00531. Judgment of the Court of 7 February 1985.

Procureur de la République v Association de défense des brûleurs d‟huiles usagées (ADBHU).

Reference for a preliminary ruling: Tribunal de grande instance de Créteil - France. Free

movement of goods - Waste oils. Case 240/83.

http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexplus!prod!CELEXnumdoc&lg=en&n

umdoc=61983J0240.

31

explicit competence for EU action in the area. It proposed the addition of a whole new

title, „Title VII‟, to the treaty, dealing exclusively with the environment.

Title VIII enshrined three objectives: „to preserve, protect and improve the quality of the

environment‟, to „contribute towards protecting human health‟ and to „ensure a prudent

and rational utilization of natural resources‟ This article of the SEA went on to outline

three basic principles: that action should be preventative; that environmental damage

should be rectified at source; and that the polluter should pay. Furthermore,

environmental protection should be a component of other community policies. In

applying these principles the SEA stated that the community should take into account

„the available scientific and technical data‟, regional environmental conditions; the

„potential benefits and costs of action or lack of action‟, and the whole community‟s

economic and social development (article 130r). The 1993 Treaty on European Union

(TEU) or Maastricht Treaty took this process further in the environmental field as in

many others, with environmental protection gaining a mention in the Act‟s preamble.

Furthermore, respect for the environment was added to the principles of the EU, as

listed in Article 2, and environmental policy stated as a defining activity of the EU in

Article 3. This 1993 Maastricht Treaty on European Union also added the precautionary

principle to the list of principles outlined in the earlier SEA. The incorporation of this

principle into the basic treaty of the European Union was a significant step, although the

text of the treaty did not offer a definition of it. This marked the rise in importance of

the precautionary principle within international law, also reflected in the 1992 Rio Earth

Summit and the ensuing „Rio Declaration on Environment and Development‟ which

stated:

„In order to protect the environment the Precautionary Approach shall be widely

applied by states according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious

or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a

reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental

degradation.‟

32

This is perhaps the best-known version of the precautionary principle, the meaning of

which has become subject to multiple and contested interpretations. This confusion lead

the European Commission to issue a formal communication on the principle aimed at

clarifying its meaning in 2000 and a resolution at the EU Nice Summit later that year,

again reflecting the significance of the concept within EU policy.

We have traced how environmental concerns and the precautionary principle became

part of the EU‟s policy around issues of the environment, health and techno-scientific

controversy. These changes would become key factors which would affect its handling of

the introduction of GM crops and food. This brief history sheds light on the conflicting

imperatives at the heart of the emerging EU and its stance towards GM agrifood

technology. The imperative of the European Union towards economic growth and the

liberalization and harmonization of trade rules was for a long time its only rationale, and

in a neo-liberal age remains its primary one. Other imperatives such as environmental,

health and consumer protection have emerged, but these remain within the overall

original rationale of the creation and maintenance of the common market. Burchell and

Lightfoot describe how this history institutionalizes within EU environmental policy a

long running tension between promoting the market and protecting the environment

(2001; 54). They also show how a continual driver behind the creation of EU

environmental policy and institutions was the necessity of maintaining a „harmonised‟

internal market by keeping up with developments in its member states – thus

environmental advances in some member states could prompt and shape EU-wide

measures. However, it is also possible to argue that over time „the environment‟ became

an attractive policy area around which the EU could define and construct itself, with

pollution, ecosystems and resources being the sort of trans-border issues able to bring

legitimacy to such a common project, and issues that would also have strong cultural

resonances around nature and geography. All these then would form the conditions that

would help shape the Deliberate Release Directive with which the EU sought to regulate

the introduction of GMOs into the European environment.

Relatedly, the reception of GM crops was shaped by a „participatory turn‟ in patterns of

governance, particularly around the regulation of controversial technologies. The social

33

changes associated with globalisation and the post-Fordist production of new

subjectivities demanding participation and inclusion had also contributed to an erosion

of the epistemic authority of the nation-state and its scientific advisory structures.

Feeding into this crisis was the history of environmental degradation and risk, and crises

of legitimacy over new technologies from nuclear power to novel food production

technologies. As a Europe-wide phenomenon, this was leading to new patterns of

governance; public participation would eventually be listed as one of the „five principles

of good governance‟ in the European Commission‟s 2001 White Paper on European

Governance.

Thus GM crops emerged in the mid 1990s into a changing cultural and political

landscape marked by in particular by both environmental and precautionary concerns as

well as neo-liberal globalisation and its emerging international regulatory architectures

ranging from the WTO to the EU. This emerging mix of factors pushed GM policy in

radically new directions. In the late 1980s, the development of regulation of GM in the

EU was uneven, with some member states such as Germany and Denmark advocating

more restrictive regulation, and others such as Britain being more aligned to a form of

trans-Atlantic neo-liberalism. The EU‟s imperative to create a single market led to the

standardisation of GM regulation through a Deliberate Release Directive which was

more precautionary than countries like the UK would have favoured. At this stage, the

EU GM crop regulatory system began to dramatically diverge from that of the US, in

particular by insisting that GMOs formed a distinct category requiring regulation.

Furthermore, as we shall see in section 4, due to the rise of environmental and

precautionary discourses within the EU the Deliberate Release Directive started with a

framing of GM in effect as a form of living pollution.

Nevertheless, the EU shared with the WTO and the US a prioritisation of „hard science‟

for its key regulatory criteria, in terms of physical risk to human health or the

environment, rather than including ethical, social and legal factors, never mind

advocating any public participation. The World Trade Organisation (WTO), launched in

1996 (the same year that the first GM crops crossed the Atlantic), framed GM solely as a

free-trade issue, rejecting the precautionary principle in favour of a framing of „sound

34

science‟. But neither the EU nor the WTO made an allowance for public opinion or

popular political legitimacy, instead attempting to take a narrowly expert- and science-

based route to legitimation. The principles of the WTO also clashed with and threatened

to override a rival treaty, the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol, part of the UN Convention

on Biological Diversity (CBD), which regulated the trans-boundary movement of living

modified organisms.

Thus the reception of GM crops in the EU was marked by these contradictory

imperatives. As well as the pressure to support high tech innovation, there was also

pressure to pay tribute to both „consumer choice‟ and labelling and also environmental

protection and specifically agricultural biodiversity. As we shall see, a considerable part of

the debate in the UK began to revolve around whether GM HR crops would encourage

or deplete certain key species that featured in national „Biodiversity Action Plans‟

required under the CBD, illustrating the changing rural economic priorities.

35

3. The GM controversy in Europe: the narrative

3.1 Europe

The establishment of the EU regulatory framework for GMOs

Before the first GM crops and foods arrived into global markets and ecosystems in the

mid 1990s, the European Union had already established its regulatory framework around

the Deliberate Release Directive (1990/220/EEC). This regulatory framework was based

upon expert scientific advice about possible harm to health or the environment and

required each member state to establish a „competent authority‟ (CA) which would

handle such decisions. The EU framework was inherently more precautionary than that

adopted by the US because it considered the novelty of the genetic modification process

to still contain important areas of scientific uncertainty and therefore potential risk. This

led the EU to base its GMO regulatory system upon the process behind the products while

the US approach was based upon the simple regulation of the end products alone.

Therefore unlike the US, the EU considered GMOs to be a special category that required

its own unique regulatory framework. This unique nature of GMOs and their potential

risks is expanded upon in the preamble of the Deliberate Release Directive, which argued

that:

[L]iving organisms, whether released into the environment in large or small

amounts for experimental purposes or as commercial products, may reproduce in

the environment and cross national frontiers thereby affecting other member

states; [and] the effects of such releases on the environment may be irreversible.

We may note two important discursive moves here in the preamble‟s opening paragraph:

Firstly GMOs are designated as a potential form of „living pollution‟ which may

reproduce in the environment with irreversible effects. This framing helps justify the

unique regulatory system and precautionary approach. Secondly, the paragraph refers to

the possibility that this novel form of pollution may cross national frontiers and affect

other member states, implicitly justifying a special regulatory role for the EU as a

multinational regulatory body.

36

The Directive‟s preamble then goes on to state, amongst other things, that „the

protection of human health and the environment requires that due attention be given to

controlling risks‟ and that for each GM variety „a case-by-case environmental risk

assessment should always be carried out prior to a release‟. The twin competing

imperatives of techno-economic growth on the one hand and precaution on the other

are both institutionalized in this directive, leading to a simultaneous commitment to both

the deliberate release of possibly harmful products and to an attempt to evaluate and

regulate this possible harm. The preamble argues for a „step by step‟ approach, whereby:

[T]he containment of GMOs is reduced and the scale of release increased

gradually, step by step, but only if evaluation of the earlier steps in terms of

protection of human health and the environment indicates that the next step can

be taken.

This leads to a two stage procedure, involving experimental release prior to commercial

release, covered by parts „B‟ and „C‟ of the directive respectively: Part „B‟ covers

experimental releases of GM crops such as field trials, while Part „C‟ covers consent for

commercial import, processing, feed or cultivation. A „Part B Consent‟ is given by a

national competent authority of each EU member state and is valid in that state only. A

„Part C Consent‟ is valid for the whole EU under the principle of free circulation of

products within the internal market. For a Part C Consent, first a biotechnology

company would submit a dossier of information (a „Summary Notification Information

Format‟, or SNIF) to the national competent authority of any particular member state.

Following a favourable opinion by this authority on the notification, the relevant

Member State would then inform the European Commission on its opinion. If there are

no objections raised by the other member states, the national competent authority that

carried out the original evaluation then grants the consent. This consent, once given by

the competent authority of any member state, would be valid for the whole EU. The

principle of the internal market means that the GMO in question must be accepted by

every other Member State, although the directive had a safeguard clause under its Article

16. This clause allowed a member state to impose its own provisional prohibition on the

37

sale or use of a GM variety within its territory if it had „justifiable reasons‟ to consider

that product „a risk to human health or the environment‟.

While tending towards precaution, the EU‟s Deliberate Release Directive therefore

shared with both the USA and the WTO a set of assumptions that confined the area of

valid consideration to strictly science-based concerns around positive harm to health or

the environment. Any assessment of wider social, economic or cultural factors was ruled

irrelevant. Furthermore, the procedure would be expert-based and technocratic, with

little regard for public participation. Toke (2004) argues that in democratic terms

regarding public consultation, the EU‟s 1990/220 directive lagged behind the US, where

a compulsory requirement for some public consultation was routine (Toke 2004: 159).

Members of the European Parliament had tried to insert clauses making public

consultation compulsory. However, this merely remained an optional and ill defined

requirement, with the Directive‟s Article 7 stating that: „Where a Member State considers

it appropriate, it may provide that groups or the public shall be consulted on any aspect

of the proposed deliberate release‟ (DRD 1990/220 A7). This requirement for

consultation would only become compulsory with the revisions to the directive after

2001. As well as lagging behind the US in this regard, the 1990/220 directive reversed the

trend towards public participation in techno-scientific decision making that had been

established within many EU member states. Torgersen et al. (2002) draw on Jülich‟s study

to distinguish between two groups of European countries based upon their possibilities

for formal public participation in GMO policy: On the one hand the Netherlands,

Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Austria (plus non EU Norway) are classified as

having already had a tradition of public participation, while others including Belgian,

France, the UK, Ireland Italy Portugal and Spain are described as providing minimal such

opportunities. The establishment of the 1990/220 deliberate release directive was actually

used as the occasion for the German government to revise its gene law and actually

restrict the rights to public participation in GM decision making (Torgersen et al. 2002:

52). Thus while moving towards the precautionary principle, the regulatory framework

established by the EU after 1990 was narrowly scientistic and technocratic, allowing no

space for participation or for the other framings of the GMO issue that would emerge in

the coming public controversy over the new technology.

38

Consents and discontents

This system began to grant EU wide marketing consents under Part C of the Directive

from 1992 onwards, starting with some GM veterinary vaccines. The first GM plant to

receive a part C consent was:

Societe National d‟Exploitation des Tabacs et Allumettes‟ herbicide resistant

tobacco (ITB 1000 OX ) (granted in June 1994 via the French CA)

1994 also saw the first notifications for crop plants intended for the agri-food system:

Plant Genetic Systems‟ (now Bayer) glufosinate-tolerant oilseed rape (MS1Bn ×

RF1Bn) for seed production purposes only (granted in February 1996 via the

UK CA)

Ciba-Giegy‟s (now Syngenta‟s) herbicide tolerant and insect resistant maize (Bt

176) for food, feed and cultivation (granted in February 1997 via the French CA).

Monsanto‟s herbicide resistant (Roundup Ready) soya for import for food

processing (granted in May 1996 via the UK CA)

The move towards consent for these first GM crop plants in the mid 1990s began to

generate considerable controversy, amongst member states, between member states and

EU institutions, in the public sphere and wider civil society. Under the Directive and the

EU‟s GM regulatory framework, ultimate power to push through consent for a disputed

GM variety lay with the European Commission, which was to happen repeatedly as the

above notifications worked their way through the regulatory system.

The dossier on the very first GM crop plant under consideration, the herbicide-resistant

ITB 1000 OX tobacco, was objected to by a member state which raised questions about

the environmental effects of the herbicide use related to the GM variety and other

questions around health and environmental aspects of GMO itself. However, the

Commission, in its 1994 decision (decision 94/385/EC) argued that: (a) objections raised

about the impacts of the herbicides to be used with the GM plants did not fall under the

39

jurisdiction of the deliberate release directive but under another separate directive that

covers herbicide use (Pesticides Directive 91/41/EEC), and (b) the potential risks for

human health and the environment posed by the GM variety were „not expected to be

significant‟.6

More objections about the herbicide use patterns related to herbicide resistant GM

varieties were raised by member states about the next GM crop, the glufosinate-tolerant

MS1Bn × RF1Bn oilseed rape. Other objections raised about this oilseed rape variety

included its potential toxicological effects if used for human food or animal feed; its

potential spread as an invasive species; and the possibility of the transfer of the herbicide

tolerance gene or its other modified genes to compatible species. The Commission

overruled these objections (although it did support the placing of a special condition on

the consent requiring labelling in an attempt to make sure it was only used to reproduce

seed and not enter the food or feed chain).

But it was the next two crops – Ciba-Giegy‟s Bt 176 Maize and Monsanto‟s Roundup

Ready soy, the first crops to be commercially cultivated, in the USA in 1996 – which as

they moved onto global markets and ecosystems in 1996 would galvanize open public

controversy and create divisions within the EU, and become defining battles within the

regulatory system. The battle over Bt 176 Maize illustrates the workings of EU

comitology around GM releases, and the way that this contributed to the declining

legitimacy of the regulatory framework. This maize variety had been engineered by Ciba

Geigy to have both of the common GM traits – herbicide tolerance and insect resistance.

The French CA received the original notification and then passed on a favourable

recommendation to the Commission the next year. However when the Commission

circulated this amongst the rest of the member states it received a large amount of

objections from these states CAs and scientific advisory bodies. These objections

included possible toxicological effects from Bt toxin; possible growth of resistance to the

Bt insecticide amongst pests; possible harm to non-target insect species; and the possible

6 Official Journal of the European Communities - 09.07.1994 - L 176 P. 0023 –

0024.

40

spread of antibiotic resistance to bacteria in the guts of animals and then humans, due to

the use of ampicillin-resistance genes to identify successfully transformed cells.

Because of these objections, in April 1996 the Commission had to take the maize

proposal to the „Article 21‟ committee7 made up of representatives of the member states.

Even if they had agreed to object to the proposal, the Commission still had the power to

proceed; however they were unable to reach a majority opinion, so the Commission took

the decision to the Council of Ministers (that is, the Environment Ministers of the 15

member states). When the Council met in June 1996, surrounded by the banners of

protesting civil society groups, 13 out of the 15 member states, including even

traditionally pro-GM governments like Britain, objected to the authorization. Only

France, as proposer, was in favour, while Spain was undecided – although according to a

commission spokesperson even France „was wavering‟, yet was bound by its role as the

proposing member state. However, without a unanimous decision the proposed crop

variety could not be blocked. Therefore the Council decided not to take a vote, but

instead asked the Commission to withdraw the proposal.

However, it was now still within the Commission‟s powers to proceed with the consent.

Leaked minutes (Levidow 2006, quoting Rich 1997) show that the Commission was itself

divided on how to proceed. The Commissioner for Consumer Affairs, Emma Bonino,

advocated a labelling requirement as part of the approval, a proposal that was

successfully opposed by the Trade Commissioner Leon Brittain and Industry

Commissioner Martin Bangemann on the grounds that such a requirement might be

illegal under WTO rules and could draw the EU into a trade dispute with the US. Some

Commissioners, including Bonino, then successfully argued that the wider expert

disagreements necessitated waiting for the opinions of three EU-level scientific

committees.8 After receiving positive opinions from the committees, the Commission

7 So called because this procedure is laid out in Article 21 of the DRD.

8 The Scientific Committee for Pesticides, the Scientific Committee for Food and the

Scientific Committee for Animal Nutrition.

41

finally announced its decision in favour in Jan 1997, with the French CA finally giving

consent in February. However over the next few months Austria, Luxembourg and Italy

invoked Article 16 of the DRD to place their own national ban on the maize, France

decided not to authorise the growing of the maize (thought its sale was still permitted)

and the European Parliament condemned the Bt Maize decision and demanded

suspension of its import (Boy and de Cheveigne, 2001: 182, cited in Gaskell and Bauer

2001).

This conflict within the regulatory system occurred at the same time as a growing wave

of public reaction swept across Europe. This had been particularly intense in Austria

with two leading Supermarkets, Spar and Julius Meinl, declaring that they would not

stock GM. Other states faced similar pressure, with Sweden‟s largest food chain SABA

banishing GM from its shelves. In this early period there was a more muted reaction in

UK in 1996-7 (Toke, 2004: 148). But it was the arrival of Monsanto‟s Roundup Ready

Soya which provoked the most high profile public and supermarket reaction, and also

triggered even stronger calls for the labelling of GM products.

The call for labelling

The discourses about the need for GM labelling had begun to surface a few years earlier,

during the discussions around the drafting of the EU‟s novel food and feed regulations.

In 1992 the EU Commission had published its first proposals of what would become

Reg. 258/97 on „Novel Foods and Novel food Ingredients‟. This contained no provision

for the labelling of food. Rather, it pointed towards the relaxation and liberalisation of

the EU‟s GM regulatory stance by proposing a US style procedure of simple notification

and a statement of substantial equivalence rather that scientific assessment and testing

(Toke 2004: 154). However, when in the Autumn of 1993 the European Parliament‟s

Environment Committee held its first reading of the proposed regulations it proposed

the labelling of food containing GMO ingredients. It also argued for the requirements

for a full safety assessment and public consultations. This was followed soon after by the

full (plenary) meeting of the European Parliament backing the demand for labelling. The

idea of labelling was also gaining support around the EU, and was an emerging concern

in various stakeholder consultations, with for example the UK consensus conference

42

proposing labelling. That year Denmark and Sweden also passed their own GMO

labelling laws. The controversy was heightened further when in October of 1995 the

Council of ministers dropped the European Parliament‟s labelling proposal. Germany,

Austria, Denmark and Sweden then voted against the Councils common provision on

the grounds that the measure did not contain labelling. Then at a meeting of the

European Parliament in November 1996, despite opposition from Commission and

Council of Ministers, overwhelming parliamentarian pressure led to an agreement to

accept labelling on the basis of a product containing detectable GMO DNA. This was

just as the shipments of the unlabeled and unsegregated GM soya were crossing the

Atlantic. The version of the novel food and feed regulation containing provision for

labeling was adopted by the Commission in January 1997 and came into force in May of

that year. The impending introduction of the new regulation and disagreements amongst

regulators and member states combined with the unlabelled arrival of the first imports to

escalate the crisis in public confidence.

The first shipments of this GM soya were scheduled to arrive in European ports in

November 1996. The fact that it would be arriving unlabelled and mixed in with the

conventional soya shipments (2% in the 1996 shipments, growing to 15% in 1997) added

to the controversy and intensified the growing discourse about GM labelling and

segregation amongst policy makers, NGOs, the media and the wider public. Soya or

soya-derived ingredients are central to contemporary industrial food processing and are

therefore found in a very wide range of foods. Furthermore, the USA was Europe‟s

main supplier of soya, with the EU accounting for over 30% of US soya exports at the

time. This meant that the GM soya would be spread amongst a very large number of

food products purchased in Europe. Thus the campaigning groups would find a

powerful resonance amongst consumers, the media creating concern in the food retail

industry, making soya the key battleground.

Roundup Ready Soya had been given EU wide consent by the Commission for import as

a food in May of 1996 in the face of opposition from Austria, Denmark and Sweden,

who demanded labelling. Monsanto had submitted its „notification‟ to the UK CA, as the

UK along with France was considered to have of the most favourable government

43

positions to GMOs in the EU (Charles, 2001: 165). This body indeed made an initial

favourable assessment in early 1995 and furthermore had argued there was no need for

labelling. After its contested journey through the EU regulatory procedure, the

Commission granted approval, also arguing that there were „no safety reasons which

justify the segregation of the product from other soya beans‟ and „no safety reasons for

labelling which mentions that the product has been obtained by genetic modification

techniques‟ (Commission Decision 96/281/EC; Official Journal of the European

Communities. 30.04.1996 - L 107 P. 0010 - 0011). – which put the EU in apparent

harmony with the stance taken by the US administration, Monsanto and the American

Soybean Association.

However, other actors within the food chain and within wider society took a different

view. All around Europe food retailers were worried by a growing crisis of public

confidence in food safety. This had dramatically escalated in March 1996 following the

announcement by the UK government that a probable link has been established between

the human brain disease of vCJD and BSE, popularly dubbed „Mad Cow Disease‟, after

years of assurances by government scientific advisers, politicians and the industry that

„British beef is safe to eat‟. Following this admission 1996 public trust in the regulatory

and scientific advice system along with the food and agriculture industries plummeted,

and within a week the European Union had banned all exports of British beef. It was

into this cultural and political climate that the new and disputed form of food and

agriculture was to be introduced. A potential crisis of confidence in Soya might be

particularly damaging given its status as one of the most important of US food crop

exports into the EU, and its virtually ubiquitous use in contemporary processed

foodstuffs.

44

1996 saw a number of influential European industry bodies calling for labelling. In July

EuroCommerce9 wrote to the American Soybean Association warning that „European

Commerce insists that in order to ensure consumer confidence, consumers must receive

full information on foodstuffs they wish to purchase, thus allowing them to make an

informed choice‟.10 This body, which proclaims its political objective as the championing

of the „cause of free and open markets both within the European Union and beyond‟

makes a seemingly unlikely ally of the radical environmental activists supporting

Greenpeace. However, powerful discourses proclaiming the sovereignty of consumer

choice were enshrined in the neo-liberal project, and through the conflict over labelling

these discourses were now somehow being placed as a fetter on the project of

agricultural biotechnology being pursued by companies like Monsanto. The

EuroCommerce statement was followed by many other concerned exchanges between

European retailers and the American soyabean growers. For example, in August 1996 the

British Retail Consortium, an industry body whose members include all the major UK

supermarkets, expressed concern about the way that the GM soy was being introduced

onto the market, and how this thwarts the systems and policies of labelling and

traceability that the retailers had been developing in order to maintain consumer

confidence. Elsewhere, the author of the BRC statement commented on its context:

After the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or „mad cow‟ crisis, British

retailers knew that it would be essential to introduce genetically modified foods

sensitively. Genetic modification is considered a new technology and, therefore,

consumers would view its launch without full disclosure with suspicion (Nunn

2000)

9 EuroCommerce is the representative in Brussels of the European retail, wholesale and

international trade sectors, grouping together over 100 other bodies, including national

associations in 28 countries and several Europe-wide sectoral trade associations

(http://www.eurocommerce.be).

10 Friends Of the Earth Europe Biotechnology Programme Mailout Vol. 2 (1996)

Issue 6, 15th September 1996.

45

As these warnings about the need for segregation and labelling were ignored by US

government and industry, the stance taken by European business and commercial

organisations also hardened. Thus on 28th September 1996 EuroCommerce held a press

conference with the Greens in the European Parliament calling for a boycott of products

made from the GM soybeans until these were adequately labelled.

Environmental and consumer NGO‟s began to form alliances and mobilise. Greenpeace

elevated the campaign to one of its top three priorities and set its international network

into action. A press conference in Germany launched a campaign on 11th September

1996 bringing together Greenpeace Germany, BUND/Friends of the Earth Germany

and the consumer organisation AgV (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbande)

around the issue of the GM soya. This aimed to intensify the pressure on giant food

processing corporations such as Unilever, Danone, Nestle and Kraft-Jacobs-Suchard not

to use the soya. Similar campaigns were being launched in most European countries. 16

Oct 1996 was proclaimed „world food day‟ and used as an opportunity for more alliance

building between environmentalists, consumers and retailers. Greenpeace held protests at

Unilever offices around Europe while the European Consumers Organization (BEUC)

chose this day to call for mandatory labelling of the GM soya beans and foods derived

from them.

In the same week, supermarket and wholesale organisations in Austria, Switzerland,

Sweden and Norway, including Meinl, one of Austria‟s leading supermarket chains, and

the Federation of Swedish Food Industry, confirmed that they would not be stocking

products containing the GM soya unless separated and labelled. On 29 October,

Consumers International, a federation of 215 consumer organizations in more than 90

countries, also announced its opposition, calling GM crops a health risk because of their

use of antibiotic resistance genes. The campaign also spanned the Atlantic as on 7

October 1996 Jeremy Rifkin‟s Foundation on Economic Trends and Greenpeace in the

USA launched an international alliance of more than 300 consumer, health, trade and

agricultural organizations from 48 countries in a campaign for a boycott of the Monsanto

soya and Ciba-Giegy‟s maize. This was followed on 10 October with Greenpeace activists

46

taking direct action against a field of Monsanto‟s Roundup Ready soyabeans in the USA‟s

agricultural heartlands of Iowa. They symbolically marked the field with a gigantic 100

foot „X‟ and the word „biohazard‟, creating an iconic image that would appear around the

world‟s media.

The protests would follow the crop as it was harvested and shipped across the Atlantic

and a month later Greenpeace and others were staging demonstrations at major

European ports as the ships carrying the GM soy arrived. Ships docking at Hamburg,

Antwerp, Liverpool, Ghent and on the Rhine were met with protests and direct action

throughout November 1996, while in the USA grain terminals were blockaded. Thus

powerful discourses, resonant with symbols of defending the territorial borders of

European countries against foreign genetic pollution and US global power could be

invoked. It is significant that this action around the symbolic protection of borders flared

up during the same year which saw the birth of the WTO, and thus the intensification of

the trend towards a global neo-liberal market space. The campaign then followed the

Soya as it entered the food chain, with groups such as Greenpeace protesting outside the

food companies‟ offices and leafleting the supermarkets. The giant „X‟ placed upon the

field in Iowa that harvest had become a powerful global symbol, an act of labelling

imposed by a social movement that then travelled along with the contested commodity

from the field to the supermarket.

