The Regulation of GMOs in Europe and the United States: A Case-Study of Contemporary

This paper seeks to place the divergent approaches of the European Union and United States toward the introduction and marketing of genetically modified (GM) foods and seeds in a broader context. It argues that an important key to understanding why Europe and the United States have chosen to regulate identical technologies in such a dissimilar fashion has to do with recent changes in politics of risk regulation in Europe. From the 1960s through the mid 1980s, the regulation of health, safety and environmental risks was generally stricter in the United States than in Europe. Since the mid 1980s, the obverse has often been the case: a wide array of European consumer and environmental regulations, including those governing GMOs, are now more restrictive than in the United States. In a number of important respects, European regulatory politics and policies over the last fifteen years resemble those of the United States between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s. They are often politicized, highly contentious and characterized by a suspicion of science and a mistrust of both government and industry. By Page 1 of 39 The Regulation of GMOs in Europe and the United States: A Case-Study of Contemp...