PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE AND
I N S T I T U T I O N A L I N N O V AT I O N
Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation [PAGANINI]
Contract No. CIT2-CT-2004-505791 . Deliverable Number 16
Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski with Maria Kousis and Yannis Volakakis
6th EU Framework Programme for Research and Technology

Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation [PAGANINI]
Contract No. CIT2-CT-2004-505791 . Deliverable Number 16
WORK PACKAGE 6 _ GM FOOD
Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski with Maria Kousis and Yannis Volakakis

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The Paganini Project
Focussing on selected key areas of the 6th EU Framework Programme for Research and
Technology, PAGANINI investigates the ways in which participatory practices contribute to problem solving in a number of highly contentious fields of EU governance. PAGANINI looks at a particular dynamic cluster of policy areas concerned with what we call “the politics of life”: medicine, health, food, energy, and environment.
Under “politics of life” we refer to dimensions of life that are only to a limited extent under human control - or where the public has good reasons to suspect that there are serious limitations to socio-political control and steering. At the same time, “politics of life” areas are strongly connected to normative, moral and value-based factors, such as a sense of responsibility towards the non-human nature, future generations and/or one‟s own body. In these areas traditional mechanisms of governance can be seen to hamper policymaking and much institutional experimentation has been taking place.
The overall objective of the proposed research is
 to analyse how fields of governance related to the “politics of life” constitute a new and particular challenge for citizen participation and the generation of active trust
 to illuminate how citizens‟ participation in key areas of European research and technology policy that are connected to the “politics of life” can be made more effective and appropriate,
 to investigate the changing role of civic participation in the context of multi-level governance in the European Union,
 to contribute to institutional re-design in a the emerging European “politics of life”.
Work package 6 – GM-Food: the role of participation in a technoscientific controversy
The WP will examine the role played by public participation in the regulation of agricultural biotechnology in Europe. In particular it aims:
 to understand the development of the social controversy over the use of agricultural biotechnology in Europe;
 to identify, categorise and assess existing and emerging participatory practices in
Europe, and assess the way in which they have succeeded in generating innovative governance and active trust, with attention to the „inclusiveness‟ of participation in terms of gender, age, class and ethnicity;
 to analyse tensions and conflicts between emergent participatory governance practices at the national level and transnational bodies such as the EU and WTO; and
 to draw out implications for the effective design of participatory institutions.
This report
This report is the final report of work package 6.

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Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ 3
Executive summary .......................................................................................................... 4
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 10
2. The context: the gene and competing European imperatives ..................................... 13
2.1 – The meaning of the gene ......................................................................................... 13
2.2 – The meanings of GM ............................................................................................... 15
2.3 – Competing European imperatives ............................................................................. 20
The innovatory imperative............................................................................................ 21
The precautionary imperative ....................................................................................... 27
3. The GM controversy in Europe: the narrative .............................................................. 35
3.1 Europe ..................................................................................................................... 35
The establishment of the EU regulatory framework for GMOs ............................................ 35
Consents and discontents ............................................................................................. 38
The call for labelling .................................................................................................... 41
Public unrest, institutional void, bans and moratoria ........................................................ 46
Changes to the regulatory frame work ........................................................................... 51
3.2. Greece .................................................................................................................... 58
Introduction ............................................................................................................... 58
Phase I. The beginning of institutional innovation: formation of concern and initiatives about GMOs, early-late nineties .................................................................................... 60
Phase II. The moratorium, GMO infiltration, and participatory governance, late nineties to 2004 .......................................................................................................... 68
Phase III: Coexistence, GM-free Balkans, and institutional innovation, 2004 and beyond ...................................................................................................................... 78
3.3. The United Kingdom ................................................................................................. 90
Phase I: The arrival of GM food and crops, 1996-1998 ..................................................... 90
Phase II: Institutional innovation, 1998-9 ...................................................................... 92
Phase III, AEBC and GM Nation , 2000-2004 ................................................................. 101
4. The politics of life in the GM controversy .......................................................................... 115
4.1 - Europe as a technological zone ............................................................................... 115
4.2 - The DRD: governing GMOs as a special category. Life, pollution and technology ........... 116
4.3 - Institutional ambiguity and the transition from risk to uncertainty ............................... 117
4.4 - The innovation of the new regime of coexistence: From (nation) states to (global) markets, from scientific governance to consumer choice. ................................................... 119
4.5 - Science and its others: spaces, separations and orderings in the governance of
GMOs .......................................................................................................................... 121
4.6 - Spaces, separations and reorderings in the UK ......................................................... 126
5. Performing publics and participation ........................................................................ 132
6. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 145
Glossary of acronyms ................................................................................................... 151
Key EU directives, regulations and guidelines .............................................................. 152
Interviews .................................................................................................................... 155
References ................................................................................................................... 160

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Acknowledgments
This report was written by Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski with Maria Kousis and Yannis Volakakis. Kousis and Volakakis researched the Greek case study, were the lead authors of section 3.2, and commented on drafts of the other sections.
The UK team is grateful for the generous cooperation of those who agreed to be interviewed for the project. The Greek team also gratefully acknowledges the assistance of interviewees and informants from state agencies (especially I. Hondropoulos from
YPEHODE and K. Anagnostou from YPAAT), NGOs (especially M. Pispini from
Greenpeace and K. Mpalias, legal advisor of Greenpeace), universities, members of bioethics committees and other fora.

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Executive summary
This report is about the conflict over Genetically Modified Organisms in food and agriculture between 1990 and 2006. It looks at the dynamics of this conflict within the
European Union and two of its member states which had contrasting responses, Greece and Great Britain. This „Battle over GMOs‟ has been one of the sharpest so far in the
„biotech revolution‟ threatening to derail the new technology. It thus provides an important case for the exploration of the key themes that the PAGANINI Project takes as its focus – the destabilising potential of the „politics of life‟ and the role of participation in the governance of such contentious policy areas. This report therefore explores the patterns of participation and governance, of regulation and contestation in the GMO controversy. Its conclusions may be summarised as follows:
 The conflict over GM was structured by two contradictory imperatives, built into the European Union’s original GMO regulatory framework of the 1990
Deliberate Release Directive (DRD): On the one hand there was an imperative to foster a climate of innovation and economic growth, while on the other, an imperative to address the precautionary concerns around the potential impact of these innovations on health and the environment. Thus while being committed to the free movement of GMOs within European space, the DRD created a special regulatory category of the GMO, with each variety needing to go through a process of approval before gaining admission to this space. This regulatory category bore the cultural charge of dealing with „life‟ remade as a technology, a commodity and as a potential form of pollution. It was therefore entangled in questions of both ecosocial complexity and uncertainty and also in popular conceptions of natural and social order. However, having highlighted these precautionary concerns, the 1990
DRD then made no provisions for post-release monitoring, labelling or traceability of these products once admitted into the European regulatory space. This tension shaped the dynamics of the ensuing conflict within the EU, creating a regulatory void that drew in new participants and which allowed various parties including food retailers, nature conservation bodies and member states to demand a moratorium and push for a new round of regulation. The Deliberate Release Directive‟s delineation of

5 the GMO as a separate category of regulatory object had the further consequence of bringing into being the opposite category of „non-GM‟. This latter category was to create new opportunities for parallel, „quality‟ bio-economic strategies, as individual farmers, regions and even whole countries such as Austria and Greece sought to gain added value by appropriating this opposing „non-GM‟ category. This development has the potential to alter the innovatory imperative by opening up new paths of innovation, challenging a linear view of progress that demands rDNA engineering for an intensive agri-industrial model.
 Different patterns of contestation, participation and governance were manifest in different member states: The two national case studies in this report, Greece and Britain exemplified two divergent responses by to the political crisis over GMOs.
One response was to ban GM varieties from the member states territory, allowed as a temporary measure under a special article of the Deliberate Release Directive. Greece was one of seven EU member states following this path, which in addition to its leadership in the late 1990‟s of calls for the EU wide moratorium, made it representative of the more GM sceptical position within the Union. The UK government, on the other hand, represented a more pro-GM stance amongst member states, with its attempt at the managed release of GMOs into society and the environment. These two responses lead to different dynamics of the controversies in the two countries. In Greece, the prime discourse and practice was of „defending‟ national borders from GM „contamination‟ – and this was to an extent shared by both opponents of GM and the state. In Britain, however, the situation was much more polarised, with government and industry attempts to release GMOs provoking more intense and widespread resistance and new forms of participation in new kinds of arenas. Consequently the UK government found itself engaging in a large-scale public participation exercise called GM Nation ; no such formal participatory arrangement was found in Greece. However, rather than representing the emergence of some new, normalised regime of participatory and deliberative governance, GM
Nation provides an example of mass participation momentarily employed as a crisismanagement tool. The outlines of a possible new GM regulatory regime can be traced, although such a regime is more marked by the enrolment of market-based rationales rather than deliberative participatory ones. In observing these contrasting

6 patterns between Britain and Greece, a pattern of national and post-national regulatory modes and responses to GMOs clearly emerges. While Greece exemplifies a struggle that is still largely organised around national boundaries, in the UK the battle lines began to shift to follow new contours that flow within and beyond nation states, between GM and Non-GM fields and along supermarket shelves.
 In its controlled introduction into the European Union, the GMO was performed as a regulatory object by dividing science from politics. Dominant expert based regulatory discourses and practices have tried to constitute the GMO as a purely technical object of regulation, attempting to strip it from its intrinsic social and cultural dimensions. Nevertheless the new technology‟s introduction became deeply re-entangled in these, with the public controversy bringing forward contested meanings which could not be managed within purified technocratic discourses and regulatory spaces with any legitimacy. Thus we see some attempts at the improvisation of new institutions and spaces where „other‟ discourses and criteria defined as „ethical‟, „social‟, „cultural‟ or „political‟ were permitted a voice. Yet new questions then emerge about the relations between these realms of „science‟ and its
„others‟, of their division of labour and relative status within the regulatory hierarchy.
These emerged at their sharpest in the Britain, as the Greek governmental ban on
GM varieties both softened its domestic conflict and deployed scientific discourses within the European arena that aligned with and masked its economic, cultural and political „others‟. In the intensity of the British contest, a pattern of bifurcation emerged, with the government supplementing ACRE (its traditional narrowly science based expert GM advisory body) with a new advisory commission on the „wider issues‟ called the AEBC that included more diverse forms of expertise and knowledge, including social scientists. Furthermore, these bodies draw their authority from two parallel public experiments crucial to the performance of the UK controversy – ACRE from the Farm Scale Evaluations and the AEBC from GM
Nation . This institutional bifurcation attempts to keep nature and society separate, to ensure that the public will only deliberate on values, rather than on facts – a dynamic which is further strengthened by the timing of GM Nation to finish before the publication of the results of the Farm Scale Evaluations. The separation also serves to leave conventional technocratic modes of governance intact, with the classical

7 modern apex of the executive power of the state remaining as the ultimate decisionmaking power, the point at which the separate information feeds from the different regulatory experiments can be combined.
 Public engagement exercises are characterised by battles over the multiple, overlapping and shifting definitions of the public. The open meetings of GM
Nation attracted specialist „engaged publics‟ around the issue. Those worried about the „representativeness‟ of these „engaged publics‟ counterpoised them to a „silent majority‟ or „general public‟ defined by ambivalence and disengagement and constructed by focus groups or opinion polls. These different publics are deployed by different parties to the controversy. However, rather than attempting to bypass
„engaged publics‟ as unrepresentative, these should be considered a valid part of the decision making process as knowledgeable and legitimate actors.
 The battle over GM helped to precipitate a transformation of the regulatory regime towards one of ‘coexistence’ which may in turn form a new battleground.
The GM battle resulted in an „epistemological stalemate‟ where within the traditional regulatory discourse of risk neither side could conclusively prove either the safety or harmfulness of the technology. Thus the language of „coexistence‟ was evoked. This shift in regulatory regime occurred along a number of different dimensions: from (nation) states to (global) markets, from discourses of safety to those around consumer choice, and from the calculation of risk to the management of uncertainty. Firstly, the regulatory membrane was moved away from the national border, and instead began to follow new contours within and through nation states, between labelled products on supermarket shelves, and between GM and non-GM crops in fields. Secondly, the transformation involved the dethronement of positivistic „centres of calculation‟ by relativistic tropes of consumer sovereignty, forcing the former to relinquish their unquestioned primacy and instead occupy a terrain where different rationales jostle for position. Thirdly, instead of GM governance being the preserve of state-appointed experts, pronouncing definitively on calculable and specific risks, now uncertainty intensifies, associated with a proliferation of voices which are ostensibly left to be managed by the market. This is the regime of coexistence, which declares its welcome to a plurality of agricultures –
GM, organic and conventional – within the European Union. However, this new

8 regime becomes a further battleground: on the one hand it is possible that coexistence regulations could be used to stifle the new technology; on the other hand the release of GM crops into agro-ecosystems with the inevitable processes of gene flow might serve to carry the new technology into a position of dominance.

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1. Introduction
When genetically modified (GM) crops first made their entrance into global markets, agro-ecosystems and public consciousness in 1996, their full and normalised integration into European food and farming seemed imminent. Approval for the new crop varieties was being granted under the GM regulatory system that had been established by the EU with the 1990/220 Deliberate Release Directive. Protests and criticism seemed in the past, and the bio-industry and their supporters in governments felt confident in their proposals for liberalising what they already saw as an overly restrictive and precautionary deliberate release directive.
However, behind the scenes, the European GM regulatory framework had been the site of almost continuous conflict since the first „consents‟ for the release of GM plants into the European environment had been applied for. Then, as the actual prospect of the new technology entering fields and foodstuffs grew nearer, it encountered growing public controversy and rejection around Europe. As well as finding expression in protests, debates, referenda and the media, this controversy also found expression within the increasingly politicised areas of consumerism and science. Thus supermarkets, facing a collapse in consumer confidence already accelerated by the BSE crisis, found themselves on the frontline of a cultural-political battle over trust, and demanded GM labelling, declaring their products to „GM free‟ (and thus even finding a novel way to add value).
At the same time, industry and governments experienced the erosion of the authority of a singular „science‟, finding themselves operating in an increasingly pluralised epistemic polity and having to compete for trust in a knowledge market with NGOs and others.
„Outsiders‟, ranging from dissident scientists to farmers, gardeners and alternative networks around food, health and the environment, were now contesting official judgments. Questions of gene flow, antibiotic resistance or pollen movement suddenly became part of a new currency in public political debate.
In this situation (described as a „meltdown‟ of confidence), member states and sections of the EU apparatus began a strategic retreat, while at the time searching for a way to stabilise the situation and regain the initiative. On the one hand they would remain within the discourses of „sound science‟ required by the neo-liberal regulatory systems of the

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WTO and the EU. On the other hand they had to find a new political language and architecture to address public concerns. This formed a tension at the heart of many responses by member states and EU institutions when attempting to govern the GM issue. The narrowly reductionist frameworks of the EU and the WTO could neither legitimate the crops nor illuminate the barriers and problems their passage faced, for the
GM debate involved complex mixtures of science, culture, politics and economics that extended far beyond the narrow framings of the regulatory system. As the new technology became entangled in contestation and controversy, it became clear that technocratic elites would not be able to legitimately manage the introduction and governance of GMOs alone, raising the question of how new technologies are to be governed, and what the role of the public in this might be.
The development and deployment of GM crops raised enormous questions – implicit in the shape of the technology and the networks sustaining it – questions for example about the relationship people want to have with their food, each other, other species or the environment These vast cultural, political and ethical questions about what kind of nature and what kind of society we want to live in all found themselves closed off, resolved in a particular way by the „bio-industrial complex‟ that surrounded the production, regulation and governance of GM crops.
Into this void stepped an array of actors including subpolitical networks around food, health and agricultural biodiversity who began to find a voice, challenging the existing expert based system of the Directive. In this context, various member states along with the European Commission began to search for ways to manage this rupture of legitimacy. This report examines the responses of two member states in particular,
Britain and Greece, and the novel practices these states and societies began to develop to attempt to manage this crisis. Greece, with a strongly anti-GM population and a government with little outward enthusiasm for agricultural biotechnology, was one of five member states to impose national bans on GMOs invoking „Article 16‟ of the
Directive, and the leader of the related group which pushed the EU-wide de facto moratorium on new consents. The UK on the other hand, as one of the most pro-GM member states, was reluctant to go down this path of national bans. Instead, it attempted

12 to proceed with the deployment of GM agriculture, but in the face of mounting social resistance and wider unease and was forced to embark on a series of institutional manoeuvres, including a series of public experiments and debates. Because of the national ban in Greece for most of the period, the situation between the government and civil society was less polarised, and thus the patterns of public engagement and institutional innovation were different. Thus these two different initial responses, either a national ban and EU ban or an attempted managed introduction of the technology provided very different terrains of struggle on which the attempted governance of
GMOs was played out. We analyse the changing patterns of regulation within the EU, the reworking of the distinction between „GM‟ and „non-GM‟, the shifting significance of national boundaries in the spatial organisation of this distinction, and the transition towards a regime of „coexistence‟.
In analysing these patterns of governance and participation of technoscientific innovation, we pay attention to possible transformations of „classical modernity‟ and high modernist statecraft (Scott 1998). Crudely, such classical modernist forms correspond to the nationally organised formations of capital and society that reached their zenith in the middle years of the twentieth century. Associated with this form are centralised and technocratic modes of governance with scientific expertise privileged over public participation and playing the key role in regulation, especially in areas of science policy and high-tech ventures. This analysis is also informed by Latour‟s (1993) observations of the purifications at work in the „modernist constitution‟, with its separations of „nature‟ from „society‟ and „science‟ from „politics‟. These categories form certain discourses and spaces within which the governance of technoscience is performed. We examine the patterns of regulation and their performance within these discursive spaces and also the constructions of the „public‟ which these spaces permit and exclude from the process.

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2. The context: the gene and competing European imperatives
2.1 – The meaning of the gene
At the centre of the battle over GM food and crops stands „the gene‟ as one of the great iconic and ideologically potent symbols of the age. In 1953 Watson and Crick had invoked terms such as „the secret of life‟ to describe their success in understanding the structure of DNA. In the ensuing projects of molecular biology and genetic engineering such portentous language has simultaneously evoked both hope and anxiety in equal measure from different quarters. The concept of „the gene‟ and a genetic „code‟ form a significant presence within our culture, with stories and legends about the power of biotechnology simultaneously animating bio-industrialists and their social movement opponents alike.
The idea that behind the multiplicity of all living beings lays a universal „code‟ that we might be able to read has deep roots. The historian of molecular biology Lily Kay notes how 17th century scientists appropriated earlier Christian traditions to propose that nature was a book written by God – a „Book of nature‟ that could be read by scientists.
She argues that: „[i]n a vision reminiscent of the genetic code and the human genome projects, the Book of Nature in the seventeenth century awaited “decoding” by the experimental investigator equipped with an “ideal language”„ (Kay 1999). Kay traces this move through some key figures in the scientific revolution, such as Bacon, Descartes,
Galileo and Leibniz. Thus even from the 17th century the „scientific revolution‟ offered the idea that the world, with all its complexity, could nevertheless be reduced to an essential nature, the discovery of the laws of which would offer prediction and control.
However, while the disciplines associated with the industrial age – physics and chemistry
– seemed able to work within this model, the study of living beings or „natural history‟ was seen as „merely descriptive‟, lacking generalizing concepts and therefore below the level of „proper science‟. The path towards such a powerful generalising concept would not begin until the early nineteenth century, with the transformation of natural history into biology and the emergence of the concept of „life itself‟ as an abstract quality that

14 underlay the variety of living beings. Thus Foucault would famously argue that „Up to the end of the eighteenth century life does not exist: only living beings‟ (1970). To Darwin‟s concern with the origin and transformations of species would be added a focus on the transmission of heredity marked by the utilisation of Mendel‟s work. Finally with the description of DNA structure in the mid-twentieth century biology could rise in prestige, only now possessing adequate levels of abstraction and generalisation (Lewontin, 1997;
115). As Evelyn Fox Keller explains:
In the mid twentieth century, biology became a „mature science‟, that is to say, it succeeded, finally, in breaking through the formidable barrier of „life‟ that had heretofore precluded it from fully joining the mechanico-reductive tradition of the physical sciences (Keller 1992, 113).
This deeply rooted cultural legacy of reductionism meant that long before Crick and
Watson‟s 1953 description of DNA, scientists had been searching for elementary and particulate units of heredity. The language of „the gene‟ can be traced back to De Vries, in his 1889 work which used the term „pangens‟, drawing on still earlier concepts such as
Weismann‟s „determinants‟ and Darwin‟s „gemmules‟. The term „gene‟ itself was coined in
1909 by Johannsen taking the last syllable of De Vries‟ „pangen‟ (Keller 2000). This itself had its origin in the Greek genos – which itself means „origin‟. In the languages of modern
English and biology it becomes merged in meaning with the Latin for „kind‟ or „type‟ – genus . Thus the word carries a long heritage of cultural meaning, which helped it eventually to become the generalising concept in biology.
Therefore, from the very origins of the project of molecular biology in the early 20th century, these concepts proved attractive to powerful forces in society.
There is seductive empowerment in a scientific ideology in which the complexities of the highest levels can be fully controlled by mastering the simplicity of the lowest. The rise of molecular biology then, represented the selection and promotion of a particular kind of science: one whose form and

