"More than a Food Fight" by Julia A. Moore, and "European Responses to Biotechnology: Research, Regulation, and Dialogue" by Patrice Laget and Mark Cantley, in Issues in Science and Technology (Summer 2001), The Univ. of Texas at Dallas, P.O. Box 830688, Mail Station J030, Richardson, Tex. 75083–0688.

Many Americans aren’t wild about genetically modified foods, but it’s in Europe that "Frankenfoods" are encountering the greatest resistance from consumers and, increasingly, governments. German foreign minister (and Green Party leader) Joschka Fischer said recently that "Europeans do not want genetically modified food—period. It does not matter what research shows; they just do not want it."

The European Union imposed a de facto moratorium on the approval of new genetically modified products in 1999, and while regulations have been proposed that would allow the lifting of the ban, five of the EU’s 15 member countries oppose them. Moreover, the regulations include a still undefined "precautionary principle" that could set the bar very high—and that could be exploited as a protectionist tool. For the United States, the stakes are large: About one-third of its $46 billion in food exports, and a growing proportion of all American crops (more than 50 percent of soybeans, for example) are grown from genetically modified seed.

Moore, a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, contends that much of Europe’s resistance can be traced to a decline of public confidence in science growing out of "events that have no direct link to genetic engineering." The British government, for example, spent many years assuring Britons that bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease, posed no risk to humans. But in 1996, the government did an abrupt aboutface. Seventy people have died from a form of the disease; as many as half a million more could die during the next 30 years. Infected cattle have since been discovered in other European countries. And that’s not all. Scandals erupted in France over inadequate effort to protect blood supplies from the AIDS virus and in Belgium over tainted animal feed.

Restoring confidence in science will require a new approach by government, science, and industry, says Moore. Americans, she thinks, will have to embrace the controversial precautionary principle. She also favors much heavier government spending for independent scientific research on food safety and environmental matters. Costs are high. It could take two to three million dollars just to trace the potential impact of one kind of genetically modified corn on one species of butterfly. Greater "transparency" is also needed. Moore notes with approval that Britain’s new independent Food Standards Agency is to make all its technical risk assessments and recommendations available to the public.

Scientists generally, she says, must step out of their laboratories and speak to the public more often.

Laget and Cantley, both EU science advisers, take a somewhat different view. Europe is far from being antiscience, they say; its investments in biotechnology research are as great as America’s. But Europeans take a different view of food regulation. While American regulation "focuses primarily on the end product," European regulation begins at the farm. The two scientists add that it’s no surprise that European consumers aren’t eager to buy America’s genetically engineered foods, which have "been modified in ways beneficial to the agrichemical companies, the seed suppliers, or the farmers, but not to the consumer." Still, they express confidence in an eventual transatlantic convergence of policies on genetically modified foods.