ABSTRACT
Early work on the precautionary principle, including that of the conveners of the January 1998 Wingspread Conference on the Precau tionary Principle, was based on the assumption that the principle was a regulatory backstop to bad decisions. The principle was seen as a way of making decisions to prevent harm after a product or activity was fully developed and ready for market-or even, in some cases, al ready in use. But much of the analysis since Wingspread has con cluded that the regulatory process is too late a stage at which to exercise true precaution.1 The emergence of problems that call for pre cautionary regulation indicates that the wrong questions have been asked, or that hard questions were omitted during product develop ment or implementation, such as large-scale deployment of GE crops.