15 content best fitted with the wider dominating patterns of knowing and doing
(Kay 1993: 17, 18).
Thus molecular biology held the promise of reaching beneath the apparent complexity and multiplicity of the world to lay bare its essential code, which once revealed would offer a powerful universal lever of instrumental control. This trope was employed by
T.H. Morgan, who, when setting up the influential new Cal-Tech biology division in
1928, declared in his section on Study and Research in Biology in the Bulletin of the California
Institute of Technology , that:
„It is with a desire to lay emphasis on the fundamental principles underlying the life processes in animals and plants that an effort will be made to bring together in a single group, men whose common interests are the discovery of the unity of the phenomena of living organisms rather than in the investigation of their manifold diversities‟ (quoted in Kay, 1993, 92).
In the late 1960s the Crick and Watson 1953 story started to gain wider cultural significance, and after the advent of genetic engineering in 1973, and molecular biology‟s subsequent increased status, the gene and the genetic acquired an even more potent status within the economic and technoscientific imaginary as a lever of power.
2.2 – The meanings of GM
We have seen above that the whole project of molecular biology was deeply conditioned by cultural traditions stretching back before the Enlightenment. Even before appropriated by corporations, the idea of the genetic contained specific cultural meanings allied to reductionist forms of power and control. This meant that Cohen and Boyer‟s announcement in the early 1970s of rDNA splicing was received with an extraordinary and intertwined mixture of hope and horror. This is well illustrated by the story behind the first partnership between science and venture capital at the beginnings of the biotech revolution. One of the first responses of the molecular biologists to their own creation was to call the Asilomar Conference in February 1975 to examine the possible hazards of their work. One unanticipated effect of this conference was that it then publicised the

16 new technology to many, including the first bio-entrepreneur, Swanson, the young venture capitalist who with Boyer as a partner was to set up Genetech, the first biotech success.
For industry and government, rDNA technology fitted the perceived need for „high tech‟ innovation, seen as crucial for the advanced economies to keep ahead of growing global competition from the newly industrialising countries (Jessop 2002: 127). The adoption of the new biotechnologies by chemical corporations from the 1970s can be seen as part of this long-term shift away from bulk commodity production towards ever more valueadded, knowledge intensive products. 1973 saw three events that were hugely influential in setting the chemicals industry on this course: the publication of the first papers on rDNA engineering; the OPEC oil shock; and the banning of DDT in the USA. These last two events illustrate the crisis in which the petro-chemical complex found itself, confronted by growing ecological regulation and a perceived need to move away from oil dependence. The new biological technologies suggested a new material basis for capitalism – „back to nature‟, but a modernised, recombinant nature. These developments thus marked the beginnings of what is now coming to be called the „knowledge based bio-economy‟: knowledge-based, to escape the competition accompanying globalisation; and bio-based, to escape the growing eco-social contradictions of the petro-chemical complex.
The early years of genetic modification as a technology saw discourses of hope and grand expectations typical of technologies in that stage of development, including the circulation of apocryphal but potent stories of growing „pork chops on trees‟ (Charles,
2001). But technical limitations and the pressures of industrial investment cycles were to result in rather more humble GM products. Thus, by the second half of the 1980s, and years of basic research, the chemical corporations leading the shift towards biotechnology began seeking a range of „blockbuster‟ products that would start to realise the promise of rDNA technology and a return on their investment. There were other products, for example bovine somatrophin (BST), but focus on herbicide and insect resistant crops fitted in with Monsanto‟s existing interests around herbicides. The first products were thus herbicide resistant (HR) GM crops, along with a related line of Bt

17 crops with insect resistance. The first of these two groups of crops – HR – were genetically modified to be resistant to certain proprietary brands of broad-spectrum herbicides (Monsanto‟s „Roundup‟ and Aventis/Bayer‟s „Liberty‟) by their respective corporations. The second kind – Bt – were rendered insecticidal through the transfer of genes from the Bt bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. These two rDNA-spliced traits, engineered into maize, soy, oilseed rape, beet and cotton, would be at the centre of the regulatory conflict in the EU and around the world from the late 1990s.
The herbicide resistant products were the result of a particular techno-social matrix, shaped in particular by two salient features. Firstly, herbicide resistance was relatively simple and actually technically possible at the time, unlike most of the sensationalist claims that had originally attracted corporate and venture capital to exploit rDNA technology. (Earlier claims around yield, nutrition and nitrogen fixation can be contrasted with the actual limitations of the reductionist paradigm and practice surrounding rDNA „gene splicing‟ at the time.) Secondly, these herbicides were already a central part of the techno-economic trajectory of the chemical corporations. The chemical industry had moved into products like herbicides (and pharmaceuticals) in
1960s as a low volume, high „value added‟ solution to the maturing of global bulk chemical markets. These two factors combined to produce GM HR crop technologies like „Roundup Ready‟ and „Liberty Link‟. Likewise, the production of insect resistance through Bt was possible within the reductionist technoscientific framework of the time, and promised a new direction for the old agri-chemical sector, with high-value pesticidal crop plants pointing to a way out from the increasing regulatory and technical limits being encountered at the time.
The huge amounts invested in research and development amounted to a massive gamble.
The actors making such an investment, even with a long-term perspective, would still require the completion of the accumulation cycle, and return on the investment. This created the persistent pressure to drive to get the new technology accepted and into markets and agro-ecosystems as quickly as possible. Such economic features form the overall architecture of the dispute, necessarily building in a corporate and governmental impatience with any call for precaution, popular participation, deliberation or

18 legitimation. But this dispute would also have its own global geography: the corporate
„gene giants‟ and associated elements of the bio-industrial complex were generally clustered in the advanced capitalist countries of the global north, especially north
America and north west Europe. Thus one dimension of the struggle has been around ownership of genetic resources, „bio-prospecting‟, and resistance and sovereignty in the global south. However, there have also been important struggles between the European
Union and the USA, both with advanced biotechnology centres but also both having significantly different regulatory styles and political responses to GM agrifood.
Agricultural biotechnology was coded by industry with particular cultural meanings.
From the beginning, the new rDNA technology was suffuse with promethean promise, billed as a dramatic decoding and remaking of „life itself‟ with potentially transformative implications for humanity‟s relationship with the material world. For example, a repeated claim was that agricultural biotechnology would offer a solution to hunger and ecological crisis. In suggesting that the appropriate response to such global problems is the production of hew commodifiable products rather than a new style of farming or new forms of social relation it thus sought to represent environmental and global justice issues as tractable to technical and economic solution.
For the European public, however, GM crops tended to be associated with very different meanings – some specific to GM crops, some more generally associated with rDNA technology. Many of these meanings draw on ideas, with deep cultural historical roots, that „messing with nature‟ is likely to have bad consequences. Some draw on the potent symbolic and material linkages which food has to „nature‟ and the environment, to bodies and health, and to family and other social relationships. Others are grounded in arguably realistic, historically and socially informed expectations about the nature of the actors involved in the technology. Members of the public draw on past examples of environmental and technological controversies such as those concerning nuclear power,
PCB‟s, pesticides, Dioxins and BSE in order to justify their expectation of technological hubris, corporate greed, bureaucratic blindness or cover ups. Finally, yet other social meanings concern issues of global justice, for example the threat of corporations

19 achieving monopoly power over the seeds used by developing world farmers through intellectual property.
A clearer insight into the concerns of European publics about GM food and crops was offered by the in-depth study on „Public Attitudes to Biotechnology in Europe‟ (PABE) carried out for the European Commission between 1998 and 2000 by an interdisciplinary research team from the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy and Germany. This research, based upon 55 focus groups in the five participating countries revealed that publics expressed very similar concerns about GMOs across member states. In order to form and legitimate their opinions, participants drew on their own empirical knowledge about the behaviour of plants, insects and animals, about human fallibility, and about the past behaviour of institutions responsible for the development and regulation of the technology. The participants expressed concerns about the motivations behind the development of GMOs, about the lack of public consultation and information, about the capacity of regulators to influence the behaviour of large corporations, and about who would take responsibility for unforeseen future harm, and how (Marris et al . 2001).
There are also continual discursive manoeuvres around whether GM is a moment of rupture or continuity. Around the technology itself, opponents tend to stress the former, its radical novelty and possible danger, while proponents suggest the latter, emphasising its familiarity and by implication safety. But often the same actors will use different fames in different situations: Thus GM‟s proponents claim that the technology is radically novel when they are seeking the interest of investors, and when it comes to fulfilling the requirements of patent law. However they are more likely to claim the opposite – that it is wholly familiar, and that GM products are „substantially equivalent‟ to their non-GM counterparts – when it comes to risk assessment and regulation. Similarly, the alarm of opponents has clearly been partly fuelled by the very promethean language of novelty and genetic reductionism employed by proponents. But opponents can also draw on registers of familiarity, yet in a different mode: a pessimistic familiarity which draws on earlier techno-scientific controversies and environmental problems, not just around the behaviour of pollutants, but also the behaviour of governments and other institutions;
GM thereby appears as another episode in the familiar history of environmental

20 catastrophes. Thus in the GM controversy there is a continual renegotiation of tropes of familiarity and novelty, forming a dense and tense discursive matrix around the issue.
One possible regulatory response to this is to emphasise familiarity and safety, with no need for special regulation (USA/OECD); another is the opposite, emphasising novelty and danger, thus logically leading to an outright ban. However, given its competing twin imperatives of innovation and precaution (see the next section), the EU regulatory approach institutionalised a compromise, one which attempted to contain and harmonise both poles of this dilemma.
On the one hand, the EU approach suggested that GM was amenable to regulation within the parameters of the existing scientifico-regulatory institutions. The act of regulating GM implies that the technology is something familiar, broadly continuous with past practices and comprehendible according to precedents, and that its risks can be readily identified, assessed and calculated. Thus regulation itself is always to some extent an attempt at the normalisation of the novelty and uncertainty associated with such a technological change. Furthermore, boundaries are drawn around what counts as relevant knowledge or expertise, and who holds it, thus serving to maintain both the authority of the regulatory and political system and the broad momentum of the new technology‟s introduction.
On the other hand, however, as we shall see in section 3, the EU established a specific regulatory category of the GMO, based upon a recognition of the areas of uncertainty surrounding the new technology, and thus requiring a temporary precautionary mode of regulation. The establishment of such a specific regulatory category also has the effect of establishing an ontological distinction between GM and non-GM, a distinction which in itself will make this momentum vulnerable to derailment.
2.3 – Competing European imperatives
The emergence onto global markets in 1996 of this first generation of GM herbicide and insect resistant crops would be marked by two important trends of the period. On the

21 one hand, GM crops arose as part of a global competitive drive towards perpetual technological innovation, a process unsettling past social arrangements and producing novel products, opportunities, hazards and uncertainties. This trend emerged as part of a globalising neo-liberalism, manifest in the WTO, NAFTA and the EU and determined to obliterate all „trade barriers‟ including national regulations around social and environmental protection. On the other hand GM crops also arose alongside another trend of precaution and environmental sustainability that were entering into regulatory discourses and practices. These environmental-precautionary trends were present in national and EU level policies as well as in global discourses around the Earth Summits and associated agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the
Biosafety protocol. As we shall see, alongside this precautionary trend is an emerging participatory one, where top down technocratic and expert systems of management and governance find themselves supplemented and/or eroded by the importance of other epistemic locations or points of view. Thus we have an apparent clash of imperatives – between innovation and precaution - at the heart of much of the attempted introduction and governance of GM crops. But before we analyse the patterns of metagovernance the
EU and its member states engage in to manage these conflicting imperatives, let us first examine in more detail the policy backgrounds, discourses and forces at play at the EU level and at Member State level.
The innovatory imperative
The emerging European Union is host to a relatively powerful complex of biotechnological industrial and academic institutions. While this is a leading cluster of global significance, it still lags behind the much larger sector in the USA, a concern that forms a persistently prominent feature in EU governing discourses. Promoting the emerging European biotechnology sector became one of the ways the emerging EU could construct itself along with a specifically European scale of R&D intensive industries. Much of the basic science had taken place in European universities, and many of the leading pharmaceutical and agri-chemical corporations who had developed various biotechnologies from GM agriculture to bio-medicines had European roots. These included Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Proctor &
Gamble, and many more.

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Galloux et al . describe the sector around 1998 as mainly concentrated in northern
European countries, with 182 in the UK, 105 in Germany, 102 in France, 68 in Sweden and 48 in the Netherlands. It is important to note that this is taking the „biotechnology sector‟ as a whole, which mainly consists of bio-medical and chemical applications, with agricultural biotechnology playing a smaller role (Galloux et al , 1998; 177). The UK, as represented in this survey, can therefore be said to have one of the most substantial bioindustrial bases within the EU. On the other hand, the survey points towards an uneven development and distribution of the bioindustries and bioresearch centres across
Europe. According to another study in the same volume „Greece has lagged behind other
European countries in biotechnology. The economy is largely service oriented, without a recent strong tradition in scientific research‟ (Marouda-Chatjoulis 1998: 77). By contrast, the UK had a relatively strong biotechnology sector at the time of our narrative.
However, none of the corporations specifically associated with herbicide resistant GM crop technologies had their primary base in the UK. While the UK‟s universities, institutes and corporations had played a leading role in the development of molecular biology and plant biotechnology, by the time GM crops came to market and to the centre of contention in 1996, a small cluster of transnational corporations based in the
USA and continental Europe, known as „the gene giants‟, owned the technology. Thus the decision over whether to permit the commercial growing of GM crops was more of
„symbolic importance‟ for the „UK science base‟ as a whole, including medical and other biotechnologies, and also for its strategy of building a „knowledge based economy‟ in general. This stance also reflects the changes in the relationship between state and capital within the globalising economy, with their complex web of interconnections between corporations and governments. Thus in the 1990s the global „gene-giants‟ had substantial investments in UK, along with labs, research centres, plant and an intimate network of links with UK based companies, banks, universities and politicians. At the European level, the GM debate was of much wider symbolic importance for the science base as a whole, especially for the EU based bioindustries and their associations such as
Europabio, which form powerful lobbies within the EU policy world (Galloux et al
1998).

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Despite, or even because of this, the conflict over GM crops has often been framed as a transatlantic conflict between the US and the EU.
1 Thus it was Monsanto‟s US grown harvest of the first GM Soya in 1996 that sparked off the fin de siècle wave of controversy and protest in the EU. However, by January 1997, the controversy also enveloped
Novartis (now Syngenta) and its Bt Maize, which was the first „European owned‟ GM crop to receive EU marketing consent for import and cultivation (although both of these had been harvested in the USA) . Austria immediately responded to this consent by being the first EU member state to invoke Article 16 of the Deliberate Release Directive and impose a national ban of Novartis‟s product. In response, powerful interests inside the
EU as well as from the USA and the WTO put pressure on the European Commission to lift the various bans, blockages and moratoria. Indeed, it could be argued that the bioindustrial complex forms a globalised network and lobbying force. Thus US firms
Monsanto, Dow and DuPont also are members of Europabio and many other EU member state industry associations. Furthermore, as multinational corporations, most bio-science companies have multiple national sections rooted in various countries.
The symbolic importance of biotechnology to the European Union‟s economic strategy cannot be over-stressed. The EU‟s current strategic vision, known as the „Lisbon
Strategy‟ after the European Council‟s Lisbon meeting in 2000, declared that its „new strategic goal for the next decade‟ was „[t]o become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion‟ (Presidency Conclusions, Lisbon
European Council, 23 and 24 March 2000).
2 Central to this strategy was to be policies to promote research and development and the private appropriation of the flows of knowledge from public scientific and academic networks, in order to promote high value technoscientific innovation based production. In January 2002, the European
1 below.
This will become particularly relevant in the comparison between Greece and the UK
2 http://ue.eu.int/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/ec/00100-r1.en0.htm
.

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Commission adopted its Strategy for Europe on Life Sciences and Biotechnology . This located biotechnology within the Lisbon Agenda and opens by proclaiming: „Life sciences and biotechnology are widely recognised to be, after information technology, the next wave of the knowledge-based economy, creating new opportunities for our societies and economies‟ (European Commission 2002: 7).
However, the document quickly acknowledges that the life sciences and biotechnology
„also raise important policy and societal issues and have given rise to a broad public debate‟ (ibid, p7). When it proceeds to discuss this debate, it later laments that it:
„focused narrowly on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and specific ethical questions, on which public opinion has become polarised‟ (ibid: p 10). Most crucially, it then points to important limits constraining how long such debate might be accommodated within overall considerations of the „strategic vision‟:
Uncertainty about societal acceptance has contributed to detracting attention in
Europe from the factors that determine our capacity for innovation and technology development and uptake. This has stifled our competitive position, weakened our research capability and could limit our policy options in the longer term (European Commission 2002).
The leading bodies of the European Union have to manage a series of competing strategic imperatives that have shaped EU policies and institutions almost since their inception. They are charged with promoting bioeconomic innovation, but at the same time, as we shall see below, they are also committed to the precautionary principle and to consider other divergent social and economic interests involved in the agrifood and environmental sectors. In the case of GM, attempts to manage the conflicts between these radically different policy imperatives result in the conflicts getting played out as intra-EU battles.
Both the new technology and the emerging European institutions of governance had grown together throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Surveying the history of European biotechnology regulation in these formative decades, Jasanoff (2005:
69) describes this as a story of „co-production‟. The EU could find in the promotion and

25 regulation of biotechnology a specific role and purpose around which to further construct itself. Jasanoff draws on Gottweis‟s earlier discussion of how various
„representations of biotechnology as a “European Project” cleared the way for … [the
EU‟s] entrance into the sphere of political action‟ (1998: 174) – in other words, how it becomes a legitimate and therefore legitimating topic for such policy intervention. He traces several „discursive codes‟ through which during these decades European biotechnology programs found justification. These ranged from technological competition with the USA; the restructuring of chemical, pharmaceutical, agricultural and healthcare sectors; and changing global distributions of trade and raw material imports into the EU. Still more of these „discursive codes‟ included the building of a „strong and unified Europe‟ and the EU‟s ability to determine and manage potential risks of the new technology (ibid: 174).
To Gottweis‟s original list of „discursive codes‟ we could add the strategy unveiled in
2005 as the „knowledge-based bio-economy‟ (KBBE). This attempts once again to connect discourses around global competition and the necessity of high-tech, knowledgebased bio-innovation with discourses around solutions to climate change, environmental degradation and oil dependency. Thus the KBBE program finds itself bearing the subtitle: „Transforming life sciences knowledge into new, sustainable, eco-efficient and competitive products‟.
3
Anxieties about innovation and competition, and in particular about Europe‟s capacity to be a significant player in the development of the biosciences, became manifest across the
EU member states, albeit in an uneven way. In the UK in the 1980s certain problems and barriers to technological innovation had been identified by the Thatcher government, leading to a perceived need to dismantle corporatism and to move the focus of state intervention away from import substitution and towards technological innovation for a global market place (Gottweis 1998). This was the start of a long, still continuing discourse of fear of global competition and the need to liberate technological innovation in the UK. GM crops and biotechnology in general have come to be seen as a „frontier
3 http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/conferences/2005/kbb/index_en.html
.

26 science‟, like information technology, the cutting edge of creating a „new economy‟. The development of GM crops was thus seen as a key exemplar of this knowledge-based strategy, their development involving the (private) appropriation of advanced (public, university based) techno-scientific knowledges as added value. This was seen as vital in order to stay in advance of newly industrialising countries. Thus the leaked minutes of the meeting of UK Cabinet Office Ministerial Sub-Committee on Biotechnology
(SCI(BIO)) held on 10th February 2004, at which the decision was taken to permit the commercial planting of GM crops after a long moratorium, spoke in terms of the
„symbolic importance of the decision for the Government‟s science policy and the UK science base‟. This explains why the UK government was seen as so enthusiastically pro-
GM, even though the UK did not itself have a strong indigenous agricultural biotech sector.
As a more „peripheral‟ EU economy, Greece occupies a different position, ranking lower in most economic indicators within the EU. In terms of a technoscienfic knowledge economic strategy, it ranks lowest among the EE 15 in terms of gross national expenditure in research and technology, as well as in public expenditure in research and development as a percent of the national budget. Private expenditure in research and development are the second lowest (following Portugal), depicting serious setbacks in innovations by Greek firms/enterprises (National Council of Competitiveness and
Development, 2004). The food production sector also occupies a different position, as reflected in the absence of integrated sectoral policies and the lack of restructuring or modernization of the agricultural sector. Subsequently, Greece is generally not a producer but an importer of high technology innovations from the US and other
European countries. No biotech products have been developed or field-tested in Greece
(USDA 2005) and there have not been any major biotechnological companies working within the Greek territory. In the nineties, while industrial production is still based on low technology, slow progress is visible in corporate activity and in the macroeconomic environment (Caloghirou and Zambarloukos, 2000, Zambarloukou 2004). Structural adjustment, some convergence with the EU and privatizations are characteristics of this period (Freire and Lobo, 2004).

