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November
1, 2002, 8:30 a.m.
No
Food for You!
The dark side
of the precautionary principle.
By Frances
B. Smith
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government of Zambia — with three million people facing death by
starvation — on October 29 gave its final refusal to distribute U.S.
grain already stored there to help feed its starving population. Zambia's
Agriculture Minister Mundia Sikatana invoked the "precautionary principle"
as his rationale — that is, since the grain was produced through
the use of modern biotechnology, it has not been proven to be perfectly
safe and may present some future risks to people or the environment. The
Zambian government also said it fears European Union countries would refuse
imports from Zambia since their crops might run the risk of "contamination"
from the genetically modified grain. Currently the EU has a moratorium
on approvals of GM crops and will soon be establishing rules requiring
traceability and labeling of foods produced through biotechnology.
Oh yes — the
reason given for the EU's own actions is the "precautionary principle,"
which the EU is busily enshrining in every treaty and agreement relating
to health, safety, and the environment so that it can be a guiding principle
of international law. The precautionary principle as used by the EU is
not based on any scientific evidence of real risks but on the hypothetical.
Numerous international
scientific bodies, including the World Health Organization, have declared
that food produced through biotechnology is as safe or perhaps even safer
than conventional food. And the environmental benefits of agricultural
biotechnology are already being shown — less use of pesticides, low
tillage, greater yield per acre so that less land is needed for farming.
Future benefits are in development, such as crops that can be grown in
inhospitable soils or climates — drought-resistant or salt-tolerant
crops, for example. Yet these advances are threatened by the widespread
acceptance of the precautionary principle. The Zambian decision to invoke
the precautionary principle illustrates how a bad idea can have drastic
consequences.
While officials in
the EU, as well as many European aid agencies, have begged several African
countries including Zambia to accept the donations of grain, some of those
officials and organizations are at the same time pushing for further extensions
of the precautionary principle into the food-safety area. They ignore
the fact that the precautionary principle is a one-way ratchet. It obsesses
about imagined or potential risks of new technology or innovations while
ignoring the real risks of the status quo. In the tragic case of Zambia
and other African countries with severe famines, the overriding risk is
imminent — millions of people dying because they don't have food.
Millions of starving
people facing almost certain death are considered less real than a remote
and unproven possibility of future harm. Precaution should mandate that
we need to get rid of the precautionary principle.
—
Frances B. Smith is executive director of Consumer
Alert, a national consumer group.
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