What wimps.
That may well be the verdict future historians deliver on the human race at the dawn of the third millennium. In the middle of the second, folks set out across vast oceans with nothing but the clothes on their back and no assurance that the winds would speed them to their destination before starvation set in. Nowadays, if you believe the propaganda of European governments and radical environmentalists, flabby couch potatoes are panicked at the thought their potato chips might be made with oil from genetically modified soybeans.
So great is that threat, apparently, that representatives of over 130 of the world's governments recently convened in Montreal to draft something called the Biosafety Protocol. The agreement requires shipments of food products that "may contain" genetically modified organisms to be labeled as such.
On Tuesday, Missouri Senator John Aschroft took Secretary of State Albright to task for the Clinton administration's intention to comply with the protocol's provisions despite no legal obligation to do so. Indeed the protocol skirts Senate ratification on the pretext that it's a subset of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, which the U.S. hasn't yet agreed to. So we guess compliance with this protocol falls under the heading of President Clinton's expansive interpretation of "executive authority."
Perhaps most worrying as a precedent is that the agreement--which finesses the issue of whether it is to be considered subordinate to World Trade Organization rules--allows governments to invoke something called "the precautionary principle" to ban imports of some GMO products altogether.
The precautionary "principle" is an environmentalist neologism, invoked to trump scientific evidence and move directly to banning things they don't like--biotech, wireless technology, hydrocarbon emissions. In other words, science got in their way, so they shoved it aside. The European Union likes the tactic enough to have recently issued a 29 page memo on the subject. And it is in vogue with the public-health priesthood that dominates U.S. regulatory agencies. There is real concern that that this notion will be used as cover to disguise a raft of protectionist initiatives. Europe may not long be able to justify its agricultural rules on economic grounds, for example, but rejection of GMOs as a "precaution" would be another reason to freeze imports from places like Argentina and the United States.
The Europeans have a point that in an uncertain world cost/benefit analysis alone can't be considered an exact science or policy guide. But that's no excuse for not giving serious thought to costs and benefits when considering new rules. Draping their decision-making in the likes of the "precautionary principle" the way they seem to interpret it surely would lead to all kinds of absurd results.
Imagine what would have happened if Henry Ford had been forced to introduce the automobile in a "precautionary" world. Tut, tut; allowing folks to hurtle around at high speeds presents certain dangers. And our crystal ball tells us that hundreds of thousands around the world will be killed by cars annually. A precautionary world of course would have banned the automobile. But consider a world without the automobile. Surely hundreds of thousands more would die of things like hunger and disease without access to efficient means of transportation.
In other words, the risks of not having something can be equal or greater to the risks of having it. Indeed, one might reasonably interpret the precautionary principle to mean precisely the opposite of what most of its proponents now think. That is: Since the vast majority of scientific advances have proven of untold benefit to the human race, precaution requires that no new product be restricted until sufficient time has passed to allow meaningful consideration of its risks and benefits.
So it's probably not altogether rational to get all worked up because GMO corn killed some monarch butterflies when products like vitamin-A enhanced rice promise to save millions from premature blindness. Yet unfortunately coming first-world restrictions on GMO imports will undoubtedly mean that those countries that need GMOs the most will be slow to adopt them. Especially unfortunate in light of the fact that, given what the future has generally been in the past, the benefits of vitamin-A rice will probably be small potatoes compared to much else to come--if only we have the courage to let it.
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