Precaution Without Perversity : A Comprehensive Application of the Precautionary Principle to Genetically Modified Crops

The precautionary principle (PP) has sometimes been invoked to justify a ban on GM crops. This justification, however, takes credit for reducing potential public health and environmental risks that might result from a ban but ignores any blame for risks that the ban might generate or prolong. Contributing to such one-sided accounting is the fact that most formulations of the precautionary principle provide no guidance for evaluating a policy if it results simultaneously in uncertain benefits and uncertain harm. Accordingly, policy cures based on such one-sided applications of the PP could aggravate the underlying disease. This article develops a framework to evaluate policies where the net result might be ambiguous because their effects-both beneficial and harmful-are uncertain. This framework attempts to sort out competing claims on both sides of the ledger by considering, among other things, the nature, magnitude, and the certainty of the positive and negative effects of a ban, and the likelihood that a ban would reduce or aggravate those effects. The application of this framework shows that a ban on GM crops is likely to do more harm to public health (because a ban would retard reductions in global hunger, malnutrition, and diseases of affluence) as well as to the environment (because a ban would increase land, water and chemical inputs devoted to agriculture, further intensifying the major threats to global biodiversity). Accordingly, the article concludes that an even handed application of the PP requires that GM crops should be encouraged rather than banned, provided due caution is exercised. Corollaries to this result are: (a) a ban on GM crops would be contrary to the spirit and letter of the international Convention on Biological Diversity which aims to protect biodiversity, preferably using in situ conservation, and (b) a policy to ban all GM crops ought not to come under the purview of the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol