Experts question precautionary approach

Experts question precautionary approach

Nature 407, 551 (2000) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

October 6, 2000

COLIN MACILWAIN

[CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS] Eight months after the United Nations Biosafety Protocol

became the first fully fledged international treaty to incorporate the 'precautionary principle',

scientists and lawyers remain deeply divided on the principle's definition and merits.

Last week, at Harvard University's Center for International Development, experts gathered to

discuss the impact of the protocol's precautionary approach on the growth of agricultural

biotechnology. According to Calestous Juma of the Harvard centre, who convened the meeting, a

lack of clarity is causing confusion in developing countries. "It is evident that there is no real

agreement on what the precautionary principle means and how it should be applied," he says.

The principle states that potential environmental risks should be dealt with even in the absence

of scientific certainty. It has long been advocated by environmentalists, who see it as a more

effective way of managing hazards than traditional scientific risk assessments, which call for

numbers and hard proof as prerequisites for action.

Some experts say that the principle is too vague to be of much value, either legally or

scientifically. "It thrives because it is so ambiguous," says Gary Marchant, a law professor at

Arizona State University. "What you end up with is arbitrariness." The sceptics say that the

principle's impact on the spread of agricultural biotechnology around the world supports their

view.

For Luiz Anthonio Barreto de Castro, head of genetic resources and biotechnology at

EMBRAPA, the main agricultural research agency in Brazil, the application of the principle is

of pressing concern. Transgenic crops have been banned in his country since 1998, he says,

because of a judge's interpretation of a version of the principle included in the Rio Declaration,

which emerged from the Earth Summit held in Brazil in 1992.

Yet in India, according to Aarti Gupta of Yale University, the principle has contributed to a

well-balanced process in which extensive field trials are preceding the introduction of

commercial transgenic crops. Indian regulators support the principle, she says, viewing sound

science and a precautionary approach as synonymous.

John Mugabe of the African Centre for Technology Studies in Nairobi says that his continent

has split into a hierarchy of approaches. Countries such as South Africa and Kenya are

building regulatory regimes based on the principle. But poorer nations cannot do so, he says,

and may instead accept transgenic crops simply on the basis that the United States considers

them safe.

Critics of biotechnology claim that industrial lobbyists are trying to undermine the Biosafety

Protocol. "The precautionary principle is now becoming enshrined in international law, and that

is upsetting some powerful interests," says Philip Bereano of the University of Washington in

Seattle. Some critics are even unhappy with Juma and Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for

International Development, for holding a seminar likely to highlight the principle's

shortcomings.

Asked if he intended to praise the principle, or to bury it, Juma laughed and said: "We're a

research institute. We're not interested in taking positions on the subject."

http://www.iisd.ca/sd/biotech/