Public unrest, institutional void, bans and moratoria

Protests intensified around the EU, along with consumer and retailer unease and media

scrutiny in early 1997, following the controversial maize decision and the arrival of the

unlabelled soya. In April 1997 an Austrian Volkbegehren or „peoples initiative for

legislation‟ against GMOs was subscribed to by a massive 21 per cent of the electorate,

the second most successful such initiative ever. Lassen et al (2002) observe the uneven

development of the controversy in these first months of 1997 – contrasting countries

such as Austria and Denmark where the Soya issue went particularly „hot‟ immediately,

and ones like Italy and Greece where the issue emerged into public and political focus

later. According to Toke (2004) the GM controversy was more muted in the UK in this

initial 1996-1997 period, (ruling out any simple causative link between the intensity of the

47

BSE crisis and the reaction to GMOs.) However, the controversy was escalating

dramatically in the UK too by 1998-99.

Despite the rising controversy, more GM varieties received Part C consents. In 1997 two

varieties of herbicide resistant oilseed rape given consent in June, supported by the UK

and France but opposed by other member states; in 1998 four more GM food or feed

crop varieties given Part C Consents in April. These were a herbicide resistant spring

Oilseed Rape; a herbicide and insect resistant maize (Bt11); a herbicide resistant maize

(T25) and an insect resistant maize (Mon 810). There were also two kinds of carnation

approved in 1998, but these were unopposed by any member state and simply received

consent from the Dutch C.A.

Following the early 1997 Article 16 national bans on the Bt 176 maize by Austria,

Luxembourg and Italy more EU countries began to take similar action. Greece and

France imposed Article 16 bans on varieties of GM oilseed rape in late 1998. Germany

banned the Bt 176 maize in March 2000, while Austria two imposed more national bans,

the first on the GM maize line MON810 in June 1999, the second on Bayer‟s T25 maize

in April 2000. While various national bans have ultimately ended up being condemned as

without scientific basis by central EU bodies, the EU has been reluctant to take any

sanction against member states, sensing it lacks the legitimacy around such a contentious

issue. Thus five countries invoked article 16 of the 1990/220 directive and even after this

had been revised with the new 2001/18 Deliberate Release Directive, more national bans

were enacted by Greece, Poland and Hungary.

France presented a more complex picture, which is worth looking at in some detail

because of the echoes of the UK story presented below in section 3.2. Along with the

UK, the French government was initially seen as the most pro-GM in the EU; also like

the United Kingdom, it too experienced widespread public opposition to its national

stance, and was forced to hold a formal public debate. However, unlike the United

Kingdom, it abandoned its pro-GM position, invoking Article 16 bans and its own

moratorium.

48

It was the French CA that approved all the four new GM crop varieties listed above that

received consent in 1998. However, as we have seen, in February 1997 the French

government reversed its authorization for cultivation of the Bt 176 maize it had been

instrumental in pushing through. In May this anti-GM stance appeared to toughen when

a new left of centre government including the Greens was installed with a manifesto

commitment to propose an EU level GM moratorium. However, in November „97 this

Government re-authorised the cultivation of the Bt 176 maize it had banned in February.

Yet at the same time it announced its own moratorium on two more GM crops, and

called for more scientific tests and a public debate (see box). Then in December it

announced that no new GM varieties would be authorised in France until there had been

a public debate.

However the discussion would not remain within the official spaces made for it and 1998

started with Jose Bove and others from the radical farmers union Confederation

Paysanne taking direct action and destroying seed stocks of the GM maize in January, the

first of many such acts. Consumer unease also intensified and in March the French

supermarkets Carrefour and Leclerc declared their rejection of GM ingredients. The

conflict continued to intensify after the conference, with the government deciding in July

„98 to allow cultivation of two more GM maize varieties (Boy and de Cheveigne

2001;182). This decision which was reversed following an appeal by Greenpeace and the

Confederation Paysanne (to the Conseil d‟etat, which lead to a long European Court of

Justice constitutional debate eventually ruling against the legitimacy of this). Finally in

September 1998 the French government invoked Article 16 of the DRD to ban import

or cultivation of two varieties of GM oilseed rape. Thus with these national bans the

French government now moved towards the GM-sceptical end of the spectrum, a

position that was consolidated as they begin to press for a moratorium on new consents

at the EU level.

The French GM Consensus Conference

49

Held in June 1998 as part of a wider fact finding mission, this GM citizens conference

was an adaptation of the consensus conference model developed by the Danish Board of

Technology. A Steering Committee was set up, composed of academics – three

sociologists, three scientists and one legal expert, (this differed from the DBT model

with no stakeholder representatives). This then selected 15 lay members of the public

who had little prior knowledge or interest in the issue. These would „represent‟ society at

large and would be „educated‟ at two closed weekend sessions by eleven selected experts.

Finally, the conference proper would take three days, with the lay panel submitting pre-

prepared questions to the experts on one day, engaging in a question and answer session

with the experts and a wider audience on the next day and discussing a final report on

the third day.

The citizens conference conclusions did not call for a complete moratorium on GM, and

accepted that there would be beneficial aspects of the technology, seen by some as a

qualified „yes but‟ (Marris and Joly 1999: 19). However, it also made specific

recommendations, including banning the use of antibiotic resistance markers; strict

labelling of food products; and new laws regarding GMO traceability, liability and

responsibility. It also advocated changes to the structure of the French Commission on

Biomolecular Engineering, insisting on more democracy and transparency and proposing

a division between a „scientific college‟ made up of scientists from all disciplines having

to do with GM products (including doctors, ecologists and molecular biologists) on the

one hand and a „general college‟ on the other, including farmers, consumers and

politicians ( Marris and Joly 1999; Boy, Donnet-Kamel and Roqueplo 1998 ; Lieberman

and Taylor 2005; Chavot & Masseran 2002; Boy and de Cheveigne 2001).

Turning back to wider developments in Europe, in the summer of 1998 Monsanto

attempted a public relations counter offensive, with a multi-million dollar advertising

campaign in Europe. It also commissioned research from the opinion pollster Stan

Greenburg. The Greenburg memorandum to Monsanto, which was soon leaked to

Greenpeace in November 1998, described how this advertising campaign had been

50

„overwhelmed by the society-wide collapse of support for genetic engineering in foods‟.11

Greenburg warned how the crisis was particularly acute in the UK. He also describes a

series of interviews he had conducted with British retail leaders including „heads of

corporate communication, heads of corporate affairs, chief scientific advisors and senior

buyers and managers at Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Tesco, CWS, Asda and Safeway‟ in

September 1998:

The retailers are critical arbiters in this process, since they have very high

credibility in Britain, according to our surveys, and because they believe

Monsanto has handed off to them the task of winning public acceptance. They

carry with them their resentment of Monsanto for badly mismanaging the

introduction of biotechnology in Europe and for allowing the issue to be decided

in the supermarkets. As a result, they are right on the edge – testing public

acceptance, but now very open to a moratorium that would get them off the

front lines. They are anxious for someone else to move on the front lines,

preferably the government (Greenburg Memorandum to Monsanto, leaked to

Greenpeace 1998).

By the end of 1998, the crisis of legitimacy for those trying to promote GM agri-food in

Europe had become critical. An institutional void around the governance of GM crops

had become visible to all. The 1990/220 deliberate release directive had attempted to

govern the release of GM crops as a separate and distinct category. However, it had

provided no machinery for post-market regulation, assuming that its responsibility ended

once the new varieties were released into the fields or supermarkets. Yet now retailers

found themselves on the frontline of a new cultural and political battle that threatened

their sensitive and elaborate system of negotiations with consumer consciousness, based

upon trading with symbols of naturalness, purity and health. Within this meltdown of

public trust proliferated a growing series improvised measures, ranging from national

11 Greenpeace 1998 – „Leaked document from Monsanto reveals “collapse of

public support for genetically engineered foods”„, Greenpeace press release, 18 November

http://www.greenpeace.org.

51

bans by EU member states to boycotts by powerful supermarket chains. Activists

arrested for sabotaging GM test fields would escape punishment, with the courts refusal

to convict them demonstrating the wider lack of cultural legitimacy of the GM project.

This political, cultural, epistemic and regulatory logjam intensified until in June 1999 five

EU member states - Denmark, France, Greece Italy and Luxembourg – successfully

proposed a de-facto moratorium on any new Part C consents to the European

Environment Council. The motion at Council said that, given concerns about risk, the

specificity of European ecosystems, and the need to restore the confidence of public

opinion and the market, the Commission should suspend new authorisations until it had

strengthened and widened its risk assessment procedures and put in place a system

allowing the complete traceability of GMOs and products derived from them.12 Thus the

last two GM crops given Part C Consents in 1998 – AgroEvo/Aventis/Bayer‟s HR

Maize (T25, import only), and Monsanto‟s bt resistant maize (MON 810, import and

cultivation) – were to be the last under the old directive 90/220. In addition the

countries of Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden stated

they will take a „thoroughly precautionary approach‟ in dealing with marketing

applications, urging the Commission to make proposals for the traceability and labelling

regulations as soon as possible.

Changes to the regulatory frame work

The 1990/220 Directive had long been proposed for review. But it was expected that

this would be to liberalise and relax what industry had from the beginning seen as an

overly precautionary regulatory framework. Now, however, the crisis over GM pushed

this revision in the opposite direction – towards stronger regulation. Thus when in

February 1998 the European Commission published its proposed amendment to the

directive this contained more than the earlier commitments to „streamlining‟ some

aspects of the regulatory process. Negotiations gained momentum under the EU

12 Official minutes at http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/99/st09/09433en9.pdf ,

p. 14.

52

Austrian Presidency in the autumn of 1998. Stronger technical annexes on risk

assessment were developed, which also included addressing the potential wider and

indirect impacts of the crops such as the associated herbicide management regime. There

was also the beginning of negotiations around the development of a regime of post-

market monitoring. The new directive to replace 1990/220 was published by the

Commission in February 1998, and finally made law as Directive 2002/18 on 12 March

2001.

The revised Directive differs from the 1990 one in several significant ways. These

changes can be understood as a response to the regulatory crisis triggered by the original

directive. These included changes in both principles of risk assessment (the consideration

of wider and indirect effects; post-release monitoring; and the banning of some anti-

biotic resistance markers) and in political mechanisms (the permissibility of ethical

considerations; changes in the comitology; and more public consultation). These changes

were supported by an explicit reference to the precautionary principle for the first time,

contained in both the Directive‟s preamble and in the important technical Annex II on

risk assessment.

The principles of risk assessment were significantly extended in Annex II, so that they

now included addressing the potential wider and indirect impacts of the crops such as the

associated herbicide management regime, with more trials sanctioned to provide such

information. Other information was also required, such as an assessment of the effects

on non-target species and possible competitive advantages that may be transferred to

other plants. The revised directive also called for mandatory post-release monitoring

requirements, with the preamble stating the necessity to „establish common objectives for

the monitoring of GMOs after their deliberate release or placing on the market as or in

products‟, including „monitoring of potential cumulative long-term effects‟. (Preamble,

para 20). Furthermore, the 2001 directive put a ten year time limit on consents. Another

revision introduced, in response to public and NGO concerns, included placing some

restrictions on the controversial antibiotic resistant marker genes, stating that those still

in medical or veterinary use should be „taken into particular consideration‟ in risk

53

assessment, „with a view to identifying and phasing out those...which may have adverse

effects on human health and the environment‟ by 2004 (A4 -2).

The revised 2001 directive also attempted to address the wider issues of public and

political concern that stretched beyond the narrow technical and scientistic parameters of

the 1990 original. Thus the preamble (para 9) states that: „Respect for ethical principles

recognised in a Member State is particularly important. Member states may take into

consideration ethical aspects when GMOs are deliberately released or placed on the

market as or in products‟. Thus ethical concerns were included as having some legitimacy

within the new official regulatory frame work, although kept separate from and

subordinate to the traditional science based environmental and health risk assessment

paradigm. This is reflected in Articles 28 and 29 of the new directive which codified the

commission‟s relationship to expert authority and advice. Article 28 called for mandatory

consultation with relevant EU level scientific committees, while Article 29 had the lesser

power to recommend consultation with specialist ethical committees.

The 2001 directive also amended EU procedure, with some more power granted to

member states and an obligation to consult the European Parliament, although it also

attempted to discourage more unilateral national bans by tightening the criteria by which

they could be declared. However, it also became possible for the council of ministers to

reject a GMO notification dossier by a qualified majority. This was a change from the

previous directive‟s insistence on unanimity, which as we have seen with the example of

Bt 176 maize, had been impossible even if all member states were hostile to consent,

given the obligations of a rapporteur state whose Competent Authority was involved.

Finally, the revised 2001 directive made gestures towards including more space for

public consultation, including mandatory public consultation. Thus Article 9 within

section „B‟ of the directive covering national experimental releases, entitled „Consultation

of and information to the public‟, called on member states to:

„... consult the public and, where appropriate, groups on the proposed deliberate

release. In doing so, Member States shall lay down arrangements for this

54

consultation, including a reasonable time-period, in order to give the public or

groups the opportunity to express an opinion‟.

This article also called on member states to make „available to the public information on

all Part B releases of GMOs in their territory‟, and also called for the Commission to

make information from EU level exchanges on GM notifications available to the public.

Regarding the EU wide Part C marketing releases, the revised Directive also contained an

article (Article 24) on „Information to the public‟. This called for the summaries of GM

notifications, and related assessment reports to be made immediately publicly available,

with a further allowance that: „The public may make comments to the Commission

within 30 days‟ with a commitment that the Commission will immediately forward these

to the competent authorities. Another article of the 2001 directive (article 16) called for a

60 day period for public comments on the criteria and information requirements that the

specific GM notification had been judged to require.

These features marked a change from the 1990 Directive, which had only called for

public consultation on a Part B consent „where a Member State considers it appropriate‟

(Article 7, 1990/220). However, even under the revised Directive the calls for public

information and consultation were still vague, with the mere placing of information on

websites or advertisements in specified newspapers considered enough.

Other parts of the new EU regulatory framework for GMOs were established after more

lengthy and contested negotiations in 2003. These were Regulation 1829/2003 on GM

food and Feed regulation and Regulation 1830/2003 on Labelling and Traceability

of GM Food and Feed products. These Regulations, devised as complementary twins

and both simultaneously adopted on 22 Sept 2003, revised and extended the existing

legislation established in 1997 around the novel foods regulation. The new GM Food and

Feed Regulation 1829/2003 removed GM foods from the scope of this previous 258/97

regulation. While the 1997 regulation had split GM foods into two categories – (article

1a) „foods and food ingredients containing or consisting of genetically modified

organisms‟ and (article 1b) those „produced from, but not containing, genetically

modified organisms‟, the new regulation significantly combined these into a single

55

category of food or feed: „consisting of, containing or produced from GMOs‟ (preamble

para 3). Thus all the new regulations would apply far beyond the scope of those covered

in 258/97 and extend even to foodstuffs containing no traces of the modified DNA.

From this followed a number of changes. Under the previous 1997 novel foods

regulation, those in the second category, „produced from, but not containing‟ GMOs,

had been considered to be „substantially equivalent‟ to existing foods and therefore only

requiring a simplified regulatory procedure that avoided the safety testing associated with

the former category. The 2003 new food and feed regulation explicitly moved beyond the

concept of substantial equivalence. Its preamble paragraph 6 stating that:

„Whilst substantial equivalence is a key step in the procedure for assessment of

the safety of genetically modified foods, it is not a safety assessment in itself. In

order to ensure clarity, transparency and a harmonised framework for

authorisation of genetically modified food, this notification procedure should be

abandoned in respect of genetically modified foods‟(1829/2003 preamble para 6).

Thus for all foods and feeds whether „consisting of, containing or produced from

GMOs‟ , more information was required to be presented for assessment, including more

live animal and in vitro studies. Regulations 1829/2003 and 1830/2003 thus moved Europe

towards the establishment of a post-market-release system of monitoring, testing and regulation around

labelling and traceability. Also, for the first time, as indicated in the regulations title, GM

products intended for animal feed as well as human food were subject to regulation and

labelling. However, while the 2003 GM food and feed regulation applied to foods

produced from GMOs it did not cover food feed produced with a GMO (such as a

cheese produced with a GM enzyme). Furthermore, and against parliamentary and social

movement demands, it did not cover products derived from animals fed with GM feed

or treated with GM veterinary products. (preamble para 16).

This emerging regime of labelling and traceability was justified in a number of different

discursive registers: In both the new 2003 regulations, primary justifications were still

rooted in the rhetorics of protection of the biological sphere of human health and the

environment, announced as the key criterion, coming second only to opening paragraphs

56

announcing the need for harmonised markets and the removal of fetters on the free

movement of GMOs and GM products. However, other discursive repertoires are also

drawn on in the scramble to fill the legitimatory void. The „right of consumers to

information‟ which forms Article 153 of the EU‟s foundational treaty is invoked in

Article 17 of the food and feed regulation, which goes on to pronounce labelling as the

basis of informed choice. Article 21 of this regulation elaborates:

„Clear labelling, irrespective of the detectability of DNA or protein resulting

from the genetic modification in the final product, meets the demands

expressed in numerous surveys by a large majority of consumers, facilitates

informed choice and precludes potential misleading of consumers as regards

methods of manufacture or production‟. (1829/2003; 21). [emphasis added]

Here we see the „sound science‟ framing of the DRD being trumped or at least qualified

by ethics, values and perceptions. Furthermore, ethical and religious concerns are

referred to as legitimate reasons for labelling and informed choice, mentioned in Article

22 along with medically based special dietary needs. This extra-sound-science regulatory

discourse can be traced at least back to the 258/97 novel food regulation which included

in paragraph 8 of its preamble the „ethical concerns‟ of „defined population groups

associated with well established practices regarding food‟. Thus the EU regulatory system

moved further beyond its original positivist „sound science‟ regulatory rhetoric in its

governing of the GMO controversy.

The traceability regulations in the sibling regulation of 1830/2003 also exhibits this

jostling for position in the hierarchy of repertoires of legitimation. Thus its preambles

third paragraph argues that:

„Traceability requirements for GMOs should facilitate both the withdrawal of

products where unforeseen adverse effects on human health, animal health or the

environment, including ecosystems, are established, and the targeting of

monitoring to examine potential effects on, in particular, the environment‟

(1839/2003 para 3).

57

However, following close on the heels of this positive risk-based paragraph comes the

clarion call to „ensure that accurate information is available to operators and consumers

to enable them to exercise their freedom of choice in an effective manner‟ (1830/2003

paragraph 4). Thus the emerging world of parallel agro-food regimes brought into being

by labelling and traceability would slide in legitimatory registers between physical risk and

consumer choice. This new set of parallel regimes would also require a complex

extension of the regulatory senses, recordings and borders along the chains of food

production and distribution. As well as tests to detect for the presence of GM material,

unique identification codes would help trace GM derived products through the agro-

food system. The 2003 regulations on food and feed traceability and labeling established

a threshold for adventitious or technically unavoidable presence of GMO

„contamination‟ below which would escape labelling. The commission initially proposed a

1% threshold, while the Parliament voted for 0.5% and zero tolerance for unauthorized

GMOs. Eventually a compromise of 0.9% threshold was passed, with a 0.5% for

unauthorized constructs.

With this new regulatory machinery finally in place, the scene was set in 2004 for the

commission‟s attempt finally to break the regulatory log jam that had led to the „de facto‟

moratorium six years earlier. The Consent procedures resumed, as did the national bans

now authorised by Article 23 of the new Directive. This regulatory discourse was linked

to the emergence of a compromise position of „coexistence‟. On 23 July 2003 the

Commission had published its recommendation „on guidelines for the development of

national strategies and best practices to ensure the co-existence of genetically modified

crops with conventional and organic farming.13 The first few paragraphs, reproduced

below, are revealing of how far things have changed: away from a narrow focus on

positivistic discourses of risk assessment and embracing consumer perceptions; away

from the model of a single high-technology agricultural bioeconomy for Europe towards

a model of multiple bioeconomies coexisting in the same space; and away from a linear

13 http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/publi/reports/coexistence2/guide_en.pdf.

58

model of simply checking the safety of GMOs before release, to one of continuous

management to enable the different bioeconomies to coexist.

(1) No form of agriculture, be it conventional, organic, or agriculture using GMOs,

should be excluded in the European Union.

(2) The ability to maintain different agricultural production systems is a prerequisite for

providing a high degree of consumer choice.

(3) Co-existence refers to the ability of farmers to make a practical choice between

conventional, organic and GM-crop production, in compliance with the legal

obligations for labelling and/or purity standards.

(4) Specific co-existence measures to protect the environment and the human health, if

needed, are included in the final consent of the authorisation procedure in

accordance with Directive 2001/18/EC, with a legal obligation for their

implementation.

(5) The issue of co-existence addressed in this Recommendation concerns the potential

economic loss and impact of the admixture of GM and non-GM crops, and the

most appropriate management measures that can be taken to minimise admixture

3.2. Greece14

Introduction

With regard to its response to agricultural biotechnology, Greece exemplifies a pattern

reflecting a sceptical view which recently comes closer to that in member states such as

Austria, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Cyprus (Interview 14b-6, 180806; Interview

9b-6, 181006). The general policy style could be described as having been

14 The researchers and lead authors for this section were Maria Kousis and Yannis

Volakakis.

59

‘precautionary’, ‘positivistic’ and officially, ‘non-participatory’. With little or no

national biotechnology industry, a style of agriculture and culinary culture that did not

predispose it towards the first wave of genetically modified crops and foodstuffs, and a

population which has always been amongst the most cautious of Europeans to

agricultural biotechnology, the Greek government fairly quickly settled into a precautionary,

anti-GMO stance which has been more or less consistently held up to the present. The

Greek state apparatus attempted repeatedly to ban authorised GMOs from its territory,

invoking Article 16 of the Deliberate Release Directive 1990/220 or Article 18 of

Directive 2002/53 on the common catalogue of agricultural plant species, and led the

group of member states calling for a five-year moratorium on new authorisations in

1999. However, the dominant discourse in policy debates around GMOs was positivistic

and in favour of alternative-organic agriculture, in that techno-scientific – and later on political

and economic – arguments dominated, rather than ethical, religious ones. Even the call

for a moratorium was framed in terms of the need for a more rigorous testing and

labelling framework. Finally, given its precautionary stance, and its converging views with

the anti-GMO public, the Greek approach was non-participatory in the sense that there

were no formal attempts by state agencies to involve lay publics in making policy

decisions over GM crops, food and feed. Instead, participation in the Greek case was

confined on the one hand, to multi-level mobilisations and pressure created by coalitions

of environmentalists, local authorities, farmers associations, consumers, scientists‟ unions

and others, while on the other, to the rather close, yet informal relationship between

environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace, and political ecology groups, with

government departments in the setting of biotechnology policy agendas and the policing

of Greece‟s borders against GM.

The Greek state begins to enter the biotechnology area as late as 1982 under the Socialist

government, when Act 1266/82 establishes the new short-lived Ministry of Research and

Development. In the same year, BIOHELLAS S.A., a state controlled company is

founded to carry out projects of national interest, most of which were related to the

agro-food sector such as valorization of agricultural by-products and projects dealing

with bio-energy. This joint investment of the Ministry of Industry, the Agricultural Bank

of Greece and the Bank of Industrial Development, never initiated projects of gene

60

technology and molecular genetics, as did various independent University groups

(Chatjouli et al. 1997). In 1983, a „National Committee for Biotechnology‟ was formed by

the Ministry of National Economy and the General Secretariat of Research and

Technology (GSRT)15, comprised by scientific experts assigned to deal with all matters

concerning biotechnology. In December of 1983 Greece adopts EC Directives on

environmental policy (819.71) and consumer protection (650.79), without setting up a

public dialogue. It was the Greek Association of Biologists – not the state – which in

1984 organized a conference on „Biotechnology and Society‟, with almost null attendance

by the media and the public (Chatjouli et al. 1997). A few years later, the Greek

Association of Biotechnology was founded by non state actors, but its contribution

remained limited. In 1992 the first Greek Bioethics Committee was initiated under Act

no. 2071/92 - which provided a general mandate for the creation of advisory

committees. Yet, it was only five years later, in April, 1997, that this committee was

officially established under the auspices of the General Secretariat of Research &

Technology (GSRT), by an act of the Minister of Development (Galloux et al. 2002).

Phase I. The beginning of institutional innovation: formation of concern and initiatives

about GMOs, early-late nineties

Thus, until the early 1990s there was no significant policy concerning biotechnology in

Greece (Botetzagias et al. 2002); neither did biotechnology appear in debates in the public

sphere, nor the agendas of relevant social actors. But in the early 1990s public concern

gradually arises over biotechnological issues, mostly related to GM food and cloning. A

number of civil society bodies started to take up the issue. In 1993, organic farmers

founded DIO16, a nonprofit organisation for the inspection and certification of biological

products. Approved in 1993 and renewed in 2002 by the Ministry of Rural Development

and Food, it is the first organisation of its type to operate in Greece since 2001, under

15 GSRT belonged at that time to the Ministry of Industry.

16 The name derives from the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture, Demeter. (Δη= μήτηρ, i.e. mother - of the earth. Δη is synonymous with Γη).

61

the National Certification System. DIO strongly opposed GMOs through published

articles, books, leaflets as well as participation in conferences and a variety of activities.

Greenpeace also started to research and campaign on GMOs. It conducted a large

number of research projects concerning the presence of genetically modified materials in

Greek foods, and conducted research on the attitudes of the Greek industries towards

genetically modified foods. Nea Ecologia, the Greek representative of Friends of Earth,

engaged as well, in limited R&D related to biotechnology and the protection of

agricultural and animal bio-diversity (Kousis 2001).

The nineties also witnessed the establishment of new institutions to help steer and

implement biotechnology policy. In 1992 the first Greek Bioethics Committee (GBC)

was initiated under law No. 2071/92 which provided a general mandate for the creation

of advisory committees. Yet, it was only five years later, in April, 1997, that the

committee was officially established by an act of the Minister of Development (Galloux

et al. 2002). This Bioethics Committee belongs to the General Secretariat of Research &

Technology (GSRT), (Geniki Grammateia Erevnas & Technologias – GGET), part of

the Ministry of Development. In September 1998, it expanded its agenda to include not

only medical ethics but all bioethical issues. During this period it consisted of 7 members

(3 from biosciences, including the chair, 1 doctor, 1 law expert, 1 theologian, 1

journalist). Its main purpose has been to inform GSRT and the Ministry of Development

on the legal, ethical and socio-economic impacts of biotechnology. The committee was

headed by Professor Tsaftaris, biotechnologist, and at that time, General Secretary of

Research and Development. A year after its formation, and - as it appears -before the

moratorium was proposed by Greece, the Committee gave its expert advice on „Release

of GM Plants to the Environment,‟ warning of significant risks of contamination for

specific types of plants found in Greece:

62

„This is the case of oil rapeseed and its weed, the black mustard17, a native in Greek flora.

