ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s biotechnology has been promoted as a symbol of European progress. As a clean technology, agbiotech was meant to enhance efficient agri-production and thus fulfil the beneficent promise of a European Biosociety, like its counterpart of the Information Society. By the early 1990s biotech symbolised the ‘knowledge-based society’ and eventually the Lisbon agenda. At the 2000 Lisbon meeting of the European Council, Ministers committed the EU to become ‘the most competitive and dynamic, knowledgebased economy in the world, capable of sustainable growth with more and better jobs’. By then, however, agbiotech was becoming stigmatised, opposed and blocked throughout
Europe. ‘GM food’ was widely portrayed as a pollutant contaminating science, agriculture, the environment and democratic sovereignty. The phrase ‘GM-free’ was playing a role similar to ‘nuclear-free’ in the 1980s. Few farmers have chosen to cultivate the GM crops which gained EU approval for commercial use. Even for such products, safety claims have remained in dispute. How did agbiotech undergo such a reversal of its early status and economic ambition?
Answers can be found by locating agbiotech within a wider political-economic project – and vice versa. In this article the concept of ‘safety’ will be elaborated in several ways: as contending accounts of risks to be clarified, and as a metaphor for a socio-political system favourable or not to agbiotech. Risk issues proliferated and expanded from the late 1980s onwards. Questions were asked
about whether or how genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could be made predictably safe for the environment. In the margins of this risk debate, a philosopher turned that predictive question into a normative issue. He analysed how organisms were being standardised for predictable, efficient agri-industrial uses through genetic modification, and thus how nature was being made safe for agbiotech (Sagoff 1991). This re-ordering of nature as standard commodities meant a normative shift in what counts as natural, beneficial, rational, etc. Expanding on his insight, this article analyses an entire socio-political system. How was
Europe being re-ordered in ways more favourable to agbiotech in the 1990s? What difficulties were encountered? How was Europe becoming less safe for agbiotech by the end of the decade?
