From risk assessment to in-context trajectory evaluation: GMOs and their social implications

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, biotechnologies have raised enormous expectations as well as passionate political controversies, paving the way to a strong polarization in European society and to an on-going debate on how should these technologies be assessed. Mainstream approaches have been focusing on risk-assessment procedures. According to this perspective, new technologies should be assessed in terms of their potential risk of negatively affecting human health and in terms of the environmental risks, such as cross-contamination and biodiversity preservation. Yet, the large majority of riskassessment studies on GMOs mainly focus on animal trials, trying to detect biological or medical anomalies among the animals fed with GM products. Although many of these studies have repeatedly claimed that no significant health impact could be detected, their independence and reliability has been contested not only because they have been carried out by the same multinational corporations that produce the tested GMOs but also because the original data have not been released to the academic community for the studies to be replicated. Moreover, independent studies on GMOs have raised serious doubts about health safety in a number of different occasions (Le Curieux-Belfond et al. 2008; Seralini et al. 2009; Seralini, Cellier & Spiroux de Vendomois 2007; Gasnier et al. 2009; Heinemann & Traavik 2004; Traavik & Heinemann 2007). Independently of whether GMOs constitute a direct threat to human health and the environment, risk-assessment approaches have reduced the evaluation of GMOs merely to a question of how much risk can a society bear for the introduction of these new products in the face of their claimed benefits but there is much more to GMOs than the risk/ benefit relationship suggests (Ferretti 2009). Many reasons lay behind the emergence and diffusion of risk-assessment approaches. On the one hand, these approaches support and strengthen the technological fix attitude that affects post-industrial societies. Problems that may have a number of different social, economic or political origins are framed and addressed in terms of a technological solution that allow for a quick, effective fix that does not call into question these non-technical origins. A clear example maybe retrieved in the Syngenta website, where the issue of water scarcity and water supply all over the globe is reduced to a technical question, whose solution is offered through GM crops with reduced water absorption (www.singenta.com, “Bring plant potential to life” campaign). On the other hand, these approaches positively resonate with the tendency to delegate essentially political decisions to expert committees, which effectively divert responsibility from political actors to techno-scientific networks (Jasanoff 2003). In turn, this process de facto de-politicizes a number of controversial issues, which could otherwise threaten political consensus and stability. As a consequence, the growing momentum of risk-assessment approaches has encouraged a technocratic twist in science and technology policy, which has been criticized on a number of political and sociological grounds (Weingart 1999; Funtowicz & Liberatore 2003; Nowotny 2003; Felt at al. 2007; Levidow 2009; Ferretti & Pavone 2009). First, it has been argued that risk-assessment approaches take the technology for granted, addressing public opposition to GMOs as a problem in itself. Instead of considering public arguments against GMOs as an opportunity to reconsider the technology from a different perspective, producing a wider and more robust assessment of GMOs’ implications, the public has been addressed as the problem, calling for solutions that aimed at reducing this opposition rather than at learning from it (Felt et al. 2007; Levidow 2007). Second, risk-assessment approaches address GMOs potential impact merely in terms o