These experiments should be prohibited, and the relevant ministries acted correctly when

they prohibited such a product in our country.

In addition, the committee suggests that in the context of its external relations and

international agreements with our neighbouring countries with similar environments,

our country should attempt to stop experimental trials of plants of this category.

The committee proposes that Scientific Associations and Unions with competency in

this area, should classify our country‟s cultivated species as well as the cloned genes

[κλωνοποιημένα γονίδια] of the aforementioned five categories, so that this

classification could become a guide assisting the relevant ministries in their decision

making.

In many cases there is lack of basic knowledge … something that makes risk

assessment on biotechnology products, less precise. The Committee proposes that

the Ministry of Environment should fund related studies in order to obtain the

necessary data.

... [The risk of GM gene dispersion] could create trouble because organic farmers

would like to certify that their products are GM-free‟ (our translation).

In 1998 the Greek government established the National Bioethics Commission, an

independent advisory body of experts charged to explore the ethical, social and legal

impact of the biosciences. The Commission is composed of nine academics – four

natural scientists (with expertise in biology, genetics, medicine and biotechnology

respectively), two lawyers, a philosopher, a sociologist and a theologian. Members are

appointed by the Prime minister for a term of five years, and the commission is

supported by two senior scientists and has its own secretariat.18

17 Vrouva/es (black mustard) are wild vegetation/greens, picked and eaten boiled as a

winter salad/meal in most parts of Greece.

18 http://www.bioethics.gr/index.php?category_id=3.

63

„Up to now, the Committee has not contributed much in building trust in society,

but I think it could contribute in the future… it has failed in public

communication…Funding is necessary [to carry this out]‟ (interview 4b-6, June

2006)

Because of the more consensual opposition to GM in Greece, the Commission was not

called upon to play such a dramatic role as was the comparable Agricultural and

Environment Biotechnology Commission in the UK. Nevertheless, it has been involved

in a number of GM-related initiatives since its inception. Although predominantly

concerned with medical biotechnology, the Commission held a series of meetings on

GM plants and their products, and published its recommendation in March 2000.19 The

recommendation considers the arguments for agricultural biotechnology (nutritional

benefits, the reduced use of pesticides, labour saving, vaccine administration, and

increased global food, feed, and fibre security) as well as those against (the threat to

biodiversity, increasing farmers‟ dependence on biotechnology companies, potential

allergic reactions, accelerated bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and the political rather

than technological origins of famine). It asserts the need for objectivity:

There is a limited number of scientific studies to date concerning the potential benefits

and risks of GM plants whilst results are often controversial. This uncertainty fuels rather

sentimentally charged debates leading to public confusion, which in turn prevents

citizens to reach an objective decision as to whether they will consume or reject the

consumption of GM plants and their products

(www.bioethics.gr/media/pdf/recommendations/Recom_gmo_eng.pdf).

19 http://www.bioethics.gr/media/pdf/recommendations/Recom_gmo_eng.pdf.

64

Finally, it recommends: (i) a temporary moratorium on GM field trials and cultivation in

Greece,20 (ii) a moratorium on research effects GM plants until stricter guidelines are in

place, (iii) the compulsory labelling of products containing or deriving from GMOs, and

(iv) the establishment of a group of specialists to report on specific cases to the

Commission.

Another important institution related to GM policy was founded in September 1999 (Act

2741/28-09-1999). EFET (Enieos Foreas Eleghou Trofimon, the Unified Body for Food

Inspection) belongs to the Ministry of Development, with six other Ministries sharing

responsibility: Economics, Environment, Agriculture, Health, Public Order and Public

Administration). EFET is run by 9 members – the President, who is appointed by the

Minister of Development, 4 members appointed by the ministers of Economics,

Agriculture, Public Health and Public Order, 1 member by the Federation of Greek

Industries (SEV), 1 member by the National Confederation of Greek Commerce

(ESEE), 1 member by National Council of Consumers (ESK) and 1 member by the

Panhellenic Confederation of Agricultural Co-operatives (PASEGES). EFET‟s scientific

advisory bodies are the Scientific Council for Food Inspections, ESET, and the National

Policy Council on Food Inspections ESPET. While the first advices when the EFET‟s

administrative council requests its scientific advice, the second operates as an advisory

body on related policy issues and recommends action programmes and proposals related

to EFET‟s mission.21

The main function of EFET is the formation of quality standards for food in order to

protect public health and the interests of the consumers, quality inspections of food

companies and the setting of hygienic rules according to EC Directive 1993/43 and

national legislation. Laboratory testing remained at the General Chemical Laboratory of

20 By this time, as we will see, Greece and other member states had already secured a five-

year de facto moratorium on new authorisations within the EU; this call, however, went further

as far as the Greek territory was concerned.

21 www.efet.gr.

65

the State (Geniko Himeio tou Kratous) under the administration of the Ministry of

Economics. Among the main programmes that have been run by EFET, the three on

GMOs have mainly been concerned with monitoring foodstuffs for traces of genetically

modified material. The first two programs, during 2000 and 2001 respectively, related to

the tracing of GMOs in food according to the implementation of EC Regulation

258/97,22 and the subsequent regulations 1139/98, 49/2000 and 50/2000. The third

(2002 to the present) involves inspections to ensure compliance with EU rules on GM

food labelling, with results being accessible to the public.23

However, Greece, like member-states such as Austria, has its own very strict GM-related

controls on imported seed and food, controls which go beyond what is required to

comply with EU regulations, especially on grains.24 In the past five years EFET has

documented its rejection of all applications concerning market circulation of new

products such as corn Bt11, NK603, BtCRY1F 1507, rice LLRICE62 and rape oil seed

Ms8xRf3. In its efforts to secure GMO traceability, EFET has initiated the creation of

mechanisms that could trace food content to its constitutive parts via the creation of a

register of food companies (EFET site). In December of 2003, EFET requested from

EFSA „to proceed towards a comprehensive evaluation of the likely comparative

advantages or benefits which might be associated with GM components, in comparison

with conventional food‟ (EFET site).

On June 24, 1999, with the support of Denmark, France, Italy and Luxembourg, the

Greek government through the vice Minister of Environment Mr Koliopanos, succeeded

22 Regulation 258/97 on Novel Foods and Novel Food Ingredients

http://www.biosafety.be/GB/Dir.Eur.GB/FF/258_97/258_97.html

23 www.efet.gr, accessed 11-08-2005. The results of the inspections showed a 4% -

25% presence of GM products, mainly soy bean in processed food.

24 Interview, civil servant responsible for GMOs in Food, Ministry of Rural Development

and Food – see also June 2004 interview with Professor Alifakiotis on

http://www.agrotypos.gr/.

66

in proposing a five-year, Europe-wide moratorium on new authorisations of GM crops.

According to Koliopanos (2006) the main reasons that led to the moratorium were:

1. The gaps and weakenesses of European legislation (directive 90/220 of EEC)

mainly in risk assessment, traceability, labelling, the time duration of research on

possible negative impacts, etc.

2. The concern of the European citizens, but global public opinion as well, for

the dangers related to health and the environment.

3. The need to abide to the precautionary principle.

4. The reservations of the large majority of the scientific community.

5. The visible danger of future dependence of our farmers and our agriculture

from a few multinational companies (Koliopanos, 2006, our translation).

One key feature of the Greek case is the close and for the most part informal

relationship of political ecology and professional ENGOs with state agencies, especially

since the mid nineties, i.e. the early part of PASOK‟s three consecutive terms in

government (1992-2004). This relationship may be also seen as an effect of the EU

political opportunity structure, which encourages and promotes the incorporation and

collaboration of environmental NGOs in/with state and supra-state agencies. At the

same time, it also reflects a domestic political opportunity structure portrayed in an

intimate relationship between leftist and environment or ecology oriented groups in

Greece. For example, collaborations between the Ecologists-Alternatives and SYN

[synaspismos], the leftist coalition party, contributed to its new name – the Coalition of

the Left, Social Movements and Ecology – while environmental protection was a novel

commitment of PASOK‟s new governance beginning in 1992 (Karamichas 2002). Also

visible are PASOK‟s co-optation tactics involving members of professional

environmental NGOs and the Federation of Ecologists Alternatives (FEA)25 in its

echelons, following a „modernization‟ rhetoric. In 1994, state agencies supported a group

of environmentalists including Modinos and Efthimiopoulos who created the

Interdisciplinary Institute for Environmental Research (DIPE), a nonprofit organization

25 Founded in 1998.

67

linked to the first ecology journal in Greece, Nea Oikologia, a collaborator of Friends of

the Earth. The institute actively engages in environment and conservation related

programmes, while at the same time, it is closely tied to the Modinos-headed

organization that published Nea Oikologia during the 1984-1994 period. PASOK also

appointed Modinos, a well-known figure in FEA, as the head of a new major strategic

advisory body which it created in 1999, the National Centre for Environment and

Sustainable Development (EKPAA, 2002).

Thus, albeit for a brief, year and a half period, PASOK selected former director of

Greenpeace, Ilias Efthimiopoulos, as its new deputy Minister of Environment26 in April

of 2000.27 At that time, the General Director of the office of the Environment Ministry

was G. Politis, also former member of WWF, while Martinos Gaitlich, one of the

founding members of the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Nature was a major

advisor of the deputy Minister. Nea Ecologia‟s member Papagiannakis, also represented

SYN as a member of the European Parliament (Kousis, 2004).

In 1996 the Greek transposition of Directive 1990/220, involved the Ministry of

Environment as „competent authority‟ for part B (experimental) consents, and the

Ministry of Agriculture for part C (commercial) consents. Members of the Competent

Authority included representatives from the Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning

and Public Works; the Ministry of Health; the Ministry of Agriculture; the General

Chemistry Laboratory of the State; the Ministry of Development; and two scientific

experts (Caloghirou & Zambarloukos, 2000). During the same year, multinational

biotechnology company ZENECA (now Syngenta) requested permission to cultivate

GM tomatoes. Although initially the PASOK government agreed, strong reactions by

Greenpeace, with close ties to state agencies as mentioned above, appear to push the

state to withdraw its approval (Marouda-Chatjoulis et al. 1998).

26 Part of the Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works (YPEHODE).

27 Efthimiopoulos deacribed the experience as „an experiment that did not prove

to be particularly successful‟ (Kathimerini, 25.10.01).

68

Phase II. The moratorium, GMO infiltration, and participatory governance, late nineties

to 2004

But it is particularly from 1998 that the GM issue started to become prominent in the

Greek polity, and quickly established a dominant framing in terms of „genetic infiltration,

contamination and pollution‟, which created pressure towards the formulation of new

national regulations, and the establishment of new bodies to act as gatekeepers. In that

year Greenpeace conducted a laboratory analysis in a specialized lab in Germany with

samples from imported soybean flour, the first to be analysed from Greece. The

shipment had come from the US via Italy, and was destined to be used as cattle feed. The

analysis showed the presence of GM soy in the flour. Greenpeace stressed the way that

the absence of controls intensifies public concern, and asked for full labelling in all

products. In March of the following year Greenpeace conducted research on products on

supermarket shelves. Everyday products were sent to Germany for testing and the results

showed that at least three imported products contained GMOs: soybean lecithin, corn

chips and strawberry cream imported from the Netherlands. „There was no label in any

of those products informing the consumers‟, said Greenpeace representative, Mr

Haralampidis. Greenpeace informed the General Secretariat of Consumers (Ministry of

Development), and the supermarket where those GM foods were found withdrew the

specific products.

Since 1998, influenced by growing public opposition to agricultural biotechnology, the

Greek government also started to use powers granted to member states by EU legislation

in order to try to keep GMOs out of Greece. In October 1998, followed by Austria,

Luxembourg and France, Greece initiated the move to invoke Article 16 of Directive

1990/220 in order to ban previously authorised GMOs from its territory. In the first

instance, Greece banned the import, marketing and cultivation of a variety of GM HR

rapeseed developed by the German company AgrEvo. Mounting opposition by organic

farmers and local authorities to planned experimental GM cultivations in Greek rural

areas such as Thessaly, Central Greece, and the Thessaloniki region in 1998 and 1999,

also led the government to reject almost all applications made by several multinational

companies for Part B consents for experimental cultivation under 1990/220. Out of the

19 SNIF applications for experimental GM cultivations, only one was authorized and

69

carried out, while another one was authorized, but not completed (Interview 11b-6). Vice

Minister of Environment (YPEHODE) Koliopanos and General Secretary Mpieratos

announced that no similar applications would be approved in 1999 and 2000, and

suggested that the EU reconsider the whole issue.

A couple of years later, in the June 2001 session of the Greek Parliament, PASOK‟s

deputy (MP, vouleutis) and former vice minister of Environment, Koliopanos,

questioned the stance of the Minister of Agriculture towards GM cultivations (implying

non-compliance with the EU-wide moratorium that was by then in place), reminding

Parliament that:

Our position is…that we do not accept, for political reasons, for reasons of trade

(εμπορικής), if you wish, politics (πολιτικής), even if such a decision has the approval of

the Scientific Committee of the United Europe, that a seed of this type, a product of this

type does not harm neither the environment nor human life, even then [if it wouldn‟t] we

have to say to the producers only this: that we want our country clean from genetically

modified organisms, because this, far from scientific disputes and conflicts [αντιδικίες],

accommodates [βολεύει] our trade policy…

The big success [moratorium] in the Council of the Environment Ministers in 1999…did

not happen from one moment to another. It was preceded by a three year period of

procedures, dialogues, inner-governmental dialogue. We talked with all the co-competent

Ministries, we agreed to this policy, the Prime Minister agreed. We took it to the

European Union, we achieved and convinced and created a big block inside the

European Union and succeeded what was considered inconceivable to the European

70

citizen, i.e. the moratorium on the mutated28 [μεταλλαγμένα]. This was a national policy,

which became community [policy]…

..all which is proposed by the big companies as a moral mission, that with the mutated

we will hit hunger in the world, are fairy tales [παραμύθια]. So were they fairy tales in the

past, that agrochemicals will fight hunger. We know what happened. Dumping sites

increased and dangerous toxic substances were traced in maternal milk…

The „No‟ [όχι] which we raised then with our initiative in the European Union was not a

„No‟ to progress and science, but was a „No‟ to genetic trade [γενετικό εμπόριο], a „No‟ to

a few big companies, wishing to present themselves as semi-gods, because their only god

is profits [το κέρδος]. And we know from this story that the Greek as well as the

European farmer will be totally dependent from these few companies. And you know

that there is support in this direction from the scientific community … (Parliament

Minutes, June 2001, our translation).

A variety of groups have influenced the government‟s position concerning the

moratorium, including Greenpeace-Greece, as well as committees of experts other than

bioethics committees.

„When in 1999 some experimental GM tomato cultivations were approved, Greenpeace

demonstrated outside the Parliament and the Ministry of the Environment. We invited

local authorities (nomarhies) and they immediately came to our side, refusing to accept

the fact that GM plants (even at an experimental stage) were grown in their area. After

this mobilisation, tomato factories in Central Greece and Peloponnese assured they had

28 Albeit an adjective in English, „mutated‟ (used in this section as a noun) is the term

which comes closest to the commonly used term „Μεταλλαγμένα‟, reflecting negative views across

formal and informal social, economic and political spaces in Greece (see Volakakis and Kiourkas,

2004).

71

no intention to use GM tomato any more. Even though it was a peaceful demonstration

we did not face any obstacles by the government. In fact we only found allies in our

efforts. After that, we informed Deputy Minister Mr Koliopanos, who had previously

signed for the GM experimental cultivations. He then took the initiative to promote the

moratorium in the EU along with France, Austria, Luxembourg and Belgium. Mr

Koliopanos acknowledged the role of Greenpeace in the Moratorium of 1999 admitting

that, „If it were not for Greenpeace there would nοt have been a Moratorium‟ (interview

2b-6, with representative of Greenpeace Greece, our translation).

„During that year (1999), I was participating in the Bioethics Committee of the Ministry

of Environment. Mr Koliopanos, who really wanted to make a difference, asked us about

the issue of GM crops. With our suggestions and our contribution as a Committee,

Deputy Minister of the Environment took the initiative to propose a five year

Moratorium‟ (interview 1b-6, our translation)

In subsequent years Greece continued to play a key role in calls for an adequate system

of labelling and traceability. Greek NGOs and scientists, and the deputy Minister of

Environment, Ilias Efthimiopoulos, pointed out the lack of control mechanisms and the

need for more strict measures. Therefore during the convention of EU‟s Environment-

Ministers in Paris, Efthimiopoulos proposed additional measures to be taken concerning

labelling, legal responsibilities to companies that produce, commerce and transfer such

products, as well as the creation of GM-zones within the EU.

In 2000 a „serious blow‟ shook Greek cotton production29 when GM seeds were

identified within the imported conventional seeds. Labelling this as a major scandal,

29 Greece is EU‟s major cotton grower, cultivating 80% of EU‟s cotton growing areas

(interview 6b-6, 031006)

72

Greenpeace accused the ministries of agriculture and environment for violating EC

legislation in order to protect the interests of specific companies which broke the law,

and requested from the prime minister to stop the scandal of the „illegal import and

cultivation of GM cotton‟. Specifically they stressed that:

While the vice minister of PEHODE, I. Efthimiopoulos, announced (on 12-7-

2000) the undertaking of a European initiative aiming to promote the impartial

responsibility for the mutated and the legitimation of a country‟s or a region‟s

right to deny the cultivation of mutated plants, the minister of agriculture pushed

in order that „we do not lose the opportunity‟ which the mutated offer to

agriculture (informal Council of Ministers of Agriculture, 3-5 September, Biarritz,

France). The non-existence of a national policy on the issue of the mutated

legitimates jumped-up and dangerous decisions as is the recent one concerning

cotton. Greece is in danger of being defenceless in facing the storm of the

mutated, [Greece is] a free field of action for the uncontrolled importation and

cultivation of mutated organisms (Greenpeace Greece, 2000, our translation).

As a result of pressures from various groups and following state actions, 679 tons of

cotton seeds [σύσπορου] were removed because they contained GM seeds and farmers

were compensated by the state with 50 million drachmas – of these, 365 tons were

destroyed, 85 tons were burned, 65 tons were returned to Spain, which was their country

of origin, and 10 tons were restrained by Greek Authorities (SDOE). Although this

problem was identified in eight European countries, only Greece and Sweden took

control measures of this type (Tzanavara 2001).

Given the above, the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment decided to establish a

Scientific Council of Biotechnology for the multiplicative material of agricultural

products under the auspices of the National Institute of Agricultural Research

(ETHIAGE). In addition, during 2001, a joint ministerial decree signed by the Ministers

of Environment and Agriculture aimed to stop the import, trade and cultivation of GM

seeds by defining control mechanisms and by resolving the mixing [prosmixeis] of

conventional seeds with GM seeds. According to the vice minister of Environment:

73

„Our country is the first promoting such a decision … Greece insists on the

labelling issue, because it offers the possibility of tracing all GMOs, their

products and derivatives, from seeds to the final product. Control over the entire

process, from field to shelf‟ (Efthimiopoulos, as cited in Tzanavara 2001, our

translation)

Recounting Efthimiopoulos‟ achievements during his brief 2000-2001 period as deputy

minister of Environment, the head of Greenpeace pointed to a single, major

achievement:

„Following his initiative on the issue of the „mutated‟ (μεταλλαγμένα) [GM], a new

and innovative legal frame was created. Overall however, we lived a theatre of the

irrational, since from the other side, Mr. Anomeritis [Minister of Agriculture] said

and did other things. ... Is it possible to expect a political parachutist to stand

next to a years-long member [of PASOK]? In essence, in the case οf the mutated,

Efthimiopoulos was exposed for something over which he had no control‟

(Charalambides as cited in Ntanou 2001)

In November of 2000, the Pan-Hellenic Network of Ecological Organizations organized

a conference dedicated to GMOs in Kavala, Northern Greece30. The conference was

attended by the representatives of local government, including Margaritis from the left-

of-centre party SYN; deputy Minister of Environment Efthimiopoulos, and his General

Secretary sent their greetings. It was agreed at the conference that there is a great need

for thorough controls and transparency in technological procedures, for active public

participation not only in expressing views, but in the decision–making process as well.

The political role of the US and its attempts to impose GMOs in the EU and in third

world counties was stressed. Participants demanded funding for alternative, more

acceptable to the public, agro-technologies, such as organic agriculture.

30 Lately experiencing internal tensions and more diverging views, vis-à-vis the anti-gmo

Thessaly network (interview 10b-6).

74

Among the groups that have been attending a reasonable number of meetings and

actions against GMOs are representatives of the Greek Church (Interview10b-6). This is

reflected in the announcements made by organizers of Pan-Hellenic networks (e.g.

gmostop)

The church, from the bioethics point of view, is in essence against such [GMO]

products (www.gmostop.org/keimena/thesalia).

as well as church related publications (e.g. „Church Intervention‟):

Such GMOs are a specific type[ιδιότυπος] of rape on nature and that has

consequences upon the human body and its health… Mutation should lead us to

a change of mentality concerning the manners in which we live and think.

(Naupaktou Ierotheos, October 2006)

The views of the Orthodox Church relate to its comprehensive view on creation. Under

this view there is no reason to stall research; research is not demonic [„δαιμονική‟].

However, in view of the great risks and the ethical issues related to its applications, i.e.

GM products, this research should be carried out with balance [ισορροπία] and self-

restraint [εγκράτεια], as the fathers of the church, such as Megas Vasileios,31 have noted

in their work (Zorbas, 2001).

The term „Orthodox Church‟ refers as much to the rite of the Church, as to the

moral character (φρόνιμα), the ethos (το ήθος) and the way of life, which the

believer shapes within his participation in the thanksgiving society. This

community expresses a way of life which is able to and intervenes in the

31 According to Μέγας Βασίλειος: "Εγκρατείας δε ο κάλλιστος όρος και κανών

ούτως έστω, το μήτε τρυφήν, μήτε προς κακοπάθειαν της σαρκός βλέπειν, αλλά φεύγειν εν εκατέρω

την αμετρίαν, ίνα μήτε πολυσαρκούσα ταράσσηται, μήτε, νοσώδης γενομένη, αδυνατή προς την των

εντολών εργασίαν ", PG, 31:876.(Zorbas, 2001).

75

commons aiming for their perfection, without however being subjected to

attrition and alterations [φθορά και αλλοίωση], which would deduct from her [the

community‟s] the ontological substance οντολογικό content. This means that

there is a logic in the „food culture‟ of traditional societies in Greece.

(Zorbas 2005)

It also means that the meaning of biotechnology according to the view of the

Church should be found not only in the ethics but in „bio-spirituality‟, since at the

end, the ethical is „whatever maintains the operation of the self-governed inside

of us, whatever preserves the harmony of our psychosomatic balance and

whatever evokes the need of God and the feel for eternal perspective in our

lives.‟

(Hatzinikolaou32 2002, as cited in Zorbas, 2005)

In 2001 the PASOK government seems to have shifted its attitude towards GMOs

towards a more liberal one. In May 2001, the Minister of Agriculture announced that he

would allow experimental cultivation of two Monsanto GM cotton varieties. He criticised

all those who opposed GM, arguing that the Greek proposal for a moratorium made by

Koliopanos had been extreme and unrealistic, since in the two year period there had

been no proof that GMOs were dangerous to people‟s health, or the environment. The

Minister of Agriculture was also critical of Greenpeace and the former president of

GESASE (General Confederation of Greek Agricultural Associations). During the same

month, the Minister of Development, Nikos Christodoulakis, criticised Greenpeace for

publishing a catalogue of companies believed to be using GM ingredients, despite the

simultaneous publication by EFET of test results which found that 12 percent of 241

32 Hatzinikolaou (Harvard &MIT Ph.D. in HST, Biomedical technology, current

Metropolitan [Mitropolitis] Nikolaos) has been a member of the Bioethics Committee of GSRT,

the chair of the bioethics committee of the Greek Orthodox Church, as well as other bioethics

committees).

76

food samples containing soy or corn included GM products, without mentioning this on

the packaging.33

At the same time, the Ministry of Environment considered allowing the experimental

cultivations of GMOs. Related applications were submitted by research institutes such as

ETHIAGE (National Agricultural Research Foundation) and universities, but not by

multinational companies. The only application from a company to experimentally

cultivate GM sugar beet was rejected given the high risk involved due to the many wild

plants closely related to sugar beet. ETHIAGE applied for GM rice cultivation in

Thessaloniki.34 Reactions from the press and NGOs led PASOK‟s Prime Minister,

Kostas Simitis, to announce that there was no change in Greek policy concerning

GMOs, even though Greece should comply with the EU if there is such a resolution at

the council of the Ministers of Environment in Brussels. The same turn in GM attitude

can be noted in the Ministry of Agriculture as well. Minister Yiorgos Drys was quoted as

saying, „GMOs are a reality we must accept‟.35 This slight pro-GM turn lasted until the

PASOK government was replaced by the conservative New Democracy (ND) party in

2004, after eleven consecutive years of socialist government.

However, opposition by anti-GMO groups and networks endured throughout this

period, manifesting itself even within scientific circles. In 2001 the Medical Association

of Thessaloniki, headed by Kourakis, associate professor of medicine-genetics (ΑΠΘ) as

well as member and deputy of SYN, formed a committee in order to examine the

consequences of GM food to public health. The committee suggested the following:

33 http://archives.foodsafetynetwork.ca/agnet/2001/5-2001/ag-05-30-01-01.txt,

citing Kathimerini.

34 Kathimerini, April, 2002.

35 Eleftherotypia, 15 October 2002.

77

1. The suspension [of GMOs] should last for as long as needed to produce the necessary

techno-knowledge which would guarantee the non-provocation of harm to health and

the environment. Science does not assure this guarantee today.

2. [We] invite/call the state to prevent the importation and disposal of GMO derived

food; to also forbid experimental or extensive cultivation of GM plants, as well as GM

feed to animals;[we] call the competent agencies in our country to be the protagonists in

the EC for a moratorium stopping the release of GTO in the environment…to declare

our country a GTO free country in the context of EC institutions.

3. Research on genetic engineering and GTOs should be supported in the research

institutions of our country….not according to the rules of the market but according to

the real needs of people in the context of sustainable development…

4. In order that society is able to pronounce on this issue, citizens should be well

informed and educated. This knowledge is necessary in order to provide an open and

general dialogue. Therefore mixed committees of experts and representatives of various

social groups must be formed.