27
Anxious about increasing global competition, the Greek state has made attempts to restructure the economy: under both Socialist and Right wing governments privatisation policies have steadily been implemented in all economic areas, while unions and cooperatives have been losing state support. The government has also made weak efforts since the early 1980s to support scientists in their research and to capitalise on biotechnological breakthroughs. Even though PASOK created the Ministry of Research and Technology, within a short period it was transformed into the General Secretariat of
Research and Technology belonging to the Ministry of Development. Biotechnology has been one of its three priority areas. In 2001, the establishment of the National Council of
Competitiveness and Development (ESAA) aimed to delineate strategies to promote national competitiveness, such as the development of collaborations between the scientific and entrepreneurial communities (European Commission 2004).
The precautionary imperative
However, as well as these innovatory imperatives, the EU also had commitments to protecting human health and the environment and subscribed to the precautionary principle. These precautionary policy imperatives also found added impetus rooted in deep trends in culture, economy and society: the same sort of structural social changes that helped give rise to GM crops would thus also lay the ground for the forces resisting them. In its late twentieth century search for new frontiers of accumulation, capital would penetrate, dismember and commodify diverse aspects of the world at ever-deeper levels. Thus social relationships and culture as well as science, ecologies, organisms, would all have their features atomised, isolated and then recombined in ways optimised for capital. The shift towards post-Fordist, knowledge-based economies would therefore also help produce a set of increasingly individuated new subjectivities, contributing to the increased reflexivity noted by, amongst others, Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992).
These increasingly individuated subjectivities would pervade and transform all sorts of relationships of trust, authority and expertise. Importantly for the story of GM crops, these would connect with discourses of consumer sovereignty and also of natural, healthy food and individual self-improvement. The increasingly informational and symbolic component of products noted by Lash & Urry (1994) and Klein (2000) forms a

28 significant feature of knowledge-based economies. While food has always had important cultural and symbolic dimensions, the twist given to this by the accelerating processes of commodification in the late twentieth century means food inhabits an especially highly charged area. The historic processes of the industrialisation and commodification of food production has increased the separation and alienation of people from knowledge of and confidence in what they eat. Branding, labelling, packaging and the symbolic world of advertising attempts to bridge this gap. Yet this distance can become a resonating chamber for public doubts and anxieties about foodstuffs and wider issues. Furthermore, a changing economy and rural structure has produced a „post-Fordist countryside‟, one that in Europe is increasingly seen not as a place for the mass production of foodstuffs, but also of aesthetics, leisure and biodiversity. This connects with a changing global division of labour in agri-food production. While the resistance to GM food cannot be reduced into these macro-economic changes, these changes do form an important base underpinning and shaping the possibility of such resistance.
Another significant feature of these broad social changes was the emergence of the environmental movement from the end of the 1960s onwards, with political groups and movements springing up almost simultaneously in a number of industrialized countries, bringing something of the radicalism of the student movement to the politics of environmental protection and technology critique. By the end of the 1980s, environmental mobilisations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were an influential and seemingly permanent feature of „advanced‟ technological societies. The rise of environmentalism, while not reducible into any simple meta-trend, can also be associated with the production of new subjectivities, forming part of the shift from
Fordism to a knowledge economy. The conflict over GM can therefore be seen as exacerbated by the combined and uneven development of the post-Fordist knowledge economy. The emergence of green parties over this period will also become crucial later on in shaping the response of member states and the European Parliament to GMOs.
This rise in environmental discourses began to enter the policy sphere of the EU and its member states from the 1970s on. Throughout the development of the EU over many

29 years, Environmental policy gradually increased in importance.
4 While the 1957 founding
Treaty of Rome contains no mention of environmental protection, defining the institution as primarily about liberalising inter EU trade and promoting economic growth, by the early 1970s rising environmental discourses started to impact on the institutions agendas. When in 1972 the European heads of state met in Paris they thus declared that „economic expansion is not an end in itself‟, mentioning the additional importance of „quality of life‟ issues, particularly „intangible values‟ and „protecting the environment‟ (Burchell and Lightfoot 2001: 35). That same year also saw the beginning of the EU‟s series of Environmental Action Programmes. At this time, the market based
European institutions lagged behind the US in terms of Environmental protection.
However, from the early 1970s onward the environment became one of the EU‟s fastest growing areas of policy making, although it would still not be listed as one of the institutions common policies in the main treaties until the Single European Act of 1987.
Before 1987, environmental measures were based on Articles 94 and 308 of the Treaty of
Rome. These articles allowed for the issuing of extra directives by agreement of the
Council that were deemed necessary for the establishment or operation of the common market. Thus from the start, environmental legislation had to fit within the overall market based imperative of the EU. The original 1957 treaty allowed some exceptions to trade liberalisation, its article 36 exempting some national measures justified by „the protection of health and life of humans, animals or plants‟ along with the protection of
„public morality, public policy or public security‟, historic heritage and industrial or commercial property. However, (in a sentence that mirrored the concerns of the parallel international process of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which would eventually become the World Trade Organisation), article 36 of the Treaty of Rome takes the trouble to explicitly state that these exemptions should not be allowed to constitute a disguised trade barrier.
4 In describing this history we shall use the words EU to also denote its antecedent forms the EEC and the EC.

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Exemptions to trade liberalization that were explicitly based upon „the environment‟ eventually surfaced in an important case before the European Court of Justice in 1985.
This judgment, relating to the Waste-Oils Directive, observed that „the principle of freedom of trade is not to be viewed in absolute terms but is subject to certain limits‟, limits which could be justified by the „objectives of general interest pursued by the community‟. In the next paragraph the judgement states that „environmental protection‟ is „one of the community‟s essential objectives‟.
5 This judgement therefore represented a fundamental reinterpretation of the EU‟s mission, to include „environmental protection‟ as an „essential objective‟. However, this was not based upon any of the treaties that updated the founding one of 1957, which did not mention the environment, but on the ad-hoc practice established under its articles 94 and 308.
It has been noted that these pushes towards environmental policymaking were more of a product of the drive for the EU-wide harmonisation of national laws and initiatives to create a single market, rather than by a strategic shift towards environmental thinking amongst the EU‟s political leaderships. Fear of distorting competition rather than of environmental degradation was the key factor, thus giving moves at a national level towards environmental legislation a significant impact at the European level (Judge 1993;
Burchell and Lightfoot 2001: 36). However, with the intensification of environmental concern in the late 1980s, the EU began explicitly to act at a more strategic level, a shift represented in a series of major acts of legislation from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.
The 1987 Single European Act (SEA) was the first major revision to the Treaty of Rome.
While mainly centred on trade harmonisation, preparations for closer political cooperation and significant institutional changes, this act also for the first time enshrined environmental objectives as a „Policy of the Community‟, therefore officially granting
5 European Court Reports 1985, page 00531. Judgment of the Court of 7 February 1985.
Procureur de la République v Association de défense des brûleurs d‟huiles usagées (ADBHU).
Reference for a preliminary ruling: Tribunal de grande instance de Créteil - France. Free movement of goods - Waste oils. Case 240/83. http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexplus!prod!CELEXnumdoc&lg=en&n umdoc=61983J0240 .

31 explicit competence for EU action in the area. It proposed the addition of a whole new title, „Title VII‟, to the treaty, dealing exclusively with the environment.
Title VIII enshrined three objectives: „to preserve, protect and improve the quality of the environment‟, to „contribute towards protecting human health‟ and to „ensure a prudent and rational utilization of natural resources‟ This article of the SEA went on to outline three basic principles: that action should be preventative; that environmental damage should be rectified at source; and that the polluter should pay. Furthermore, environmental protection should be a component of other community policies. In applying these principles the SEA stated that the community should take into account
„the available scientific and technical data‟, regional environmental conditions; the
„potential benefits and costs of action or lack of action‟, and the whole community‟s economic and social development (article 130r). The 1993 Treaty on European Union
(TEU) or Maastricht Treaty took this process further in the environmental field as in many others, with environmental protection gaining a mention in the Act‟s preamble.
Furthermore, respect for the environment was added to the principles of the EU, as listed in Article 2, and environmental policy stated as a defining activity of the EU in
Article 3. This 1993 Maastricht Treaty on European Union also added the precautionary principle to the list of principles outlined in the earlier SEA. The incorporation of this principle into the basic treaty of the European Union was a significant step, although the text of the treaty did not offer a definition of it. This marked the rise in importance of the precautionary principle within international law, also reflected in the 1992 Rio Earth
Summit and the ensuing „Rio Declaration on Environment and Development‟ which stated:
„In order to protect the environment the Precautionary Approach shall be widely applied by states according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.‟

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This is perhaps the best-known version of the precautionary principle, the meaning of which has become subject to multiple and contested interpretations. This confusion lead the European Commission to issue a formal communication on the principle aimed at clarifying its meaning in 2000 and a resolution at the EU Nice Summit later that year, again reflecting the significance of the concept within EU policy.
We have traced how environmental concerns and the precautionary principle became part of the EU‟s policy around issues of the environment, health and techno-scientific controversy. These changes would become key factors which would affect its handling of the introduction of GM crops and food. This brief history sheds light on the conflicting imperatives at the heart of the emerging EU and its stance towards GM agrifood technology. The imperative of the European Union towards economic growth and the liberalization and harmonization of trade rules was for a long time its only rationale, and in a neo-liberal age remains its primary one. Other imperatives such as environmental, health and consumer protection have emerged, but these remain within the overall original rationale of the creation and maintenance of the common market. Burchell and
Lightfoot describe how this history institutionalizes within EU environmental policy a long running tension between promoting the market and protecting the environment
(2001; 54). They also show how a continual driver behind the creation of EU environmental policy and institutions was the necessity of maintaining a „harmonised‟ internal market by keeping up with developments in its member states – thus environmental advances in some member states could prompt and shape EU-wide measures. However, it is also possible to argue that over time „the environment‟ became an attractive policy area around which the EU could define and construct itself, with pollution, ecosystems and resources being the sort of trans-border issues able to bring legitimacy to such a common project, and issues that would also have strong cultural resonances around nature and geography. All these then would form the conditions that would help shape the Deliberate Release Directive with which the EU sought to regulate the introduction of GMOs into the European environment.
Relatedly, the reception of GM crops was shaped by a „participatory turn‟ in patterns of governance, particularly around the regulation of controversial technologies. The social

33 changes associated with globalisation and the post-Fordist production of new subjectivities demanding participation and inclusion had also contributed to an erosion of the epistemic authority of the nation-state and its scientific advisory structures.
Feeding into this crisis was the history of environmental degradation and risk, and crises of legitimacy over new technologies from nuclear power to novel food production technologies. As a Europe-wide phenomenon, this was leading to new patterns of governance; public participation would eventually be listed as one of the „five principles of good governance‟ in the European Commission‟s 2001 White Paper on European
Governance.
Thus GM crops emerged in the mid 1990s into a changing cultural and political landscape marked by in particular by both environmental and precautionary concerns as well as neo-liberal globalisation and its emerging international regulatory architectures ranging from the WTO to the EU. This emerging mix of factors pushed GM policy in radically new directions. In the late 1980s, the development of regulation of GM in the
EU was uneven, with some member states such as Germany and Denmark advocating more restrictive regulation, and others such as Britain being more aligned to a form of trans-Atlantic neo-liberalism. The EU‟s imperative to create a single market led to the standardisation of GM regulation through a Deliberate Release Directive which was more precautionary than countries like the UK would have favoured. At this stage, the
EU GM crop regulatory system began to dramatically diverge from that of the US, in particular by insisting that GMOs formed a distinct category requiring regulation.
Furthermore, as we shall see in section 4, due to the rise of environmental and precautionary discourses within the EU the Deliberate Release Directive started with a framing of GM in effect as a form of living pollution.
Nevertheless, the EU shared with the WTO and the US a prioritisation of „hard science‟ for its key regulatory criteria, in terms of physical risk to human health or the environment, rather than including ethical, social and legal factors, never mind advocating any public participation. The World Trade Organisation (WTO), launched in
1996 (the same year that the first GM crops crossed the Atlantic), framed GM solely as a free-trade issue, rejecting the precautionary principle in favour of a framing of „sound

34 science‟. But neither the EU nor the WTO made an allowance for public opinion or popular political legitimacy, instead attempting to take a narrowly expert- and sciencebased route to legitimation. The principles of the WTO also clashed with and threatened to override a rival treaty, the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol, part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which regulated the trans-boundary movement of living modified organisms.
Thus the reception of GM crops in the EU was marked by these contradictory imperatives. As well as the pressure to support high tech innovation, there was also pressure to pay tribute to both „consumer choice‟ and labelling and also environmental protection and specifically agricultural biodiversity. As we shall see, a considerable part of the debate in the UK began to revolve around whether GM HR crops would encourage or deplete certain key species that featured in national „Biodiversity Action Plans‟ required under the CBD, illustrating the changing rural economic priorities.

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3. The GM controversy in Europe: the narrative
3.1 Europe
The establishment of the EU regulatory framework for GMOs
Before the first GM crops and foods arrived into global markets and ecosystems in the mid 1990s, the European Union had already established its regulatory framework around the Deliberate Release Directive (1990/220/EEC). This regulatory framework was based upon expert scientific advice about possible harm to health or the environment and required each member state to establish a „competent authority‟ (CA) which would handle such decisions. The EU framework was inherently more precautionary than that adopted by the US because it considered the novelty of the genetic modification process to still contain important areas of scientific uncertainty and therefore potential risk. This led the EU to base its GMO regulatory system upon the process behind the products while the US approach was based upon the simple regulation of the end products alone.
Therefore unlike the US, the EU considered GMOs to be a special category that required its own unique regulatory framework. This unique nature of GMOs and their potential risks is expanded upon in the preamble of the Deliberate Release Directive, which argued that:
[L]iving organisms, whether released into the environment in large or small amounts for experimental purposes or as commercial products, may reproduce in the environment and cross national frontiers thereby affecting other member states; [and] the effects of such releases on the environment may be irreversible.
We may note two important discursive moves here in the preamble‟s opening paragraph:
Firstly GMOs are designated as a potential form of „living pollution‟ which may reproduce in the environment with irreversible effects. This framing helps justify the unique regulatory system and precautionary approach. Secondly, the paragraph refers to the possibility that this novel form of pollution may cross national frontiers and affect other member states, implicitly justifying a special regulatory role for the EU as a multinational regulatory body.

36
The Directive‟s preamble then goes on to state, amongst other things, that „the protection of human health and the environment requires that due attention be given to controlling risks‟ and that for each GM variety „a case-by-case environmental risk assessment should always be carried out prior to a release‟. The twin competing imperatives of techno-economic growth on the one hand and precaution on the other are both institutionalized in this directive, leading to a simultaneous commitment to both the deliberate release of possibly harmful products and to an attempt to evaluate and regulate this possible harm. The preamble argues for a „step by step‟ approach, whereby:
[T]he containment of GMOs is reduced and the scale of release increased gradually, step by step, but only if evaluation of the earlier steps in terms of protection of human health and the environment indicates that the next step can be taken.
This leads to a two stage procedure, involving experimental release prior to commercial release, covered by parts „B‟ and „C‟ of the directive respectively: Part „B‟ covers experimental releases of GM crops such as field trials, while Part „C‟ covers consent for commercial import, processing, feed or cultivation. A „Part B Consent‟ is given by a national competent authority of each EU member state and is valid in that state only. A
„Part C Consent‟ is valid for the whole EU under the principle of free circulation of products within the internal market. For a Part C Consent, first a biotechnology company would submit a dossier of information (a „Summary Notification Information
Format‟, or SNIF) to the national competent authority of any particular member state.
Following a favourable opinion by this authority on the notification, the relevant
Member State would then inform the European Commission on its opinion. If there are no objections raised by the other member states, the national competent authority that carried out the original evaluation then grants the consent. This consent, once given by the competent authority of any member state, would be valid for the whole EU. The principle of the internal market means that the GMO in question must be accepted by every other Member State, although the directive had a safeguard clause under its Article
16. This clause allowed a member state to impose its own provisional prohibition on the

37 sale or use of a GM variety within its territory if it had „justifiable reasons‟ to consider that product „a risk to human health or the environment‟.
While tending towards precaution, the EU‟s Deliberate Release Directive therefore shared with both the USA and the WTO a set of assumptions that confined the area of valid consideration to strictly science-based concerns around positive harm to health or the environment. Any assessment of wider social, economic or cultural factors was ruled irrelevant. Furthermore, the procedure would be expert-based and technocratic, with little regard for public participation. Toke (2004) argues that in democratic terms regarding public consultation, the EU‟s 1990/220 directive lagged behind the US, where a compulsory requirement for some public consultation was routine (Toke 2004: 159).
Members of the European Parliament had tried to insert clauses making public consultation compulsory. However, this merely remained an optional and ill defined requirement, with the Directive‟s Article 7 stating that: „Where a Member State considers it appropriate, it may provide that groups or the public shall be consulted on any aspect of the proposed deliberate release‟ (DRD 1990/220 A7). This requirement for consultation would only become compulsory with the revisions to the directive after
2001. As well as lagging behind the US in this regard, the 1990/220 directive reversed the trend towards public participation in techno-scientific decision making that had been established within many EU member states. Torgersen et al . (2002) draw on Jülich‟s study to distinguish between two groups of European countries based upon their possibilities for formal public participation in GMO policy: On the one hand the Netherlands,
Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Austria (plus non EU Norway) are classified as having already had a tradition of public participation, while others including Belgian,
France, the UK, Ireland Italy Portugal and Spain are described as providing minimal such opportunities. The establishment of the 1990/220 deliberate release directive was actually used as the occasion for the German government to revise its gene law and actually restrict the rights to public participation in GM decision making (Torgersen et al . 2002:
52). Thus while moving towards the precautionary principle, the regulatory framework established by the EU after 1990 was narrowly scientistic and technocratic, allowing no space for participation or for the other framings of the GMO issue that would emerge in the coming public controversy over the new technology.

38
Consents and discontents
This system began to grant EU wide marketing consents under Part C of the Directive from 1992 onwards, starting with some GM veterinary vaccines. The first GM plant to receive a part C consent was:
 Societe National d‟Exploitation des Tabacs et Allumettes‟ herbicide resistant tobacco ( ITB 1000 OX ) (granted in June 1994 via the French CA)
1994 also saw the first notifications for crop plants intended for the agri-food system:
 Plant Genetic Systems‟ (now Bayer) glufosinate-tolerant oilseed rape ( MS1Bn ×
RF1Bn ) for seed production purposes only (granted in February 1996 via the
UK CA)
 Ciba-Giegy‟s (now Syngenta‟s) herbicide tolerant and insect resistant maize ( Bt
176 ) for food, feed and cultivation (granted in February 1997 via the French CA).
 Monsanto‟s herbicide resistant ( Roundup Ready ) soya for import for food processing (granted in May 1996 via the UK CA)
The move towards consent for these first GM crop plants in the mid 1990s began to generate considerable controversy, amongst member states, between member states and
EU institutions, in the public sphere and wider civil society. Under the Directive and the
EU‟s GM regulatory framework, ultimate power to push through consent for a disputed
GM variety lay with the European Commission, which was to happen repeatedly as the above notifications worked their way through the regulatory system.
The dossier on the very first GM crop plant under consideration, the herbicide-resistant
ITB 1000 OX tobacco , was objected to by a member state which raised questions about the environmental effects of the herbicide use related to the GM variety and other questions around health and environmental aspects of GMO itself. However, the
Commission, in its 1994 decision (decision 94/385/EC ) argued that: (a) objections raised about the impacts of the herbicides to be used with the GM plants did not fall under the

39 jurisdiction of the deliberate release directive but under another separate directive that covers herbicide use (Pesticides Directive 91/41/EEC), and (b) the potential risks for human health and the environment posed by the GM variety were „not expected to be significant‟.
6
More objections about the herbicide use patterns related to herbicide resistant GM varieties were raised by member states about the next GM crop, the glufosinate-tolerant
MS1Bn × RF1Bn oilseed rape . Other objections raised about this oilseed rape variety included its potential toxicological effects if used for human food or animal feed; its potential spread as an invasive species; and the possibility of the transfer of the herbicide tolerance gene or its other modified genes to compatible species. The Commission overruled these objections (although it did support the placing of a special condition on the consent requiring labelling in an attempt to make sure it was only used to reproduce seed and not enter the food or feed chain).
But it was the next two crops – Ciba-Giegy‟s Bt 176 Maize and Monsanto‟s Roundup
Ready soy, the first crops to be commercially cultivated, in the USA in 1996 – which as they moved onto global markets and ecosystems in 1996 would galvanize open public controversy and create divisions within the EU, and become defining battles within the regulatory system. The battle over Bt 176 Maize illustrates the workings of EU comitology around GM releases, and the way that this contributed to the declining legitimacy of the regulatory framework. This maize variety had been engineered by Ciba
Geigy to have both of the common GM traits – herbicide tolerance and insect resistance.
The French CA received the original notification and then passed on a favourable recommendation to the Commission the next year. However when the Commission circulated this amongst the rest of the member states it received a large amount of objections from these states CAs and scientific advisory bodies. These objections included possible toxicological effects from Bt toxin; possible growth of resistance to the
Bt insecticide amongst pests; possible harm to non-target insect species; and the possible
6
0024.
Official Journal of the European Communities - 09.07.1994 - L 176 P. 0023 –

40 spread of antibiotic resistance to bacteria in the guts of animals and then humans, due to the use of ampicillin-resistance genes to identify successfully transformed cells.
Because of these objections, in April 1996 the Commission had to take the maize proposal to the „Article 21‟ committee 7 made up of representatives of the member states.
Even if they had agreed to object to the proposal, the Commission still had the power to proceed; however they were unable to reach a majority opinion, so the Commission took the decision to the Council of Ministers (that is, the Environment Ministers of the 15 member states). When the Council met in June 1996, surrounded by the banners of protesting civil society groups, 13 out of the 15 member states, including even traditionally pro-GM governments like Britain, objected to the authorization. Only
France, as proposer, was in favour, while Spain was undecided – although according to a commission spokesperson even France „was wavering‟, yet was bound by its role as the proposing member state. However, without a unanimous decision the proposed crop variety could not be blocked. Therefore the Council decided not to take a vote, but instead asked the Commission to withdraw the proposal.
However, it was now still within the Commission‟s powers to proceed with the consent.
Leaked minutes (Levidow 2006, quoting Rich 1997) show that the Commission was itself divided on how to proceed. The Commissioner for Consumer Affairs, Emma Bonino, advocated a labelling requirement as part of the approval, a proposal that was successfully opposed by the Trade Commissioner Leon Brittain and Industry
Commissioner Martin Bangemann on the grounds that such a requirement might be illegal under WTO rules and could draw the EU into a trade dispute with the US. Some
Commissioners, including Bonino, then successfully argued that the wider expert disagreements necessitated waiting for the opinions of three EU-level scientific committees.
8 After receiving positive opinions from the committees, the Commission
7 So called because this procedure is laid out in Article 21 of the DRD.
8 The Scientific Committee for Pesticides, the Scientific Committee for Food and the
Scientific Committee for Animal Nutrition.

41 finally announced its decision in favour in Jan 1997, with the French CA finally giving consent in February. However over the next few months Austria, Luxembourg and Italy invoked Article 16 of the DRD to place their own national ban on the maize, France decided not to authorise the growing of the maize (thought its sale was still permitted) and the European Parliament condemned the Bt Maize decision and demanded suspension of its import (Boy and de Cheveigne, 2001: 182, cited in Gaskell and Bauer
2001).
This conflict within the regulatory system occurred at the same time as a growing wave of public reaction swept across Europe. This had been particularly intense in Austria with two leading Supermarkets, Spar and Julius Meinl, declaring that they would not stock GM. Other states faced similar pressure, with Sweden‟s largest food chain SABA banishing GM from its shelves. In this early period there was a more muted reaction in
UK in 1996-7 (Toke, 2004: 148). But it was the arrival of Monsanto‟s Roundup Ready
Soya which provoked the most high profile public and supermarket reaction, and also triggered even stronger calls for the labelling of GM products.
The call for labelling
The discourses about the need for GM labelling had begun to surface a few years earlier, during the discussions around the drafting of the EU‟s novel food and feed regulations.
In 1992 the EU Commission had published its first proposals of what would become
Reg. 258/97 on „Novel Foods and Novel food Ingredients‟. This contained no provision for the labelling of food. Rather, it pointed towards the relaxation and liberalisation of the EU‟s GM regulatory stance by proposing a US style procedure of simple notification and a statement of substantial equivalence rather that scientific assessment and testing
(Toke 2004: 154). However, when in the Autumn of 1993 the European Parliament‟s
Environment Committee held its first reading of the proposed regulations it proposed the labelling of food containing GMO ingredients. It also argued for the requirements for a full safety assessment and public consultations. This was followed soon after by the full (plenary) meeting of the European Parliament backing the demand for labelling. The idea of labelling was also gaining support around the EU, and was an emerging concern in various stakeholder consultations, with for example the UK consensus conference

42 proposing labelling. That year Denmark and Sweden also passed their own GMO labelling laws. The controversy was heightened further when in October of 1995 the
Council of ministers dropped the European Parliament‟s labelling proposal. Germany,
Austria, Denmark and Sweden then voted against the Councils common provision on the grounds that the measure did not contain labelling. Then at a meeting of the
European Parliament in November 1996, despite opposition from Commission and
Council of Ministers, overwhelming parliamentarian pressure led to an agreement to accept labelling on the basis of a product containing detectable GMO DNA. This was just as the shipments of the unlabeled and unsegregated GM soya were crossing the
Atlantic. The version of the novel food and feed regulation containing provision for labeling was adopted by the Commission in January 1997 and came into force in May of that year. The impending introduction of the new regulation and disagreements amongst regulators and member states combined with the unlabelled arrival of the first imports to escalate the crisis in public confidence.
The first shipments of this GM soya were scheduled to arrive in European ports in
November 1996. The fact that it would be arriving unlabelled and mixed in with the conventional soya shipments (2% in the 1996 shipments, growing to 15% in 1997) added to the controversy and intensified the growing discourse about GM labelling and segregation amongst policy makers, NGOs, the media and the wider public. Soya or soya-derived ingredients are central to contemporary industrial food processing and are therefore found in a very wide range of foods. Furthermore, the USA was Europe‟s main supplier of soya, with the EU accounting for over 30% of US soya exports at the time. This meant that the GM soya would be spread amongst a very large number of food products purchased in Europe. Thus the campaigning groups would find a powerful resonance amongst consumers, the media creating concern in the food retail industry, making soya the key battleground.
Roundup Ready Soya had been given EU wide consent by the Commission for import as a food in May of 1996 in the face of opposition from Austria, Denmark and Sweden, who demanded labelling. Monsanto had submitted its „notification‟ to the UK CA, as the
UK along with France was considered to have of the most favourable government

43 positions to GMOs in the EU (Charles, 2001: 165). This body indeed made an initial favourable assessment in early 1995 and furthermore had argued there was no need for labelling. After its contested journey through the EU regulatory procedure, the
Commission granted approval, also arguing that there were „no safety reasons which justify the segregation of the product from other soya beans‟ and „no safety reasons for labelling which mentions that the product has been obtained by genetic modification techniques‟ (Commission Decision 96/281/EC; Official Journal of the European
Communities. 30.04.1996 - L 107 P. 0010 - 0011). – which put the EU in apparent harmony with the stance taken by the US administration, Monsanto and the American
Soybean Association.
However, other actors within the food chain and within wider society took a different view. All around Europe food retailers were worried by a growing crisis of public confidence in food safety. This had dramatically escalated in March 1996 following the announcement by the UK government that a probable link has been established between the human brain disease of vCJD and BSE, popularly dubbed „Mad Cow Disease‟, after years of assurances by government scientific advisers, politicians and the industry that
„British beef is safe to eat‟. Following this admission 1996 public trust in the regulatory and scientific advice system along with the food and agriculture industries plummeted, and within a week the European Union had banned all exports of British beef. It was into this cultural and political climate that the new and disputed form of food and agriculture was to be introduced. A potential crisis of confidence in Soya might be particularly damaging given its status as one of the most important of US food crop exports into the EU, and its virtually ubiquitous use in contemporary processed foodstuffs.

44
1996 saw a number of influential European industry bodies calling for labelling. In July
EuroCommerce 9 wrote to the American Soybean Association warning that „European
Commerce insists that in order to ensure consumer confidence, consumers must receive full information on foodstuffs they wish to purchase, thus allowing them to make an informed choice‟.
10 This body, which proclaims its political objective as the championing of the „cause of free and open markets both within the European Union and beyond‟ makes a seemingly unlikely ally of the radical environmental activists supporting
Greenpeace. However, powerful discourses proclaiming the sovereignty of consumer choice were enshrined in the neo-liberal project, and through the conflict over labelling these discourses were now somehow being placed as a fetter on the project of agricultural biotechnology being pursued by companies like Monsanto. The
EuroCommerce statement was followed by many other concerned exchanges between
European retailers and the American soyabean growers. For example, in August 1996 the
British Retail Consortium, an industry body whose members include all the major UK supermarkets, expressed concern about the way that the GM soy was being introduced onto the market, and how this thwarts the systems and policies of labelling and traceability that the retailers had been developing in order to maintain consumer confidence. Elsewhere, the author of the BRC statement commented on its context:
After the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or „mad cow‟ crisis, British retailers knew that it would be essential to introduce genetically modified foods sensitively. Genetic modification is considered a new technology and, therefore, consumers would view its launch without full disclosure with suspicion (Nunn
2000)
9 EuroCommerce is the representative in Brussels of the European retail, wholesale and international trade sectors, grouping together over 100 other bodies, including national associations in 28 countries and several Europe-wide sectoral trade associations
( http://www.eurocommerce.be
).
10 Friends Of the Earth Europe Biotechnology Programme Mailout Vol. 2 (1996)
Issue 6, 15th September 1996.

45
As these warnings about the need for segregation and labelling were ignored by US government and industry, the stance taken by European business and commercial organisations also hardened. Thus on 28th September 1996 EuroCommerce held a press conference with the Greens in the European Parliament calling for a boycott of products made from the GM soybeans until these were adequately labelled.
Environmental and consumer NGO‟s began to form alliances and mobilise. Greenpeace elevated the campaign to one of its top three priorities and set its international network into action. A press conference in Germany launched a campaign on 11th September
1996 bringing together Greenpeace Germany, BUND/Friends of the Earth Germany and the consumer organisation AgV (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbande) around the issue of the GM soya. This aimed to intensify the pressure on giant food processing corporations such as Unilever, Danone, Nestle and Kraft-Jacobs-Suchard not to use the soya. Similar campaigns were being launched in most European countries. 16
Oct 1996 was proclaimed „world food day‟ and used as an opportunity for more alliance building between environmentalists, consumers and retailers. Greenpeace held protests at
Unilever offices around Europe while the European Consumers Organization (BEUC) chose this day to call for mandatory labelling of the GM soya beans and foods derived from them.
In the same week, supermarket and wholesale organisations in Austria, Switzerland,
Sweden and Norway, including Meinl, one of Austria‟s leading supermarket chains, and the Federation of Swedish Food Industry, confirmed that they would not be stocking products containing the GM soya unless separated and labelled. On 29 October,
Consumers International, a federation of 215 consumer organizations in more than 90 countries, also announced its opposition, calling GM crops a health risk because of their use of antibiotic resistance genes. The campaign also spanned the Atlantic as on 7
October 1996 Jeremy Rifkin‟s Foundation on Economic Trends and Greenpeace in the
USA launched an international alliance of more than 300 consumer, health, trade and agricultural organizations from 48 countries in a campaign for a boycott of the Monsanto soya and Ciba-Giegy‟s maize. This was followed on 10 October with Greenpeace activists

46 taking direct action against a field of Monsanto‟s Roundup Ready soyabeans in the USA‟s agricultural heartlands of Iowa. They symbolically marked the field with a gigantic 100 foot „X‟ and the word „biohazard‟, creating an iconic image that would appear around the world‟s media.
The protests would follow the crop as it was harvested and shipped across the Atlantic and a month later Greenpeace and others were staging demonstrations at major
European ports as the ships carrying the GM soy arrived. Ships docking at Hamburg,
Antwerp, Liverpool, Ghent and on the Rhine were met with protests and direct action throughout November 1996, while in the USA grain terminals were blockaded. Thus powerful discourses, resonant with symbols of defending the territorial borders of
European countries against foreign genetic pollution and US global power could be invoked. It is significant that this action around the symbolic protection of borders flared up during the same year which saw the birth of the WTO, and thus the intensification of the trend towards a global neo-liberal market space. The campaign then followed the
Soya as it entered the food chain, with groups such as Greenpeace protesting outside the food companies‟ offices and leafleting the supermarkets. The giant „X‟ placed upon the field in Iowa that harvest had become a powerful global symbol, an act of labelling imposed by a social movement that then travelled along with the contested commodity from the field to the supermarket.
Public unrest, institutional void, bans and moratoria
Protests intensified around the EU, along with consumer and retailer unease and media scrutiny in early 1997, following the controversial maize decision and the arrival of the unlabelled soya. In April 1997 an Austrian Volkbegehren or „peoples initiative for legislation‟ against GMOs was subscribed to by a massive 21 per cent of the electorate, the second most successful such initiative ever. Lassen et al (2002) observe the uneven development of the controversy in these first months of 1997 – contrasting countries such as Austria and Denmark where the Soya issue went particularly „hot‟ immediately, and ones like Italy and Greece where the issue emerged into public and political focus later. According to Toke (2004) the GM controversy was more muted in the UK in this initial 1996-1997 period, (ruling out any simple causative link between the intensity of the

47
BSE crisis and the reaction to GMOs.) However, the controversy was escalating dramatically in the UK too by 1998-99.
Despite the rising controversy, more GM varieties received Part C consents. In 1997 two varieties of herbicide resistant oilseed rape given consent in June, supported by the UK and France but opposed by other member states; in 1998 four more GM food or feed crop varieties given Part C Consents in April. These were a herbicide resistant spring
Oilseed Rape; a herbicide and insect resistant maize (Bt11); a herbicide resistant maize
(T25) and an insect resistant maize (Mon 810). There were also two kinds of carnation approved in 1998, but these were unopposed by any member state and simply received consent from the Dutch C.A.
Following the early 1997 Article 16 national bans on the Bt 176 maize by Austria,
Luxembourg and Italy more EU countries began to take similar action. Greece and
France imposed Article 16 bans on varieties of GM oilseed rape in late 1998. Germany banned the Bt 176 maize in March 2000, while Austria two imposed more national bans, the first on the GM maize line MON810 in June 1999, the second on Bayer‟s T25 maize in April 2000. While various national bans have ultimately ended up being condemned as without scientific basis by central EU bodies, the EU has been reluctant to take any sanction against member states, sensing it lacks the legitimacy around such a contentious issue. Thus five countries invoked article 16 of the 1990/220 directive and even after this had been revised with the new 2001/18 Deliberate Release Directive, more national bans were enacted by Greece, Poland and Hungary.
France presented a more complex picture, which is worth looking at in some detail because of the echoes of the UK story presented below in section 3.2. Along with the
UK, the French government was initially seen as the most pro-GM in the EU; also like the United Kingdom, it too experienced widespread public opposition to its national stance, and was forced to hold a formal public debate. However, unlike the United
Kingdom, it abandoned its pro-GM position, invoking Article 16 bans and its own moratorium.

48
It was the French CA that approved all the four new GM crop varieties listed above that received consent in 1998. However, as we have seen, in February 1997 the French government reversed its authorization for cultivation of the Bt 176 maize it had been instrumental in pushing through. In May this anti-GM stance appeared to toughen when a new left of centre government including the Greens was installed with a manifesto commitment to propose an EU level GM moratorium. However, in November „97 this
Government re-authorised the cultivation of the Bt 176 maize it had banned in February.
Yet at the same time it announced its own moratorium on two more GM crops, and called for more scientific tests and a public debate (see box). Then in December it announced that no new GM varieties would be authorised in France until there had been a public debate.
However the discussion would not remain within the official spaces made for it and 1998 started with Jose Bove and others from the radical farmers union Confederation
Paysanne taking direct action and destroying seed stocks of the GM maize in January, the first of many such acts. Consumer unease also intensified and in March the French supermarkets Carrefour and Leclerc declared their rejection of GM ingredients. The conflict continued to intensify after the conference, with the government deciding in July
„98 to allow cultivation of two more GM maize varieties (Boy and de Cheveigne
2001;182). This decision which was reversed following an appeal by Greenpeace and the
Confederation Paysanne (to the Conseil d‟etat, which lead to a long European Court of
Justice constitutional debate eventually ruling against the legitimacy of this). Finally in
September 1998 the French government invoked Article 16 of the DRD to ban import or cultivation of two varieties of GM oilseed rape. Thus with these national bans the
French government now moved towards the GM-sceptical end of the spectrum, a position that was consolidated as they begin to press for a moratorium on new consents at the EU level.
The French GM Consensus Conference

49
Held in June 1998 as part of a wider fact finding mission, this GM citizens conference was an adaptation of the consensus conference model developed by the Danish Board of
Technology. A Steering Committee was set up, composed of academics – three sociologists, three scientists and one legal expert, (this differed from the DBT model with no stakeholder representatives). This then selected 15 lay members of the public who had little prior knowledge or interest in the issue. These would „represent‟ society at large and would be „educated‟ at two closed weekend sessions by eleven selected experts.
Finally, the conference proper would take three days, with the lay panel submitting preprepared questions to the experts on one day, engaging in a question and answer session with the experts and a wider audience on the next day and discussing a final report on the third day.
The citizens conference conclusions did not call for a complete moratorium on GM, and accepted that there would be beneficial aspects of the technology, seen by some as a qualified „yes but‟ (Marris and Joly 1999: 19). However, it also made specific recommendations, including banning the use of antibiotic resistance markers; strict labelling of food products; and new laws regarding GMO traceability, liability and responsibility. It also advocated changes to the structure of the French Commission on
Biomolecular Engineering, insisting on more democracy and transparency and proposing a division between a „scientific college‟ made up of scientists from all disciplines having to do with GM products (including doctors, ecologists and molecular biologists) on the one hand and a „general college‟ on the other, including farmers, consumers and politicians ( Marris and Joly 1999; Boy, Donnet-Kamel and Roqueplo 1998 ; Lieberman and Taylor 2005; Chavot & Masseran 2002; Boy and de Cheveigne 2001).
Turning back to wider developments in Europe, in the summer of 1998 Monsanto attempted a public relations counter offensive, with a multi-million dollar advertising campaign in Europe. It also commissioned research from the opinion pollster Stan
Greenburg. The Greenburg memorandum to Monsanto, which was soon leaked to
Greenpeace in November 1998, described how this advertising campaign had been

50
„overwhelmed by the society-wide collapse of support for genetic engineering in foods‟.
11
Greenburg warned how the crisis was particularly acute in the UK. He also describes a series of interviews he had conducted with British retail leaders including „heads of corporate communication, heads of corporate affairs, chief scientific advisors and senior buyers and managers at Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Tesco, CWS, Asda and Safeway‟ in
September 1998:
The retailers are critical arbiters in this process, since they have very high credibility in Britain, according to our surveys, and because they believe
Monsanto has handed off to them the task of winning public acceptance. They carry with them their resentment of Monsanto for badly mismanaging the introduction of biotechnology in Europe and for allowing the issue to be decided in the supermarkets. As a result, they are right on the edge – testing public acceptance, but now very open to a moratorium that would get them off the front lines. They are anxious for someone else to move on the front lines, preferably the government (Greenburg Memorandum to Monsanto, leaked to
Greenpeace 1998).
By the end of 1998, the crisis of legitimacy for those trying to promote GM agri-food in
Europe had become critical. An institutional void around the governance of GM crops had become visible to all. The 1990/220 deliberate release directive had attempted to govern the release of GM crops as a separate and distinct category. However, it had provided no machinery for post-market regulation, assuming that its responsibility ended once the new varieties were released into the fields or supermarkets. Yet now retailers found themselves on the frontline of a new cultural and political battle that threatened their sensitive and elaborate system of negotiations with consumer consciousness, based upon trading with symbols of naturalness, purity and health. Within this meltdown of public trust proliferated a growing series improvised measures, ranging from national
11 Greenpeace 1998 – „Leaked document from Monsanto reveals “collapse of public support for genetically engineered foods”„, Greenpeace press release, 18 November http://www.greenpeace.org.

51 bans by EU member states to boycotts by powerful supermarket chains. Activists arrested for sabotaging GM test fields would escape punishment, with the courts refusal to convict them demonstrating the wider lack of cultural legitimacy of the GM project.
This political, cultural, epistemic and regulatory logjam intensified until in June 1999 five
EU member states - Denmark, France, Greece Italy and Luxembourg – successfully proposed a de-facto moratorium on any new Part C consents to the European
Environment Council. The motion at Council said that, given concerns about risk, the specificity of European ecosystems, and the need to restore the confidence of public opinion and the market, the Commission should suspend new authorisations until it had strengthened and widened its risk assessment procedures and put in place a system allowing the complete traceability of GMOs and products derived from them.
12 Thus the last two GM crops given Part C Consents in 1998 – AgroEvo/Aventis/Bayer‟s HR
Maize (T25, import only), and Monsanto‟s bt resistant maize (MON 810, import and cultivation) – were to be the last under the old directive 90/220. In addition the countries of Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden stated they will take a „thoroughly precautionary approach‟ in dealing with marketing applications, urging the Commission to make proposals for the traceability and labelling regulations as soon as possible.
Changes to the regulatory frame work
The 1990/220 Directive had long been proposed for review. But it was expected that this would be to liberalise and relax what industry had from the beginning seen as an overly precautionary regulatory framework. Now, however, the crisis over GM pushed this revision in the opposite direction – towards stronger regulation. Thus when in
February 1998 the European Commission published its proposed amendment to the directive this contained more than the earlier commitments to „streamlining‟ some aspects of the regulatory process. Negotiations gained momentum under the EU
12 p. 14.
Official minutes at http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/99/st09/09433en9.pdf
,

52
Austrian Presidency in the autumn of 1998. Stronger technical annexes on risk assessment were developed, which also included addressing the potential wider and indirect impacts of the crops such as the associated herbicide management regime. There was also the beginning of negotiations around the development of a regime of postmarket monitoring. The new directive to replace 1990/220 was published by the
Commission in February 1998, and finally made law as Directive 2002/18 on 12 March
2001.
The revised Directive differs from the 1990 one in several significant ways. These changes can be understood as a response to the regulatory crisis triggered by the original directive. These included changes in both principles of risk assessment (the consideration of wider and indirect effects; post-release monitoring; and the banning of some antibiotic resistance markers) and in political mechanisms (the permissibility of ethical considerations; changes in the comitology; and more public consultation). These changes were supported by an explicit reference to the precautionary principle for the first time, contained in both the Directive‟s preamble and in the important technical Annex II on risk assessment.
The principles of risk assessment were significantly extended in Annex II, so that they now included addressing the potential wider and indirect impacts of the crops such as the associated herbicide management regime, with more trials sanctioned to provide such information. Other information was also required, such as an assessment of the effects on non-target species and possible competitive advantages that may be transferred to other plants. The revised directive also called for mandatory post-release monitoring requirements, with the preamble stating the necessity to „establish common objectives for the monitoring of GMOs after their deliberate release or placing on the market as or in products‟, including „monitoring of potential cumulative long-term effects‟. (Preamble, para 20). Furthermore, the 2001 directive put a ten year time limit on consents. Another revision introduced, in response to public and NGO concerns, included placing some restrictions on the controversial antibiotic resistant marker genes, stating that those still in medical or veterinary use should be „taken into particular consideration‟ in risk

53 assessment, „with a view to identifying and phasing out those...which may have adverse effects on human health and the environment‟ by 2004 (A4 -2).
The revised 2001 directive also attempted to address the wider issues of public and political concern that stretched beyond the narrow technical and scientistic parameters of the 1990 original. Thus the preamble (para 9) states that: „Respect for ethical principles recognised in a Member State is particularly important. Member states may take into consideration ethical aspects when GMOs are deliberately released or placed on the market as or in products‟. Thus ethical concerns were included as having some legitimacy within the new official regulatory frame work, although kept separate from and subordinate to the traditional science based environmental and health risk assessment paradigm. This is reflected in Articles 28 and 29 of the new directive which codified the commission‟s relationship to expert authority and advice. Article 28 called for mandatory consultation with relevant EU level scientific committees, while Article 29 had the lesser power to recommend consultation with specialist ethical committees.
The 2001 directive also amended EU procedure, with some more power granted to member states and an obligation to consult the European Parliament, although it also attempted to discourage more unilateral national bans by tightening the criteria by which they could be declared. However, it also became possible for the council of ministers to reject a GMO notification dossier by a qualified majority . This was a change from the previous directive‟s insistence on unanimity, which as we have seen with the example of
Bt 176 maize, had been impossible even if all member states were hostile to consent, given the obligations of a rapporteur state whose Competent Authority was involved.
Finally, the revised 2001 directive made gestures towards including more space for public consultation , including mandatory public consultation. Thus Article 9 within section „B‟ of the directive covering national experimental releases, entitled „Consultation of and information to the public‟, called on member states to:
„... consult the public and, where appropriate, groups on the proposed deliberate release. In doing so, Member States shall lay down arrangements for this

54 consultation, including a reasonable time-period, in order to give the public or groups the opportunity to express an opinion‟.
This article also called on member states to make „available to the public information on all Part B releases of GMOs in their territory‟, and also called for the Commission to make information from EU level exchanges on GM notifications available to the public.
Regarding the EU wide Part C marketing releases, the revised Directive also contained an article (Article 24) on „Information to the public‟. This called for the summaries of GM notifications, and related assessment reports to be made immediately publicly available, with a further allowance that: „The public may make comments to the Commission within 30 days‟ with a commitment that the Commission will immediately forward these to the competent authorities. Another article of the 2001 directive (article 16) called for a
60 day period for public comments on the criteria and information requirements that the specific GM notification had been judged to require.
These features marked a change from the 1990 Directive, which had only called for public consultation on a Part B consent „where a Member State considers it appropriate‟
(Article 7, 1990/220). However, even under the revised Directive the calls for public information and consultation were still vague, with the mere placing of information on websites or advertisements in specified newspapers considered enough.
Other parts of the new EU regulatory framework for GMOs were established after more lengthy and contested negotiations in 2003. These were Regulation 1829/2003 on GM food and Feed regulation and Regulation 1830/2003 on Labelling and Traceability of GM Food and Feed products . These Regulations, devised as complementary twins and both simultaneously adopted on 22 Sept 2003, revised and extended the existing legislation established in 1997 around the novel foods regulation. The new GM Food and
Feed Regulation 1829/2003 removed GM foods from the scope of this previous 258/97 regulation. While the 1997 regulation had split GM foods into two categories – (article
1a) „foods and food ingredients containing or consisting of genetically modified organisms‟ and (article 1b) those „produced from, but not containing, genetically modified organisms‟, the new regulation significantly combined these into a single

55 category of food or feed: „consisting of, containing or produced from GMOs‟ (preamble para 3). Thus all the new regulations would apply far beyond the scope of those covered in 258/97 and extend even to foodstuffs containing no traces of the modified DNA.
From this followed a number of changes. Under the previous 1997 novel foods regulation, those in the second category, „produced from, but not containing‟ GMOs, had been considered to be „substantially equivalent‟ to existing foods and therefore only requiring a simplified regulatory procedure that avoided the safety testing associated with the former category. The 2003 new food and feed regulation explicitly moved beyond the concept of substantial equivalence. Its preamble paragraph 6 stating that:
„Whilst substantial equivalence is a key step in the procedure for assessment of the safety of genetically modified foods, it is not a safety assessment in itself. In order to ensure clarity, transparency and a harmonised framework for authorisation of genetically modified food, this notification procedure should be abandoned in respect of genetically modified foods‟(1829/2003 preamble para 6).
Thus for all foods and feeds whether „consisting of, containing or produced from
GMOs‟ , more information was required to be presented for assessment, including more live animal and in vitro studies. Regulations 1829/2003 and 1830/2003 thus moved Europe towards the establishment of a post-market-release system of monitoring, testing and regulation around labelling and traceability.
Also, for the first time, as indicated in the regulations title, GM products intended for animal feed as well as human food were subject to regulation and labelling. However, while the 2003 GM food and feed regulation applied to foods produced from GMOs it did not cover food feed produced with a GMO (such as a cheese produced with a GM enzyme). Furthermore, and against parliamentary and social movement demands, it did not cover products derived from animals fed with GM feed or treated with GM veterinary products. (preamble para 16).
This emerging regime of labelling and traceability was justified in a number of different discursive registers: In both the new 2003 regulations, primary justifications were still rooted in the rhetorics of protection of the biological sphere of human health and the environment, announced as the key criterion, coming second only to opening paragraphs

56 announcing the need for harmonised markets and the removal of fetters on the free movement of GMOs and GM products. However, other discursive repertoires are also drawn on in the scramble to fill the legitimatory void. The „ right of consumers to information ‟ which forms Article 153 of the EU‟s foundational treaty is invoked in
Article 17 of the food and feed regulation, which goes on to pronounce labelling as the basis of informed choice. Article 21 of this regulation elaborates:
„Clear labelling, irrespective of the detectability of DNA or protein resulting from the genetic modification in the final product , meets the demands expressed in numerous surveys by a large majority of consumers, facilitates informed choice and precludes potential misleading of consumers as regards methods of manufacture or production‟. (1829/2003; 21). [emphasis added]
Here we see the „sound science‟ framing of the DRD being trumped or at least qualified by ethics, values and perceptions. Furthermore, ethical and religious concerns are referred to as legitimate reasons for labelling and informed choice, mentioned in Article
22 along with medically based special dietary needs. This extra-sound-science regulatory discourse can be traced at least back to the 258/97 novel food regulation which included in paragraph 8 of its preamble the „ethical concerns‟ of „defined population groups associated with well established practices regarding food‟. Thus the EU regulatory system moved further beyond its original positivist „sound science‟ regulatory rhetoric in its governing of the GMO controversy.
The traceability regulations in the sibling regulation of 1830/2003 also exhibits this jostling for position in the hierarchy of repertoires of legitimation. Thus its preambles third paragraph argues that:
„Traceability requirements for GMOs should facilitate both the withdrawal of products where unforeseen adverse effects on human health, animal health or the environment, including ecosystems, are established, and the targeting of monitoring to examine potential effects on, in particular, the environment‟
(1839/2003 para 3).

57
However, following close on the heels of this positive risk-based paragraph comes the clarion call to „ensure that accurate information is available to operators and consumers to enable them to exercise their freedom of choice in an effective manner‟ (1830/2003 paragraph 4). Thus the emerging world of parallel agro-food regimes brought into being by labelling and traceability would slide in legitimatory registers between physical risk and consumer choice. This new set of parallel regimes would also require a complex extension of the regulatory senses, recordings and borders along the chains of food production and distribution. As well as tests to detect for the presence of GM material, unique identification codes would help trace GM derived products through the agrofood system. The 2003 regulations on food and feed traceability and labeling established a threshold for adventitious or technically unavoidable presence of GMO
„contamination‟ below which would escape labelling. The commission initially proposed a
1% threshold, while the Parliament voted for 0.5% and zero tolerance for unauthorized
GMOs. Eventually a compromise of 0.9% threshold was passed, with a 0.5% for unauthorized constructs.
With this new regulatory machinery finally in place, the scene was set in 2004 for the commission‟s attempt finally to break the regulatory log jam that had led to the „de facto‟ moratorium six years earlier. The Consent procedures resumed, as did the national bans now authorised by Article 23 of the new Directive. This regulatory discourse was linked to the emergence of a compromise position of „coexistence‟. On 23 July 2003 the
Commission had published its recommendation „on guidelines for the development of national strategies and best practices to ensure the co-existence of genetically modified crops with conventional and organic farming.
13 The first few paragraphs, reproduced below, are revealing of how far things have changed: away from a narrow focus on positivistic discourses of risk assessment and embracing consumer perceptions; away from the model of a single high-technology agricultural bioeconomy for Europe towards a model of multiple bioeconomies coexisting in the same space; and away from a linear
13 http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/publi/reports/coexistence2/guide_en.pdf
.

58 model of simply checking the safety of GMOs before release, to one of continuous management to enable the different bioeconomies to coexist.
(1) No form of agriculture, be it conventional, organic, or agriculture using GMOs, should be excluded in the European Union.
(2) The ability to maintain different agricultural production systems is a prerequisite for providing a high degree of consumer choice.
(3) Co-existence refers to the ability of farmers to make a practical choice between conventional, organic and GM-crop production, in compliance with the legal obligations for labelling and/or purity standards.
(4) Specific co-existence measures to protect the environment and the human health, if needed, are included in the final consent of the authorisation procedure in accordance with Directive 2001/18/EC, with a legal obligation for their implementation.
(5) The issue of co-existence addressed in this Recommendation concerns the potential economic loss and impact of the admixture of GM and non-GM crops, and the most appropriate management measures that can be taken to minimise admixture
3.2. Greece 14
Introduction
With regard to its response to agricultural biotechnology, Greece exemplifies a pattern reflecting a sceptical view which recently comes closer to that in member states such as
Austria, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Cyprus (Interview 14b-6, 180806; Interview
9b-6, 181006). The general policy style could be described as having been
14
Volakakis.
The researchers and lead authors for this section were Maria Kousis and Yannis

59
‘precautionary’, ‘positivistic’ and officially, ‘non-participatory’ .
With little or no national biotechnology industry, a style of agriculture and culinary culture that did not predispose it towards the first wave of genetically modified crops and foodstuffs, and a population which has always been amongst the most cautious of Europeans to agricultural biotechnology, the Greek government fairly quickly settled into a precautionary , anti-GMO stance which has been more or less consistently held up to the present. The
Greek state apparatus attempted repeatedly to ban authorised GMOs from its territory, invoking Article 16 of the Deliberate Release Directive 1990/220 or Article 18 of
Directive 2002/53 on the common catalogue of agricultural plant species, and led the group of member states calling for a five-year moratorium on new authorisations in
1999. However, the dominant discourse in policy debates around GMOs was positivistic and in favour of alternative-organic agriculture , in that techno-scientific – and later on political and economic – arguments dominated, rather than ethical, religious ones. Even the call for a moratorium was framed in terms of the need for a more rigorous testing and labelling framework. Finally, given its precautionary stance, and its converging views with the anti-GMO public, the Greek approach was non-participatory in the sense that there were no formal attempts by state agencies to involve lay publics in making policy decisions over GM crops, food and feed. Instead, participation in the Greek case was confined on the one hand, to multi-level mobilisations and pressure created by coalitions of environmentalists, local authorities, farmers associations, consumers, scientists‟ unions and others, while on the other, to the rather close, yet informal relationship between environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace, and political ecology groups, with government departments in the setting of biotechnology policy agendas and the policing of Greece‟s borders against GM.
The Greek state begins to enter the biotechnology area as late as 1982 under the Socialist government, when Act 1266/82 establishes the new short-lived Ministry of Research and
Development. In the same year, BIOHELLAS S.A., a state controlled company is founded to carry out projects of national interest, most of which were related to the agro-food sector such as valorization of agricultural by-products and projects dealing with bio-energy. This joint investment of the Ministry of Industry, the Agricultural Bank of Greece and the Bank of Industrial Development, never initiated projects of gene

60 technology and molecular genetics, as did various independent University groups
(Chatjouli et al . 1997). In 1983, a „National Committee for Biotechnology‟ was formed by the Ministry of National Economy and the General Secretariat of Research and
Technology (GSRT) 15 , comprised by scientific experts assigned to deal with all matters concerning biotechnology. In December of 1983 Greece adopts EC Directives on environmental policy (819.71) and consumer protection (650.79), without setting up a public dialogue. It was the Greek Association of Biologists – not the state – which in
1984 organized a conference on „Biotechnology and Society‟, with almost null attendance by the media and the public (Chatjouli et al . 1997). A few years later, the Greek
Association of Biotechnology was founded by non state actors, but its contribution remained limited. In 1992 the first Greek Bioethics Committee was initiated under Act no. 2071/92 - which provided a general mandate for the creation of advisory committees. Yet, it was only five years later, in April, 1997, that this committee was officially established under the auspices of the General Secretariat of Research &
Technology (GSRT), by an act of the Minister of Development (Galloux et al . 2002).
Phase I. The beginning of institutional innovation: formation of concern and initiatives about GMOs, early-late nineties
Thus, until the early 1990s there was no significant policy concerning biotechnology in
Greece (Botetzagias et al . 2002); neither did biotechnology appear in debates in the public sphere, nor the agendas of relevant social actors. But in the early 1990s public concern gradually arises over biotechnological issues, mostly related to GM food and cloning. A number of civil society bodies started to take up the issue. In 1993, organic farmers founded DIO 16 , a nonprofit organisation for the inspection and certification of biological products. Approved in 1993 and renewed in 2002 by the Ministry of Rural Development and Food, it is the first organisation of its type to operate in Greece since 2001, under
15 GSRT belonged at that time to the Ministry of Industry.
16 The name derives from the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture, Demeter. (Δη= μήτηρ, i.e. mother - of the earth. Δη is synonymous with Γη).

61 the National Certification System. DIO strongly opposed GMOs through published articles, books, leaflets as well as participation in conferences and a variety of activities.
Greenpeace also started to research and campaign on GMOs. It conducted a large number of research projects concerning the presence of genetically modified materials in
Greek foods, and conducted research on the attitudes of the Greek industries towards genetically modified foods. Nea Ecologia, the Greek representative of Friends of Earth, engaged as well, in limited R&D related to biotechnology and the protection of agricultural and animal bio-diversity (Kousis 2001).
The nineties also witnessed the establishment of new institutions to help steer and implement biotechnology policy. In 1992 the first Greek Bioethics Committee (GBC) was initiated under law No. 2071/92 which provided a general mandate for the creation of advisory committees. Yet, it was only five years later, in April, 1997, that the committee was officially established by an act of the Minister of Development (Galloux et al . 2002). This Bioethics Committee belongs to the General Secretariat of Research &
Technology (GSRT), (Geniki Grammateia Erevnas & Technologias – GGET), part of the Ministry of Development. In September 1998, it expanded its agenda to include not only medical ethics but all bioethical issues. During this period it consisted of 7 members
(3 from biosciences, including the chair, 1 doctor, 1 law expert, 1 theologian, 1 journalist). Its main purpose has been to inform GSRT and the Ministry of Development on the legal, ethical and socio-economic impacts of biotechnology. The committee was headed by Professor Tsaftaris, biotechnologist, and at that time, General Secretary of
Research and Development. A year after its formation, and - as it appears -before the moratorium was proposed by Greece, the Committee gave its expert advice on „Release of GM Plants to the Environment,‟ warning of significant risks of contamination for specific types of plants found in Greece:

62
„This is the case of oil rapeseed and its weed, the black mustard 17 , a native in Greek flora.
These experiments should be prohibited, and the relevant ministries acted correctly when they prohibited such a product in our country.
 In addition, the committee suggests that in the context of its external relations and international agreements with our neighbouring countries with similar environments, our country should attempt to stop experimental trials of plants of this category.
 The committee proposes that Scientific Associations and Unions with competency in this area, should classify our country‟s cultivated species as well as the cloned genes
[κλωνοποιημένα γονίδια] of the aforementioned five categories, so that this classification could become a guide assisting the relevant ministries in their decision making.
 In many cases there is lack of basic knowledge … something that makes risk assessment on biotechnology products, less precise. The Committee proposes that the Ministry of Environment should fund related studies in order to obtain the necessary data.
... [The risk of GM gene dispersion] could create trouble because organic farmers would like to certify that their products are GM-free‟ (our translation).
In 1998 the Greek government established the National Bioethics Commission , an independent advisory body of experts charged to explore the ethical, social and legal impact of the biosciences. The Commission is composed of nine academics – four natural scientists (with expertise in biology, genetics, medicine and biotechnology respectively), two lawyers, a philosopher, a sociologist and a theologian. Members are appointed by the Prime minister for a term of five years, and the commission is supported by two senior scientists and has its own secretariat .
18
17 Vrouva/es (black mustard) are wild vegetation/greens, picked and eaten boiled as a winter salad/meal in most parts of Greece.
18 http://www.bioethics.gr/index.php?category_id=3 .

63
„Up to now, the Committee has not contributed much in building trust in society, but I think it could contribute in the future… it has failed in public communication…Funding is necessary [to carry this out]‟ ( interview 4b-6, June
2006 )
Because of the more consensual opposition to GM in Greece, the Commission was not called upon to play such a dramatic role as was the comparable Agricultural and
Environment Biotechnology Commission in the UK. Nevertheless, it has been involved in a number of GM-related initiatives since its inception. Although predominantly concerned with medical biotechnology, the Commission held a series of meetings on
GM plants and their products, and published its recommendation in March 2000.
19 The recommendation considers the arguments for agricultural biotechnology (nutritional benefits, the reduced use of pesticides, labour saving, vaccine administration, and increased global food, feed, and fibre security) as well as those against (the threat to biodiversity, increasing farmers‟ dependence on biotechnology companies, potential allergic reactions, accelerated bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and the political rather than technological origins of famine). It asserts the need for objectivity:
There is a limited number of scientific studies to date concerning the potential benefits and risks of GM plants whilst results are often controversial. This uncertainty fuels rather sentimentally charged debates leading to public confusion, which in turn prevents citizens to reach an objective decision as to whether they will consume or reject the products consumption of GM plants and their
( www.bioethics.gr/media/pdf/recommendations/Recom_gmo_eng.pdf
).
19 http://www.bioethics.gr/media/pdf/recommendations/Recom_gmo_eng.pdf
.

64
Finally, it recommends: (i) a temporary moratorium on GM field trials and cultivation in
Greece, 20 (ii) a moratorium on research effects GM plants until stricter guidelines are in place, (iii) the compulsory labelling of products containing or deriving from GMOs, and
(iv) the establishment of a group of specialists to report on specific cases to the
Commission.
Another important institution related to GM policy was founded in September 1999 (Act
2741/28-09-1999). EFET ( Enieos Foreas Eleghou Trofimon , the Unified Body for Food
Inspection) belongs to the Ministry of Development, with six other Ministries sharing responsibility: Economics, Environment, Agriculture, Health, Public Order and Public
Administration). EFET is run by 9 members – the President, who is appointed by the
Minister of Development, 4 members appointed by the ministers of Economics,
Agriculture, Public Health and Public Order, 1 member by the Federation of Greek
Industries (SEV), 1 member by the National Confederation of Greek Commerce
(ESEE), 1 member by National Council of Consumers (ESK) and 1 member by the
Panhellenic Confederation of Agricultural Co-operatives (PASEGES). EFET‟s scientific advisory bodies are the Scientific Council for Food Inspections, ESET, and the National
Policy Council on Food Inspections ESPET. While the first advices when the EFET‟s administrative council requests its scientific advice, the second operates as an advisory body on related policy issues and recommends action programmes and proposals related to EFET‟s mission.
21
The main function of EFET is the formation of quality standards for food in order to protect public health and the interests of the consumers, quality inspections of food companies and the setting of hygienic rules according to EC Directive 1993/43 and national legislation. Laboratory testing remained at the General Chemical Laboratory of
20 By this time, as we will see, Greece and other member states had already secured a fiveyear de facto moratorium on new authorisations within the EU; this call, however, went further as far as the Greek territory was concerned.
21 www.efet.gr
.

65 the State ( Geniko Himeio tou Kratous) under the administration of the Ministry of
Economics. Among the main programmes that have been run by EFET, the three on
GMOs have mainly been concerned with monitoring foodstuffs for traces of genetically modified material. The first two programs, during 2000 and 2001 respectively, related to the tracing of GMOs in food according to the implementation of EC Regulation
258/97, 22 and the subsequent regulations 1139/98, 49/2000 and 50/2000. The third
(2002 to the present) involves inspections to ensure compliance with EU rules on GM food labelling, with results being accessible to the public.
23
However, Greece, like member-states such as Austria, has its own very strict GM-related controls on imported seed and food, controls which go beyond what is required to comply with EU regulations, especially on grains.
24 In the past five years EFET has documented its rejection of all applications concerning market circulation of new products such as corn Bt11, NK603, BtCRY1F 1507, rice LLRICE62 and rape oil seed
Ms8xRf3. In its efforts to secure GMO traceability, EFET has initiated the creation of mechanisms that could trace food content to its constitutive parts via the creation of a register of food companies (EFET site). In December of 2003, EFET requested from
EFSA „to proceed towards a comprehensive evaluation of the likely comparative advantages or benefits which might be associated with GM components, in comparison with conventional food‟ (EFET site).
On June 24, 1999, with the support of Denmark, France, Italy and Luxembourg, the
Greek government through the vice Minister of Environment Mr Koliopanos, succeeded
22 Regulation 258/97 on Novel Foods and Novel Food Ingredients http://www.biosafety.be/GB/Dir.Eur.GB/FF/258_97/258_97.html
23 www.efet.gr
, accessed 11-08-2005. The results of the inspections showed a 4% -
25% presence of GM products, mainly soy bean in processed food.
24 Interview, civil servant responsible for GMOs in Food, Ministry of Rural Development and Food – see also June 2004 interview with Professor Alifakiotis on http://www.agrotypos.gr/ .

66 in proposing a five-year, Europe-wide moratorium on new authorisations of GM crops.
According to Koliopanos (2006) the main reasons that led to the moratorium were:
1. The gaps and weakenesses of European legislation (directive 90/220 of EEC) mainly in risk assessment, traceability, labelling, the time duration of research on possible negative impacts, etc.
2. The concern of the European citizens, but global public opinion as well, for the dangers related to health and the environment.
3. The need to abide to the precautionary principle.
4. The reservations of the large majority of the scientific community.
5. The visible danger of future dependence of our farmers and our agriculture from a few multinational companies (Koliopanos, 2006, our translation).
One key feature of the Greek case is the close and for the most part informal relationship of political ecology and professional ENGOs with state agencies, especially since the mid nineties, i.e. the early part of PASOK‟s three consecutive terms in government (1992-2004). This relationship may be also seen as an effect of the EU political opportunity structure, which encourages and promotes the incorporation and collaboration of environmental NGOs in/with state and supra-state agencies. At the same time, it also reflects a domestic political opportunity structure portrayed in an intimate relationship between leftist and environment or ecology oriented groups in
Greece. For example, collaborations between the Ecologists-Alternatives and SYN
[synaspismos], the leftist coalition party, contributed to its new name – the Coalition of the Left, Social Movements and Ecology – while environmental protection was a novel commitment of PASOK‟s new governance beginning in 1992 (Karamichas 2002). Also visible are PASOK‟s co-optation tactics involving members of professional environmental NGOs and the Federation of Ecologists Alternatives (FEA) 25 in its echelons, following a „modernization‟ rhetoric. In 1994, state agencies supported a group of environmentalists including Modinos and Efthimiopoulos who created the
Interdisciplinary Institute for Environmental Research (DIPE), a nonprofit organization
25 Founded in 1998.

67 linked to the first ecology journal in Greece, Nea Oikologia , a collaborator of Friends of the Earth. The institute actively engages in environment and conservation related programmes, while at the same time, it is closely tied to the Modinos-headed organization that published Nea Oikologia during the 1984-1994 period. PASOK also appointed Modinos, a well-known figure in FEA, as the head of a new major strategic advisory body which it created in 1999, the National Centre for Environment and
Sustainable Development (EKPAA, 2002).
Thus, albeit for a brief, year and a half period, PASOK selected former director of
Greenpeace, Ilias Efthimiopoulos, as its new deputy Minister of Environment 26 in April of 2000.
27 At that time, the General Director of the office of the Environment Ministry was G. Politis, also former member of WWF, while Martinos Gaitlich, one of the founding members of the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Nature was a major advisor of the deputy Minister. Nea Ecologia‟s member Papagiannakis, also represented
SYN as a member of the European Parliament (Kousis, 2004).
In 1996 the Greek transposition of Directive 1990/220, involved the Ministry of
Environment as „competent authority‟ for part B (experimental) consents, and the
Ministry of Agriculture for part C (commercial) consents. Members of the Competent
Authority included representatives from the Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works; the Ministry of Health; the Ministry of Agriculture; the General
Chemistry Laboratory of the State; the Ministry of Development; and two scientific experts (Caloghirou & Zambarloukos, 2000). During the same year, multinational biotechnology company ZENECA (now Syngenta) requested permission to cultivate
GM tomatoes. Although initially the PASOK government agreed, strong reactions by
Greenpeace, with close ties to state agencies as mentioned above, appear to push the state to withdraw its approval (Marouda-Chatjoulis et al . 1998).
26 Part of the Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works (YPEHODE).
27 Efthimiopoulos deacribed the experience as „an experiment that did not prove to be particularly successful‟ (Kathimerini, 25.10.01).

68
Phase II. The moratorium, GMO infiltration, and participatory governance, late nineties to 2004
But it is particularly from 1998 that the GM issue started to become prominent in the
Greek polity, and quickly established a dominant framing in terms of „genetic infiltration, contamination and pollution‟, which created pressure towards the formulation of new national regulations, and the establishment of new bodies to act as gatekeepers. In that year Greenpeace conducted a laboratory analysis in a specialized lab in Germany with samples from imported soybean flour, the first to be analysed from Greece. The shipment had come from the US via Italy, and was destined to be used as cattle feed. The analysis showed the presence of GM soy in the flour. Greenpeace stressed the way that the absence of controls intensifies public concern, and asked for full labelling in all products. In March of the following year Greenpeace conducted research on products on supermarket shelves. Everyday products were sent to Germany for testing and the results showed that at least three imported products contained GMOs: soybean lecithin, corn chips and strawberry cream imported from the Netherlands. „There was no label in any of those products informing the consumers‟, said Greenpeace representative, Mr
Haralampidis. Greenpeace informed the General Secretariat of Consumers (Ministry of
Development), and the supermarket where those GM foods were found withdrew the specific products.
Since 1998, influenced by growing public opposition to agricultural biotechnology, the
Greek government also started to use powers granted to member states by EU legislation in order to try to keep GMOs out of Greece. In October 1998, followed by Austria,
Luxembourg and France, Greece initiated the move to invoke Article 16 of Directive
1990/220 in order to ban previously authorised GMOs from its territory. In the first instance, Greece banned the import, marketing and cultivation of a variety of GM HR rapeseed developed by the German company AgrEvo. Mounting opposition by organic farmers and local authorities to planned experimental GM cultivations in Greek rural areas such as Thessaly, Central Greece, and the Thessaloniki region in 1998 and 1999, also led the government to reject almost all applications made by several multinational companies for Part B consents for experimental cultivation under 1990/220. Out of the
19 SNIF applications for experimental GM cultivations, only one was authorized and

69 carried out, while another one was authorized, but not completed (Interview 11b-6). Vice
Minister of Environment (YPEHODE) Koliopanos and General Secretary Mpieratos announced that no similar applications would be approved in 1999 and 2000, and suggested that the EU reconsider the whole issue.
A couple of years later, in the June 2001 session of the Greek Parliament, PASOK‟s deputy (MP, vouleutis) and former vice minister of Environment, Koliopanos, questioned the stance of the Minister of Agriculture towards GM cultivations (implying non-compliance with the EU-wide moratorium that was by then in place), reminding
Parliament that:
Our position is…that we do not accept, for political reasons, for reasons of trade
(εμπορικής), if you wish, politics (πολιτικής), even if such a decision has the approval of the Scientific Committee of the United Europe, that a seed of this type, a product of this type does not harm neither the environment nor human life, even then [if it wouldn‟t] we have to say to the producers only this: that we want our country clean from genetically modified organisms, because this, far from scientific disputes and conflicts [αντιδικίες], accommodates [βολεύει] our trade policy…
The big success [moratorium] in the Council of the Environment Ministers in 1999…did not happen from one moment to another. It was preceded by a three year period of procedures, dialogues, inner-governmental dialogue. We talked with all the co-competent
Ministries, we agreed to this policy, the Prime Minister agreed. We took it to the
European Union, we achieved and convinced and created a big block inside the
European Union and succeeded what was considered inconceivable to the European

70 citizen, i.e. the moratorium on the mutated 28 [μεταλλαγμένα]. This was a national policy, which became community [policy]…
..all which is proposed by the big companies as a moral mission, that with the mutated we will hit hunger in the world, are fairy tales [παραμύθια]. So were they fairy tales in the past, that agrochemicals will fight hunger. We know what happened. Dumping sites increased and dangerous toxic substances were traced in maternal milk…
The „No‟ [όχι] which we raised then with our initiative in the European Union was not a
„No‟ to progress and science, but was a „No‟ to genetic trade [γενετικό εμπόριο], a „No‟ to a few big companies, wishing to present themselves as semi-gods, because their only god is profits [το κέρδος]. And we know from this story that the Greek as well as the
European farmer will be totally dependent from these few companies. And you know that there is support in this direction from the scientific community … (Parliament
Minutes, June 2001, our translation).
A variety of groups have influenced the government‟s position concerning the moratorium, including Greenpeace-Greece, as well as committees of experts other than bioethics committees.
„When in 1999 some experimental GM tomato cultivations were approved, Greenpeace demonstrated outside the Parliament and the Ministry of the Environment. We invited local authorities (nomarhies) and they immediately came to our side, refusing to accept the fact that GM plants (even at an experimental stage) were grown in their area. After this mobilisation, tomato factories in Central Greece and Peloponnese assured they had
28 Albeit an adjective in English, „mutated‟ (used in this section as a noun) is the term which comes closest to the commonly used term „Μεταλλαγμένα‟, reflecting negative views across formal and informal social, economic and political spaces in Greece (see Volakakis and Kiourkas,
2004).

71 no intention to use GM tomato any more. Even though it was a peaceful demonstration we did not face any obstacles by the government. In fact we only found allies in our efforts. After that, we informed Deputy Minister Mr Koliopanos, who had previously signed for the GM experimental cultivations. He then took the initiative to promote the moratorium in the EU along with France, Austria, Luxembourg and Belgium. Mr
Koliopanos acknowledged the role of Greenpeace in the Moratorium of 1999 admitting that, „If it were not for Greenpeace there would nοt have been a Moratorium‟ ( interview
2b-6, with representative of Greenpeace Greece, our translation ).
„During that year (1999), I was participating in the Bioethics Committee of the Ministry of Environment. Mr Koliopanos, who really wanted to make a difference, asked us about the issue of GM crops. With our suggestions and our contribution as a Committee,
Deputy Minister of the Environment took the initiative to propose a five year
Moratorium‟ ( interview 1b-6, our translation )
In subsequent years Greece continued to play a key role in calls for an adequate system of labelling and traceability. Greek NGOs and scientists, and the deputy Minister of
Environment, Ilias Efthimiopoulos, pointed out the lack of control mechanisms and the need for more strict measures. Therefore during the convention of EU‟s Environment-
Ministers in Paris, Efthimiopoulos proposed additional measures to be taken concerning labelling, legal responsibilities to companies that produce, commerce and transfer such products, as well as the creation of GM-zones within the EU.
In 2000 a „serious blow‟ shook Greek cotton production 29 when GM seeds were identified within the imported conventional seeds. Labelling this as a major scandal,
29 Greece is EU‟s major cotton grower
,
cultivating 80% of EU‟s cotton growing areas
(interview 6b-6, 031006)

72
Greenpeace accused the ministries of agriculture and environment for violating EC legislation in order to protect the interests of specific companies which broke the law, and requested from the prime minister to stop the scandal of the „illegal import and cultivation of GM cotton‟. Specifically they stressed that:
While the vice minister of PEHODE, I. Efthimiopoulos, announced (on 12-7-
2000) the undertaking of a European initiative aiming to promote the impartial responsibility for the mutated and the legitimation of a country‟s or a region‟s right to deny the cultivation of mutated plants, the minister of agriculture pushed in order that „we do not lose the opportunity‟ which the mutated offer to agriculture (informal Council of Ministers of Agriculture, 3-5 September, Biarritz,
France). The non-existence of a national policy on the issue of the mutated legitimates jumped-up and dangerous decisions as is the recent one concerning cotton. Greece is in danger of being defenceless in facing the storm of the mutated, [Greece is] a free field of action for the uncontrolled importation and cultivation of mutated organisms (Greenpeace Greece, 2000, our translation).
As a result of pressures from various groups and following state actions, 679 tons of cotton seeds [σύσπορου] were removed because they contained GM seeds and farmers were compensated by the state with 50 million drachmas – of these, 365 tons were destroyed, 85 tons were burned, 65 tons were returned to Spain, which was their country of origin, and 10 tons were restrained by Greek Authorities (SDOE). Although this problem was identified in eight European countries, only Greece and Sweden took control measures of this type (Tzanavara 2001).
Given the above, the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment decided to establish a
Scientific Council of Biotechnology for the multiplicative material of agricultural products under the auspices of the National Institute of Agricultural Research
(ETHIAGE). In addition, during 2001, a joint ministerial decree signed by the Ministers of Environment and Agriculture aimed to stop the import, trade and cultivation of GM seeds by defining control mechanisms and by resolving the mixing [prosmixeis] of conventional seeds with GM seeds. According to the vice minister of Environment:

73
„Our country is the first promoting such a decision … Greece insists on the labelling issue, because it offers the possibility of tracing all GMOs, their products and derivatives, from seeds to the final product. Control over the entire process, from field to shelf‟ (Efthimiopoulos, as cited in Tzanavara 2001, our translation)
Recounting Efthimiopoulos‟ achievements during his brief 2000-2001 period as deputy minister of Environment, the head of Greenpeace pointed to a single, major achievement:
„Following his initiative on the issue of the „mutated‟ (μεταλλαγμένα) [GM], a new and innovative legal frame was created. Overall however, we lived a theatre of the irrational, since from the other side, Mr. Anomeritis [Minister of Agriculture] said and did other things. ... Is it possible to expect a political parachutist to stand next to a years-long member [of PASOK]? In essence, in the case οf the mutated,
Efthimiopoulos was exposed for something over which he had no control‟
(Charalambides as cited in Ntanou 2001)
In November of 2000, the Pan-Hellenic Network of Ecological Organizations organized a conference dedicated to GMOs in Kavala, Northern Greece 30 . The conference was attended by the representatives of local government, including Margaritis from the leftof-centre party SYN; deputy Minister of Environment Efthimiopoulos, and his General
Secretary sent their greetings. It was agreed at the conference that there is a great need for thorough controls and transparency in technological procedures, for active public participation not only in expressing views, but in the decision–making process as well.
The political role of the US and its attempts to impose GMOs in the EU and in third world counties was stressed. Participants demanded funding for alternative, more acceptable to the public, agro-technologies, such as organic agriculture.
30 Lately experiencing internal tensions and more diverging views, vis-à-vis the anti-gmo
Thessaly network (interview 10b-6).

74
Among the groups that have been attending a reasonable number of meetings and actions against GMOs are representatives of the Greek Church (Interview10b-6). This is reflected in the announcements made by organizers of Pan-Hellenic networks (e.g. gmostop)
The church, from the bioethics point of view, is in essence against such [GMO] products ( www.gmostop.org/keimena/thesalia ). as well as church related publications (e.g. „Church Intervention‟):
Such GMOs are a specific type[ιδιότυπος] of rape on nature and that has consequences upon the human body and its health… Mutation should lead us to a change of mentality concerning the manners in which we live and think.
(Naupaktou Ierotheos, October 2006)
The views of the Orthodox Church relate to its comprehensive view on creation. Under this view there is no reason to stall research; research is not demonic [„δαιμονική‟].
However, in view of the great risks and the ethical issues related to its applications, i.e.
GM products, this research should be carried out with balance [ισορροπία] and selfrestraint [εγκράτεια], as the fathers of the church, such as Megas Vasileios, 31 have noted in their work (Zorbas, 2001).
The term „Orthodox Church‟ refers as much to the rite of the Church, as to the moral character (φρόνιμα), the ethos (το ήθος) and the way of life, which the believer shapes within his participation in the thanksgiving society. This community expresses a way of life which is able to and intervenes in the
31 According to Μέγας Βασίλειος: "Εγκρατείας δε ο κάλλιστος όρος και κανών
ούτως έστω, το μήτε τρυφήν, μήτε προς κακοπάθειαν της σαρκός βλέπειν, αλλά φεύγειν εν εκατέρω
την αμετρίαν, ίνα μήτε πολυσαρκούσα ταράσσηται, μήτε, νοσώδης γενομένη, αδυνατή προς την των
εντολών εργασίαν ", PG, 31:876.(Zorbas, 2001).

75 commons aiming for their perfection, without however being subjected to attrition and alterations [φθορά και αλλοίωση], which would deduct from her [the community‟s] the ontological substance οντολογικό content. This means that there is a logic in the „food culture‟ of traditional societies in Greece.
(Zorbas 2005)
It also means that the meaning of biotechnology according to the view of the
Church should be found not only in the ethics but in „bio-spirituality‟, since at the end, the ethical is „whatever maintains the operation of the self-governed inside of us, whatever preserves the harmony of our psychosomatic balance and whatever evokes the need of God and the feel for eternal perspective in our lives.‟
(Hatzinikolaou 32 2002, as cited in Zorbas, 2005)
In 2001 the PASOK government seems to have shifted its attitude towards GMOs towards a more liberal one. In May 2001, the Minister of Agriculture announced that he would allow experimental cultivation of two Monsanto GM cotton varieties. He criticised all those who opposed GM, arguing that the Greek proposal for a moratorium made by
Koliopanos had been extreme and unrealistic, since in the two year period there had been no proof that GMOs were dangerous to people‟s health, or the environment. The
Minister of Agriculture was also critical of Greenpeace and the former president of
GESASE (General Confederation of Greek Agricultural Associations). During the same month, the Minister of Development, Nikos Christodoulakis, criticised Greenpeace for publishing a catalogue of companies believed to be using GM ingredients, despite the simultaneous publication by EFET of test results which found that 12 percent of 241
32 Hatzinikolaou (Harvard &MIT Ph.D. in HST, Biomedical technology, current
Metropolitan [Mitropolitis] Nikolaos) has been a member of the Bioethics Committee of GSRT, the chair of the bioethics committee of the Greek Orthodox Church, as well as other bioethics committees).

34
35
76 food samples containing soy or corn included GM products, without mentioning this on the packaging.
33
At the same time, the Ministry of Environment considered allowing the experimental cultivations of GMOs. Related applications were submitted by research institutes such as
ETHIAGE (National Agricultural Research Foundation) and universities, but not by multinational companies. The only application from a company to experimentally cultivate GM sugar beet was rejected given the high risk involved due to the many wild plants closely related to sugar beet. ETHIAGE applied for GM rice cultivation in
Thessaloniki.
34 Reactions from the press and NGOs led PASOK‟s Prime Minister,
Kostas Simitis, to announce that there was no change in Greek policy concerning
GMOs, even though Greece should comply with the EU if there is such a resolution at the council of the Ministers of Environment in Brussels. The same turn in GM attitude can be noted in the Ministry of Agriculture as well. Minister Yiorgos Drys was quoted as saying, „GMOs are a reality we must accept‟.
35 This slight pro-GM turn lasted until the
PASOK government was replaced by the conservative New Democracy (ND) party in
2004, after eleven consecutive years of socialist government.
However, opposition by anti-GMO groups and networks endured throughout this period, manifesting itself even within scientific circles. In 2001 the Medical Association of Thessaloniki, headed by Kourakis, associate professor of medicine-genetics (ΑΠΘ) as well as member and deputy of SYN, formed a committee in order to examine the consequences of GM food to public health. The committee suggested the following:
33 citing Kathimerini . http://archives.foodsafetynetwork.ca/agnet/2001/5-2001/ag-05-30-01-01.txt
,
Kathimerini , April, 2002.
Eleftherotypia , 15 October 2002.

77
1. The suspension [of GMOs] should last for as long as needed to produce the necessary techno-knowledge which would guarantee the non-provocation of harm to health and the environment. Science does not assure this guarantee today.
2. [We] invite/call the state to prevent the importation and disposal of GMO derived food; to also forbid experimental or extensive cultivation of GM plants, as well as GM feed to animals;[we] call the competent agencies in our country to be the protagonists in the EC for a moratorium stopping the release of GTO in the environment…to declare our country a GTO free country in the context of EC institutions.
3. Research on genetic engineering and GTOs should be supported in the research institutions of our country….not according to the rules of the market but according to the real needs of people in the context of sustainable development…
4. In order that society is able to pronounce on this issue, citizens should be well informed and educated. This knowledge is necessary in order to provide an open and general dialogue. Therefore mixed committees of experts and representatives of various social groups must be formed.
(Medical Association of Thessaloniki 2002, our translation) 36
During this period, Greenpeace continued its actions against GM products. In 2001 it took the initiative to create a consumers‟ network for the protection and information about GM food and distribute a questionnaire concerning the use of GM crops and seeds to 180 food industries (Kousis, 2001). The organisation ran a survey on cattle feed products to all the related food companies, asking them to reply and guarantee that no
GMOs were being used in breeding animals. The food companies cover all spectrums of meat and dairy products.
37 Consumers are given this widely circulated list of all marked,
36 Thessaloniki, 5/6/2001, Kathimerini newspaper 06/06/2001.
37 According to the answers received, Greenpeace classifies the companies in three categories: “Red” – those that have not yet answered the Greenpeace questionnaire, so one could easily assume that they are “suspect”; “Grey” – the ones stating that their products come from animals not fed with GMOs, but have not yet brought evidence or certifications to verify the above. In addition, it includes companies claiming that they find ways to assure GM-free cattle

78 food companies, as a consumer guide. Greenpeace also organised more dynamic protest actions like the occupation of the food factory „Ellinikes Elaiourgies‟ in Fthiotida, as a reaction to the company‟s use of GM cattle feed, traced in specimens containing GM soybean (November 2002). They also held a protest outside the US embassy (September
2003). The organisation continued their active involvement in the detection of imported
GMOs. For example, during May 2005, three incidents concerning the importation of
GM soybean and corn were recorded by the organisation. Greenpeace made public accusations or tried to block ships that were carrying GMOs. Responding to the pressure created, in two of the three cases, the authorities assured the public through announcements that thorough inspections would take place.
Simultaneously, major newspapers leaning towards the center or center-left such as
Kathimerini Eleftherotypia, To Vima, Ta Nea , left-oriented Avgi and the Evonymos
Ecological Library, as well as a major state tv channel (ET1), gave special attention to
GM issues (Kanellopoulou 2006).
Phase III: Coexistence, GM-free Balkans, and institutional innovation, 2004 and beyond
In 2000, Greenpeace had started a discussion on GM-free zones with the National
Bioethics Commission and DIO. In 2003, it proposed to all local authorities that they declare their prefectures and municipalities GM-free; the last remaining one did so in
October 2004, making the whole of Greece a declared „GM-free zone‟, as did other countries and regions in the EU.
38 In April 2005, Greenpeace proposed a bill declaring
Greece a GM-free country . Based on the Precautionary principle, the Cartagena protocol on biosafety, and the European Parliament vote on any country‟s right to ban feed and/or the future will clear the food chain from GMOs; “Green” – the companies that have stated that their products come from animals not fed with GMOs, and have brought evidence or certifications to verify the above.
38 USDA (2005) Greece Biotechnology Annual 2005, p. 6 http://www.fas.usda.gov/gainfiles/200508/146130613.doc
.

79
GM crops, the proposed bill does not permit the use of genetically modified seeds of
GM multiplicative material. The initiative was approved by Deputy Minister of
Environment, Stavros Kalogiannis, and the Secretary General of the Ministry of Rural
Development and Food, Thomas Alifakiotis ( Eleftherotypia, 13/04/2005). Through article
1, the new Act aims: a)
To avoid the probable negative social and economic impacts stemming from the use of genetically modified organisms. b)
To deter the possibility of dissemination of pollen, seeds and plant multiplicative material of genetically modified cultivations in conventional or biological cultivations and/or in the environment c)
To ensure the economic freedom and the right of free choice of producers to produce products, especially food and animal feed in a conventional or biological manner, and to allocate them to the market
(www.greenpeace.org, our translation)
Under this proposed bill, penal (ranging from 100.000 to 1.000.000euro) and administrative sanctions are also included, under two separate articles, while a Scientific
Committee for agricultural biotechnology is to be constituted, under Article 5:
… not by public administration persons, but by scientists of renowned prestige, who have special knowledge in the sector of agricultural biotechnology, society and economy . Representatives of producers and consumers will also participate in the committee. This composition ensures the principles of transparency and sufficiency, and the representation of all scientific opinions, including minority ones.
( www.greenpeace.org
, our translation, our emphasis)
Keeping in mind that 16% of the active population in Greece remains occupied in the agricultural sector, heightened concern over the expected serious and irreversible damage, is likely. At the same time, the small family farm holdings would lead to conflicts and juridical fights between owners choosing to cultivate GM on the one

80 hand, and conventional or organic farmers on the other ( Eleftherotypia, 13/04/2005).
Thus, in addition to the bill proposed by Greenpeace, another bill was proposed in May
20, 2005, by the anti-GM Thessaliko Network. Neither of the bills were forwarded to
Parliament (Kanellopoulou, 2006).
In this period there was also wider grass-roots action against GMOs. However, unlike that of the United Kingdom, the Greek government did not feel it was necessary to canalise it into official participatory fora. Towards the end of 2003, under the initiative of
„Thessaly Citizens of the World,‟ the Greek Social Forum and a few other groups, the first anti-GM network meeting took place in Trikala, with the participation of environmental, social, consumer, scientific, professional, agricultural and local government groups (Kanellopoulou, 2006).
In February 2004, the Panhellenic Movement Against GMOs ( Panelladiki Kinisi kata ton GTO ) was founded as a grass-roots, anti-GM network during the last day of the
Agrotica conference held in Thessaloniki, with the participation of 142 bodies, including environmental NGOs (36), scientific unions (12), farmers‟ organisations, both organic (8) and conventional (19) (GESASE, PASEGES), municipalities (11), labour unions (GSEE)
(1), food producers and retailers, women‟s groups (6), consumer organisations (4), church bodies (4), and political movements (4). Particularly striking was the alliance between the traditional rivals of conventional farmers‟ organisations and environmental
NGOs. As their resolution from this panhellenic conference-assembly shows, participants were as much concerned with political-economic issues such as the role of multinational companies and the effects of genetic patenting, as much as they were for purely environmental issues centred on risk and uncertainty.

81
We, the hundreds of representatives….co-sign the following resolution [ψήφισμα] expressing:
A) Our concern for the fact that genetically modified organisms and mutated products are facing the open entry gates and the cultivations of EU areas. Searching for legal regulations to liberalize their international marketing, the multinationals producing and trading the mutated, apply pressure, via the US and WTO, to the EU and the other countries to withdraw the obstacles to their importation. …Two community principles are by-passed: that of subsidiarity and that of the right of local societies to exercise their right to the scientific evaluation of the dangers and the given precautionary principle.
B) Our denial to the transformation of global genetic heritage into privately owned patents by a group of profit-seeking multinational companies…Let us not be the guinea pigs of multinational biotechnology companies.
C) Our claims to the rights of
- the farmers and producers to use clean [from GMO] seeds and animal feed and to produce safe and certified quality products, traditional, biological, brand named, conventional and integrated pest management products…
- the consumers to information and the right to choose quality, non-mutated products with nill percentage of [GM] pollution [epimolinsi]….
- the collective bodies of citizens , of the scientific community , and public offices to protect public health, agriculture and the environment, under the principles of prevention, precaution, and subsidiarity….
- the future generations to inherit the biodiversity of seeds and flora and fauna.
With the dispersion of the mutated to the environment, environmental sustainability and food safety are jeopardized…
D) Our invitation to all prefectorial and community councils as well as the farmers and workers syndicates to….decide:
1. to declare immediately their areas as free from production and trade of the mutated , according to the Cartagena „Right to Biosafety‟ Protocol…

82
2. to communicate their decision up to… April 2004 to the Greek and
European Parliaments…
E) Our request that the government in collaboration with movements of citizens and fora, the scientific community and the institutions of our country and the EU, will shield local, quality production and public health in Greece .
F) Our request from all political parties and all candidate deputies to take an immediate, public and clear position of support towards our struggle [αγώνα] and to participate with interventions in the Greek and European parliament…in order to stop the mutated and promote local produce of quality.
Resolution of the Panhellenic conference-assembly in Agrotika, 1.2.2004, in www.dimitra2000.gr
(our translation, our emphasis).
The network has its own website with news, articles and information on the issue, 39 and has made a number of interventions in public fora.
40 In June 2004 it carried out an
„Autonomous Coordinating Action against the Mutated‟ (Aytonomi Syntonistiki Drasi kata ton Metallagmenon) outside the 1 st Conference of Biotechnology at the National
Agricultural Research Foundation, and the Panhellenic protest against GMOs in Psahna,
Evoia, Central Greece, the march towards factory „Soya Hellas‟, an initiative of Evoia against GMOs – Network Ecocommunity .
39 www.nogmos.gr
, accessed 10-3-2005, 15-6-2005, 18-7-2005, 12-8-2005.
40 Among which are: three letters to local authorities, an open letter to many societal groups (ministries, mass media, farmers, other NGOs), meetings with the President of the
Hellenic Republic (December 2004), the President of the Greek parliament and Ministers of
Rural Development and Health, the organization of a public discussion on GMOs, participation in two protests, the organization of the 12th Organic Agriculture festival dedicated to GMOs
(September 23-25, 2005).

83
The next meeting of the „Thessaly Citizens of the World‟ brought together ninety (90) groups in an effort to organize actions, including those related to the declaration of four,
Thessaly prefectures as anti-GMO zones. Also in the spring of 2004, following the proposal of ATTAC Greece and Greenpeace, the General Confederation of Greek
Workers (GSEE) held a meeting of its food sector branches in order to inform workers on GM issues (Kanellopoulou, 2006).
In Greece, the issue of GM did not divide organic and conventional farmers to the same extent that it has in other countries like the UK. However, between May and July
2004, a number of conventional farmers unknowingly used GM seeds. Seven cases of accidental cultivation of GM corn and cotton, involving hundreds of hectares, were reported by local environmental NGOs and Greenpeace in Northern Greece, and nine cases in the Peloponnese region. On March 10, 2005, GESASE sued multinational biotechnological company Syngenta for GM corn contamination involving farmers in
Xanthi, Northern Greece, without informing them, demanding compensation of €45,000 for each farmer. At the same time, GESASE sued the Greek State as well, for actions and omissions that permit companies to act without limits. This action is expected to create a precedent for the Greek legal system because it involves the application of all the relevant EU regulations and decisions in „real life‟ (Cartagena protocol, EU regulations
1829/2003, 1830/2003, EU directive 18/2001). The court decision is expected to be announced by March 2007.
Greece has continued to attempt to use EU legislation to ban specific GMOs from its territories. For example, in March 2005, a ministerial decision (FEK 320) sought to prohibit the marketing of GM hybrid corn MON 810, invoking Article 18 of Directive
2002/53 on the common catalogue of agricultural plant species. However, the decision was reversed on 26 January 2006 (FEK 89), after its rejection by the EC on the grounds that the ban was for economic reasons, rather than for safety ones permissible under
2002/53 (EC Decision 2006/10). A few days later, on 30 January 2006, this lifting was followed by a new attempt by the ministry to ban MON 810 seeds from Greece, invoking scientific data on risk to the environment and to health from the circulation of
MON 810; especially as regarding undesired resistance to lepidoptera, disturbance of

84 biodiversity, increased transport of pollen vis-à-vis bee keeping (highly developed in
Greece), as well as GM-imposition on pre-existing cultivations.
Greece is currently responding to the EU Recommendation of 23 July 2003 on guidelines for national co-existence strategies by establishing a working group. The 11member „Working Group on measures of co-existence of GM crops and conventional and biological methods‟ was established in 2005 through a ministerial decision by the
Ministry of Rural Development & Food (YPAAT). With the exception of one sociologist of science, the members are employees of YPAAT – eight agriculturalists and biotechnologists and two lawyers. The Working Group is preparing the new law in collaboration with environmental professional organizations – the main one being
Greenpeace – and others groups, including GESASE (General Confederation of Greek
Agrarian Associations), but will also seek the views of other public bodies before the final drafting of the law (interview 10b-6). The final law is expected to allow Greece to maintain its anti-GM position without contravening EU or WTO commitments to free trade, by drawing up sufficiently stringent rules on coexistence to make it an unfavourable economic terrain for GM crops.
Within an international opportunity structure, during the 2006 Vienna Co-existence conference, the Greek Commissioner of Environment (and New Democracy deputy since the seventies), Stavros Dimas (2006) notes that variations in geography, topography, climate, as well as in agricultural production systems are reflected in national approaches to co-existence. In his view, the EC should help some member states overcome difficulties in the formulation of their national measures on co-existence. At the same time however, he also assures that coexistence measures can play a role in avoiding potential risks due to GMO cultivation, if complemented by sound risk assessment and risk management practices.
So, in Greece, the dominant framing of the GM controversy has been in terms of the need to defend national and more recently, cross-national (Balkan) borders as well, against the alien presence of GMOs. State actors and NGOs, especially Greenpeace and leftist political ecology groups, have often worked in concert, in terms of both the active

85 monitoring of foodstuffs entering the Greek territory, and the use of EU and other regulatory mechanisms to try to block new GMOs from being authorised for cultivation and marketing within the European space.
Increasingly, this framing has involved the articulation of a distinctive, non-GM
„bioeconomy‟ for Greek agriculture. Given the existence of the GM/non-GM distinction, possible economic strategies have emerged based upon the mobilisation of symbols of „purity‟ and „naturalness‟ in relation to high-quality organic and GM free produce. This discourse has surfaced all around the world, but appeared particularly appealing to countries like Greece, with the support of agricultural cooperatives and unions. The appropriateness of this strategy for Greece was alluded to in the National
Bioethics Council‟s 2000 recommendation on GM crops:
In addition, the small land share regime, and the fact that exports correspond to both primary and processed agricultural products, together with the substantial number of tourists visiting the country suggest that a delay in the cultivation of
GE crops could only be to the country‟s interest. In contrast, in the short term the Commission suggests that State agriculture should be directed towards integrated and sustainable agricultural practices ( www.agrotypos.gr
, our translation)
But it was expressed even more explicitly in an interview given in June 2004 by the
General Secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development and Food, Professor Alifakiotis
(Animal Biotechnology, University of Thessaloniki):
In Greece, things are different [compared to GM producing countries like the US and some EU countries]. The climate here encourages the production of high quality, diverse produce. We are not interested in GM produce; we direct our agriculture towards the production of a range of high quality products, like organic ones, which come to the market because of their fine taste. The Greek

86 consumer must realize that he has to pay more for the better quality products 41
( www.agrotypos.gr
, our translation)
Despite the government‟s efforts to guard the country from the infiltration of GM products, a variety of anti-gm groups have accused the state for not taking the appropriate measures. During an October 2004 meeting of the European Social Forum in London, a member of the coordinating committee of the Panhellenic Network against the Mutated 42 and SYN‟s responsible for agricultural policy, Tolios (2004) discussed
GMO penetration in Greece:
In recent years, an increasing penetration of GMO products in the Greek market, as well as attempts to develop GM cultivations are observed…Phenomena of the distribution of GM products as well as GM polluted seeds have increased since the lifting of the moratorium. At the same time, a number of applications have been made requesting permission to cultivate mutated plants, mainly corn, without, nevertheless, having been granted one until today. The main reasons for this increasing GMO penetration [dieisdisi] is the lack of: [a] effective tracing and labelling mechanisms, [b] timely information to farmers, [c] sample and comprehensive inspection of the imported seed material, [d] its dissemination before the results of the inspections are known, and [e] a legal framework imposing sanctions, etc. During last year the illegal importation and distribution of gm-polluted seeds (393 sacks of Ribera type corn), has serious effects. These are „psychological warfare‟ actions aiming to convince producers and consumers that everything has been polluted, and that resistance has no meaning since the mutated are already in the field, on the shelf and in our plates. Surely in the cases where gm cultivations were located, their destruction was ordered, but full compensations have not been given to the affected farmers for their income losses (Tolios, 2004, www.oikologos.gr
)
41 Interview at http://www.agrotypos.gr/ ; our translation.
42 Amounting to two hundred groups.

87
In a June 2005 workshop on „Food Prices-Quality-Safety‟, organized by the leftist coalition party‟s (SYN‟s) Agricultural Policy department, SYN‟s president as well as the other speakers emphasized the inadequate inspection mechanisms and practices:
Whereas the entire framework [EU and national] establishes a „unified inspections profile‟ and demands inspections at all stages, in practice, production controls are separated from processing controls [while] some responsibilities are allocated to the prefectures, and others to health or trade departments. EFET is unable to coordinate all the above agencies, resulting in minimal inspections by multi-scattered state mechanisms with minimal financing and inadequate staff and infrastructure (Alavanos, 2005)
SYN proposes: a) systematic food sample-survey inspections before they circulate in the market and strict sanctions to delinquents, b) coordination of public service food inspection agencies (EFET, General State Chemistry agency…), c) implementation of all [EU] community regulations…d) forbidding the mutated with the immediate application of the Cartagena Protocol on
Biosafety and the declaration of the country as a GM free zone … (Tolios – www.syn.gr
13.04.05)
During the same year, GESASE, prepared a legal proposal supporting the creation of national inspection mechanisms based on the Cartagena Protocol. Under this initiative, they publicly proposed: a) the creation of a national biosafety center, b) the participation of citizens in the related decision-making, c) the organization of a GMO-watch network in all Greek regions, d) the regulation of responsibility/accountability issues for genetic pollution and co-existence guarantees between GM and conventional, or biological cultivations (Kanellopoulou 2006, p. 126). As GESASE president, Goniotakis, stated in a press conference:

88
We are flatly [κατηγορηματικά] opposed [to GMOs]. They discredit our products, they undermine consumer trust and damage our national economy. We resist 3-4 companies who want to control global food (Kanellopoulou 2006: 126)
In June 2006, under the initiative of the national consumers‟ union, BIO ZΩ 43 , nineteen groups including FoE, bio-cultivators, the Greek Social Forum, local environmental groups, and the Panthessaliko anti-GMO network, called upon the government, the
Minister of Development and the Minister of Rural Development and Food:
To proceed to the immediate implementation of laws, with inspections concerning labeling and traceability of the large importers of mutated
[products]….
To apply immediately the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, and utilize, in addition, the decisions of all the Prefectoral self-governments of Greece, that declared their regions „free from mutated‟, declaring [in this way] Greece, a country without mutated [products] (BIO ZO press announcement, 6.6.06, www.gmostop.org
).
They expressed their:
... indignation [αγανάκτηση], because the government‟s inspection authorities tolerate and show complete political inability to check the multiple illegalities/trespasses in the distribution and processing of the mutated, without abiding to the traceability and labelling requirements … (BIO ZO press announcement 6.6.06, www.gmostop.org
)
On November 2006, EFET‟s president and vice president admitted the difficulties in carrying out inspections since:
43 The Pan-Hellenic Consumers‟ Union BIO ZO: “Bio-Consumers for quality-life” (ΒΙΟ
ΖΩ: „Βιο-καταναλωτές για ποιοτική ζωή‟).

89
- EFET is not responsible for supervising the withdrawal of large quantities of products (like those of GM rice, whose distribution and sales are prohibited by
EU legislation); this is carried out by the involved retail companies.
- EFET does not have the necessary staff (but is staffed with only 220 out of the required 550 employees) needed to carry out a fully effective supervision of the market. After the Olympic Games, EFET was left unsupported.
( www.agrotypos.gr
– retrieved 24.11.06)
Moving beyond Greek national borders, concern over genetic contamination, has led the
Union of Prefectures and forty-five Greek groups and organizations to organize a Balkan meeting bringing together a variety of groups from Balkan regions in Thessaloniki, between November 25-27, 2005, in order to exchange information and discuss common strategies (Kanellopoulou, 2006). Supporters of the initiative include Greenpeace,
OTOE, EFET, GSEE and the Prefecture of Thessaloniki. The meeting was attended by
110 groups from Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia-Mavrovounio, Croatia, FYROM, Albania,
Turkey and Cyprus. The signed declaration stresses the aim of the network:
The Balkan Network, which is now constituted, will contribute to the establishment of an Observatory on GMOs and of an Internet site, so that everything that happens in the Balkan countries and relates to the cultivation and distribution of GMOs will be immediately communicated. In this way, coordinated actions can be organized in many countries at the same time.
The movement against GMOs is the expression of a moral choice of citizens, institutions and organisations with innocent motives and goals. It objects to the degradation of human values, to the abuse of scientific knowledge [which does] not take into account common interest.
We are all committed to provide to the coming generations the heritage of a rich variety of seeds, plants and animals. The distribution of GMOs in the environment threatens food safety and environmental sustainability of the whole planet.
We call citizens to take this matter into their hands ( www.gmostop.org
)

90
It also points to common social and physical features of the Balkans:
In the Balkan countries, there is small-scale land property and a rich and sensitive natural environment. Here the objectives are to provide support to the farmers, to develop agricultural production with respect to natural resources, human health and animal health. These objectives should be met regardless of the financial and political interests of different groups. This model cannot compromise to the application of genetic engineering.
Common in all Balkan countries is also the preservation of natural, nonindustrialized food, the lack of awareness among the farmers and the insufficient control capacity to avoid GMOs in the food chain. Our common threats concern field trials and commercial cultivation of GMOs, the contamination of local varieties, ground and food, the dependence from the multinational companies and the loss of markets ( www.gmostop.org
)
As we shall see, the story of GMOs in the United Kingdom took a very different pattern, one in which the division between GM and non-GM was not inscribed round the territorial boundary of the nation, but was drawn through the nation itself – between field and field, between public and government, and even through the government itself and its advisory structure.
3.3. The United Kingdom
Phase I: The arrival of GM food and crops, 1996-1998
When the first shipments of GM Soya arrived from across the Atlantic, the UK like other EU member states had a regulatory system for the new agri-food biotechnologies in place, established in 1990 with reference to the Deliberate Release Directive, and Part
VI of the UK Environmental Protection Act (1990). In the UK, the assessment of each new GM crop is carried out by the Advisory Committee on Releases into the

91
Environment (ACRE), and under this regulatory system the first of the new GM Crops had already been granted consent before the dramatic escalation of the issue. As the UK did not follow the route taken by many other member states of invoking „Article 16‟ to justify a national ban, the conflict was given an extra intensity; rather than remaining restricted to the official UK, EU and WTO regulatory spaces, it became played out more in the arena of domestic civil society. Its refusal to invoke Article 16 would also force the
UK government into the novel politico-scientific arrangement of the Farmscale
Evaluations (FSEs) to legitimate the UK‟s own eventual de facto moratorium.
A heterogeneous array of networks and discourses around agriculture, biodiversity, food, and health therefore became drawn into the controversy, in a process that would only intensify in the wake of this new technology‟s arrival after 1996. These would articulate diverse worldviews and values and help form or transform a range of newly politicised arenas and spaces, from supermarkets to fields and laboratories. By 1998 the original UK and EU GMO regulatory apparatus established eight years earlier was thus already becoming overwhelmed. Its purely science based authority around ACRE formed too narrow and reductionist a foundation to provide the necessary political legitimacy for the
GM project. From then on, the government began to attempt to draw more legitimacy from the other side of the science-politics dichotomy. This would involve the participation or incorporation of a wider range of actors and the establishment of the bifurcated structure of two parallel committees, ACRE being joined by the AEBC
(Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission) with its wider, more socially reflexive remit beyond the narrower confines of science alone. Furthermore, each would end up connected to a key public experiment, ACRE with the FSEs and the AEBC with the GM Nation public debate.
44 Thus a distinct pattern in UK GM crop policy would be the management of a dualism of Science and Politics, via various institutional arrangements and spaces.
44 The name „ GM Nation?
‟ has a significant question mark at the end, but for clarity we omit the question mark from here on.

