Regulatory system

Paper

Regulating Between National Fears and Global Disciplines: Agricultural Biotechnology in the EU

Jean Monnet Working Paper 10/04, May (2004)

Few issues of European law and policy excite as much attention and concern as the creation and marketing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Lauded by many scientists, policy elites, and members of the biotechnology industry as a step forward in scientific and economic terms, genetically modified (GM) foods and crops have also been rejected as unsafe or undesirable by many environmentalists and consumer advocates, and by a majority of the European public as recorded in successive polls over the past decade. Into this controversy have stepped the institutions of the European Union, which increasingly play the leading role in establishing the regulatory framework for the growing and marketing of GM foods and crops in the Union’s 25 member states. In this paper, we examine EU policy and policy-making in the area of biotechnology, with a specific focus on agricultural biotechnology – namely, the development and marketing of GM crops and foods. More specifically, the paper aims to summarize both the content of the EU’s rapidly evolving regulations, and the process whereby these regulations have been promulgated, implemented, and comprehensively reformed in the space of just over a decade. As we shall see, EU policy in this area is predominantly regulatory in character, setting the increasingly detailed regulatory framework within which genetically modified foods and crops may be developed, introduced into the environment, and work their way into the food supply. Throughout the paper, we develop three interrelated arguments about the nature of GMO regulation and the challenges it poses to the European Union.

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