(Medical Association of Thessaloniki 2002, our translation)36

During this period, Greenpeace continued its actions against GM products. In 2001 it

took the initiative to create a consumers‟ network for the protection and information

about GM food and distribute a questionnaire concerning the use of GM crops and

seeds to 180 food industries (Kousis, 2001). The organisation ran a survey on cattle feed

products to all the related food companies, asking them to reply and guarantee that no

GMOs were being used in breeding animals. The food companies cover all spectrums of

meat and dairy products.37 Consumers are given this widely circulated list of all marked,

36 Thessaloniki, 5/6/2001, Kathimerini newspaper 06/06/2001.

37 According to the answers received, Greenpeace classifies the companies in three

categories: “Red” – those that have not yet answered the Greenpeace questionnaire, so one could

easily assume that they are “suspect”; “Grey” – the ones stating that their products come from

animals not fed with GMOs, but have not yet brought evidence or certifications to verify the

above. In addition, it includes companies claiming that they find ways to assure GM-free cattle

78

food companies, as a consumer guide. Greenpeace also organised more dynamic protest

actions like the occupation of the food factory „Ellinikes Elaiourgies‟ in Fthiotida, as a

reaction to the company‟s use of GM cattle feed, traced in specimens containing GM

soybean (November 2002). They also held a protest outside the US embassy (September

2003). The organisation continued their active involvement in the detection of imported

GMOs. For example, during May 2005, three incidents concerning the importation of

GM soybean and corn were recorded by the organisation. Greenpeace made public

accusations or tried to block ships that were carrying GMOs. Responding to the pressure

created, in two of the three cases, the authorities assured the public through

announcements that thorough inspections would take place.

Simultaneously, major newspapers leaning towards the center or center-left such as

Kathimerini Eleftherotypia, To Vima, Ta Nea, left-oriented Avgi and the Evonymos

Ecological Library, as well as a major state tv channel (ET1), gave special attention to

GM issues (Kanellopoulou 2006).

Phase III: Coexistence, GM-free Balkans, and institutional innovation, 2004 and beyond

In 2000, Greenpeace had started a discussion on GM-free zones with the National

Bioethics Commission and DIO. In 2003, it proposed to all local authorities that they

declare their prefectures and municipalities GM-free; the last remaining one did so in

October 2004, making the whole of Greece a declared „GM-free zone‟, as did other

countries and regions in the EU.38 In April 2005, Greenpeace proposed a bill declaring

Greece a GM-free country. Based on the Precautionary principle, the Cartagena

protocol on biosafety, and the European Parliament vote on any country‟s right to ban

feed and/or the future will clear the food chain from GMOs; “Green” – the companies that have

stated that their products come from animals not fed with GMOs, and have brought evidence or

certifications to verify the above.

38 USDA (2005) Greece Biotechnology Annual 2005, p. 6

http://www.fas.usda.gov/gainfiles/200508/146130613.doc.

79

GM crops, the proposed bill does not permit the use of genetically modified seeds of

GM multiplicative material. The initiative was approved by Deputy Minister of

Environment, Stavros Kalogiannis, and the Secretary General of the Ministry of Rural

Development and Food, Thomas Alifakiotis (Eleftherotypia, 13/04/2005). Through article

1, the new Act aims:

a) To avoid the probable negative social and economic impacts stemming from

the use of genetically modified organisms.

b) To deter the possibility of dissemination of pollen, seeds and plant

multiplicative material of genetically modified cultivations in conventional or

biological cultivations and/or in the environment

c) To ensure the economic freedom and the right of free choice of producers to

produce products, especially food and animal feed in a conventional or

biological manner, and to allocate them to the market

(www.greenpeace.org, our translation)

Under this proposed bill, penal (ranging from 100.000 to 1.000.000euro) and

administrative sanctions are also included, under two separate articles, while a Scientific

Committee for agricultural biotechnology is to be constituted, under Article 5:

… not by public administration persons, but by scientists of renowned

prestige, who have special knowledge in the sector of agricultural

biotechnology, society and economy. Representatives of producers and

consumers will also participate in the committee. This composition ensures the

principles of transparency and sufficiency, and the representation of all scientific

opinions, including minority ones.

(www.greenpeace.org, our translation, our emphasis)

Keeping in mind that 16% of the active population in Greece remains occupied in the

agricultural sector, heightened concern over the expected serious and irreversible

damage, is likely. At the same time, the small family farm holdings would lead to

conflicts and juridical fights between owners choosing to cultivate GM on the one

80

hand, and conventional or organic farmers on the other (Eleftherotypia, 13/04/2005).

Thus, in addition to the bill proposed by Greenpeace, another bill was proposed in May

20, 2005, by the anti-GM Thessaliko Network. Neither of the bills were forwarded to

Parliament (Kanellopoulou, 2006).

In this period there was also wider grass-roots action against GMOs. However, unlike

that of the United Kingdom, the Greek government did not feel it was necessary to

canalise it into official participatory fora. Towards the end of 2003, under the initiative of

„Thessaly Citizens of the World,‟ the Greek Social Forum and a few other groups, the

first anti-GM network meeting took place in Trikala, with the participation of

environmental, social, consumer, scientific, professional, agricultural and local

government groups (Kanellopoulou, 2006).

In February 2004, the Panhellenic Movement Against GMOs (Panelladiki Kinisi kata

ton GTO) was founded as a grass-roots, anti-GM network during the last day of the

Agrotica conference held in Thessaloniki, with the participation of 142 bodies, including

environmental NGOs (36), scientific unions (12), farmers‟ organisations, both organic (8)

and conventional (19) (GESASE, PASEGES), municipalities (11), labour unions (GSEE)

(1), food producers and retailers, women‟s groups (6), consumer organisations (4),

church bodies (4), and political movements (4). Particularly striking was the alliance

between the traditional rivals of conventional farmers‟ organisations and environmental

NGOs. As their resolution from this panhellenic conference-assembly shows,

participants were as much concerned with political-economic issues such as the role of

multinational companies and the effects of genetic patenting, as much as they were for

purely environmental issues centred on risk and uncertainty.

81

We, the hundreds of representatives….co-sign the following resolution [ψήφισμα]

expressing:

A) Our concern for the fact that genetically modified organisms and mutated products

are facing the open entry gates and the cultivations of EU areas. Searching for legal

regulations to liberalize their international marketing, the multinationals producing

and trading the mutated, apply pressure, via the US and WTO, to the EU and the

other countries to withdraw the obstacles to their importation. …Two community

principles are by-passed: that of subsidiarity and that of the right of local societies to

exercise their right to the scientific evaluation of the dangers and the given

precautionary principle.

B) Our denial to the transformation of global genetic heritage into privately owned

patents by a group of profit-seeking multinational companies…Let us not be the

guinea pigs of multinational biotechnology companies.

C) Our claims to the rights of

- the farmers and producers to use clean [from GMO] seeds and animal feed and

to produce safe and certified quality products, traditional, biological, brand named,

conventional and integrated pest management products…

- the consumers to information and the right to choose quality, non-mutated

products with nill percentage of [GM] pollution [epimolinsi]….

- the collective bodies of citizens, of the scientific community, and public offices

to protect public health, agriculture and the environment, under the principles of

prevention, precaution, and subsidiarity….

- the future generations to inherit the biodiversity of seeds and flora and fauna.

With the dispersion of the mutated to the environment, environmental

sustainability and food safety are jeopardized…

D) Our invitation to all prefectorial and community councils as well as the farmers and

workers syndicates to….decide:

1. to declare immediately their areas as free from production and trade of the

mutated, according to the Cartagena „Right to Biosafety‟ Protocol…

82

2. to communicate their decision up to… April 2004 to the Greek and

European Parliaments…

E) Our request that the government in collaboration with movements of citizens and

fora, the scientific community and the institutions of our country and the EU, will

shield local, quality production and public health in Greece.

F) Our request from all political parties and all candidate deputies to take an

immediate, public and clear position of support towards our struggle [αγώνα] and

to participate with interventions in the Greek and European parliament…in order to

stop the mutated and promote local produce of quality.

Resolution of the Panhellenic conference-assembly in Agrotika, 1.2.2004, in

www.dimitra2000.gr (our translation, our emphasis).

The network has its own website with news, articles and information on the issue,39 and

has made a number of interventions in public fora.40 In June 2004 it carried out an

„Autonomous Coordinating Action against the Mutated‟ (Aytonomi Syntonistiki Drasi

kata ton Metallagmenon) outside the 1st Conference of Biotechnology at the National

Agricultural Research Foundation, and the Panhellenic protest against GMOs in Psahna,

Evoia, Central Greece, the march towards factory „Soya Hellas‟, an initiative of Evoia

against GMOs – Network Ecocommunity.

39 www.nogmos.gr, accessed 10-3-2005, 15-6-2005, 18-7-2005, 12-8-2005.

40 Among which are: three letters to local authorities, an open letter to many societal

groups (ministries, mass media, farmers, other NGOs), meetings with the President of the

Hellenic Republic (December 2004), the President of the Greek parliament and Ministers of

Rural Development and Health, the organization of a public discussion on GMOs, participation

in two protests, the organization of the 12th Organic Agriculture festival dedicated to GMOs

(September 23-25, 2005).

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The next meeting of the „Thessaly Citizens of the World‟ brought together ninety (90)

groups in an effort to organize actions, including those related to the declaration of four,

Thessaly prefectures as anti-GMO zones. Also in the spring of 2004, following the

proposal of ATTAC Greece and Greenpeace, the General Confederation of Greek

Workers (GSEE) held a meeting of its food sector branches in order to inform workers

on GM issues (Kanellopoulou, 2006).

In Greece, the issue of GM did not divide organic and conventional farmers to the

same extent that it has in other countries like the UK. However, between May and July

2004, a number of conventional farmers unknowingly used GM seeds. Seven cases of

accidental cultivation of GM corn and cotton, involving hundreds of hectares, were

reported by local environmental NGOs and Greenpeace in Northern Greece, and nine

cases in the Peloponnese region. On March 10, 2005, GESASE sued multinational

biotechnological company Syngenta for GM corn contamination involving farmers in

Xanthi, Northern Greece, without informing them, demanding compensation of €45,000

for each farmer. At the same time, GESASE sued the Greek State as well, for actions

and omissions that permit companies to act without limits. This action is expected to

create a precedent for the Greek legal system because it involves the application of all the

relevant EU regulations and decisions in „real life‟ (Cartagena protocol, EU regulations

1829/2003, 1830/2003, EU directive 18/2001). The court decision is expected to be

announced by March 2007.

Greece has continued to attempt to use EU legislation to ban specific GMOs from its

territories. For example, in March 2005, a ministerial decision (FEK 320) sought to

prohibit the marketing of GM hybrid corn MON 810, invoking Article 18 of Directive

2002/53 on the common catalogue of agricultural plant species. However, the decision

was reversed on 26 January 2006 (FEK 89), after its rejection by the EC on the grounds

that the ban was for economic reasons, rather than for safety ones permissible under

2002/53 (EC Decision 2006/10). A few days later, on 30 January 2006, this lifting was

followed by a new attempt by the ministry to ban MON 810 seeds from Greece,

invoking scientific data on risk to the environment and to health from the circulation of

MON 810; especially as regarding undesired resistance to lepidoptera, disturbance of

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biodiversity, increased transport of pollen vis-à-vis bee keeping (highly developed in

Greece), as well as GM-imposition on pre-existing cultivations.

Greece is currently responding to the EU Recommendation of 23 July 2003 on

guidelines for national co-existence strategies by establishing a working group. The 11-

member „Working Group on measures of co-existence of GM crops and conventional

and biological methods‟ was established in 2005 through a ministerial decision by the

Ministry of Rural Development & Food (YPAAT). With the exception of one sociologist

of science, the members are employees of YPAAT – eight agriculturalists and

biotechnologists and two lawyers. The Working Group is preparing the new law in

collaboration with environmental professional organizations – the main one being

Greenpeace – and others groups, including GESASE (General Confederation of Greek

Agrarian Associations), but will also seek the views of other public bodies before the

final drafting of the law (interview 10b-6). The final law is expected to allow Greece to

maintain its anti-GM position without contravening EU or WTO commitments to free

trade, by drawing up sufficiently stringent rules on coexistence to make it an

unfavourable economic terrain for GM crops.

Within an international opportunity structure, during the 2006 Vienna Co-existence

conference, the Greek Commissioner of Environment (and New Democracy deputy

since the seventies), Stavros Dimas (2006) notes that variations in geography,

topography, climate, as well as in agricultural production systems are reflected in national

approaches to co-existence. In his view, the EC should help some member states

overcome difficulties in the formulation of their national measures on co-existence. At

the same time however, he also assures that coexistence measures can play a role in

avoiding potential risks due to GMO cultivation, if complemented by sound risk

assessment and risk management practices.

So, in Greece, the dominant framing of the GM controversy has been in terms of the

need to defend national and more recently, cross-national (Balkan) borders as well,

against the alien presence of GMOs. State actors and NGOs, especially Greenpeace and

leftist political ecology groups, have often worked in concert, in terms of both the active

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monitoring of foodstuffs entering the Greek territory, and the use of EU and other

regulatory mechanisms to try to block new GMOs from being authorised for cultivation

and marketing within the European space.

Increasingly, this framing has involved the articulation of a distinctive, non-GM

„bioeconomy‟ for Greek agriculture. Given the existence of the GM/non-GM

distinction, possible economic strategies have emerged based upon the mobilisation of

symbols of „purity‟ and „naturalness‟ in relation to high-quality organic and GM free

produce. This discourse has surfaced all around the world, but appeared particularly

appealing to countries like Greece, with the support of agricultural cooperatives and

unions. The appropriateness of this strategy for Greece was alluded to in the National

Bioethics Council‟s 2000 recommendation on GM crops:

In addition, the small land share regime, and the fact that exports correspond to

both primary and processed agricultural products, together with the substantial

number of tourists visiting the country suggest that a delay in the cultivation of

GE crops could only be to the country‟s interest. In contrast, in the short term

the Commission suggests that State agriculture should be directed towards

integrated and sustainable agricultural practices (www.agrotypos.gr, our

translation)

But it was expressed even more explicitly in an interview given in June 2004 by the

General Secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development and Food, Professor Alifakiotis

(Animal Biotechnology, University of Thessaloniki):

In Greece, things are different [compared to GM producing countries like the US

and some EU countries]. The climate here encourages the production of high

quality, diverse produce. We are not interested in GM produce; we direct our

agriculture towards the production of a range of high quality products, like

organic ones, which come to the market because of their fine taste. The Greek

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consumer must realize that he has to pay more for the better quality products41

(www.agrotypos.gr, our translation)

Despite the government‟s efforts to guard the country from the infiltration of GM

products, a variety of anti-gm groups have accused the state for not taking the

appropriate measures. During an October 2004 meeting of the European Social Forum

in London, a member of the coordinating committee of the Panhellenic Network against

the Mutated42 and SYN‟s responsible for agricultural policy, Tolios (2004) discussed

GMO penetration in Greece:

In recent years, an increasing penetration of GMO products in the Greek market,

as well as attempts to develop GM cultivations are observed…Phenomena of the

distribution of GM products as well as GM polluted seeds have increased since

the lifting of the moratorium. At the same time, a number of applications have

been made requesting permission to cultivate mutated plants, mainly corn,

without, nevertheless, having been granted one until today. The main reasons for

this increasing GMO penetration [dieisdisi] is the lack of: [a] effective tracing and

labelling mechanisms, [b] timely information to farmers, [c] sample and

comprehensive inspection of the imported seed material, [d] its dissemination

before the results of the inspections are known, and [e] a legal framework

imposing sanctions, etc. During last year the illegal importation and distribution

of gm-polluted seeds (393 sacks of Ribera type corn), has serious effects. These

are „psychological warfare‟ actions aiming to convince producers and consumers

that everything has been polluted, and that resistance has no meaning since the

mutated are already in the field, on the shelf and in our plates. Surely in the cases

where gm cultivations were located, their destruction was ordered, but full

compensations have not been given to the affected farmers for their income

losses (Tolios, 2004, www.oikologos.gr)

41 Interview at http://www.agrotypos.gr/; our translation.

42 Amounting to two hundred groups.

87

In a June 2005 workshop on „Food Prices-Quality-Safety‟, organized by the leftist

coalition party‟s (SYN‟s) Agricultural Policy department, SYN‟s president as well as the

other speakers emphasized the inadequate inspection mechanisms and practices:

Whereas the entire framework [EU and national] establishes a „unified

inspections profile‟ and demands inspections at all stages, in practice, production

controls are separated from processing controls [while] some responsibilities are

allocated to the prefectures, and others to health or trade departments. EFET is

unable to coordinate all the above agencies, resulting in minimal inspections by

multi-scattered state mechanisms with minimal financing and inadequate staff

and infrastructure (Alavanos, 2005)

SYN proposes: a) systematic food sample-survey inspections before they

circulate in the market and strict sanctions to delinquents, b) coordination of

public service food inspection agencies (EFET, General State Chemistry

agency…), c) implementation of all [EU] community regulations…d) forbidding

the mutated with the immediate application of the Cartagena Protocol on

Biosafety and the declaration of the country as a GM free zone … (Tolios –

www.syn.gr 13.04.05)

During the same year, GESASE, prepared a legal proposal supporting the creation of

national inspection mechanisms based on the Cartagena Protocol. Under this initiative,

they publicly proposed: a) the creation of a national biosafety center, b) the participation

of citizens in the related decision-making, c) the organization of a GMO-watch network

in all Greek regions, d) the regulation of responsibility/accountability issues for genetic

pollution and co-existence guarantees between GM and conventional, or biological

cultivations (Kanellopoulou 2006, p. 126). As GESASE president, Goniotakis, stated in a

press conference:

88

We are flatly [κατηγορηματικά] opposed [to GMOs]. They discredit our products,

they undermine consumer trust and damage our national economy. We resist 3-4

companies who want to control global food (Kanellopoulou 2006: 126)

In June 2006, under the initiative of the national consumers‟ union, BIO ZΩ43, nineteen

groups including FoE, bio-cultivators, the Greek Social Forum, local environmental

groups, and the Panthessaliko anti-GMO network, called upon the government, the

Minister of Development and the Minister of Rural Development and Food:

To proceed to the immediate implementation of laws, with inspections

concerning labeling and traceability of the large importers of mutated

[products]….

To apply immediately the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, and utilize, in

addition, the decisions of all the Prefectoral self-governments of Greece, that

declared their regions „free from mutated‟, declaring [in this way] Greece, a

country without mutated [products] (BIO ZO press announcement, 6.6.06,

www.gmostop.org).

They expressed their:

... indignation [αγανάκτηση], because the government‟s inspection authorities

tolerate and show complete political inability to check the multiple

illegalities/trespasses in the distribution and processing of the mutated, without

abiding to the traceability and labelling requirements … (BIO ZO press

announcement 6.6.06, www.gmostop.org)

On November 2006, EFET‟s president and vice president admitted the difficulties in

carrying out inspections since:

43 The Pan-Hellenic Consumers‟ Union BIO ZO: “Bio-Consumers for quality-life” (ΒΙΟ

ΖΩ: „Βιο-καταναλωτές για ποιοτική ζωή‟).

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- EFET is not responsible for supervising the withdrawal of large quantities of

products (like those of GM rice, whose distribution and sales are prohibited by

EU legislation); this is carried out by the involved retail companies.

- EFET does not have the necessary staff (but is staffed with only 220 out of the

required 550 employees) needed to carry out a fully effective supervision of the

market. After the Olympic Games, EFET was left unsupported.

(www.agrotypos.gr – retrieved 24.11.06)

Moving beyond Greek national borders, concern over genetic contamination, has led the

Union of Prefectures and forty-five Greek groups and organizations to organize a Balkan

meeting bringing together a variety of groups from Balkan regions in Thessaloniki,

between November 25-27, 2005, in order to exchange information and discuss common

strategies (Kanellopoulou, 2006). Supporters of the initiative include Greenpeace,

OTOE, EFET, GSEE and the Prefecture of Thessaloniki. The meeting was attended by

110 groups from Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia-Mavrovounio, Croatia, FYROM, Albania,

Turkey and Cyprus. The signed declaration stresses the aim of the network:

The Balkan Network, which is now constituted, will contribute to the

establishment of an Observatory on GMOs and of an Internet site, so that

everything that happens in the Balkan countries and relates to the cultivation and

distribution of GMOs will be immediately communicated. In this way,

coordinated actions can be organized in many countries at the same time.

The movement against GMOs is the expression of a moral choice of citizens,

institutions and organisations with innocent motives and goals. It objects to the

degradation of human values, to the abuse of scientific knowledge [which does]

not take into account common interest.

We are all committed to provide to the coming generations the heritage of a rich

variety of seeds, plants and animals. The distribution of GMOs in the

environment threatens food safety and environmental sustainability of the whole

planet.

We call citizens to take this matter into their hands (www.gmostop.org)

90

It also points to common social and physical features of the Balkans:

In the Balkan countries, there is small-scale land property and a rich and sensitive

natural environment. Here the objectives are to provide support to the farmers,

to develop agricultural production with respect to natural resources, human

health and animal health. These objectives should be met regardless of the

financial and political interests of different groups. This model cannot

compromise to the application of genetic engineering.

Common in all Balkan countries is also the preservation of natural, non-

industrialized food, the lack of awareness among the farmers and the insufficient

control capacity to avoid GMOs in the food chain. Our common threats concern

field trials and commercial cultivation of GMOs, the contamination of local

varieties, ground and food, the dependence from the multinational companies

and the loss of markets (www.gmostop.org)

As we shall see, the story of GMOs in the United Kingdom took a very different pattern,

one in which the division between GM and non-GM was not inscribed round the

territorial boundary of the nation, but was drawn through the nation itself – between

field and field, between public and government, and even through the government itself

and its advisory structure.

3.3. The United Kingdom

Phase I: The arrival of GM food and crops, 1996-1998

When the first shipments of GM Soya arrived from across the Atlantic, the UK like

other EU member states had a regulatory system for the new agri-food biotechnologies

in place, established in 1990 with reference to the Deliberate Release Directive, and Part

VI of the UK Environmental Protection Act (1990). In the UK, the assessment of each

new GM crop is carried out by the Advisory Committee on Releases into the

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Environment (ACRE), and under this regulatory system the first of the new GM Crops

had already been granted consent before the dramatic escalation of the issue. As the UK

did not follow the route taken by many other member states of invoking „Article 16‟ to

justify a national ban, the conflict was given an extra intensity; rather than remaining

restricted to the official UK, EU and WTO regulatory spaces, it became played out more

in the arena of domestic civil society. Its refusal to invoke Article 16 would also force the

UK government into the novel politico-scientific arrangement of the Farmscale

Evaluations (FSEs) to legitimate the UK‟s own eventual de facto moratorium.

A heterogeneous array of networks and discourses around agriculture, biodiversity, food,

and health therefore became drawn into the controversy, in a process that would only

intensify in the wake of this new technology‟s arrival after 1996. These would articulate

diverse worldviews and values and help form or transform a range of newly politicised

arenas and spaces, from supermarkets to fields and laboratories. By 1998 the original UK

and EU GMO regulatory apparatus established eight years earlier was thus already

becoming overwhelmed. Its purely science based authority around ACRE formed too

narrow and reductionist a foundation to provide the necessary political legitimacy for the

GM project. From then on, the government began to attempt to draw more legitimacy

from the other side of the science-politics dichotomy. This would involve the

participation or incorporation of a wider range of actors and the establishment of the

bifurcated structure of two parallel committees, ACRE being joined by the AEBC

(Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission) with its wider, more socially

reflexive remit beyond the narrower confines of science alone. Furthermore, each would

end up connected to a key public experiment, ACRE with the FSEs and the AEBC with

the GM Nation public debate.44 Thus a distinct pattern in UK GM crop policy would be

the management of a dualism of Science and Politics, via various institutional

arrangements and spaces.

44 The name „GM Nation?‟ has a significant question mark at the end, but for clarity

we omit the question mark from here on.

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Of all the different possible framings of the GM issue (property relations, farmers rights,

gene flow, alien species, ethics, religion and so on), opposition to GM found expression

through two main pressure points in the UK‟s political opportunity structure. The first

involved discourses of food safety, consumer choice and labelling, where supermarkets

were particularly vulnerable. A crucial regulatory body here was the Advisory Committee

on Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP), which largely parallels the Greek food

inspection organisation EFET. ACNFP advises government agencies on matters relating

to novel foods (including those containing GMOs) and novel processes such as food

irradiation, and carries out safety assessments of new products and processes submitted

for approval under the EC novel food regulation. Later on, as we will see, the Food

Standards Agency also emerged as a significant regulatory body operating in this domain.

And towards the end of our narrative, labelling and consumer choice will become key

elements within the new discourse of „coexistence‟ in relation to agricultural and

conventional biotechnology.

Nevertheless, although the safety and labelling framing was highly significant in other

member states (as we have seen above in the case of Greece), in the United Kingdom it

was eclipsed in significance by another framing during the height of the controversy.

This second framing, concerning the question of farmland biodiversity and the UK

wildlife policy networks around English Nature and the Royal Society for the Protection

of Birds (RSPB), played the key role in the debates in the UK and provided the space for

the emergence of the FSEs, the AEBC and GM Nation.

Phase II: Institutional innovation, 1998-9

By 1998 these tensions had accumulated, making it a pivotal year in the history of GM

regulation. Opposition continued to rise across many sectors of society in the UK: (a)

amongst the wildlife scientific policy community (RSPB etc.), with the government

statutory body English Nature calling publicly for a moratorium; (b) within the

environmental movement, particularly with launch in July of the GenetiX Snowball

campaign of direct action; (c) amongst consumers, with whom environmentalists started

organising „supermarket actions‟; (d) in the supermarket sector, with many chains

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deciding to withdraw GM products from their shelves; and (e) in the media, with Prince

Charles in particular mounting a vociferous campaign against GM agriculture.

Within government and policy networks, questions concerning the effects of the

herbicide use associated with GMHR crops on farmland biodiversity started to increase

in legitimacy. Against the background of the news in February 1998 that the EU was

considering accelerating the process of revising the Directive, which had been criticised

for ignoring the indirect effects of GM agriculture, the Environment Minister started to

hold meetings with environmental NGOs, statutory wildlife bodies, etc. on these

questions. ACRE, after criticism, agreed to incorporate more elements of the

wildlife/ecology scientific community amongst its membership, and widened its remit to

deal with biodiversity issues.

„[English Nature] realised back in the middle of the 1990s that there were a lot of

herbicide tolerant crops in the pipeline and no one seemed to be concerned at all about

the indirect effect of changing herbicide systems. Our analyses had shown us over the

years that changes in crop management systems had a far greater impact on biodiversity

than any other factor, you know like crop variety or soil type or anything like that; it was

really changes in management systems. So we became rather alarmed by the prospect of

broad-spectrum herbicides being used over vast areas of Britain, because we knew that

herbicide use was a major factor in the decline of farmland birds for example but also of

course in the decline of farm and arable plants. And so we raised the issue with ACRE in

my position as an assessor on ACRE. And ACRE at first in 1996 argued that it wasn‟t

within their remit to consider the indirect effects, only the direct effects of the plant

variety. Well, we went back to the European Directive and said „oh, no that‟s wrong, you

have to consider all the effects on the environment and that would include the indirect

effects‟ um, and after about two years of writing some pretty strong letters to Defra and

to ministers coming from our chair, ACRE finally relented and decided yes, there was an

issue here, and interestingly had a lot of support for that view from other regulatory

authorities, especially the Germans, who were being increasingly anxious about indirect

effects ...

