Dark side of precautionary principle.

The government of Zambia--with three million people facing death by starvation--on October 29 gave its final refusal to distribute U.S. grain already stored there to help feed its starving population. Zambia's Agriculture Minister Mundia Sikatana invoked the "precautionary principle" as his rationale--that is, since the grain was produced through the use of modern biotechnology, it has not been proven to be perfectly safe and may present some future risks to people or the environment. The Zambian government also said it fears European Union countries would refuse imports from Zambia since their crops might run the risk of "contamination" from the genetically modified grain. Currently the EU has a moratorium on approvals of GM crops and will soon be establishing rules requiring traceability and labeling of foods produced through biotechnology

Oh yes--the reason given for the EU's own actions is the "precautionary principle," which the EU is busily enshrining in every treaty and agreement relating to health, safety, and the environment so that it can be a guiding principle of international law. The precautionary principle as used by the EU is not based on any scientific evidence of real risks but on the hypothetical.

Numerous international scientific bodies, including the World Health Organization, have declared that food produced through biotechnology is as safe or even safer than conventional food. And the environmental benefits of agricultural biotechnology are already being shown--less use of pesticides, low tillage, greater yield per acre so that less land is needed for farming. Future benefits are in development, such as crops that can be grown in inhospitable soils or climates--drought-resistant or salt-tolerant crops, for example. Yet these advances are threatened by the widespread acceptance of the precautionary principle. The Zambian decision to invoke the precautionary principle illustrates how a bad idea can have drastic consequences.

While officials in the EU, as well as many European aid agencies, have begged several African countries including Zambia to accept the donations of grain, some of those officials and organizations are at the same time pushing for further extensions of the precautionary principle into the food-safety area. They ignore the fact that the precautionary principle is a one-way ratchet. It obsesses about imagined or potential risks of new technology or innovations while ignoring the real risks of the status quo. In the tragic case of Zambia and other African countries with severe famines, the overriding risk is imminent--millions of people dying because they don't have food.

Millions of starving people facing almost certain death are considered less real than a remote and unproven possibility of future harm. Precaution should mandate that we need to get rid of the precautionary principle.