Genetic Engineering in Agriculture:

Genetically modified crops and foodstuff have been highly controversial for environmental, health, and ethical reasons. The controversies have been world-wide, but most prominent in the European Union, for reasons that include distrust of the regulatory authorities, scientists and technocratic decision making. An informal moratorium in the EU came recently to an end, without solving the underlying problems. In response to the criticisms, the European governments have attempted to improve the risk assessment methods and its scientific basis, and to tailor public policies to the growing demand for transparency, accountability, and public participation. This paper proposes two novel approaches to including the public in evaluating the impacts of food and agricultural biotechnology and present and future applications. The first is to use the growing practice of sustainability reporting by companies. The most visible among those, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), when implemented properly, includes a wide range of stakeholders, including the financial institutions, companies, NGOs and the civil society, in an interactive multistakeholder discourse and collaboration. Moreover, the reporting exercise would open the discussion about the R&D around new GMO products, and could mitigate potential adverse effects in an early stage (Constructive Technology Assessment). We specifically propose initiating a broadly based societal initiative aimed at developing of a new sectoral supplement of GRI Guidelines, specifically designed for the food and agricultural biotechnology sector. The second approach entails experimentation on a small scale with a multitude of stakeholders involved. We argue that such Bounded Socio-Technical Experiments (BSTE) are effective venues for higher-order learning among participants, meaning reformulating problem definitions and interpretive frames. Such experiments may slow down innovation processes, but may increase mutual understanding and trust between parties with widely different worldviews. Sustainability reports and BSTEs have been so far applied in limited cases, none of which included highly controversial technologies such as biotechnology; they need further elaboration and testing to become possibly highly effective concepts and tools for mitigating conflicts on the societal implications of emerging technologies, and to lead to better public policies and greater social trust.