ABSTRACT
During the early 1990s, as the European Community, and later the European Union (EU), endeavoured to ‘complete the Single Market’, and as the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established, many economists and trade policy analysts hoped and expected that national differences between technical standards providing consumer and environmentalprotection, such as those covering food safety, would be diminished or even eradicated. Such convergence was anticipated by those who assumed that standards could and would be set solely or predominantly by reference to ‘sound science’. Suchconvergencehas,tosaythe least, been incomplete and in the case of genetically modified (GM) crops in the EU the prospect of convergence has sharply receded. This chapter first analyses the role of scientific evidence and expertise in regulatory policy-making and their interactions with non-scientific considerations, such as economic and political factors. It then uses that analytical framework to explain why regulatory convergence has not been achieved and outlines the conditions under which greater convergence might occur, or under which continued diversity may be sustainable.
