Abstract
A radical reform of the agri-food biotech regulation in the EU is considered in many quarters (mostly by academia and industry) as a pressing necessity. Indeed, two important decisions (by the European Court of Justice and by the Commission) on the legal status of the so-called New Breeding Techniques are expected shortly. In order to clarify some basic aspects of the complex scenario, after a brief introduction regarding the “GMO” fallacy, we offer our point of view on the following facets: (1) A faulty approach is frequent in the discussion of the agri-food regulation; (2) NBTs, genome editing may lead to the disappearance of the “GMO” meme; (3) Beyond health and safety issues: socio-economic considerations; (4) Sustainability: the comprehensive, meaningful starting point of a positive reform; (5) The theoretical and legal basis for the reform are already contained in the EU’s general guidelines to legislation.
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Notes
To be more precise, the reference here is to the “deliberate release into the environment of genetically modified organisms” (title of Dir. 2001/18), i.e. the cultivation of rDNA crops, as opposed to the use/importation of them (or their derivatives, or products which contain them as ingredients), which falls under Regulation 1829/2003 “on genetically modified food and feed”.
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To the Editor: We would like to start from a paper recently published in this journal (Zetterberg and Edvardsson Björnberg 2017; from now on Z-EB) to offer some constructive criticism and give a provisional outline of a wider hypothesis regarding the necessary radical reform of the agri-food biotechnology regulation in the EU. We hope that this letter, published in an authoritative social/human sciences journal, may attract the attention of scholars outside the life sciences field, where most concepts that we will try to explain are taken for granted—whereas the message, in our opinion, has not yet fully reached other scholarly areas. To put it more bluntly, as far as advanced innovative biotechnologies are concerned, “[s]ocial science disciplines have played an important, but not always impartial, role in understanding these changes, […] questioning the authority of scientific expertise and the validity of scientific evidence used to support policy and regulatory decisions by government” (Tait 2016, p. 7).
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Tagliabue, G., Ammann, K. Some Basis for a Renewed Regulation of Agri-Food Biotechnology in the EU. J Agric Environ Ethics 31, 39–53 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9708-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9708-9