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 by Paul B. Thompson
After several years of broad market acceptance in the United States, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) (i.e. foods developed using recombinant DNA gene transfer techniques) are becoming more and more controversial. The challenge came first in Europe, where food retailers responded to consumer unrest by pulling GMOs and promising food that is "GMO-free."
What causes one food technology to be challenged, while another is accepted without protest? For one thing, foods have special significance to many people that goes beyond taste, price, nutrition and safety. The food industry should have realized that there would be a minority of consumers who would not eat GMO foods for religious or cultural reasons. For another, all consumers may resent being placed in a position of having no choice. Of course, people may not even notice that they lack choice until someone complains. Recognizing this, the food industry may have gambled that no one would complain when GMO foods were mainstreamed in the mid 1990s.
Americans may not have noticed. When the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) proposal for exempting most forms of biotechnology from special review went through in 1996, there was hardly a peep. But when American food exporters and trade negotiators expected Europeans to follow suit, controversy erupted. The story usually told on this side of the Atlantic is that it was just a non-tariff trade barrier. But if it is a trade barrier, it is clearly one that has a great deal of popular support. So we must still ask ourselves, "Why did Europeans make an issue of GMOs, when Americans did not?"
Ordinary European consumers were attentive to the introduction of GMOs because a series of incidents, notably the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the 1980s and Mad Cow Disease in the 1990s, have shown them how vulnerable they can be to scientific judgments made in other countries. The FDA decision may have looked fine from an American perspective, but Europeans were unimpressed. When American biotech countries resisted labeling of GMO foods, European consumers noticed and complained. It is possible that early acquiescence to the labeling demand might have quieted controversy once and for all, but that is something we will never know.
What is more, Europeans have a long tradition of proudly providing copious information about the geographic origins and local processes used in the production of foods, notably cheese and wine. When Americans came on the scene saying that information about origins or processes might stigmatize a product, Europeans noticed that, and their suspicions were further aroused.
Or maybe we should ask why American consumers didn't notice that GMOs were being introduced. In Europe, farming is considered to be part of nature. Nature preservation means preservation of wildlife habitat and rural aesthetics on farms. American conservationists focus on forests and wild ecosystems, seemingly writing off the rural landscape. Americans who are not directly involved in agricultural production are pretty inattentive when it comes to agricultural practices.
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