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headlines about ‘Frankenstein foods’ intuitively resonated
with these concerns at the height of the GM debate in the
United Kingdom.
The perceived inability of governments to impose
adequate controls mixes with these concerns. Such
perception is based on clear evidence of regulatory and
management controls (and their failures) across multiple
apparently unrelated hazards. For example, the fact that
GM crops have met with such vehement public reaction
in the United Kingdom compared to the United States
has been linked, at least in part, to people’s experience of
the mismanagement of bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE). That disease involved risks that obviously are entirely
unrelated to GM — yet both speak to issues around
the intensification of agriculture and the trans-boundary
movement of hazards.
Recent comparative work 17 looking at responses to GM
crops in Mexico, Brazil, and India confirms the strength
of cultural and political factors (see also case study in
Chapter 2). In Mexico, for example, maize has a deep
cultural resonance with long-held traditional practices of
food preparation, and a symbolic resonance with plants and
seeds in everyday lives. Negative reactions to GM maize
are therefore a complex mix of concerns about the insult
to tradition, and a lack of credibility in seed companies,
regulatory bodies and government. In India, negative reaction
has particularly been symbolized as a struggle against
multinational companies and globalization. In relation to a
deeply traditional and important non-food crop — cotton
— the deliberate importation of Bt cotton led to fears of
increased dependency on certain seed companies.
For the United Kingdom, the current rise in local
conflicts around proposals to extract shale gas by hydraulic
fracturing (fracking) appears to reflect a combination
of Nimby-esque responses to the local impacts on the
environment (such as noise and water pollution); threats
to the social and economic status quo; and a sense of
decision-making isolation from the potentially affected
communities. Importantly, there is a lack of saliency in terms
of the national need for alternative energy supplies (see the
fracking case study in Section 2 for more on this issue).
Fracking is viewed primarily as an environmental rather
than an energy issue, as differences in responses by socioeconomic
status and rural versus urban locations in the
United States have confirmed 18 . However, in local contexts
where new exploitation of gas supplies has seen rapid ‘boom
town’ change in rural areas that have endured extended
periods of economic decline, risk can be associated with
opportunity 19 .
The fracking debate resonates with the divergent
responses to energy-from-waste incineration. In countries
like Denmark and Sweden, the technology is often part of
the mix in the local supply of heat and energy. In the United
Kingdom it is primarily a waste management solution, and
has frequently sparked local concern about the need for
large-scale plants with all of the perceived local dis-benefits.
In Scandinavia, plants tend to be smaller because they
are sized to meet local heat-supply needs, and to process
lower volumes of feed material that arise within reasonable
travel distances. In general, a more nuanced understanding
of ‘place based’ as opposed to ‘project based’ concerns
seems important, not least when national policies need to
be implemented locally (such as in relation to large-scale
energy infrastructures 20 ).
Regulatory Cultures
Normal and sustained cultures of trust can be dramatically
challenged by new risks. This is evinced by the differing
regulatory approaches to interpreting ‘hazard’ and ‘risk’, and
to dealing with uncertainty, that reflect cultural scientific
differences.
The difference between the UK approach to risk
management and the European precautionary regulatory
approach to hazards has long been evident. One wellknown
and particularly economically-damaging impact of
this difference was seen in the response to BSE. When this
previously unknown cattle disease erupted in the United
Kingdom in the mid-1980s, it was acknowledged that a new
variant (nv) of the human encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt-Jacob
disease (nvCJD), might be caused by exposure to BSE. This
led the European Union to impose a ban on the worldwide
export of beef products from the UK, plunging the country’s
beef industry into potential disaster.
At the heart of the regulatory response was a cultural
difference in the approach to scientific uncertainty. The
British approach traditionally excludes abstract uncertainties
or knowledge limitations and applies a pragmatic,
instrumentalist approach. The continental European tradition
is founded in a culture that tends to integrate natural
and human sciences more directly. Hence, precautionary
regulatory intervention is often taken in response to a
plausible risk, even though pathways of exposure cannot be
demonstrated 21 .
Differences in agricultural policy between the European
Union and the Unites States underpin their divergent
approach to GM crop risks. Regulatory differences have
been analyzed in terms of the different cultural and
economic meanings of agriculture 22 . US farms have more
often been seen as analogous to factories, separate from
wilderness and nature conservation areas. In Europe,
however, farmland is widely regarded as an integral
component of the environment — an aesthetic landscape,
wildlife habitat, and part of the local heritage. Importantly,
farms are a traceable guarantee of food quality. So EU
Genetic modification
drives to the heart of
concerns about ‘mucking
around with nature’.