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„Under John Beringer [ACRE] was largely made up of molecular biologists, many of

those, not surprisingly derived from industry, or funded by industry. ... ACRE very

quickly then pulled into it some more professional ecologists, all of whom agreed with us

that there did seem to be a real issue here and it was I think largely their influence, and

the influence of people like Chris Pollock, that was responsible for ACRE changing its

mind on indirect effects. And Linda Smith had a hand in that as well, because she though

basically we were right to call for more experimentation. And so her advice to ACRE was

that this was a real issue which if they ignored, they would be in dereliction of their

statutory duty and therefore they could be accountable,‟ interview with Brian Johnson, English

Nature

At the same time, the industry formed a strategy and in June launched SCIMAC (Supply

Chain Initiative on Modified Agricultural Crops), which advocates the managed and

regulated introduction of GM Crops, allegedly in co-existence with conventional and

organic agriculture, and support the labelling of GM products for the consumer. On 5

November the government announced a voluntary agreement with SCIMAC for a

moratorium on commercial GM plantings and a programme of Farm Scale

Evaluations (FSEs) of four GM crops, which would be compared with non-GM crops

for their effects on wildlife biodiversity.

For the government, the FSEs served several possible functions of (a) buying time and

taking the heat out of the issue, creating a period to wait and observe further EU

developments; (b) providing a scientific rationale for this politically needed moratorium;

(c) keeping the GM crop project moving forwards, albeit in a more precautionary mode;

(d) signalling an assent to the demands of the wildlife/ecologist bodies, and

incorporating them in an expanded „expert/industrial‟ bloc – thus separating them out

from other opponents of GM who firmly opposed the FSEs; and (e) providing a

technocratic and apparently neutral way to legitimate GM crops.

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The FSE strategy was a mutation of an earlier one of „managed development‟ of

commercial GM crops. In this scenario the limited commercial planting of the herbicide

resistant GM crops would go ahead, but this would be accompanied by farmscale

evaluation of this process for ecological effects, such as the effect of the different

herbicide regimes on agricultural biodiversity. This was the strategy broadly outlined by

environment ministers Michael Meacher and Jeff Rooker to the House of Lords

Agriculture Select Committee in October 1998. However, by 1999 it was being

emphasised that these were non- commercial trials, and therefore „purely scientific‟. The

environment minister clarified the position by announcing a further deal with SCIMAC

in November 1999 agreeing that no commercial cultivation would go ahead until another

three years of the trials. Thus the FSE‟s were born as commercial scale trials, but

sanctified as pure „science‟. These birthmarks raised further scepticism amongst critics in

the NGO‟s and media, that behind the scientific and precautionary rhetoric the FSE‟s

were merely a way of moving the GM project further towards a goal of mass commercial

release.

The specification for the studies were established by DETR scientists in discussions

with other government departments, members of ACRE and wildlife and research

advisers to test the to test the statistical „null hypothesis‟ that „there are no significant

differences between the biodiversity associated with the management of the particular GMHT crop and

the comparable non-GM crop at the farm scale‟. A secondary objective was to „contribute to an

assessment of the wider question of whether the commercial use of GMHT crops will

change the management of farming systems and the agricultural landscape‟.45

A tendering and selection process lead to the formation of a consortium of three

research organisations: Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE, now Centre for Ecology

and Hydrology, CEH), Institute of Arable Crops Research (IACR) and Scottish Crop

Research Institute (SCRI). There was also an independent Scientific Steering Committee

(SSC) appointed by the Secretary of State, consisting of scientists and representatives

45 http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/gm/fse/background/rationale.htm#fn.

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from universities, the RSPB, the Game Conservancy Trust, the farming industry‟s Morley

Research Centre and English Nature.

However, following the development of this strategy public hostility continued to grow,

with the FSEs providing a new focus for opposition and concern. Before the FSEs, GM

had been an abstract issue; the field trials made them concrete and located:

„In doing the farmscale evaluations there was this benefit which we didn‟t think of at the

time: it opened up the way to have a better debate about it by making it real for people

by there actually being crops. We told everyone where they were, and we told them that

they were going to happen – “you can go and look at it if you like – it looks just like

oilseed rape”„, interview with Linda Smith, Head of GM Policy Science and Regulation, Defra.

But the FSEs also opened up new political spaces for informal participation around the

issue. This was particularly turbulent, because the FSE process did not offer the public

any formal mechanism for participation in decisions about whether or where to sow GM

crops. The public were informed (via the government website, by an announcement in a

local newspaper, and by a letter to the local parish council), but only after the site had

been chosen and the decision to sow has been made. The announcement was supposed

to be made four to six weeks before planting, but this commitment was not always met.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) sent representatives

to provide information about the GM crops and the FSEs when local public meetings

were called formally by parish councils.

The FSEs trials provoked a whole new set of political critiques and interventions in a

number of registers: of science – that the inevitably reductionist nature of the FSEs would

not produce valid knowledge about the GM socio-ecological complex; of democracy – that

the FSEs were being foisted on local populations without their consent; and of risk – that

the FSEs were in themselves a form of pollution. A pattern of public participation began

to emerge around the FSEs, ranging from village meetings, picnics and trespasses on the

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sites, to „crop-trashings‟. The trials thus became the cause and focus of yet more anti-GM

activism and popular/civic unrest; rather than closing down and narrowing the debate

into purely „technical‟ issues, they produced a more complex, turbulent situation between

1999 and 2003 – not helped by the fact that for many they were seen as preparing the

way towards mass commercial cultivation. Therefore, attempts to create a scientific zone

purified of all politics were frustrated as politics continued to intrude. As well as

detecting the reactions of weeds and insects to the presence of the new technology, other

actors were drawn into the fields: the nightly crop-trashings widened the experiments

into hybrid politic-scientific spaces (Szerszynski 2005).

The court cases of those arrested in the crop field actions would often become high

profile trials of the GM crops rather than the activist defendants. These courtroom

battles occurred across the UK. The trial of 28 Greenpeace activists who removed part

of a crop of GM maize in July 1999 at Lyng in Norfolk was particularly well publicised

and documented. In the trial and retrial, Greenpeace assembled 10 expert scientific

witnesses to help defend the activists, with the intention of putting „GM on trial‟ instead.

These witnesses included Professor Jean Emberlin, director of the National Pollen

Research Unit, giving evidence on wind pollination, Professor Terje Traavik Head of the

University of Tromsø‟s Department of Virology and scientific director of the Norwegian

Institute of Gene Ecology, on horizontal gene transfer, as well as other expert testimony

challenging the underlying basis of politico-scientific constructs including „substantial

equivalence‟ and the FSEs themselves. This evidence was later published as a

campaigners‟ guide called GM on Trial (Greenpeace 2000).

Thus the GM debate was already happening before, between and beyond the officially

sanctioned GM Nation in a variety of novel arenas: supermarkets, farmers‟ fields,

courtrooms, seed list hearings, beekeepers gatherings and many other spaces provided

novel and unanticipated sites of participation in the political battle over the new

technology.

From the late 1990s the anti-GM environmental and consumer social movements began

to stage „supermarket actions‟. Giant cobs of corn and paper-maché cows danced in

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shopping malls and supermarket aisles. Packed with consumable symbols of family,

naturalness and health, these would suddenly provide a potent and newly politicised

terrain for the contest over GM. The growing consumer reaction against the new

technology registered amongst supermarket executives, and „GM Free‟ became a new

selling point. Neither solely the politicisation of markets nor the marketisation of politics,

novel couplings were made between discourses of consumer choice and citizen concern,

mobilising powerful tensions around food and trust, (especially heightened by a recent

series food scandals such as BSE/CJD) as well as the powerful discourses around

consumer sovereignty and food labelling.

One of the most interesting and important of these newly politicised arenas of

participation was the National Seed List Hearings held in 2000 and 2002 over the GM

HR Maize variety Chardon LL (T25). These hearings became by accident one of the sole

sites within the UK regulatory system where members of the public could officially

challenge the introduction of the new GM crops. Following an early EEC directive

(70/457/EEC), the sale of a new variety was prohibited unless it was included in the

EEC Common Catalogue and National List. This was originally aimed at securing

minimum standards of seed quality and the legislation predates the GM controversy and

applies to all varieties not just GM ones. Under this directive statutory tests and trials are

required to demonstrate that new varieties are „distinct, uniform and stable‟ (DUC), have

„value for cultivation and use‟ (VCU) and represent an improvement on existing listed

varieties. These tests on Chardon LL had already been performed in France for Aventis,

then the owner of the technology. Seed listing therefore constituted the last stage in the

regulatory process and follows the granting of marketing consent under the GM

Deliberate Release Directive 1990/220.

In March 2000, the addition of Chardon LL T25 Maize was proposed to the National

List, marking the final part of legislative clearance for that variety. This gave another

alarm signal to those opposed to GM that, despite the commercial moratorium during

the FSEs, the introduction of the technology was still moving forward with government

approval. But a latent power existed under the legislation for members of the public to

demand a hearing and examine the evidence for the DUC and VCU of a variety. Prior to

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Chardon LL objections to seed listing were rare and there had never before been a

request for a public hearing. With this new GM variety, however, there were 223 written

objections, including 67 requests for a public hearing, (with each objector required to pay

the MAFF a fee of £30 plus a further £60 to lodge their request for a public hearing).

Interestingly, these hearings had been bequeathed a structure that went beyond usual

consultation mechanisms and allowed for what amounted to a two or three stage

representation and appeals process, including written representations, cross examination,

a hearing, and an additional tribunal.

At the hearings one of the first problems to emerge was that the DUV testing had been

carried out over only one year, rather than the statutory two years required by the EU

Directive. Thus the £500,000 hearing had to be delayed until 2002. This enabled Friends

of the Earth to claim in a 2000 press release:

„This fiasco has only come to light because Friends of the Earth and ordinary

members of the public forced the Government to hold a public hearing on the

listing of this GM seed. Only a week after the BSE report was published, we now

find that the minimum official testing of this crop has simply not taken place. If

the hearing had not happened, this vital information would never have come to

light and the crop would have been given official approval‟.

In the hearings the tests carried out for the GM Maize were scrutinised and cross-

examined by coalitions of NGO‟s and a host of dissident or independent scientists. The

outcome was a succession of exposures of uncertainties in the science and inadequacies

in the tests undertaken, some of which would be acknowledged by the chair of ACRE .46

By September 2002, Defra was proposing changes to these procedures, removing the

right to hearings and written representations, stating that „the National List system is not

the appropriate place to challenge GM safety assessments‟. Instead, an intention to

develop „improved, effective and transparent mechanisms‟ of consultation under the

46 Professor Alan Gray on Farming Today, BBC Radio 4, 27 April 2002.

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deliberate release directive was announced. The Defra document also finishes with an

acknowledgement of „genuine public concern‟ and the need for a „GM Public Debate‟.47

Thus like a kindly chaperone, DEFRA is concerned to escort public participation away

from the hybrid and „inappropriate‟ arenas of the national seed list hearings and into new

formal arenas made safe for such participation.

In September 2002 DEFRA issued a consultation paper on these proposed changes to

the right to seed list hearings, as part of a wider round of consultations on the UK‟s

plans for implementing the revised deliberate release directive (2001/18/EC). A total of

60 responses about the proposed changes to the seed list hearings were received from

stakeholders ranging from farmers, organic growers and industry to NGO‟s, with 55

against and 5 in favour. A „Summary of Responses‟ drawn up by DEFRA officials

themselves reveals some of these stakeholder concerns about the new arrangements, the

shortcomings of the new directives consultation provisions and the inadvertent

advantages discovered in the Seed List Hearings:

• „Widespread agreement that concerns about GM safety assessments should be

heard before GM safety decisions were made, and that the National List system was not

the appropriate place to challenge these. However, the proposed regulatory framework

under the Genetically Modified Organisms (Deliberate Release) Regulations 2002

provided no opportunity for a Hearing at any stage.

• „The various public consultations being offered were no substitute for a Hearing

– each served a different purpose. A Hearing afforded a more in-depth, participative

approach and had the potential to permit the cross-examination of witnesses on both

sides in full view of the public.

• „Lack of provision for holding a Hearing at any stage in the approval process was

a serious omission. It removed the only opportunity currently available to the public for

voicing concerns. The Hearing also afforded an opportunity for participants to consider

material which had been submitted to advisory bodies‟ (Defra 2002).

47 http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/nationallist/letter.htm.

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Of particular interest here is the realisation that a certain mode of holding a „hearing‟ can

allow a „more in-depth, participative approach and had the potential to permit the cross-

examination of witnesses on both sides in full view of the public‟. This raises important

questions not only for the structure of spaces and arenas of public and stakeholder

participation, but also about the conduct of socially and politically controversial scientific

debate. We find respondents claiming some advantages in this more antagonistic model

(perhaps more familiar in law and politics) over the presentation of peer group consensus

and found in more traditional scientific advisory committees and arenas.

From our brief survey of this period, we can see a pattern. In order to resolve the crisis

of legitimacy that intensified throughout this period, the UK government sought to

involve the participation of wider layers of society in its GM legitimation process. The

first step after 1998 was to widen participation within the official scientific advisory

system by involving previously excluded networks around wildlife, agricultural

biodiversity and ecology. These new layers were included both within ACRE and in the

management of the FSE‟s. The second step was to respond to the pressure to find some

sort of official spaces for much broader social perspectives and voices – constituted as

„stakeholder interests‟ and „the general public‟. This took the form of the establishment

of the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC) and the GM

Nation public debate respectively.

Phase III, AEBC and GM Nation, 2000-2004

The AEBC had its origins in a report published by the Cabinet Office and the Office of

Science and Technology in May 1999, „The Advisory and Regulatory Framework for

Biotechnology‟. This was the culmination of a public review of the biotechnology regulatory

system which the government had announced in December 1998, which had involved an

extensive consultation process involving the participation of over a hundred civil society,

industry and regulatory bodies as well as the „general public‟ accessed via focus groups

and over 1000 interviews with members of a „peoples‟ panel‟. The report argued that the

current advisory and regulatory structure was, amongst other things, not sufficiently

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forward looking and strategic in its thinking to keep pace with such a rapidly developing

technology and also did not „properly reflect the broader ethical and environmental

questions and views of potential stakeholders‟. Thus three new bodies were to be

established; The Food Standards Agency, the Human Genetics Commission and the

AEBC.

The report also identified two separate functions for advisory bodies. On the one hand

there was the granting of approval for individual products or processes; in relation to

GM, this was historically carried out by ACRE, a statutory function to be retained by this

body. On the other hand, it was argued that a more „strategic framework‟ was also

needed, with a body that would examine the wider issues and direction the technology

should take. Prior to this OST report, such a body was already beginning to feature in

governmental discourses: in the address to a House of Lords Select Committee where

the UK secretary of State announced the FSEs on 21 October 1998, he also announced

the proposal for a „stakeholders‟ forum‟ which would work „in parallel with ACRE, which

would remain a scientifically based committee‟.48 Thus a division of labour was emerging

between two bodies of expert advisors which the government could draw upon.

In this division of labour ACRE would retain control over the central legitimating

discourse of „sound science‟ and would also keep its monopoly as the statutory advisor to

government. The AEBC‟s power would be much less clearly defined – as „stakeholder

forum‟ and provider of „strategic advice‟ on the direction of the technology as a whole.

However, while having no statutory power, it would hold a considerable moral power,

occupying a discursive space that made it hard for the government to ignore (at its

inception Cabinet Office Minister Mo Mowlam told the AEBC „you are the people‟s

voice‟).

As former Commissioner Robin Grove-White explains, the commission was set up in

order to show that the government was being even-handed towards the diversity of

48 http://www.parliament.the-stationery-

office.co.uk/pa/ld199899/ldselect/ldeucom/11/8102102.htm.

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viewpoints on GM in the country, which led to it having a large membership of twenty

members with a wide rage of expertise and attitude to GM agriculture, and giving the

commissioners a large degree of autonomy in shaping the agenda. The commission

quickly settled on an understanding of its task as exploratory and deliberative rather than

simply educative of the public. It also set itself on a course which would at times bring it

into conflict with ACRE in terms of which body had the power to set the terms in which

GM regulatory debates would proceed in the United Kingdom, contesting the dominant

EU regulatory framing of GM constructs as „stable entities, with knowable and

specifiable properties and consequences‟ (Grove-White 2006: 172-3).

„Margaret Beckett ... wanted a creature which would produce sort of pro-government

propaganda, and this did not turn out to be such,‟ interview with Michael Meacher MP, former

Environment Minister

Apart from its role in the creation of GM Nation, the AEBC was a significant innovation

in its own right, becoming as it did a space for deliberation and debate – often very

heated – about the nature of the knowledge that should guide policy:

„The commission to my mind demonstrated that it is possible to have a commission

appointed by a government that asks about the nature of knowledge and the way in

which it is constructed within the dominant forces that determine public policy – to have

a commission that can draw together knowledge constructs from different disciplines

and to have intelligent arguments about the intersection of those disciplines and about

the conclusions or indications that one can draw from those debates,‟ speech by Malcolm

Grant, AEBC Chair.

Yet because of the lack of clarity over its remit, the AEBC remained a contested object,

especially over whether its correct role was exploratory or the offering of advice on

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specific policy options. Neil Williams, in his official review of the performance of the

AEBC for the DTI in 2004, said that:

Two competing pictures emerged. On the one hand were those who judged that

the AEBC has made an important contribution to exploring and exposing

different perspectives on GM through a rigorous process of extended argument

that was open and transparent, taking forward debate and reducing polarisation

in viewpoints through the development of consensus conclusions and

recommendations that commanded broad respect. On the other were those who

judged that the AEBC, whilst providing a valuable conduit and focus for

discussion of GM issues that taken some of the heat out of the debate, has

ultimately failed to find a way of reconciling public involvement with science in

ways that command broad respect, or to provide Government with evidence

based advice that was sufficiently timely and specific to assist the policy making

process‟ (Williams 2004: 5-6)

Because of its non-statutory status, the influence of the AEBC on policy was often

indirect and hard to identify – making it more vulnerable to being seen as ineffective in

Williams‟ review. For example, its informal exposure of the way that Ministers were

misrepresenting the science of the FSEs – that they would provide a definitive answer to

the safety of the crops, rather than being a narrower test of a limited set of parameters –

reportedly resulted in the quiet dropping of such representations by government

representatives (interview with Robin Grove-White).

But the AEBC did publish a number of reports which were highly significant in shaping

the policy debate. Its first report, Crops on Trial, was published in 2001. This argued that

the FSEs „were not enough to form the basis for a decision on commercialisation, and

needed to be complemented by an open and inclusive process of decision-making about

the commercialisation of GM crops‟. In particular, the AEBC argued that:

„It will be crucial for the public to be involved in the important decisions which

need to be taken. We have to find a way to foster informed public discussion of

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the development and application of new technologies: whatever decisions are

ultimately reached, they will be more palatable if they have not been taken behind

closed doors. At present, there seem to be no avenues for a genuine, open,

influential debate with inclusive procedures, which does not marginalise the

reasonable scepticism and wide body of intelligent opinion outside specialist

circles. We need to harness new deliberative mechanisms, to develop

participatory methods of public engagement, together with new capacities within

Government and industry for digesting and responding to the implications‟

(AEBC 2001: para 68).

In response, in May 2002 the government accepted the AEBC‟s advice, announcing that

there should be a „national dialogue‟ on GM issues, that would be separated into three

different strands – a review of the science of GM, a study of its economic feasibility, and

a public debate. Preparation for these began in late 2002, with the main processes

running in 2003.

The science review attempted to be „publicly driven‟, allowing public debate to set questions.

It used a web interface and some public meetings/workshops, reviewed extant scientific

papers and to some extent surveyed fields of uncertainty. The writing of the final report

by the Steering Group was a bitterly contested process, with threats made to the

academic funding of dissident members. The economics review was carried out by the

cabinet office, and explored the commercial viability of GM products under a range of

future scenarios. The public debate GM Nation was the highpoint of formal „public

participation‟ in the GM controversy in the UK.

The first step in setting up GM Nation was the establishment of a Steering Board to

oversee its planning and conduct. AEBC Chair, Malcolm Grant was invited by the

Secretary of State to also chair the steering board and appoint a membership that could

gain public confidence and symbolise independence from the government. For example

it had both a leading figure from the Five Year Freeze anti-GM coalition as well as from

the industry body the „Agricultural Biotechnology Council‟ (ABC), made up of six

agrochemical multinational companies. Eight of its members were also commissioners

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from the AEBC, while two were co-opted from government departments. As one of its

first tasks at its launch meeting in September 2002 the steering body had to appoint a

contractor that would actually implement the debate. However, the steering board found

it had very little choice in this appointment, and for various reasons had to appoint a

government agency, the Central Office of Information (CoI). This appointment went

ahead despite worries amongst a number of steering board members that the decision

might compromise public confidence in the independence of the exercise from the

government. Nevertheless, the CoI was appointed firstly because of budgetary

constraints and secondly because of its established subcontracting arrangements which

meant that it could avoid a lengthly European selection process over tender, thus

working within the time constraints. Such constraints, of limited time and money, would

shape GM Nation and diminish it in the eyes of its critics. The process began to be

criticised by NGO‟s, academics and others from these early stages. These debates were

articulated by a submission to the steering boards November 2002 meeting from a group

of academics prominent in the fields of science policy and public participation. As well as

criticising the budget and time allocated as too limited, it also argued that these limits

would exacerbate a number of other problems including a lack of clarity as to the overall

purpose of the debate and its relationship with governing institutions and official

decisions. These connected to questions about the relationship of the debate to the

eventual FSE results, and to the other strands in the dialogue. Furthermore, the

submission raised questions of public suspicions about governmental openness to the

debates outcomes and the top-down nature of the process (Healey 2004; 15, 20, 67). The

steering board itself raised criticisms of the time and budgetary constraints, eventually in

February 2003 winning a commitment from the Secretary of State to double the budget

and extend the time period:

„It soon became clear to us that a credible debate needed more money and more time.

We put these requests to Government in December 2002 and January 2003, and in

February the UK Government and the devolved administrations agreed to double the

budget for the debate programme, to £500,000, and to extend the timetable for the

debate to July, with the Steering Board reporting to Government in September. This

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was still intended to allow for the expected publication of the first results of the farm-

scale evaluations‟ (GM Nation PDSB 2003: 14).

The steering board had established the principle that the public should frame the

questions for the debate. To do this a series of nine „Foundation Workshops‟ were held

during November 2002 in Manchester, County Down, Ludlow, Reading, Wales,

Norwich, Bromsgrove, Edinburgh and North London in a series of towns selected for

their geographical spread. Furthermore, this stage witnessed the development of a

contrast between a conception of „the general public‟ versus another category of the

„Actively Involved‟, categories that would become significant in the subsequent reception

and interpretation of the debates outcomes by various parties. As the Steering Board

themselves put it:

Eight of the workshops involved members of the general public, representing

four broad stages in life and two broad socioeconomic groups....However, the

Norwich workshop, for purposes of comparison, comprised participants who

were „Actively Involved‟ in GM, half of them supporters and half opponents

(2003; 13)

Each of these foundation workshops had 18-20 participants meeting for three hours.

They also each had two facilitators and were developed, run analysed and reported on by

Corr Willbourn Research and Development a subcontracted company (Corr Willbourn

Research and Development 2003).

From these foundation workshops the Corr Willbourn Report identified six overlapping

principle frames for the debate, around food, choice, information needs, uncertainty and

trust, ethics and the targets and intended trajectory of GM technology. This report was

then distilled into a series of tools for public engagement and participation that would be

central to structuring the debate.

The first of these tools was a series of thirteen questions that would form the basic

structure of GM Nation. These questions took the form of a series of statements ranging

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from the optimistic or favourable to the critical or pessimistic towards GM crops. A

series of „tick boxes‟ were then offered in response to these statements offering five

choices ranging from „agree strongly‟ to „disagree strongly‟. These thirteen framework

questions were distributed in the mass open meetings of GM Nation public debates as

well as the selected „control‟ of the „narrow-but-deep‟ focus groups. After these thirteen

closed questions there followed another two more open questions where participants

were allowed five dotted lines to express there views, and also some more tick boxes to

present „information about you‟ including gender, age, postcode and their involvement

with the debate. This GM Nation information pack and feedback form/questionnaire was

also distributed at many events and via the website and post. These therefore formed a

mobile technology of engagement and participation, with the ability to incorporate many

events and situations into „GM Nation‟. The Central office of Communications declared

that wherever a batch of thirty or more feedback forms were ordered they would assume

this represented a GM Nation meeting (GM Nation PDSB 2003: 59).

The other tool that emerged from the Corr Willbourn Foundation Workshops report

was the prepared common „stimulus materials‟ that all GM Nation participants would be

exposed to before filling in the feedback form questions. This stimulus material had

originally been planned as a single video. However, following the results of the

foundation workshops expressing a desire for more diverse views coming from a variety

of acknowledged partisan sources, some members of the steering board won the

argument to have additional more pluralistic and diverse stimulus material. A variety of

stakeholders engaged in the debate were therefore enrolled to help prepare their own

answers and perspectives to the questions emerging from the foundation workshops.

These were then passed to a subcontracted company „Creative Research‟ working with

the science museum to be worked into a more standardized, and perhaps more neutral

format. Furthermore, by April 2003 the decision to attribute sources was abandoned due

to lack of time to contact all the sources to gain consent. Thus the stimulus materials

ended up being bland statements that were unattributed to any sources, perhaps making

them less successful at stimulating and framing the debate. These materials were also put

on a CD-Rom in a form identical to both the pages of the GM Nation website and the

booklet that came attached to the questionnaire / feedback form. Together, the stimulus

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material, questions and feedback form formed GM Nation tool that attempted to

standardise the diverse moments and modes of participation into a nationally coherent

and somehow measurable entity.

The public debate itself was launched on 3 June 2003 with a press briefing in London,

and the first of the six Tier 1 meetings – facilitated round-table discussions based on

stimulus material – in Birmingham. The rest of the Tier 1 events took place in Swansea,

Harrogate, Taunton, Glasgow and Belfast over the next ten days, attended in total by

over 1,000 people. The government‟s Central Office of Information (COI

Communications) estimated that between 16 June and 18 July there also were a total of

around 40 Tier 2 regional and county-level meetings, organized in partnership with

county councils and other bodies, and more varied in form, including expert witnesses

and debates around a motion. They also estimate that there were also 629 local Tier 3

meetings, largely organized by town councils and civil society groups for which the

„toolkit‟ was made available by the Steering Board, using „stimulus material‟ in paper, CD-

Rom or video form. There were thus an estimated 675 meetings in total. At each meeting

in every tier feedback forms were made available so the participants could express further

views. The Steering Board Summarised:

„Over 4,500 individual requests for materials were received by GM Nation. As a

result 20,000 workbooks, 6,000 CD-Roms, over 1,000 videos and more than 70,

000 feedback forms were sent to members of the general public and interested

parties. In addition, the contents of the workbook and CD Rom were available

on the GM Nation website, along with the feedback form, which was available to

complete between 3 June and 18 July 2003. During this period over 27,000

unique visitors to the website were recorded. ... In total 36,557 completed

questionnaires were received by 18 July 2003 and were included in this analysis.

Of these, 18,771 were submitted in hard copy, and 17,786 were submitted on the

website.‟ 49

49 http://www.gmnation.org.uk/docs/introduction_to_feedback.pdf.

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In contrast to the public meetings of the open debate, the participants in which were

„self-selecting‟, the Steering Board also commissioned a series of „narrow but deep‟ focus

group discussions in June and July 2003 to act as a „control‟. Ten different groups were

convened with a total of 77 participants, chosen to be broadly representative of the

general public, and selected to have no immediate connection or interest in the issue.

Each group met twice over a two week period: in the first meeting they were exposed to

the GM Nation stimulus material; between the two meetings participants were

encouraged to collect more information, and kept a diary to record their thoughts; finally,

in the second meeting, the participants discussed what they had decided were the salient

issues. At the beginning of both sessions, they completed the GM Nation „feedback form‟

with its thirteen closed questions, in order to determine how their opinion changed over

the two weeks.

The GM Nation process of public events was planned to finish in July. However, the

publication of the results of the FSEs was postponed from July until September 2003.

This lead to demands from the GM Nation steering committee and others to have the

timescale of the debate extended, so that the FSEs could be included in the public‟s

deliberations, but these were rejected by government. This raised the question of the

whole relationship between the public debate and the FSEs: whether the in GM Nation

the public would be allowed to deliberate on the scientific results, or whether these

would be kept as two separate information feeds, with the deliberative power exclusively

reserved for government. This move raised doubts amongst NGOs about the status of

GM Nation, and even suspicions at ministerial level:

„I think the best science that is available ought to be made available to the public. The

only reason that the government wanted to keep them separate was because the FSE

results came out wrong from their point of view. If the FSE results were a clean bill of

health I‟m sure they would have been extremely keen, indeed demanding, that the GM

Nation, every member should be sent a copy of the results or something, to make sure

that they got it in their head that their was nothing wrong with GM. But it all went

wrong‟, interview with Michael Meacher MP, former Environment Minister

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The Public Debate Steering Board (PDSB) published its report GM Nation? The Findings

of the Public Debate in September 2003. This attempted to combine information from both

the public debates and the „narrow but deep‟ groups and then refine this into seven „Key

Messages‟. These were: „(1) People are generally uneasy about GM; (2) The more people

engage in GM issues, the harder their attitudes and more intense their concerns; (3)

There is little support for early commercialization; (4) There is widespread mistrust of

government and multi-national companies; (5) There is a broad desire to know more and

for more research to be done; (6) Developing countries have special interests; (7) The

debate was welcomed and valued‟ (GM Nation PDSB 2003: 51-3).

Challenges to the representativeness of the participation in GM Nation were raised by the

official evaluation team, and echoed by industry and government. Later, the government

responded:

„We accept that the findings of the public debate broadly reflect the current state

of public opinion on GM crops. We acknowledge that people are generally

uneasy about GM crops and food, and that there is little support for early

commercialisation of GM crops in this country. However the results suggest that

the general public may have a lower degree of outright opposition to GM than

the participants in the debate, while still being very cautious. The debate has also

confirmed that people‟s attitudes towards GM crops are shaped by a complex

range of issues and concerns, and that to some extent GM crops have become a

focus for much wider concerns‟ (Defra 2004).

However, the government would treat this result of public participation as just one more

information feed amongst many. In the autumn of 2003 the whole series of separate

parts of the process produced reports – the science review, the economics review by the

strategy unit and most importantly for the government the results of the FSEs. Finally in

November came the AEBC‟s report on coexistence and liability. The conclusions of this

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report would place still more major limitations on the commercial cultivation of GM

crops and also had a significant affect on the eventual outcome.

Drawing on the FSE results, published from late 2003 onwards, ACRE gave three of the

four crops negative appraisals: the herbicide / GM technology package around HR beet

and two varieties of HR oilseed rape were found to have adverse effects on arable weeds

when compared to conventional crop and herbicide regimes. By contrast, the GM / HR

Maize regime was found to be less damaging than the existing conventional herbicide

regime. However, this existing conventional herbicide regime was based on Atrazine, a

chemical that was due to be banned in the EU due to its negative effects. Thus none of

the GM HR crops could be free from claims of damage to agricultural biodiversity.

These results surprised many, including oppositional NGOs who had assumed the

criteria inbuilt into the FSEs would make the GM HR crop technology look favourable.

In March 2004, Margaret Beckett announced the government‟s decision – that the

commercial cultivation of only one GM crop, the maize, could go ahead. However, even

this permission was subject to a number of conditions:

1 that the experimental growing conditions continue to be applied;

2 that the consent holders be required to carry out further scientific analysis to

monitor changes in herbicide use on conventional maize; and

3 that a scheme, funded by the GM sector itself, be set up to provide

compensation to non-GM farmers who suffer financial loss due to the

coexistence of GM and non-GM agriculture.

The fact that both the public debate and the scientific field trials had produced largely

negative results enabled the government to announce a decision which was backed up by

the science, but also would not, at least in the short term, run up against public opinion:

„I think it‟s one of the hallmarks of Whitehall under Labour that policy decision are made

from an evidence base, I mean that‟s the message that‟s been going out very clearly and

very strongly to the civil service and to advisory committees and so when you do get

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evidence like this, that is hard scientific evidence if I can put it like that, then clearly as a

politician you can make a decision that is more easily defensible than a decision that‟s

simply based on public view, especially where you‟re dealing with a regulatory system that

is governed by such a tight directive‟, interview, Brian Johnson, English Nature.

The industry, while publicly welcoming the „sound-science‟ based announcement, began

to retreat. On 30th March Bayer CropScience, the German owners of Aventis,

announced that this ruling had made Chardon LL „economically unviable‟, effectively

ruling out the commercial growing of any GM crops in Britain for the foreseeable future.

GM was in effect kicked into the long grass as an issue in the UK. In a wider move, on

10th May Monsanto announced it was abandoning its plans to introduce its long-

trumpeted GM wheat on to the world market, concerned that consumer resistance to

GM in Europe would damage the US export market.

To summarise the narrative in section 3, the European regulatory framework for GMOs

which was established by the DRD (1990/220) contained an internal contradiction: it

marked out GM as a separate category for regulation, but without containing any

requirements for post-market monitoring. With lack of confidence in the regulatory

system, the passage of each consent for a new GM crop or product became a hard-

fought battle amongst member states and Commission bodies, carried out behind closed

doors within the DRD regulatory mechanism. Calls for labelling of GM products began

early – from the European Parliament, from member states, and later on from retail

organisations. From 1996 onwards, the condition became critical, with consumer

resistance, protest movements, national bans, and a moratorium on new Consents,

resulting in a regulatory void. This provoked significant changes to the regulatory

framework, including: wider risk assessment and explicit reference to the precautionary

principle; ethical considerations being given space for consideration; and mandatory

public consultation. But the most significant shift is to coexistence, labelling and

traceability – a new regime, whose fundamental logic is not that of the state but of the

market.

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Greece, as we saw, exemplifies a group of GM-sceptical member states in its broad

pattern. From the start it was characterised by an alliance between environmental NGOs

and the state, and the influence of minor parties, which helped shape its anti-GM stance

(a pattern which was also seen in other anti-GM member states), a stance which was

characterised by a discourse of the policing of national borders. It invoked Article 16 in

order to ban EU-permitted GMOs from its territory, and, led by scientists who were

themselves aligned with environmental, precautionary discourses, developed a range of

bio-precautionary institutions in order to detect GMOs in food, feed and seed. There

were some slight vacillations on the part of the government, but any attempts to move

towards more pro-GM positions intensified grassroots and NGO actions. Over the

period studied Greece moved slowly but positively towards grasping an alternative, non-

GM bioeconomic strategy.

The United Kingdom – the first Member State to adopt a neo-liberal stance, and the

most pro-GM – wanted to move to GM commercial growing with some monitoring

after 1996. But this strategy was derailed by an adverse public reaction, channelled

through consumer/supermarket discourse and wildlife/agricultural biodiversity

discourse. The government and industry cooperated in a plan to carry out the „managed

development‟ of GM crops, partly to head off anticipated political demands for a

moratorium (Levidow et al 1999: 4). But, with growing unrest, what had been framed as

precautionary, monitored, commercial introduction became reframed as the FSEs – as

safety trials being carried out before any decision to commercialise – in order to placate

the public, and at the same time to justify the UK‟s own de facto moratorium to the EU in

scientific terms. However, rather than dispelling public concern, the FSE‟s aggravated it.

The subsequent attempt to move beyond narrow scientistic apparatus with the AEBC

and GM Nation ended up with the UK occupying the same position as anti-GM

countries, albeit by a very different, contingent route: an unofficial moratorium, a

scientific ban on certain crops, and a general blockage to GM agriculture, with no

commercial cultivation of GM crops and few experimental plantings. Under the new EU

guidelines the UK is currently attempting to negotiate a co-existence regime which would

allow GM agriculture under certain specified conditions.

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4. The politics of life in the GM controversy

4.1 - Europe as a technological zone

We approach Europe as a „technological zone‟ in the sense developed by Andrew Barry

(2001). Barry suggests that increasingly government operates not just by mediating the

relationship between population and territory, but also „in relation to zones formed

through the circulation of technical practices and devices‟ (3). Barry builds on

Giandomenico Majone‟s conception of Europe as a „regulatory state‟ (1996). Majone

argued that, whereas the US, with its deep-rooted ideological commitment to the market,

responds to instances of market failure by regulation, European „welfare‟ states,

preoccupied with redistribution and stabilisation, have generally responded to such

problems through nationalisation or self-regulation (Majone 1996, p 10). However, the

EU is more like the US in being a „regulatory state‟, in that it consists not of a large

centralised bureaucracy but a distributed network of regulatory agencies combating

„market failure‟ through environmental and consumer protection, and health and safety

legislation (Barry 2001: 26-7).

While broadly agreeing with this analysis of the EU, Barry suggests that Majone‟s analysis

of the regulatory state (i) neglects the role of technology in its constitution, and (ii)

underestimates its contested and problematic nature. Using examples such as bathing

water quality and food standards, Barry analyses the way that regulation in the EU

requires the spatial comparability and connectedness of technical devices and practices;

„technology is expected to form connections across and establish boundaries around an

empire, a firm or a nation-state‟ (25). In this account, standardisation turns from being a

mundane and marginal issue to one of the central preconditions of creating a

technological zone like the EU; „standardisation is critical to the formation of what I

have called technological zones, and the generation of new spaces of political rule‟, by

reducing blockages and securing boundaries „with clear and well-policed points of access‟

(63). He traces the way that the meaning of the term „harmonisation‟ shifted over the

history of the European Union. The earliest uses of the term used referred to the

reduction of social and economic differences between regions; however, from the 1980s

onwards, „harmonisation‟ was used increasingly to mean the removal of impediments to

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the flow of objects, capital and labour. It was thought that this form of harmonisation

„would eradicate the striations of national-state capitalism and create the entirely smooth

space of multinational capitalism‟ (69-70).

However, Barry argues that the very act of regulating can bring about unanticipated

consequences. „The ideal of standardisation is the fantasy of a smooth and homogeneous

technological zone in which the speed of circulation is maximised. In practise,

standardisation may produce new fractures and dislocations which may act as catalytic

points for further political conflict‟ (63). We develop this observation by exploring the

transformation of the European regulatory framework as laid out in section 3.1. The

1990 Deliberate Release Directive, with its delegated but harmonised system of

regulating GMOs, contained within it the tension between precaution and neo-liberalism.

On the one hand, GMOs were classified as „living pollution‟, a special class of entities

which by virtue of their origins in rDNA technology warranted their own system of

regulation. On the other, the Directive gave companies a clear passage point at which to

introduce a particular GMO into the European technological zone; once a GMO had

been deemed to have been „safe‟ by a member states competent authority and the

commission, it would be free to circulate without specific labelling within the whole

European Union. We trace the complex dynamics through which this original settlement

collapsed: the European technological zone for GMOs was transformed through a series

of ruptures from being a desired smooth space of circulation to a folded, ruptured space

of barriers, absences and resistances; the epistemological stalemate over the safety of

GMOs resulted in a coexistence regime in which the GMO has to accommodate to

multiple bioeconomies of GM and conventional agriculture; and the GMO, far from

being admitted as a free and equal citizen of the European technological zone, is released

always under license: labelled, traceable and always subject to recall.

4.2 - The DRD: governing GMOs as a special category. Life, pollution and

technology

The regulatory framing adopted by the EU at the beginning of the 1990s marked out

GMOs as belonging to a separate and special ontological category. Such a precautionary

categorisation had been justified by referring to the scientific novelty and uncertainty

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surrounding the new technology. The EU‟s approach differed from that of the US and

OECD which was based upon the idea of „substantial equivalence‟ between GM and

Non-GM products, (measurable by a simple and reductionist content analysis that

assumed the familiarity of the effects sought) leading these bodies to argue that GM

crops needed no special regulatory category.

Thus the EU regulatory discourses began to focus on the containment and policing of a

special new category that was simultaneously a life form, a new technology, a commodity

and a potential form of „living pollution‟ that could threaten to contaminate and subvert

the natural and social order. However, such a mode of regulation would help to

symbolically mark out GM crops, a move which would have important consequences for

the performance of patterns of regulation and conflict around the technology. As we

saw in section 2.2, GM crops had been born saturated with cultural meanings invested in

by all sides, having been produced by an industry that had proclaimed its mastery of „the

secret of life‟, in Crick‟s famous phrase. It was perhaps therefore not surprising that the

attempt by corporations to re-write the „code of life‟ of societies crop plants and

foodstuffs would have a society wide symbolic and cultural impact. „Life Itself‟ was at

stake, and with its many unruly meanings and potencies could disrupt the established

regulatory patterns.

4.3 - Institutional ambiguity and the transition from risk to uncertainty

Having performed such an act of symbolic marking, the Directive then allowed their

release into society and the environment with no machinery for post-market monitoring

and regulation, assuming that its responsibility ended once the new varieties were

released into the fields or supermarkets. This situation of institutional ambiguity that

emerged from this discrepancy provided a strong ground for contestation by

environmental and consumer groups and placed the supermarkets on the front line of a

cultural and scientific battle they were not prepared to fight. A legitimatory meltdown

followed, creating a regulatory void that was initially filled by NGO action and an

insurgency of new public and outsider actors into the spaces of a previously technocratic

regulatory realm. These shortcomings of the initial 1990 directive would also provide the

logic for the introduction of a post market regime of labelling, traceability and

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coexistence the demand for which gave member state grounds for introducing the EU

wide de facto moratorium.

The special categorisation created by the 1990 directive was intended to be a

precautionary holding operation and thus a temporary state to be quickly displaced by

more familiarity and knowledge, followed by the liberalisation of the directive and its

harmonisation with the US model. However, this was based upon the assumption that

uncertainty would be a temporary state. It did not take into account the proliferation of

uncertainties that would be unleashed by this regulatory discourse. Furthermore it was

based upon a model of limited uncertainty and growing knowledge, rather than one

whereby more knowledge actually generates more uncertainty. This may also be

understood as part of a wider shift from a culture of „risk‟ to „uncertainty‟ which has

important social dimensions, relating to the increasing number of actors whose concerns

and viewpoints are considered, thus leading to greater complexity. Risk as a limited and

calculable concept corresponds to a social standpoint located within technocratic centres

of control, while „uncertainty‟ represents the erosion of these central locations by

complexifying and globalising flows with proliferating sites of and claims to knowledge.

When therefore the uncertainties did not simply get rolled aside, but began to proliferate

the expectations that the deliberate release directive would be liberalised and made to

harmonise with the US model were thwarted. Instead, the revised directive would

become stronger and the requirement for segregation labelling and traceability would

entrench the separate classes of GM and non-GM. Thus the governance of GM via the

creation of a new and special category would not be a temporary measure, but would

develop further, becoming the centre of the new round of legislation and the new EU

GMO regulatory framework. Governing the recombination of „life itself‟ would depend

on the performance of a number of dichotomies, between GM and non-GM and

between science and politics.

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4.4 - The innovation of the new regime of coexistence: From (nation) states to

(global) markets, from scientific governance to consumer choice.

The consequent inability to resolve the debate within the scientific framings of risk and

safety led to an epistemological stalemate. The overall scientifico-cultural battle over

GMOs had not been won by either side and neither positive proof of safety nor of harm

could be mobilised to gain unchallenged consumer acceptance or trust on the one hand,

nor justify an outright legislative ban on the other. In the face of this stalemate a new

mode of governance began develop, with the more relativistic discourses of consumer

sovereignty and choice moving upwards to become the dominant regulatory framings in

the EU.

Thus emerged the new regime of „coexistence‟, where „market choice‟ begins to eclipse

„safety‟ as the authoritative guideline. This presents an idealised vision of a new,

normalised „post-conflict‟ regime of GM governance with a plurality of agri-food

systems. Conventional, GM and Organic systems will purportedly exist alongside each

other, ultimately regulated by the sovereign consumer exercising market choice through

labels and brands. The collective subject of a concerned citizenry of the GM controversy

period is replaced by individualised shopping choices. Citizen knowledge, deliberation

and participation become replaced by consumer preferences.

However, behind the truce represented by the rhetoric of coexistence the GM war

continues. On the one hand the coexistence regulations may prove too restrictive for

profitable GM cultivation. In this scenario the EU‟s coexistence guidelines are

interpreted strictly, strangling GM via tight regulation without having to invoking an

outright ban and break the neo-liberal consensus of the WTO and EU. On the other

hand, it is possible that coexistence may lead to the eventual dominance of GM

agriculture, with the agency of gene flow and market forces leading to the proliferation

and diffusion of modified genetic constructs through the agrifood system until choice is

impossible. In countries such as Greece the former scenario may be crystallising as it

consolidates an alternative bioeconomic strategy, while in the UK, anti-GM groups fear

that the latter scenario is coming about. Thus the forces promoting and resisting the new

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technology continue to manoeuvre for advantage within the new regime, raising

questions about the permanence or stability of this new regulatory mode.

We have seen how different member states have employed different responses (including

combinations of different responses) to the challenge of the GM conflict. One strategy is

represented by Greece which centres on the defence of territorial borders and the

invocation of national bans. Another strategy, represented by the UK, at first attempted

the monitored introduction of GM agriculture with the model of large scale trials. While

this was thrown into retreat, this model with its debates over separation distances stands

as possible precursor of the regime of coexistence. Associated with this strategy was an

attempt to manage the related public unease and opposition through a large scale public

engagement exercise.

These two responses have implications for debates over the erosion of the power of

nation states in a globalising world and also the related erosion of the authority of the

„centres of calculation‟ (Latour 1990) of high modernist statecraft. Thus we have noted

how the UK saw the emergence of parallel expert committees – ACRE and the AEBC –

related to two parallel mass experiments in „nature‟ and „society‟ that drew on and

developed scientific and political forms of legitimacy respectively. This improvisation

represented a departure from earlier simple monolithic forms of technocratic governance

and an attempt to manage the incorporation of extra-scientific concerns in a new pattern

of governance (even though this move was strictly limited). While this move can be

found elsewhere, including in Greece, here it is less prominent as a strategy. This may be

because the stronger anti-GM stance of the Greek state led to less internal domestic

conflict and a more united national stance buttressed by arguments that remained within

a predominantly scientific framing, with many scientific bodies forming not a bio-

industrial complex, where industrial and regulatory science forms a hegemonic alliance,

but something approaching what may be termed a „bio-precautionary complex‟ defending

territorial borders from contamination. These divergences in regulatory modes among

member states have eventually been worked through into the new EU strategy of

coexistence.

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This regime of coexistence with its technologies of post market monitoring, labelling and

tracing therefore represents an attempt to move into a new mode of GM regulation that

shifts the regulatory membrane away from national borders to follow new contours

which run within and beyond the boundaries of nation states. These new lines of

regulation might run along supermarket shelves with the labelling of products and

through agricultural landscapes attempting to demark areas of GM and non-GM

agriculture.

The friction along these new contours may call for some forms of participatory

management, as was seen in the UK. However, it is difficult to tell at this stage whether

such friction and participation may only mark a period of transition, and whether the

public reactions to coexistence will indeed eventually become managed with reference to

individual consumerism rather than collective deliberation – or whether this may never

become stabilised within the regimes of perpetual innovation and the manufacture of

biotechnological uncertainty.

4.5 - Science and its others: spaces, separations and orderings in the

governance of GMOs

In our narrative therefore, a major „dislocatory moment‟, rupture or „key turning point‟

can be identified between 1996 and 1999 with the crisis of the existing regime of

directive 90/220 . This regime became unable to deal with the unruly and contested zone

of „life politics‟ around GM agri-food and the GM battle became played out in a range of

alternative political spaces and discourses.

A central theme that emerges from our narrative is the inability of the original 1990

directive‟s narrowly scientistic framings around positive evidence of environmental and

health risks to address the much wider questions raised by the public debate. This

narrowness of scope played an important part of the crisis and breakdown of the

European GM regulatory framework that lead up to the de facto EU wide moratorium in

1999 and the subsequent revision of the directive. The EU faced two competing

imperatives; one outlined above was the need for wider criteria to match societal

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concerns. The other imperative was to attempt to remain within the limits imposed by

the WTO, which remained strictly scientistic, allowing only positive proof of harm to the

environment or health to disrupt its attempt to create a homogeneous global market

space.

Such imperatives imposed by neo-liberal bodies such as the WTO demonstrate once

again how political, economic and cultural values may underlie and help form a

regulatory structure, but are then hidden from view behind an apparently neutral set of

scientific criteria. This may be understood as part of a continual process of purification,

identified by Latour (1993) as part of the construction of the „modern constitution‟

where the world is divided into two separate realms of the „social‟ and the „natural‟. The

house of nature, accessible by scientists alone yields „the facts‟, which are separate from

and superior to „values‟. Scientific discourses about „the facts‟ are granted greater power

and status than public discourses about „values‟. Powerful and technocratic forces are

granted rule by their possession of the former category, while democracy may appear

circumvented with the wider public only having access to their own subjective values,

which are devalued and rendered secondary by such a constitution.

While both the EU and its member states found themselves under enormous pressure

from both of the imperatives of technocracy and democracy outlined above, to govern

the GM crisis they found themselves obliged to move in the direction of the latter and

make some attempt to provide space for the wider considerations various European

publics found important. Therefore the revised directive 2001/18 and its related

legislation made some attempts to widen this set of framings, to include not only broader

risk assessment criteria but also mentioning ethical considerations, public consultations

and consumer preferences.

However, once wider framings and considerations are accepted as valid, a series of

choices then emerge as to the „correct‟ place of these within the overall framework.

Might these different criterion be given equal consideration or will science remain the

primary regulatory discourse, with others allotted a secondary role? Are science and its

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others to be kept strictly separate, or be brought into conversation with one another?

What kind of discursive spaces does this all take place in? Should there remain a pure

space for scientific regulatory discourses, accountable only to their traditional circle of

acknowledged disciplinary peers and their established epistemological frameworks? Or

should there be some kind of wider circulation, mixing and accountability of these

discourses, with an extension of the acknowledged reviewing peers and permitted

epistemologies? While these questions and dilemmas are not necessarily posed explicitly

in the design of these institutional innovations, they are nonetheless performed implicitly.

In what follows, we shall attempt to trace these implicit performances during the attempt

to regulate both GMOs and the public controversy around them. Within which

discourses and spaces regulation is exercised and participation permitted becomes a key

question for our analysis. Does this, for example, occur within purely scientific discursive

spaces, or hybrid spaces which allow different combinations of knowledge?

Before we do this, however, it is necessary to add some more points about the nature of

political space. Loeber, Hajer and Van Tatenhove provide us with the beginnings of

taxonomy of political spaces. Starting with the claim that; „Over the past decades, the

image of the state as a unified political space gradually has lost its convincing power‟

(2005: 6), they argue that in response to this two types of participatory spaces have

emerged: Firstly, there are the formally instituted participatory spaces, usually initiated by

the state but also sometimes by others such as corporations or NGOs (2005: 7) Secondly

they point to the emergence of „new political spaces‟:

New political spaces are sites where processes of political judgment and

decision making take place that exist next to or across the institutions that

are traditionally considered the exclusive centres of political power. These

„new‟ loci of political activity may a priori be considered sites of

„participatory governance‟ as they by definition entail the involvement of

„non-state‟ actors. Thus, they form a second – potentially overlapping yet

possibly distinct – type of empirical research objects in the PAGANINI

project, in addition to formally arranged (state or non-state actor initiated)

participatory practices (Loeber et al, 2005: 10).

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These „new political spaces‟ emerge in response to the failure of the institutions of the

„high modernist‟ regime to cope with certain unruly problems around the „politics of life‟,

thus creating conditions referred to in varying theoretical registers as „institutional

ambiguity‟; „civic dislocations‟; „dislocatory moments‟; „turning points‟ or „ruptures‟ in the

discursive field associated with periods of crises of institutional trust and legitimacy.

However, rather than there being simply new political spaces in the language of Loeber et

al (2005), we can also detect the emergence of may be more accurately described as

existing spaces that became newly politicised. When techno-scientific systems like the GM

regulatory apparatus become politicised, „new political spaces‟ erupt within them – they

are „new‟ precisely because they lay on the reclaimed ground for politics that had

previously been submerged beneath the appearance of technocratic neutrality. An

example we find of this in the UK narrative is the politicisation of the National Seed List

hearings. While Seed list hearings or Court cases may be formal legal arenas, the eruption

of the scientifico-political battles over GM within them transforms their original

purpose, rendering them novel spaces. A similar pattern fits other spaces such as

supermarkets. Therefore spaces that had previously seen purely as techno-bureaucratic,

commercial, scientific or legal became places where the hybrid scientific/political

discourses of GM were practised and became transformed by the participation of wider

networks and rationalities.

Thus beyond the formal technoscientific discursive spaces of GM governance, such as

formal scientific advisory committees, GMO life-politics erupted across Europe after

1996, in a series of „new‟ or newly political spaces. These were on the quays of great

shipping ports, in the supermarket aisles and forecourts, in experimental crops fields and

legal courtrooms, in community meetings and in previously obscure technical hearings.

Here items and artefacts such as antibiotic resistance markers and geneflow, which had

previously been confined to the rarefied discourses of purely technoscientific elites

suddenly began to circulate through wider zones and spaces.

