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Beyond Biosafety: Opening up the GM Crop Debate
Sally Brooks - 10 September 2009
In developing countries, debates around transgenic crops have tended to focus on biosafety and its regulation at the risk of ignoring broader ethical concerns. A new project by the STEPS Centre, based at IDS, is exploring how to open-up these debates among civil society actors.
GM crop debates and biosafety
Debates about transgenic (genetically-modified) crops have become highly polarised across the globe. In the process, civil society organisations and movements have emerged as key actors in debates on agricultural biotechnology, alongside more traditional actors such as governmental and ‘expert' science institutions.
In developing countries, biosafety and its regulation has become the lightening rod for debates about transgenic crops. This reflects an international focus on harmonising national biosafety systems. A new STEPS Centre project seeks to open up debates among civil society actors to look beyond biosafety and to address important broader concerns such as ethics around investment and technology deployment.
Closing down
This focus on biosafety has tended to narrow national biotechnology debates to the control and management of risks, rather than broader political-economic and ethical concerns about investment in and deployment of technologies.
These dynamics at the national level reflect global efforts to harmonise national frameworks around an OECD ‘ideal', seen as the benchmark for biosafety capacity building in developing countries. But is a uniform pattern of closure based on frameworks developed in such different circumstances a realistic or even desirable goal? Or should regulations be built from the bottom up, in response to local contexts and needs? Particularly given the differences in regulatory reach and capacity between developing countries - and a far from uniform interpretation of the OECD ‘ideal' even among OECD countries themselves.
Opening up
The STEPS Centre's pilot project will explore how debates about and beyond biosafety can be ‘opened up'. The project will focus, initially, on Kenya and the Philippines - two countries that have been seen, at different times, as regional ‘test cases' for biotechnology and biosafety regulatory development. The aim will be to connect civil society actors in the two countries for an exchange of ideas and lessons about how, when and where opportunities exist - or might be created - to open up these debates in new ways. Hannington Odame, Executive Director of the Centre for African Bio-Entrepreneurship (CABE), and STEPS Centre partner is collaborating on the project.
Sally Brooks is the Beyond Biosafety Project Convenor at the STEPS Centre
Image: iStock photos
Related Publications
- Glover, D. (2009) 'Undying Promise: Agricultural Biotechnology’s Pro-poor Narrative, Ten Years on', STEPS Working Paper 15, Brighton: STEPS Centre
- Glover, D. (2008) 'Made by Monsanto: the Corporate Shaping of GM Crops as a Technology for the Poor', STEPS Working Paper 11, Brighton: STEPS Centre
- Scoones, I. and Glover, D. (2009) 'GM crops in Africa: polarising the debate'
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