Can you imagine a government bureaucrat banning you from eating potatoes--because they’re an exotic new food that might prove harmful to your health?
The chairman of one of the world’s largest food companies can.
“If the humble potato were being introduced in Europe now, rather than in the sixteenth century, it would never have got though the regulatory regime,” said Niall FitzGerald of Unilever in a recent speech. “Given the choice between the precautionary principle and a plate of fish and chips, which would you rather have?”
It doesn’t take a taste for fish and chips to understand FitzGerald’s point: Governments around the world must strike a common-sense balance between protecting consumers from unhealthy products and strangling innovation with red tape and regulation. In Europe, they’re not doing this.
“To cease innovation is to accept stagnation and failure,” said FitzGerald. It is also to accept misery that need not occur.
The products the Europeans would block from the marketplace include genetically modified foods that provide the best hope our world has for feeding its hungry. More than half a billion people live in sub-Saharan Africa, and the United Nations estimates that 41 percent of them are malnourished. At a time when general prosperity is increasing throughout most of the world, the UN thinks the malnourishment rate in sub-Saharan Africa actually will rise over the next decade.
Last year, President Bush called free trade “a moral imperative.” This is the sort of thing he was talking about, Delivering life-saving food products to starving people. He might have extended his stirring remarks to include agricultural innovations that fight disease and boost crop yield, too, because it’s only through these improvements that we stand a chance to make a dent in those bleak numbers from Africa.
“We must embrace change, not fear it,” said FitzGerald in his speech. “We have become frightened of what is new, and reluctant to engage in rational scientific debate.”
Fear of change is a common and understandable phenomenon, but allowing it to persist requires that we base it on something other than raw emotion. When microwave ovens were introduced on the market, some critics feared that zapping our food would rob it of nutritional value. This, of course, just isn’t true, and the “controversy” over microwaves soon dissipated. A century ago, canned food had to survive a similar kind of scrutiny.
Can you imagine feeding a family today without using microwaves and canned food? A generation from now, people will be saying the same thing about genetically modified food--so long as wise heads prevail right now.
Unfortunately, there’s too much fear in the air. Genetically modified foods represent one of the most important scientific developments of our times. They’re simply a high-tech form of crossbreeding and hybridization, which are practices farmers have engaged in ever since primitive societies of hunters and gatherers decided to quit their nomadic ways, settle down in one place, plant crops and raise animals. Yet FitzGerald is exactly right when he describes “numerous instances of alarmist and hysterical reporting, law-breaking, and pseudo-science.”
These problems certainly afflict the debate over genetically modified crops in the United States, but the problem is much worse in Europe. Says FitzGerald: “It seems sometimes that Europe has taken a step backwards into a time when the scientific discoveries of Galileo could be regarded as incorrect on the basis of dogma.”
That’s bad news for European consumers, who will see their range of market choices cut down by know-nothing regulators. It’s also bad news for American farmers, who grow so much of what might be sold on the grocery-store shelves of Europe.
There is not a single scrap of authentic scientific evidence showing a health problem associated with genetically modified food. The enemies of science do not have reason on their side, though they do have the same level of passion that animated Galileo’s persecutors.
Their passion is misdirected. It should be focused on figuring out ways to help the starving people of Africa--and, indeed, starving people all over the world. Today, however, they’re committed to sparking controversy where there should be no controversy at all and regulating perfectly good products out of the marketplace.
Remember what FitzGerald said about the potato--and keep it in mind the next time you go to a restaurant and someone asks, “Would you like fries with that?”
Dean Kleckner is Chairman of Truth About Trade and Technology, a national grassroots organization based in Des Moines, IA formed by farmers to promote expanded trade and advancements in agricultural biotechnology.
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