Hence in the GM battle we see the emergence of a series of new political spaces, where

science and its „others‟ become reconnected in new ways. These form hybrid zones,

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where statements about the behaviour of genes, plants, ecosystems are allowed alongside

statements about the behaviour of corporations, governments and scientists. The

institutions of technoscientific governance could respond to these new political spaces in

a number of ways. On the one hand, government institutions may simply ignore such

hybrid spaces as illegitimate, and attempt to continue the governance of GMOs within

the traditional spaces and discourses of a purified science On the other hand government

institutions may attempt to allow a space for extra-scientific discourses, but may attempt

to purify these into „science‟ and „ethics‟ or „facts‟ and „values‟, keeping the former as the

only privileged category. This depends on a number of factors, not least the intensity of

the domestic controversy. In our narrative we have traced these responses at the level of

the EU and two of its member states, Greece and the UK.

It was within the UK that the domestic battle was at its sharpest, and the innovation of

new forms and arenas of governance more apparent. Countries such as Greece, which

invoked national bans, were as a consequence not driven into confrontation with

sceptical publics and hostile NGO‟s. Rather there could be more of the appearance of a

unified „national interest‟ keeping Greece „GMO free‟, with all major actors by and large

united and speaking within a scientised discourse of national protection against the risk

of damage to environment and health. At the EU level, the European Commission rarely

finds itself confronting any such thing as an emerging „European Public‟. Rather such

interactions are still primarily mediated via member states and their domestic political

arenas, and secondarily by institutions of representative democracy such as the European

Parliament. To some extent trans-European stakeholder organisations have emerged,

ranging from Europabio, (the European Bio-Industry association) to FOEE, (Friends of

the Earth at the European level). Following the revision of the European regulatory

framework, the European Commission did call a stakeholder convention to feed into its

„Strategic Vision for the Biosciences‟ document, but compared to the UK this remained a

low key event.

The pattern in the UK was different to the extent that the government tried the

„managed introduction‟ of GM crops. This required not only the Farm Scale Evaluations

of GM crops but also an attempt to manage the consequent public outcry via a complex

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system of innovations ranging from the setting up of the Agriculture and Environment

Biotechnology Commission to the large scale public debate GM Nation. It is this series of

experiments that the patterns of the separations and reorderings of science and politics

are therefore most vivid.

4.6 - Spaces, separations and reorderings in the UK

In the narrative of the UK GM regulatory battle presented above in section three, it is

possible to trace a pattern of the dislocation and reordering of the regimes, discourses

and practices of high modernist statecraft. We can also follow this pattern through the

series of „political spaces‟ in which it is performed, spaces that may be formal, informal,

new or transformed. In this pattern of ordering we see acts of both purification and

recombination, where the hybrid mixture of science and politics that is the GM

controversy gets purified into separate spaces and discourses, but with the final right to

recombine them reserved for the apex of central government. In tracing these patterns

we therefore pay attention to which discourses are permitted a voice within these spaces;

whether they are the purified discourses of „science‟ and „politics/culture/ethics‟ or

whether such spaces call forth hybrid re-workings of these. Finally, we will note how

that this pattern of ordering is not just spatial but also temporal, thus highlighting the

control over the timescales within which these spaces would be allowed to unfold as

another a key issue.

In its improvisation of new modes and arenas of the governance of life and science

around GMOs the UK therefore found itself with two expert advisory committees – the

Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC) and the Advisory

committee on Releases into the Environment (ACRE). In the ultimate enactment of GM

governance in the UK, the former spoke as experts on „society‟ while the latter spoke as

experts on „nature‟, thus exhibiting the dualisms at the heart of Latour‟s „modern

constitution‟. The story of this period of GM governance in the UK is one of a rivalry

between these different sources of authority. Furthermore, in the mass public

experiment/engagement exercise of GM Nation a division is made between the arena of

the „public debate‟ and parallel expert discourses, most notably the „science review‟ but

also one on economic implications. These purifications represent a particular

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maintenance of modernist modes of government in the UK in the face of the hybrid

epidemiologies and arenas of participation that were erupting across Europe.

In our narrative, a major „dislocatory moment‟ or „key turning point‟ can be identified

around 1998, with the crisis of the existing regime of directive 90/220 and ACRE. This

regime became unable to deal with the unruly and contested zone of „life politics‟ around

GM agri-food and thus summoned forth a range of alternative political spaces and

discourses. It is possible to identify a range of crucial new, formal and informal political

spaces within the story of the UK GM battle. Beyond the formal instituted spaces of

participation such as the AEBC, the GM dialogue and GM Nation, we can find a range of

informal or new political spaces. These newly politicised spaces that feature in our

narrative range from supermarkets, farmers‟ fields, village halls, National Seed List

hearings, Magistrates and Crown Courts, to beekeepers‟ conventions and even to the

management committee of the Farm Scale Evaluations themselves. The contests in

these informal spaces could sometimes enter and transform the official technoscientific

discourses of governance. For example, the public intervention into the Seed Listing

process by various individuals and NGOs had a significant impact, and re-wrote aspects

of the science.

However, in contrast to the proliferation of hybrid discourses within these new political

spaces, it is striking how the formal participatory spaces initiated in response to the

dislocatory moments of 1998 performed an unacknowledged process of purification.

Thus in our narrative of the division of labour between ACRE and the AEBC, and then

of the three strands of the GM Dialogue we can discern a process of sifting and filtering

of the scientific and the political back into separate discursive spaces.

In the original improvisation after 1998 ACRE was to be „strictly scientific‟, while the

AEBC was initially to address the wider, „strategic issues‟ combining both natural and

social scientific expertise. However, this would actually become performed as a natural

and social division of labour between the two bodies. The AEBC gained its unstatutory but

powerful voice within the government‟s decision-making process by representing expert

intelligence about the social reaction to, and the „public attitudes‟ about GM agri-food.

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Thus while ACRE could „speak for nature‟ via the FSEs, the AEBC would end up

„speaking for society‟ via GM Nation.

This tendency to separation and purification is also reproduced within the official „GM

Dialogue‟ itself, designed as a tripartite arrangement, with the public debate GM Nation

partitioned from separate economic and scientific strands that remained led by appointed

experts. „Facts‟ and „values‟ were in this way found to remain in the traditionally separate

domains allocated to them under the „high modernist‟ regime. In contrast to the National

Seed List Hearings where participatory intrusion commented on, challenged and changed

the science, here the public debate was to be kept isolated and permitted only to yield

knowledge about its own values. The separate public debate would be an exercise

yielding purely sociological information about the public and its „values‟ to the

government. „Facts‟ would be left safe within the domain of expert discourses,

unmolested by any such uncontrolled exposure to public participation.

The official spaces of GM Nation, and the wider „GM Dialogue‟ of which it formed a

part, were key places for the articulation of alternative rationalities and networks – but

also key in the separation of the issue into the three strands, thus curtailing the

unconstitutional mixing of politics, science, and markets. We note in our narrative how

the debate was to be diverted away from „improper‟ and hybrid spaces like the National

Seed List hearings into more appropriate forums, where public values and scientific facts

would be chaperoned by panels of experts and permitted to make no unconstitutional

liaison. The document from the UK Government‟s Department for Environment, Food

and Rural Affairs (Defra)50 that recommends the closure of the seed lists as a political

space, also points instead, like a kindly but firm policeman, towards the forthcoming GM

public debate as the appropriate place.

However, this act of purification of „science‟ and „politics‟ was only a prelude to their

eventual recombination, an act which was reserved for that traditional apex of „high

modernist‟ political practices, the UK government. The bifurcated process of

50 http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/nationallist/letter.htm.

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AEBC/GM Nation and ACRE/FSEs therefore ended up forming two separate expert

mediated information-feeds for the sole deliberation and arbitration of the UK

government. This was despite the intention and belief amongst key actors within the

AEBC and elsewhere that the timescale was to be ordered to make the public debate

process of GM Nation a key space for societies deliberations on the final scientific reports

on the Farmscale Evaluations.

This question of timescales for the process, which features as a key controversy and

point of criticism during all stages of GM Nation including its preparation, conduct and

evaluation, is therefore particularly telling. Before we detail this pattern of „high

modernist‟ epistemological ordering revealed by the debate on timescales, it is worth

making a brief point about timescales and GM in general. Most commentators (e.g.

Mayer 2003, Horlick-Jones et al. 2004) agreed that the UK GM debate process was too

short, with the only formal space allowed for participation by the public squeezed into

less than a month and a half in the summer of 2003. It is also a more general feature of

the GM controversy that opponents tend to call for more time for public discussion and

more research, demands that are often linked to calls for moratoria and freezes in the

technology‟s deployment. On the other hand the promoters of the technology tend to

favour a speedy closure of debate, admittance onto the market, and return on

investment.

However, within this general tendency a more specific factor was at work. This was

intimately connected to the question of ordering of kinds of authority in the

government‟s decision described above. The central question became whether the public

debate should finish before the publication of the FSEs, or be allowed to continue or be

resumed to take the FSE results into account. Behind this issue of timescale is thus the

deeply significant question of the ordering and priority of „scientific fact‟ over „public

value‟ in the government‟s decision-making and legitimation strategies. Should the public

debate be permitted to deliberate on the FSE results? Or should they be kept separate,

with the science alone having the last word, and the government left as the final arbiter?

The AEBC and the government had each both advocated both possible positions on this

question of timescale/ordering at different times in the initial preparations. However,

after it was announced that due to peer review the publication of the FSEs would be

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delayed from July into September 2003 (which was unexpected on all sides), the

government was unwilling to adapt and extend GM Nation to account for this. Thus by

the time the first FSE scientific reports were published in October 2003, GM Nation was

long over, with even the Final Report and recommendations to government of the Public

Debate Steering Board completed and published a month earlier in September. The

hierarchical modernist ordering of public value and scientific fact was kept intact.

When the government made its final announcement in March 2004 its legitimatory

rhetoric was centred on ACRE‟s interpretation of the FSE reports and was therefore

fully in keeping with the expert advisory system of the original 1990/220 directive and

the epistemological ordering of the „high modernist‟ regime. The results from the

„information feeds‟ of the GM dialogue and GM Nation also featured in the argument,

but as a subordinate element, which, while representing some change, also signals the

overall persistence of the older form. However, the government was able to maintain its

commitments to both of these legitimatory groundings in „science‟ and „public opinion‟,

as the interpretations of the FSEs and the GM dialogue could, in this instance, be read in

a non-contradictory way.

Therefore the development of official and unofficial participatory spaces around GM

forms a complex pattern of articulation, hybridisation, separation and recombination.

This discussion of spaces, separations and orderings demonstrates a number of things:

New political spaces and formal participatory institutions have emerged in response to

the dislocations or void experienced by the expert based „high modernist‟ GM regulatory

apparatus. The existence of these practises of participatory governance does represent

some erosion of the conventional nationally organised political spaces of high modernist

statecraft and these new official participatory fora around the AEBC and GM Nation

provided an officially recognised space for views and rationales beyond the narrow

reductionist scientific advice framework. However, at the same time they played a role

within a wider apparatus of GM governance that remained within the framework of „high

modernist‟ statecraft. This acted to contain, separate and purify the GM issue back into

distinct zones of politics and science, of society and nature, as befitting the maintenance

of the „modern constitution‟ (Latour 1993). Despite the emergence of new practices and

spaces of participatory governance, decision-making was kept at the apex of

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governmental power. Furthermore, while the new political spaces around GM

undoubtedly stretch in transnational dimensions beyond the nation state, the old

modernist category of the national still remains a key political space and discourse, as the

title of the public debate as „GM Nation‟ must suggest.

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5. Performing publics and participation

In this section we will analyse some of the themes emerging from the patterns of

participation. In particular, we will examine how different constructions and

representations of the „public‟ emerged and were deployed. As we have seen from the

narrative in section 3, the UK saw a particular pattern that differed from EU member

states which relied on national bans to diffuse their domestic GM conflict. The UK saw a

mode of „managed introduction‟ of GMOs, with the growth of the crops organised as a

mass scientifico-precautionary experiment and a parallel public debate with events like

GM Nation in an attempt to manage the unruly outbreak of informal participation that

surrounded the issue. GM Nation was one of the largest and most complex public

participatory event in the whole cycle of contestation over the life sciences, and provides

a rich example of many of the more general features of the construction, enrolment and

deployment of different versions of „publics‟ that we are trying to describe. For these

reasons this section will focus mainly on the United Kingdom case study in this section.

More generally across Europe, in our narrative account of the social and regulatory

struggle over GMOs we have seen how public groups, outside the traditional bodies of

technoscientific governance, began to engage in the debate and create new spaces of

participation. This informal moments of participation raised a dilemma for these

traditional bodies: whether (i) to ignore them as illegitimate (raising the danger of making

the whole governance process seem illegitimate itself), (ii) to engage with them on their

own terms (and thus opening up the possibility of altering the framing of the issue), or

(iii) to somehow incorporate them into the process of governance in a way that did not

excessively disrupt it. These are the growing problems in every sphere of contested

technologies, thus leading to what might be called the participatory turn in EU

technoscientific governance.

However, once it becomes accepted that public participation has a necessary and

legitimate place within technoscientific governance, further questions are then raised.

Firstly, what is public participation for? One possible rationale for public participation is

epistemological, suggesting that it yields a wider knowledge-base, bringing in new

standpoints that were in danger of being excluded by narrow techno-scientific framings.

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Another rationale is political, that of making decisions appear more legitimate by gaining

the participation and consent of wider society. A second question revolves around who

the public might be and how is this category to be constituted? The public is a

problematic and contested category itself, variously constructed in both political theory

and practice. Should there be a „representative‟ sample of the public, in social scientific

terms? Should participants be selected for their knowledgeability in relation to the issue

or for their typicality? How such questions are answered relate closely to which of the

twin rationales of public participation mentioned above is dominant.

These dilemmas are particularly well illustrated in the debates around GM Nation in the

UK, and it is to these events that we will turn to examine the issues in more detail.

Already an outcome of a longer process of social conflict over the new technology, GM

Nation itself quickly became the subject of some controversy, especially over questions of

its „representativeness‟. These questions revolved around whether a representative

„general public‟ had in fact participated, or whether those already critical towards GM

crops had in some sense „captured‟ the process. That this latter had indeed happened was

a claim made, in various degrees, by the biotechnology industry, by the government and

by the official academic evaluators of GM Nation.

In these debates over the validity of GM Nation we can therefore detect contrasting views

about what constitutes a legitimate construction or representation of the public. In

particular we see a contrast between what we may term „engaged publics‟ or „issue

publics‟ on the one hand and the „general public‟ on the other. A dominant theme of the

debates during the construction, conduct and evaluation of GM Nation was how to arrive

at a „pure‟ public, a „general public‟ unsullied by having been previously drawn into the

„public energy field‟ around the GMO issue. This theme runs through all the documents

that feature in the preparation and evaluation of the debate, from the initial advice of the

AEBC, to the statements by the government, the planning and execution of the exercise

by the steering board and COI, to the post-event evaluations and framings by academics,

government and industry.

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As the official independent GM Nation evaluation team from the Universities of East

Anglia and Cardiff put it,

[T]he intent was to have a debate that was not dominated by significant pressure

groups, but to access the „quiet majority‟. We interpret this to entail

representative sampling of the population, as opposed to biased sampling of

particular cliques. Representativeness may be ascertained in several ways: it may

be determined according to the socio-economic and demographic profiles of the

sample (in comparison to that of the general public), or by the attitudinal

similarity of sample to population (Horlick-Jones et al 2004: 22).

Thus the evaluation team contrast those who participated in GM Nation with a „general

public‟, one which they later proceeded to access via a conventional quantitative social

scientific survey of opinion on GM (Poortinga and Pidgeon 2004). Those who attended

GM Nation are seen on this basis as being unrepresentative, in terms both of their

demographics and in the intensity of their interest and opinion. Similarly the AEBC and

the steering board had built into GM Nation a series of „Narrow But Deep‟ focus groups

to create a representation of a pure, disinterested public to act as a „control‟ to balance

against capture by stakeholder networks:

We believe that the Narrow But Deep element provides evidence of grass roots

views and attitudes which might otherwise have been unheard during the debate.

If there is a silent majority, it would show itself here (GM Nation PDSB 2003: 36).

Thus both quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used in an attempt to look

beyond the publics of GM as manifest in the GM Nation debates, to find a „pure‟ public,

a „silent majority‟ stripped bare of civil society mediation, to stand naked before the state

and the social scientist. What we observe in this process is the deployment of a variety of

what Lezaun and Soneryd (2006) call „technologies of elicitation‟:

The centrality of the public in science and technology policy has been

accompanied, it must be noted, by the increasing deployment of technologies of

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elicitation; instruments, such as the opinion poll, the focus group, the counselling

meeting, or the citizen jury, used to generate lay views on controversial issues and

feed these views into the policy-making process. These technologies constitute,

we would like to argue, a veritable extractive industry, one that engages publics in

an attempt to increase the productivity of government (Lezaun and Soneryd 2006:

2).

Rather than these „technologies of elicitation‟ simply accessing a singular public and its

opinions in an unproblematic way, they instead help to bring into being different

publics, different forms of publicness, as well as different qualities of public knowledge

via their different techniques. Therefore quantitative methods such as surveys or opinion

polls tend to access the public as an aggregate of atomised individuals in a static and

isolated mode, unable with their brief questions to uncover shifting opinions or the

underlying dynamics and rationales behind the brief answers. The currents of discontent

that may crystallise around an issue like GM can lie hidden from the view of such

methods, but then appear to emerge suddenly amongst populations previously

understood to be optimistic about biotechnology. On the other hand, methods such as

citizens‟ juries or focus groups are able to articulate people into mobile collectives, where

they can deepen their knowledge and shift their opinions in relation to the presented

evidence and each other. Not only might this produce a better quality and legitimacy of

debate, such responses can also yield interesting information for research.

However, the act of focusing, whether optically or socially, is also necessarily an act of

selection, bringing some things into view at the expense of occluding others. Both

methodologies and camps also position themselves as translators and managers of

manifestations of public participation into „information‟ compatible with and of use to

the official decision-making process. The focus group, poll or jury may shift in its

rationale between research method and democratic forum. With such technologies of

elicitation, scientific and political representation are intertwined. Furthermore, the

products of these technologies and practices of elicitation can have distinct political uses

and trajectories. The GM Nation final report and the UEA/Cardiff evaluation both

deploy their respective technologies of elicitation to make the discovery that the general

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public are less opposed to the technology than the self-selecting and participating

minority.

Throughout the controversy over the representativeness of GM Nation, the expression

„silent majority‟ is frequently evoked. Such a „silent majority‟ can of course by definition

never speak for itself, but must somehow be articulated from outside. It is united in

silence, only in its unanimous muteness can it be constituted as a majority at all. This

concept has a controversial history, deployed by powerful elites as a counterweight to the

critical voices of social movements and civil society.

However, the political implications of either study and „technology of elicitation‟ also

differ significantly. In the case of the UEA/Cardiff study (Horlick-Jones et al 2004),

published in February 2004 (crucially a month before the Government‟s decision and

therefore very much part of the political process), its conclusions were taken up by

industry and politicians to weaken the political impact of GM Nation. The ambivalent

„silent majority‟ accessed via the representative, quantitative survey were deployed as

political ballast against the critical „publics of GM‟ articulated by the meetings of GM

Nation. On the other hand, the disinterested „general public‟ articulated by the „narrow

but deep‟ groups of GM Nation were found to point towards a rather different

conclusion: „The more people engage in the issues, the harder their attitudes and more

intense their concerns‟ (GM Nation PDSB 2003, p51). Thus the disinterested are

transformed via their engagement. The pure, disinterested public vanish as they pass

through the focus group process, becoming instead engaged, focused and potentially

mobilised participants.

Thus the two different technologies of elicitation bring to the fore different qualities of

publics and knowledge. The abstract, mass, atomised and unengaged „general public‟ is

only constructed as such by particular social scientific or political technologies such as

the survey, the census, opinion poll or ballot. It is the atomised individual unit of

„population‟, constructed in relation to the nation state by a liberal theory that has no

room for any intermediary between its atomic citizens and their state, as if no collective

organs, epistemic communities, hybrid collectives or social movements are allowed to

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intervene. This atomisation of the public renders it static in contrast to the mobilisation

involved in the „narrow but deep‟ groups. Thus the ambivalent „general public‟ can be

accessed as a silent but „democratic‟ ballast against the engaged minorities articulated

through GM Nation – but only through the atomising and quantifying practices of

particular modes of social science or political articulation. Such ambivalence might be

transformed were these same population samples exposed to the collective deliberations

of a focus group, a citizens‟ jury or a social movement mobilisation.51

This has important dimensions of social exclusion and inequality. The UEA/Cardiff

evaluation team, using demographic information find that the engaged minorities are part

of relatively privileged and educated elites in contrast to the social status of the more

ambivalent „general public‟. This latter are said to be excluded from both the GM Nation

debate and from the educational and other privileges said to characterise most GM

Nation participants (Horlick-Jones et al 2004). This adds validity to the exercise of eliciting

the opinions of the excluded. Yet given that public unease about GMOs is not just about

the technology „in itself‟ but is intimately linked to the social dimensions of who owns,

benefits from and controls it (Marris et al, 2001), it is also the case that the ambivalence

of the excluded can rapidly be transformed into its opposite, in ways that as we have

explained above, cannot be anticipated by the survey or poll. Furthermore, as we will

suggest below, these patterns of class, status and hegemony are revealing about the body

politic in the UK as a whole. This insight yields information not by the „vivisection‟ of

phenomena via quantitative social science, but by apprehending it in an historical mode,

as revealing how the living body politic, with its various mediating organs of civil society,

social movements and class fractions, actually received GM crops.

51 It is tempting to suggest that, while the industrial interests can refer rhetorically

to this excluded „general public‟ in their critique of GM Nation, to actually mobilise these

excluded masses to actually engage with and „reclaim‟ the debate would have been too risky. It is

as if this socially and politically excluded „silent majority‟ are only safe to invoke when left in an

atomised, static and unengaged state, lest such mobilisation means they become an engaged and

articulated body exhibiting the tendency found in the „Narrow But Deep‟ meetings.

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Rather than constructing a classical notion of the general public in relation to the state,

the PAGANINI project attempts to understand the particular publics generated around a

particular policy issue described in terms of a „public energy field‟ (Loeber et al, 2005: 43).

We may consider these as the „engaged‟ or „issue‟ publics of GM. Gaskell and Bauer

(2001; 63, 65) describe the „engaged publics of biotechnology‟, drawing on an earlier

concept of an „issue public‟ (Converse 1964). However Gaskell and Bauer‟s „engaged

public‟ is for biotechnology as a whole, including human biotechnology: a public they

characterise as being by and large as male, over 55, with a university degree and

favourable towards biotechnology (2001: 65). As we shall see, the issue public of GM,

largely considered to have participated in GM Nation‟s open debates, as well as in the

wider dynamics of the controversy, is very different to that found by Bauer and Gaskell‟s

work, especially in its more critical stance to agricultural biotechnology.

The range of publics interpellated by GM Nation that can be termed the „publics of GM‟

were formed from cultural or subpolitical networks around questions of food, health or

countryside biodiversity. Rather than a „general public‟, these had emerged as particular

publics emerging through their relationship with the GM issue. These could emerge in

terms of a widely shared relationship to GM such as „consumers‟, or in more specific

clusters such as organic or conventional farmers, allotment holders, bee-keepers, allergy

sufferers, amateur ornithologists, naturalists. While the main mode of interpellation was

through discourses of scientific cause and effect, other interpellative modes including

alternative cosmologies and worldviews drew in actors ranging from the „natural law

party‟, anthroposophists, eco-feminists, and anti-reductionists.

However, these „publics of GM‟ are more than simply the purely social „corporations‟ of

Hegel‟s civil society (Hegel 1952); they are rather part of heterogeneous networks,

composed of both human and non-human actors (Law 1991). For example, the networks

around agricultural biodiversity may involve collectives of ornithologists interwoven with

the corn buntings, linnets and skylarks that appear threatened by the herbicide resistant

GM crop regimes. Alternatively, the networks around food and health may involve self-

help groups of allergy sufferers, who connect to the GM issue through carefully

constructed repertoires involving complex categorisations of foods and their own bodily

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experiences. The „publics of GM‟ are not purely „social‟ publics, but are brought into the

GM energy field entangled within and articulated through these socio-material

assemblages and hybrid spaces.

However, the practice of the purification of the GM issue into „natural‟ and „social‟

elements and spaces described above is also at work in the constitution of the purified

„general public‟. In the very act of being constituted as such a public, they are stripped

bare of these associations with nature, technology or the material (see Latour 2004).

Rather than as knowing and embedded actors, brought into awareness of GM through

these hybrid assemblages, the „general public‟ are constructed thorough their ignorance

and lack of connection to the issue.

While we have characterised an issue public as being formed around the public energy

field of a controversy rather than the nation states general public, the GM issue forms a

series of publics and discourses that actually straddle these changes. The GM debate rests

on the intersection of transnational GM energy fields and hybrid networks with

traditional national polities, and thus leads to two types of pubic or democratic spheres –

one around the issue, others around the territorial population. As we have seen from

sections 3 and 4, the energy field of GM is also still shaped by national, classically

modern institutions legitimised with reference to a territorially bounded population.

Hence the task of assembling a GM Nation – the publics of GM within the nation – to

discuss a decision to be made by a classical modernist central state structure about a

definite national territorial area. Thus the GM controversy exhibits a shifting ground

between repertoires and invocations of different publics.

These issue publics of GM play an important role in the shaping of the controversy.

Thus to attempt to overlook them in the interests of constructing a general public would

be to miss an important feature of the dynamics of the GM debate. The UEA/Cardiff

evaluation team found in their general survey a „substantial minority subgroup of the

general public‟ who shared the same profile as the engaged publics attending GM Nation

(Horlick-Jones et al 2004). While they say that „The extent to which this subgroup might

be described as „politically engaged‟ in the GM issue is not clear‟ this does indicate the

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substratum of criticality towards GM within society that the more explicitly engaged

draw upon. The evaluation team‟s survey work identifies a significant minority of around

30% who are hostile to GM, with the larger majority of society being „ambivalent‟. Thus

they claim „that current UK „public opinion‟ is not a unitary whole, but fragmented with

considerable ambivalence co-existing alongside outright opposition‟ (2004, 9). However,

that ambivalence is certainly not support for the project, but is better characterised as

containing a criticality about GM shared with the „engaged publics‟ but along with a more

open mind to what are described as potential future benefits. Furthermore, as we have

seen, qualitative methods can show how such ambivalence may shift into other modes in

different circumstances, as with the hardening of attitudes to GM amongst GM Nation‟s

„narrow but deep‟ experiment. Ambivalence as a category may also mask a variety of

views about GMOs, especially if, as in these debates, the main mark of distinction used

to separate people into „hostile‟ or „ambivalent‟ attitudes to GM is that of an open

attitude to possible benefits. This is because participants may have too much variation of

views about the nature and possibility of these benefits, including the social conditions

under which they may be realised, for this to be a useful category.

