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to seek opportunities for more substantial returns in newly
emerging markets, the powerhouses of the twenty-first
century economy.
2. Systemic risk
A more globalized and networked world has many benefits,
particularly for the prospect of information sharing and
innovation. However, complexity is also positively correlated
with uncertainty and risk, and increased complexity can
heighten vulnerability within global systems. Increasingly
complex global networks diminish individuals’ and
governments’ abilities to accurately predict the intended and
unintended outcomes of their decisions 33 .
Geographic concentration has resulted in efficiency
gains, but has also made the global system less resilient to
single shock events. Urbanization and increasing population
density in metropolitan regions facilitates the transmission
of diseases, while concentration of capital and production in
a few geographic regions creates the possibility of massive
market disruptions.
Systemic risk can be understood as the potential for
holistic systemic break down, as opposed to a more partial
breakdown of individual system components. This complete
collapse occurs when an adverse systemic shock cannot be
CASE STUDY
RISK AND INNOVATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES:
A NEW APPROACH TO GOVERNING GM CROPS
Philip Macnaghten (Durham University/University of Campinas) and Susana Carro-Ripalda (Durham University)
32
The key objectives of the GCSA’s report are
to raise awareness of risk and innovation
concepts, to share issues of common concern
and interest, and to promote learning across borders.
A parallel set of objectives informed a recent Durham
University project, GMFuturos 1 , which was funded by
the John Templeton Foundation. The project set out
to use novel risk and innovation concepts to
examine the adequacy of current models of risk
and regulation of genetically modified (GM)
crops, and to propose alternatives.
Given that existing governance mechanisms
of GM organisms (GMOs) have suffered
polarization and controversy in Europe,
and increasingly also in North, Central
and South America, there is an
evident need to encompass broader
factors and concerns within scienceinformed
processes. An influential
2009 Royal Society working group
concluded that global food security
requires the sustainable intensification
of global agriculture, with new cropproduction
methods, including GM and
other innovations 2 . Although the rise of
GM crops has been dramatic, their uptake
has not been the smooth nor universal
transition predicted by its advocates. Even
those countries where approvals have been
impressively rapid have seen significant controversy.
All too often the regulation of GM crops has been
challenged as inadequate, even biased — and in some
settings, such as India and Mexico, the planting of
certain crops has been judicially suspended. Our strategic
question was to examine why GM crops have not been
universally accepted as a public good. If we do not address
this, we will fail to understand the conditions under which
GM crops may contribute to global food security in an
inclusive manner that meets human needs.
Current approaches to the regulation and governance
of GM crops have been dominated by risk-based
assessment methodologies. The assumption has
been that the key criterion mediating the release
of GMOs into the environment should be an
independent case-by-case risk assessment of their
impacts on human health and the environment.
One consequence is that the public debate
surrounding GM crops has been boiled down to
one of safety: are they safe to eat, and are
they safe to the environment?
In relation to these questions, we remain
agnostic. Our argument is that we need, in
addition, to ask different questions — for if
we are to govern GM crops in a socially and
scientifically robust fashion, we need to engage
with the issue within the terms of the debate as
it is considered by an inclusive array of actors.
The fieldwork for GMFuturos was undertaken
in three of the global ‘rising powers’, namely
Mexico, Brazil and India, and involved ethnographic,
interview and focus group research with farmers,
scientists and publics 3, 4 . In Mexico, we found that
maize is highly culturally resonant, and that protests
against GM maize have come to signify the defence of
Mexican culture and identity in the face of an unwanted
form of imposed neoliberal globalization. In Brazil, we