It is also worth noting here that the characterisation of the open debates of GM Nation as

captured by the engaged minority of issue publics may also be too simplistic. GM Nation

was not a homogeneous entity, especially in tier three. (Indeed, one of its most

interesting features was the methods used to attempt to standardise the diversity of fora,

locations and participants. The GM Nation booklet, with its stimulus material and

questionnaire played an important role in this, forming a standard component which

could circulate through this diversity giving it some coherence). This diversity was

evident both in the formats taken by the meetings as well as in their locations, organisers

and participants. While all the „tier one‟ launch events were given a uniform format of

being split into small groups around a table and had a certain amount of collective

deliberation, the other tiers of GM Nation open events took more heterogeneous forms.

Some held to the small group discussion table format, others were more like

conventional public meetings with seating arranged in rows. Some were guided by

facilitators and the GM Nation booklet, others revolved around a traditional debate

format, with a panel of experts speaking for and against.

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There was also diversity amongst the locations, organisers and participants, making it

important not to exaggerate the claims that the debate was captured by particular interest

groups. The transcripts available from the „tier one‟ meetings show each tables

rapporteur‟s summary of discussion. These frequently refer to divergent views expressed,

in each table, and also to different interest groups represented.52 At least one tier one

meeting, at Harrogate, is considered to have been „more typical of a broader public‟

(Bruce 2003).

Of the other levels of meetings, the „tier two‟ events were organised around local

government. These (like „tier three‟ meetings) therefore attracted those networks around

local government such as elected councillors, representatives of the main political parties,

etc., as well as those interested in the subpolitics of food, health, farming, wildlife and the

environment. The „tier three‟ meetings were organised by a heterogenous array of civil

society actors. On the list of 46 local „tier three‟ meetings given on the GM Nation

website, not all were associated with anti-GM engaged groups. For example, two GM

Nation events were at county Royal Agricultural Shows and were organised by the big

landowners „countryside alliance‟, not a location or group normally associated with

environmentalism or anti-GM interests. Others were organised around scientific research

organisations, such as the four events at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, well known

for its development and promotion of GM agriculture. Others still were organised by

agricultural colleges, local churches, parish councils, women‟s institutes and village halls

and were attended by a cross-section of the community. However, from the list, it is also

clear that a large amount of meetings were instigated by those engaged in the subpolitics

of food, health and the environment. Thus Friends of the Earth and other explicitly

environmentalist groups are associated with more than half of the local meetings. Yet

more were organised around locations such as organic food outlets and farmers markets.

From this it can be argued that the GM Nation open events drew together the diverse

engaged publics of GM. The accounts of the discussions and the results of the

52 http://www.gmnation.org.uk/ut_13/.

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questionnaires substantiate the claim that the majority of these participants were from

positions critical towards the GM agri-technology.

However, other forces did take part in these GM Nation open events: firstly, the broader

political networks around UK local government and politics who played an important

role in all tier two events and most tier three events; and secondly the other engaged

publics and stakeholders of GM – those who took a more supportive stance to the

technology. These included some sections of the farming industry, (especially large

conventional farmers organised around the UK‟s National Farmers Union) and members

and supporters of scientific establishments, (especially given the potential impact of the

debate on the cultural and political status of science and technology). As we have seen

these networks supportive of GM were able to organise a minority of the tier three

meetings, and also contributed to most other GM Nation meetings.

However, despite the presence around GM Nation of these two other social networks, it

is significant that it was the GM-sceptical networks that were able to make the decisive

impact on it. GM Nation thus revealed the relative weight of the mobilisable social

networks around the GM issue at that time. It is particularly revealing that pro-GM

networks were unable to „capture‟ the space of GM Nation, or at least balance the weight

of the other more GM-sceptical forces. This perhaps reveals the very narrow base of

support for the GM agri-food project that could be made manifest, despite the

potentially revolutionary and far-reaching changes this new class technology might bring.

Neither the cadres of mainstream local government and political parties nor the

subpolitical networks around technoscientific progress and modernised food and farming

could come to the aid of the GM corporations or the central governments GM agenda.

Apprehended this way, GM Nation reveals a living „body politic‟ as it actually inhabited

the space of the debate. This information is missed by trying to step over the actual

participants in order to construct a „general public‟ via various „technologies of

elicitation‟. The commercial, scientific and governmental innovators and proponents of

the new GM agri-food system had been unable to build the necessary social layers of

support for their technology. In this way GM Nation revealed the absence of the kind of

„hegemonic alliances‟ needed to give the new technology robust or widespread support

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amongst various classes, networks and institutions of British society at that time. Instead

as an experiment it provided a demonstration or manifestation of the scale of the

subpolitical networks and discourses around „nature‟, of food, health and the

environment that circulated through culture, the media, commerce, politics and many

other places and that were able to challenge and resist the GM project.

Although arguably not representative of a „general public‟, nevertheless these engaged

publics of GM may have their own kind of legitimacy, a point recognised by the official

evaluation team:

We ... observed that these events were often dominated by discussions

characteristic of a knowledgeable and experienced engagement in the GM issue.

However, in our view, this does not mean that the open meetings were without

merit. Of course, engaged people with clear views on GM issues had a legitimate

contribution to make in the debate. Moreover the exploration of their views was

important, in view of their prominence within the political dynamics of wider

debates about GM (Horlick-Jones et al 2004: 9).

However, the question then emerges from this observation as to what this „legitimate

contribution‟ may be. Rather than merely trying to bypass these engaged publics in

favour of some other construction, instead a new problem emerges: What role might

engaged publics play in participatory exercises and technoscientific decision making?

Following on from the two rationales – epistemological and political – advanced to

support public participation that we outlined earlier in this section, various arrangements

or modes are on offer. Given the knowledgeability of these actors, there is a strong

epistemological rationale for their inclusion, in order that policy processes would benefit

from their knowledge and insight. However, are these publics then to be considered as

somehow „lay experts‟ – and are these to be considered equal to the certified scientific

experts, or does this even lead to the end of the expert/lay distinction altogether? Collins

and Evans (2002) argue against the erosion of the expert/lay divide. Instead, they argue

for a „third wave of science studies‟, which would allow us to grant stronger

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epistemological rights to our subpolitical networks around GM. This approach elevates

our engaged publics to the status of „uncertified‟ or „contributory‟ experts, giving them a

recognised place and thus incorporating them within the existing scientific advice and

policy process. However, this arrangement only grants admission to views closest to and

commensurable with existing technocratic dominant discourses, and risks simply

transforming publics into honorary experts. It also might even occlude the wider social

issues at stake, assuming that an epistemological criterion for inclusion is knowledgability

about technology and risk as things in themselves, rather than these wider social factors.

Most importantly, such moves risk losing the specifically public quality of issue publics

by their enculturation as experts. This public quality is generated or enhanced by an

explicit appeal to a public realm and a consideration of the public dimensions of a

technology. This quality is made possible by simultaneous engagement and distance,

being at once related to and distanced from an issue of concern. This allows a scrutiny of

techno-scientific issues from perspectives outside the dominant paradigms of the

regulatory and policy networks. By finding new institutional forms through which it can

engage in „extended peer review‟ by such networks, technoscience can perhaps become

re-embedded back into society while still retaining its specificity as a distinctive sphere of

human activity.

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6. Conclusion

In analysing the overall patterns of GM regulation in the EU, we can draw the following

conclusions:

The conflict over GM was structured by the contradictory imperatives built

into the original 1990 Deliberate Release Directive. This period had seen the

emergence to centre stage of two great clashing imperatives confronting

policymakers: firstly precaution, grounded in a growing awareness of the self-

endangering dynamics of technology and environment, and secondly innovation, the

perceived need, driven by intensifying global competition, for the EU to construct

itself as an advanced techno-scientific knowledge economy. While the latter

imperative focuses on the creation of a homogenised neo-liberal market zone, where

all barriers to the free circulation of the products of innovation are progressively

removed, the former imperative implies a more regulated zone, in which the

movements of pollutants, products and organisms are subject to surveillance and

control. Thus GMOs would not find automatic admission into the European

„technological zone‟, but would be marked as a separate regulatory category, requiring

at least an initial precautionary assessment. The initial arrangement of the DRD was

that, once having passed this assessment and been granted consent, the GMO would

then be free to circulate unmarked. However, this process simultaneously added to

the symbolic charge around the GMO, raising questions about safety which in the

public‟s mind were left unresolved, and at the same time allowing for no post-release

monitoring or regulation. While the contradictions within the DRD are not the sole

cause or determinant of the GM conflict, they nevertheless played a vital role in

shaping and structuring it. The logic of the directive set up the dynamics of the

ensuing conflict within the EU, allowing various parties to demand a moratorium and

suggesting a new round of regulation, leading to a system of post-market monitoring

involving labelling and traceability.

Different member states took different approaches. The two national case

studies, Greece and Britain, were chosen largely because they largely exemplify two

extremes in terms of member states‟ attitudes and approaches to agricultural

biotechnology. The Greek government, with the most GM-hostile population in the

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EU, little domestic biotechnological research, and an agricultural structure that did

not lend itself to the high-productivity GM crops that were being developed, took a

broadly consistent anti-GM stance within the EU, invoking Article 16 of the DRD to

ban specific GM crops from its territory, and leading the call for an EU-wide

moratorium. By contract, the UK, while having a population that was still

predominantly anti-GM, had a government that supported the new technology,

congruent with its historic commitments to an Atlanticist and neo-liberal stance, and

also with its perception of biotechnology as an important symbol of its science base.

The battle-lines in the two countries were thus strikingly different. In Greece, the

battles were fought along lines which corresponded to the national boundary,

invoking discourses of defence of the Greek territory from contamination by

GMOs. Both state scientific institutions and civil society organisations were engaged

in the extensive testing of food and seed to ensure that Greece was kept GM-free. By

contrast, in the UK, as the government proceeded with a programme of

precautionary commercialisation of GM crops, (later rebranded as a series of

scientific experiments which provoked further widespread opposition amongst the

populace), the battle lines ran within and beyond the nation state, following new

contours between GM and non-GM fields and along the supermarket shelves. It is

for this reason that the UK government had to engage in large-scale public

participation exercise – not as part of a transition to a new, normalised, regime of

participatory governance for agricultural biotechnology, but as a process of crisis

management during a period when the existing regulatory regime was breaking down

but had not yet been replaced by a new one.

The controlled introduction of GMOs in the European Union performed the

GMO as a regulatory object, by dividing GM from non-GM and science from

politics. It did this by performing two divisions. First, by setting up a special

regulatory system for GM crops and food, it delineated the GMO as a separate

category of object, and thus in the same gesture brought into being the opposite

category of non-GM crops and food. This latter category was to create new

opportunities for parallel, „quality‟ bioeconomies, as individual farmers, regions and

even whole countries such as Greece sought to gain added value from growing non-

GM food. Secondly, it sought to constitute the GMO in a particular way, attempting

147

to purify the GMO of its social and cultural dimensions and to constitute it as a

purely technical object of regulation. However, this act of division was less

successful; as GMOs started to arrive in European agricultural landscapes with their

dense social networks, and attempted to penetrate European foodways, they became

entangled with social meanings and socio-material connections. In Greece this

dynamic serves to strengthen the general anti-GM stance of the government; insofar

as Greece has to ask itself whether it is a „GM nation‟ it is only in a technical sense

which requires the scientific testing for the very presence of GMOs in Greek fields,

shops and warehouses, one in which hybrid bodies like the Greek Bioethics

Committee do not have to play a key strategic role. By contrast, the United

Kingdom, with its internal conflicts over the technology played out in new political

spaces in hybrid politico-scientific terms, has to ask itself whether it is a „GM Nation‟

in a quite different, political sense – if the public, when convened in the right way, will

decide that it wants to accept the new technology. But in convening the public to

speak in official fora, the UK government channels public debate into one side of a

bifurcated institutional structure, one which separates science from politics. Two parallel

regulatory experiments thus take place: the farm scale trials of GM crops, to be

interpreted by natural scientists; and the GM Nation public debate, to be interpreted

by social scientists – thus giving the AEBC a key mediating role in the UK

controversy. This institutional bifurcation attempts to keep nature and society

separate, to ensure that the public will only deliberate on values, rather than on facts

– a dynamic which is further strengthened by the timing of GM Nation to finish

before the results of the Farm Scale Evaluations are published. The separation also

serves to leave conventional technocratic modes of governance intact, with the

classical modern apex of the executive power of the state remaining as the ultimate

decision-making power, the point at which the separate information feeds from the

different regulatory experiments can be combined.

Public engagement exercises are characterised by battles over the multiple,

overlapping and shifting definition of the public. One of the key issues in the

debate over the validity of GM Nation revolved around a distinction between

„engaged publics‟ on the one hand and the „general public‟ on the other. It was

claimed that the open meetings predominantly attracted an „engaged public‟, those

148

already active within the debate, and that these may not have been „representative‟ of

the public as a whole. Thus this engaged public was contrasted with a general public,

often called „the silent majority‟. However, this silent majority can clearly never speak

for itself, but has to be articulated from the outside. In the arguments around GM

Nation this was achieved both qualitatively through focus group discussions with

screened, representative samples, and quantitatively by opinion polls. While this is a

valid task – to look beyond the minority of the population who choose to participate

in the open meetings, and to attempt to find out what other sections of society might

think – it is a task that brings its own problems. Different „technologies of

elicitation‟, rather than simply accessing „the‟ public and its opinions in an

unproblematic way, function by bringing into being different publics, different forms

of publicness, and different qualities of public knowledge. These methodological

choices are therefore always politically charged; in particular, the concept of the

„silent majority‟ has long been used as ballast against the critical voices of social

movements and civil society. Such moves also risk privileging an atomised mode of

engagement which favours disengagement over the insights that may be generated by

engagement and deliberation. This act of creating a purified public also served the

bifurcation of the UK debate into separate zones of „science‟ and „politics‟ by not

only stripping it from its social solidarities but also from its socio-material

embeddedness, its scientific knowledgeability and its engagement. Furthermore, these

reductionist methodologies cannot apprehend the roles played by the engaged

publics within the body politic as a whole.

GM Nation revealed the existence of society-wide subpolitical networks

around food, environment and health; the challenge is to find a legitimate role

for such ‘engaged publics’. Rather than being disregarded as an unrepresentative

minority, they should be valued within the participatory process – but how?

Undoubtedly they are knowledgeable actors, and one rationale for their inclusion is

certainly epistemological, in order that policy processes would benefit from their

knowledge and insight. One approach would be to elevate them to the status of

„uncertified contributory experts‟, and thus incorporate them within the existing

scientific advice and policy process. However, this risks simply transforming publics

into honorary experts, and also only granting admission to views closest to existing

149

technocratic dominant discourses. It also implies that the issue is simply one of

knowledgeability about technology and its associated risks, rather than of its wider

social relations. Furthermore, such a move risks losing the specifically public quality

of issue publics, who despite their expertise are not simply experts, but people

considering public aspects of a technology, by being at once related to and distanced

from an issue of concern. Insofar as issue publics are able to scrutinise techno-

scientific issues from perspectives outside the dominant paradigms of the regulatory

and policy networks, it is because of their simultaneous engagement and distance.

This allows a variety of different modes of relating to science, from the obsessive to

the slightly interested: geeks, connoisseurs, fans, critics, all collected in distinctive

patterns of sociality through the mobilisation around the issue. By finding new

institutional forms through which it can engage in „extended peer review‟ by such

networks, technoscience can perhaps become re-embedded back into society while

still retaining its specificity as a distinctive sphere of human activity.

The battle over GM helped to precipitate a transformation of the regulatory

regime, which may form a new battleground. This transformation was the result

of an epistemological stalemate, itself the eventual outcome of a battle in which

neither side could irrefutably establish that the products were either safe or harmful.

This shift in regulatory regime occurred along a number of different dimensions:

from (nation) states to (global) markets, from discourses of safety to those around

consumer choice, and from the calculation of risk to the management of uncertainty.

Firstly, the regulatory membrane was moved away from the national border, and

instead began to follow new contours within and through nation states, between

labelled products on supermarket shelves, and between GM and non-GM crops in

fields. Secondly, the transformation involved the dethronement of positivistic

„centres of calculation‟ by relativistic tropes of consumer sovereignty, forcing the

former to relinquish their unquestioned primacy and instead occupy a terrain where

different rationales jostle for position. Thirdly, instead of GM governance being the

preserve of state-appointed experts, pronouncing definitively on calculable and

specific risks, now uncertainty intensifies, associated with a proliferation of voices

which are ostensibly left to be managed by the market. This is the regime of

coexistence, which declares its welcome to a plurality of agricultures – GM, organic

150

and conventional – within the European Union. However, this new regime becomes

a further battleground: on the one hand it is possible that coexistence regulations

could be used to stifle the new technology; on the other hand the release of GM

crops into agro-ecosystems with the inevitable processes of gene flow might serve to

carry the new technology into a position of dominance.

151

Glossary of acronyms

ACNFP Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes [UK]

ACRE Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment [UK]

AEBC Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission [UK]

BSE Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy

CA Competent Authority (under Directives 1990/220 and 2001/18)

CJD Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

COI Central Office of Information [UK]

Defra Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [UK]

DRD Deliberate Release Directive (1990/220, replaced by 2001/18)

DUC distinct, uniform and stable

EEC European Economic Community

EFET Enieos Foreas Eleghou Trofimon, Unified Body for Food Inspection [Greece]

ENGO environmental non-governmental organisation

ETHIAGE National Agricultural Research Foundation [Greece]

EU European Union

FSA Food Standards Agency [UK]

FSE Farm Scale Evaluation

GESASE General Confederation of Greek Agrarian Associations [Greece]

GM genetically modified; genetic modification

GMHR genetically modified herbicide resistant

GMO genetically modified organism

HR herbicide resistant

MAFF Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food [UK]

OST Office of Science and Technology [UK]

NGO non-governmental organisation

PASOK Panhellenic Socialist Movement [Greece]

PDSB Public Debate Steering Board [UK]

RSPB Royal Society for the Protection of Birds [UK]

SCIMAC Supply Chain Initiative on Modified Agricultural Crops [UK]

UEA University of East Anglia

VCU value for cultivation and use

WTO World Trade Organisation

WWF Worldwide Fund for Nature

YPAAT Ministry of Rural Development & Food [Greece]

YPEHODE Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works [Greece]

152

Key EU directives, regulations and guidelines53

The main Directives and Regulations currently in force for process of authorising use of

GMOs are:

contained use of GMOs – 1990/219

experimental or commercial release of GMOs – 2001/18 (replaced 1990/220)

food or feed containing, consisting of or produced from GMOs – 1829/2003

labelling and traceability of GM food and feed products – 1830/2003

Council Directive 1990/219 on the contained use of genetically modified micro-

organisms, subsequently amended by Commission Directive 1994/51/EC(29) and

Council Directive 1998/81.

Council Directive 1990/220 on the deliberate release into the environment of

genetically modified organisms, later amended by Commission Directive

1994/15/EC(33) and Commission Directive 1997/35, and then revised as 2001/18.

Council Directive 98/95 of 14 December 1998 amending, in respect of the

consolidation of the internal market, genetically modified plant varieties and plant genetic

resources, directives from the 1960s and 1970s on the marketing of beet seed, fodder

plant seed, cereal seed, seed potatoes, seed of oil and fibre plants and vegetable seed and

on the common catalogue of varieties of agricultural plant species

Regulation 258/97 of 27 January 1997 lays out detailed rules for the authorisation of

novel foods and novel food ingredients. Novel foods must undergo a safety assessment

before being placed on the EU market. Only those products considered to be safe for

human consumption are authorised for marketing. Article 8.1. states: „Without prejudice

to the other requirements of Community law concerning the labelling of foodstuffs, the

following additional specific labelling requirements shall apply to foodstuffs in order to

ensure that the final consumer is informed of ... (d) the presence of an organism

53 See complete details at http://www.icgeb.trieste.it/~bsafesrv/bsfeurop.htm.

153

genetically modified by techniques of genetic modification, the non-exhaustive list of

which is laid down in Annex I A, Part 1 of Directive 90/220/EEC.‟

http://www.biosafety.be/GB/Dir.Eur.GB/FF/258_97/258_97.html

European Parliament/Council Directive 2001/18 on the deliberate release into the

environment of genetically modified organisms – revision of 1990/220,

Council Directive 2002/53 of 13 June 2002 on the common catalogue of varieties of

agricultural plant species. Article 18 provides that „if it is established that the cultivation

of a variety included in the common catalogue of varieties could in any Member State be

harmful from a point of view of plant health to the cultivation of other varieties or

species, or present a risk for the environment or for human health, that Member State

may upon application, be authorised to prohibit the marketing of the seed in question in

all or part of its territory.‟

Regulation 1829/2003 of 22 September 2003 introduced a simplified, centralised

authorisation procedure for GMOs used as food or animal feed: if a company wants to

market a GM crop in the EU, it does not need to request separate authorisation for the

use of the crop as food or feed.‟

Regulation 1830/2003 of 22 September 2003 „provides a framework for the traceability

of products consisting of or containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and

food and feed produced from GMOs‟.

It seeks

to harmonise traceability and labelling for the sake of the internal market;

facilitate both the withdrawal of products where unforeseen adverse effects on

human health, animal health or the environment, including ecosystems, are

established, and;

the targeting of monitoring to examine potential effects on, in particular, the

environment. the implementation of risk management measures in accordance

with the precautionary principle;

154

to ensure that accurate information is available to operators and consumers to

enable them to exercise their freedom of choice in an effective manner as well as

to enable control and verification of labelling claims;

It exempts from labelling products with „traces of authorised GMOs in a proportion no

higher than 0,9 % or lower thresholds established under the provisions of Article 30(2),

provided that these traces are adventitious or technically unavoidable‟, and amends

Directive 2001/18 accordingly.

Commission Recommendation of 23 July 2003 on guidelines for the development of

national strategies and best practices to ensure the co-existence of genetically modified

crops with conventional and organic farming

155

Interviews

Date Location Interviewee Duration (mins)

Interviewer

Remarks

Greece

1 05 April 2005 Athens Leonidas Louloudis (Assoc. Professor, Faculty of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural University of Athens) (one of five scientists proposing the establishment of a GM information center)

82 YV 1 b-6

2 28 June 2005 Athens (Greenpeace office)

Myrto Pispini (Greenpeace-GR Responsible for the Anti-GMO campaign in Greece)

39 YV 2 b-6

3 05 April 2006 Chania Vasilis Gisakis (Chania activist)

40 YV 3b-6 Poor record-ing

4 07 July 2006 Rethymnon Konstantinos Tsoukalas (member of the National Bioethics Commission, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Athens)

52 MK, YV

4b-6

5 02 October 2006

Athens Takis Vidalis (Scientific Officer, National Bioethics Commission)

20 YV 5b-6 Phone

6 03 October 2006

Iraklion Nikos Panopoulos (Emeritus Professor of the University of California at Berkeley, Professor of the University of Greece, member of scientific, biotechnology related committees in the US -

45 MK 6b-6 Phone

156

NIH,USDA,DOE - and Greece -ministerial )

7 06 October 2006

Thessaloniki Athanasios Tsaftaris (former member of the Greek Competent Authority for Directives 219/90, 220/90 concerning GMO, 1995 President of the Greek Bioethics Committee of the General Secretariat for Research & Technology, 1999-2000 Secretary of GSRT, Professor, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki)

35 MK 7b-6 Phone

8 11 October 2006

Athens Stamatis Sekliziotis (responsible for USDA Gain report on Greece, 2005), US Embassy, Agricultural Division

36 MK 8b-6 Phone

9 18 October 2006

Athens Konstantinos Anagnostou (Officer , Directorate of Processing, Standardization and Quality Contrôle of Agri-food Products, Ministry of Rural Development and Food)

31 MK 9b-6 Phone

10 25 October 2006

Athens Konstatinos Mpalias (legal advisor of Greenpeace Greece; prepared bill proposal to declare Greece GMO-free country)

43 MK 10b-6 Phone

11 10 November 2006

Athens Ioannis Hondropoulos (Officer, Biotechnologist, staff responsible for

85 MK 11b-6 Phone

157

GM issues, Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works)

12 18 August 2006

Athens *Konstantinos Mihos (Personnel, Agriculturalist, Department of Plant Production Inputs, and Member of Working Group on issues related ti Coexistence Measures for GM, conventional & biological cultivations, Ministry of Rural Development and Food)

40 MK 12b-6 Face to face, joint with*

13 18 August 2006

Athens *Styliani Horianopoulou (Personnel, Agriculturalist, Department of Plant Production Inputs, and Member of Working Group on issues related ti Coexistence Measures for GM, conventional & biological cultivations, Ministry of Rural Development and Food)

40 MK 13b-6 Face to face, joint with*

14 18 August 2006

Athens Lyda Mpouza (Personnel, Agriculturalist, Department of Plant Production Inputs, and Member of Working Group on issues related ti Coexistence Measures for GM, conventional &

80 MK 14b-6 Face to face

158

biological cultivations, Ministry of Rural Development and Food)

United Kingdom

15 11 July 2005 Lancaster Malcolm Grant (AEBC)

26 LR, BS

16 29 Aug 2006 Dorset Alan Gray (ACRE) 76 LR Phone interview

17 06 Mar 2005 Anglesey Robin Grove-White (AEBC)

128 LR, BS

18 16 Oct 2005 Copenhagen Robin Grove-White (AEBC)

30 LR, BS

19 28 June 2006 Axminster Brian Johnson (English Nature and ACRE)

94 LR

20 06 Mar 2005 Anglesey Sue Mayer (AEBC and Genewatch UK)

25 LR, BS Not recorded

21 07 Sep 2006 Derbyshire Sue Mayer (AEBC and Genewatch UK)

30 LR Phone - not transcribed

22 27 June 2006 Parliament, London

Michael Meacher (former Environment Minister)

40 LR

23 07 Sep 2006 Yorkshire Pete Riley (Five Year Freeze)

68 LR Phone - not transcribed

24 22 June 2006 DEFRA, London

Linda Smith (former Head of GM Policy, Science and Regulation Unit, Defra)

183 LR

United Kingdom biotechnology interviews from ESRC-funded project Nanotechnology, Risk and Sustainability: Moving Public Engagement Upstream, used with permission

25 26 Jan 2004 Brian Wynne

26 04 Mar 2004 Doug Parr (Greenpeace UK)

27 15 Mar 2004 Ian Gibson (Labour MP, ex-Chair of Science and Technology Select Committee)

28 16 Mar 2004 Nigel Poole (Zeneca)

29 23 Feb 2004 Sir John Beringer (ex-chair of ACRE)

30 24 Feb 2004 Raymond Baker (former former CEO, Biotechnology and

159

Biological Sciences Research Council.

31 26 Jan 2004 Robin Grove-White (member of AEBC)

32 30 Mar 2004 Sir Thomas Blundell (Founding Chief Executive, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, 1994-1996, Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 1998-2005).

33 1 Mar 2004 Sue Mayer (Director, Genewatch UK)

160

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