92
Of all the different possible framings of the GM issue (property relations, farmers rights, gene flow, alien species, ethics, religion and so on), opposition to GM found expression through two main pressure points in the UK‟s political opportunity structure. The first involved discourses of food safety, consumer choice and labelling, where supermarkets were particularly vulnerable. A crucial regulatory body here was the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP), which largely parallels the Greek food inspection organisation EFET. ACNFP advises government agencies on matters relating to novel foods (including those containing GMOs) and novel processes such as food irradiation, and carries out safety assessments of new products and processes submitted for approval under the EC novel food regulation. Later on, as we will see, the Food
Standards Agency also emerged as a significant regulatory body operating in this domain.
And towards the end of our narrative, labelling and consumer choice will become key elements within the new discourse of „coexistence‟ in relation to agricultural and conventional biotechnology.
Nevertheless, although the safety and labelling framing was highly significant in other member states (as we have seen above in the case of Greece), in the United Kingdom it was eclipsed in significance by another framing during the height of the controversy.
This second framing, concerning the question of farmland biodiversity and the UK wildlife policy networks around English Nature and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), played the key role in the debates in the UK and provided the space for the emergence of the FSEs, the AEBC and GM Nation .
Phase II: Institutional innovation, 1998-9
By 1998 these tensions had accumulated, making it a pivotal year in the history of GM regulation. Opposition continued to rise across many sectors of society in the UK: (a) amongst the wildlife scientific policy community (RSPB etc.), with the government statutory body English Nature calling publicly for a moratorium; (b) within the environmental movement, particularly with launch in July of the GenetiX Snowball campaign of direct action; (c) amongst consumers, with whom environmentalists started organising „supermarket actions‟; (d) in the supermarket sector, with many chains

93 deciding to withdraw GM products from their shelves; and (e) in the media, with Prince
Charles in particular mounting a vociferous campaign against GM agriculture.
Within government and policy networks, questions concerning the effects of the herbicide use associated with GMHR crops on farmland biodiversity started to increase in legitimacy. Against the background of the news in February 1998 that the EU was considering accelerating the process of revising the Directive, which had been criticised for ignoring the indirect effects of GM agriculture, the Environment Minister started to hold meetings with environmental NGOs, statutory wildlife bodies, etc. on these questions. ACRE, after criticism, agreed to incorporate more elements of the wildlife/ecology scientific community amongst its membership, and widened its remit to deal with biodiversity issues.
„[English Nature] realised back in the middle of the 1990s that there were a lot of herbicide tolerant crops in the pipeline and no one seemed to be concerned at all about the indirect effect of changing herbicide systems. Our analyses had shown us over the years that changes in crop management systems had a far greater impact on biodiversity than any other factor, you know like crop variety or soil type or anything like that; it was really changes in management systems. So we became rather alarmed by the prospect of broad-spectrum herbicides being used over vast areas of Britain, because we knew that herbicide use was a major factor in the decline of farmland birds for example but also of course in the decline of farm and arable plants. And so we raised the issue with ACRE in my position as an assessor on ACRE. And ACRE at first in 1996 argued that it wasn‟t within their remit to consider the indirect effects, only the direct effects of the plant variety. Well, we went back to the European Directive and said „oh, no that‟s wrong, you have to consider all the effects on the environment and that would include the indirect effects‟ um, and after about two years of writing some pretty strong letters to Defra and to ministers coming from our chair, ACRE finally relented and decided yes, there was an issue here, and interestingly had a lot of support for that view from other regulatory authorities, especially the Germans, who were being increasingly anxious about indirect effects ...

94
„Under John Beringer [ACRE] was largely made up of molecular biologists, many of those, not surprisingly derived from industry, or funded by industry. ... ACRE very quickly then pulled into it some more professional ecologists, all of whom agreed with us that there did seem to be a real issue here and it was I think largely their influence, and the influence of people like Chris Pollock, that was responsible for ACRE changing its mind on indirect effects. And Linda Smith had a hand in that as well, because she though basically we were right to call for more experimentation. And so her advice to ACRE was that this was a real issue which if they ignored, they would be in dereliction of their statutory duty and therefore they could be accountable,‟ interview with Brian Johnson, English
Nature
At the same time, the industry formed a strategy and in June launched SCIMAC (Supply
Chain Initiative on Modified Agricultural Crops), which advocates the managed and regulated introduction of GM Crops, allegedly in co-existence with conventional and organic agriculture, and support the labelling of GM products for the consumer. On 5
November the government announced a voluntary agreement with SCIMAC for a moratorium on commercial GM plantings and a programme of Farm Scale
Evaluations (FSEs) of four GM crops, which would be compared with non-GM crops for their effects on wildlife biodiversity.
For the government, the FSEs served several possible functions of (a) buying time and taking the heat out of the issue, creating a period to wait and observe further EU developments; (b) providing a scientific rationale for this politically needed moratorium;
(c) keeping the GM crop project moving forwards, albeit in a more precautionary mode;
(d) signalling an assent to the demands of the wildlife/ecologist bodies, and incorporating them in an expanded „expert/industrial‟ bloc – thus separating them out from other opponents of GM who firmly opposed the FSEs; and (e) providing a technocratic and apparently neutral way to legitimate GM crops.

95
The FSE strategy was a mutation of an earlier one of „managed development‟ of commercial GM crops. In this scenario the limited commercial planting of the herbicide resistant GM crops would go ahead, but this would be accompanied by farmscale evaluation of this process for ecological effects, such as the effect of the different herbicide regimes on agricultural biodiversity. This was the strategy broadly outlined by environment ministers Michael Meacher and Jeff Rooker to the House of Lords
Agriculture Select Committee in October 1998. However, by 1999 it was being emphasised that these were non- commercial trials, and therefore „purely scientific‟. The environment minister clarified the position by announcing a further deal with SCIMAC in November 1999 agreeing that no commercial cultivation would go ahead until another three years of the trials. Thus the FSE‟s were born as commercial scale trials, but sanctified as pure „science‟. These birthmarks raised further scepticism amongst critics in the NGO‟s and media, that behind the scientific and precautionary rhetoric the FSE‟s were merely a way of moving the GM project further towards a goal of mass commercial release.
The specification for the studies were established by DETR scientists in discussions with other government departments, members of ACRE and wildlife and research advisers to test the to test the statistical „null hypothesis‟ that „ there are no significant differences between the biodiversity associated with the management of the particular GMHT crop and the comparable non-GM crop at the farm scale ‟. A secondary objective was to „contribute to an assessment of the wider question of whether the commercial use of GMHT crops will change the management of farming systems and the agricultural landscape‟.
45
A tendering and selection process lead to the formation of a consortium of three research organisations: Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE, now Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, CEH), Institute of Arable Crops Research (IACR) and Scottish Crop
Research Institute (SCRI). There was also an independent Scientific Steering Committee
(SSC) appointed by the Secretary of State, consisting of scientists and representatives
45 http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/gm/fse/background/rationale.htm#fn .

96 from universities, the RSPB, the Game Conservancy Trust, the farming industry‟s Morley
Research Centre and English Nature.
However, following the development of this strategy public hostility continued to grow, with the FSEs providing a new focus for opposition and concern. Before the FSEs, GM had been an abstract issue; the field trials made them concrete and located:
„In doing the farmscale evaluations there was this benefit which we didn‟t think of at the time: it opened up the way to have a better debate about it by making it real for people by there actually being crops. We told everyone where they were, and we told them that they were going to happen – “you can go and look at it if you like – it looks just like oilseed rape”„, interview with Linda Smith, Head of GM Policy Science and Regulation, Defra.
But the FSEs also opened up new political spaces for informal participation around the issue. This was particularly turbulent, because the FSE process did not offer the public any formal mechanism for participation in decisions about whether or where to sow GM crops. The public were informed (via the government website, by an announcement in a local newspaper, and by a letter to the local parish council), but only after the site had been chosen and the decision to sow has been made. The announcement was supposed to be made four to six weeks before planting, but this commitment was not always met.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) sent representatives to provide information about the GM crops and the FSEs when local public meetings were called formally by parish councils.
The FSEs trials provoked a whole new set of political critiques and interventions in a number of registers: of science – that the inevitably reductionist nature of the FSEs would not produce valid knowledge about the GM socio-ecological complex; of democracy – that the FSEs were being foisted on local populations without their consent; and of risk – that the FSEs were in themselves a form of pollution. A pattern of public participation began to emerge around the FSEs, ranging from village meetings, picnics and trespasses on the

97 sites, to „crop-trashings‟. The trials thus became the cause and focus of yet more anti-GM activism and popular/civic unrest; rather than closing down and narrowing the debate into purely „technical‟ issues, they produced a more complex, turbulent situation between
1999 and 2003 – not helped by the fact that for many they were seen as preparing the way towards mass commercial cultivation. Therefore, attempts to create a scientific zone purified of all politics were frustrated as politics continued to intrude. As well as detecting the reactions of weeds and insects to the presence of the new technology, other actors were drawn into the fields: the nightly crop-trashings widened the experiments into hybrid politic-scientific spaces (Szerszynski 2005).
The court cases of those arrested in the crop field actions would often become high profile trials of the GM crops rather than the activist defendants. These courtroom battles occurred across the UK. The trial of 28 Greenpeace activists who removed part of a crop of GM maize in July 1999 at Lyng in Norfolk was particularly well publicised and documented. In the trial and retrial, Greenpeace assembled 10 expert scientific witnesses to help defend the activists, with the intention of putting „GM on trial‟ instead.
These witnesses included Professor Jean Emberlin, director of the National Pollen
Research Unit, giving evidence on wind pollination, Professor Terje Traavik Head of the
University of Tromsø‟s Department of Virology and scientific director of the Norwegian
Institute of Gene Ecology, on horizontal gene transfer, as well as other expert testimony challenging the underlying basis of politico-scientific constructs including „substantial equivalence‟ and the FSEs themselves. This evidence was later published as a campaigners‟ guide called GM on Trial (Greenpeace 2000).
Thus the GM debate was already happening before, between and beyond the officially sanctioned GM Nation in a variety of novel arenas: supermarkets, farmers‟ fields, courtrooms, seed list hearings, beekeepers gatherings and many other spaces provided novel and unanticipated sites of participation in the political battle over the new technology.
From the late 1990s the anti-GM environmental and consumer social movements began to stage „ supermarket actions ‟. Giant cobs of corn and paper-maché cows danced in

98 shopping malls and supermarket aisles. Packed with consumable symbols of family, naturalness and health, these would suddenly provide a potent and newly politicised terrain for the contest over GM. The growing consumer reaction against the new technology registered amongst supermarket executives, and „GM Free‟ became a new selling point. Neither solely the politicisation of markets nor the marketisation of politics, novel couplings were made between discourses of consumer choice and citizen concern, mobilising powerful tensions around food and trust, (especially heightened by a recent series food scandals such as BSE/CJD) as well as the powerful discourses around consumer sovereignty and food labelling.
One of the most interesting and important of these newly politicised arenas of participation was the National Seed List Hearings held in 2000 and 2002 over the GM
HR Maize variety Chardon LL (T25). These hearings became by accident one of the sole sites within the UK regulatory system where members of the public could officially challenge the introduction of the new GM crops. Following an early EEC directive
(70/457/EEC), the sale of a new variety was prohibited unless it was included in the
EEC Common Catalogue and National List. This was originally aimed at securing minimum standards of seed quality and the legislation predates the GM controversy and applies to all varieties not just GM ones. Under this directive statutory tests and trials are required to demonstrate that new varieties are „distinct, uniform and stable‟ (DUC), have
„value for cultivation and use‟ (VCU) and represent an improvement on existing listed varieties. These tests on Chardon LL had already been performed in France for Aventis, then the owner of the technology. Seed listing therefore constituted the last stage in the regulatory process and follows the granting of marketing consent under the GM
Deliberate Release Directive 1990/220.
In March 2000, the addition of Chardon LL T25 Maize was proposed to the National
List, marking the final part of legislative clearance for that variety. This gave another alarm signal to those opposed to GM that, despite the commercial moratorium during the FSEs, the introduction of the technology was still moving forward with government approval. But a latent power existed under the legislation for members of the public to demand a hearing and examine the evidence for the DUC and VCU of a variety. Prior to

99
Chardon LL objections to seed listing were rare and there had never before been a request for a public hearing. With this new GM variety, however, there were 223 written objections, including 67 requests for a public hearing, (with each objector required to pay the MAFF a fee of £30 plus a further £60 to lodge their request for a public hearing).
Interestingly, these hearings had been bequeathed a structure that went beyond usual consultation mechanisms and allowed for what amounted to a two or three stage representation and appeals process, including written representations, cross examination, a hearing, and an additional tribunal.
At the hearings one of the first problems to emerge was that the DUV testing had been carried out over only one year, rather than the statutory two years required by the EU
Directive. Thus the £500,000 hearing had to be delayed until 2002. This enabled Friends of the Earth to claim in a 2000 press release:
„This fiasco has only come to light because Friends of the Earth and ordinary members of the public forced the Government to hold a public hearing on the listing of this GM seed. Only a week after the BSE report was published, we now find that the minimum official testing of this crop has simply not taken place. If the hearing had not happened, this vital information would never have come to light and the crop would have been given official approval‟.
In the hearings the tests carried out for the GM Maize were scrutinised and crossexamined by coalitions of NGO‟s and a host of dissident or independent scientists. The outcome was a succession of exposures of uncertainties in the science and inadequacies in the tests undertaken, some of which would be acknowledged by the chair of ACRE .
46
By September 2002, Defra was proposing changes to these procedures, removing the right to hearings and written representations, stating that „the National List system is not the appropriate place to challenge GM safety assessments‟. Instead, an intention to develop „improved, effective and transparent mechanisms‟ of consultation under the
46 Professor Alan Gray on Farming Today , BBC Radio 4, 27 April 2002.

100 deliberate release directive was announced. The Defra document also finishes with an acknowledgement of „genuine public concern‟ and the need for a „GM Public Debate‟.
47
Thus like a kindly chaperone, DEFRA is concerned to escort public participation away from the hybrid and „inappropriate‟ arenas of the national seed list hearings and into new formal arenas made safe for such participation.
In September 2002 DEFRA issued a consultation paper on these proposed changes to the right to seed list hearings, as part of a wider round of consultations on the UK‟s plans for implementing the revised deliberate release directive (2001/18/EC). A total of
60 responses about the proposed changes to the seed list hearings were received from stakeholders ranging from farmers, organic growers and industry to NGO‟s, with 55 against and 5 in favour. A „Summary of Responses‟ drawn up by DEFRA officials themselves reveals some of these stakeholder concerns about the new arrangements, the shortcomings of the new directives consultation provisions and the inadvertent advantages discovered in the Seed List Hearings:
• „Widespread agreement that concerns about GM safety assessments should be heard before GM safety decisions were made, and that the National List system was not the appropriate place to challenge these. However, the proposed regulatory framework under the Genetically Modified Organisms (Deliberate Release) Regulations 2002 provided no opportunity for a Hearing at any stage.
• „The various public consultations being offered were no substitute for a Hearing
– each served a different purpose. A Hearing afforded a more in-depth, participative approach and had the potential to permit the cross-examination of witnesses on both sides in full view of the public.
• „Lack of provision for holding a Hearing at any stage in the approval process was a serious omission. It removed the only opportunity currently available to the public for voicing concerns. The Hearing also afforded an opportunity for participants to consider material which had been submitted to advisory bodies‟ (Defra 2002).
47 http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/nationallist/letter.htm
.

101
Of particular interest here is the realisation that a certain mode of holding a „hearing‟ can allow a „more in-depth, participative approach and had the potential to permit the crossexamination of witnesses on both sides in full view of the public‟. This raises important questions not only for the structure of spaces and arenas of public and stakeholder participation, but also about the conduct of socially and politically controversial scientific debate. We find respondents claiming some advantages in this more antagonistic model
(perhaps more familiar in law and politics) over the presentation of peer group consensus and found in more traditional scientific advisory committees and arenas.
From our brief survey of this period, we can see a pattern. In order to resolve the crisis of legitimacy that intensified throughout this period, the UK government sought to involve the participation of wider layers of society in its GM legitimation process. The first step after 1998 was to widen participation within the official scientific advisory system by involving previously excluded networks around wildlife, agricultural biodiversity and ecology. These new layers were included both within ACRE and in the management of the FSE‟s. The second step was to respond to the pressure to find some sort of official spaces for much broader social perspectives and voices – constituted as
„stakeholder interests‟ and „the general public‟. This took the form of the establishment of the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC) and the GM
Nation public debate respectively.
Phase III, AEBC and GM Nation , 2000-2004
The AEBC had its origins in a report published by the Cabinet Office and the Office of
Science and Technology in May 1999, „ The Advisory and Regulatory Framework for
Biotechnology‟. This was the culmination of a public review of the biotechnology regulatory system which the government had announced in December 1998, which had involved an extensive consultation process involving the participation of over a hundred civil society, industry and regulatory bodies as well as the „general public‟ accessed via focus groups and over 1000 interviews with members of a „peoples‟ panel‟. The report argued that the current advisory and regulatory structure was, amongst other things, not sufficiently

102 forward looking and strategic in its thinking to keep pace with such a rapidly developing technology and also did not „properly reflect the broader ethical and environmental questions and views of potential stakeholders‟. Thus three new bodies were to be established; The Food Standards Agency, the Human Genetics Commission and the
AEBC.
The report also identified two separate functions for advisory bodies. On the one hand there was the granting of approval for individual products or processes; in relation to
GM, this was historically carried out by ACRE, a statutory function to be retained by this body. On the other hand, it was argued that a more „strategic framework‟ was also needed, with a body that would examine the wider issues and direction the technology should take. Prior to this OST report, such a body was already beginning to feature in governmental discourses: in the address to a House of Lords Select Committee where the UK secretary of State announced the FSEs on 21 October 1998, he also announced the proposal for a „stakeholders‟ forum‟ which would work „in parallel with ACRE, which would remain a scientifically based committee‟.
48 Thus a division of labour was emerging between two bodies of expert advisors which the government could draw upon.
In this division of labour ACRE would retain control over the central legitimating discourse of „sound science‟ and would also keep its monopoly as the statutory advisor to government. The AEBC‟s power would be much less clearly defined – as „stakeholder forum‟ and provider of „strategic advice‟ on the direction of the technology as a whole.
However, while having no statutory power, it would hold a considerable moral power, occupying a discursive space that made it hard for the government to ignore (at its inception Cabinet Office Minister Mo Mowlam told the AEBC „you are the people‟s voice‟).
As former Commissioner Robin Grove-White explains, the commission was set up in order to show that the government was being even-handed towards the diversity of
48 http://www.parliament.the-stationeryoffice.co.uk/pa/ld199899/ldselect/ldeucom/11/8102102.htm
.

103 viewpoints on GM in the country, which led to it having a large membership of twenty members with a wide rage of expertise and attitude to GM agriculture, and giving the commissioners a large degree of autonomy in shaping the agenda. The commission quickly settled on an understanding of its task as exploratory and deliberative rather than simply educative of the public. It also set itself on a course which would at times bring it into conflict with ACRE in terms of which body had the power to set the terms in which
GM regulatory debates would proceed in the United Kingdom, contesting the dominant
EU regulatory framing of GM constructs as „stable entities, with knowable and specifiable properties and consequences‟ (Grove-White 2006: 172-3).
„Margaret Beckett ... wanted a creature which would produce sort of pro-government propaganda, and this did not turn out to be such,‟ interview with Michael Meacher MP, former
Environment Minister
Apart from its role in the creation of GM Nation , the AEBC was a significant innovation in its own right, becoming as it did a space for deliberation and debate – often very heated – about the nature of the knowledge that should guide policy:
„The commission to my mind demonstrated that it is possible to have a commission appointed by a government that asks about the nature of knowledge and the way in which it is constructed within the dominant forces that determine public policy – to have a commission that can draw together knowledge constructs from different disciplines and to have intelligent arguments about the intersection of those disciplines and about the conclusions or indications that one can draw from those debates,‟ speech by Malcolm
Grant, AEBC Chair.
Yet because of the lack of clarity over its remit, the AEBC remained a contested object, especially over whether its correct role was exploratory or the offering of advice on

104 specific policy options. Neil Williams, in his official review of the performance of the
AEBC for the DTI in 2004, said that:
Two competing pictures emerged. On the one hand were those who judged that the AEBC has made an important contribution to exploring and exposing different perspectives on GM through a rigorous process of extended argument that was open and transparent, taking forward debate and reducing polarisation in viewpoints through the development of consensus conclusions and recommendations that commanded broad respect. On the other were those who judged that the AEBC, whilst providing a valuable conduit and focus for discussion of GM issues that taken some of the heat out of the debate, has ultimately failed to find a way of reconciling public involvement with science in ways that command broad respect, or to provide Government with evidence based advice that was sufficiently timely and specific to assist the policy making process‟ (Williams 2004: 5-6)
Because of its non-statutory status, the influence of the AEBC on policy was often indirect and hard to identify – making it more vulnerable to being seen as ineffective in
Williams‟ review. For example, its informal exposure of the way that Ministers were misrepresenting the science of the FSEs – that they would provide a definitive answer to the safety of the crops, rather than being a narrower test of a limited set of parameters – reportedly resulted in the quiet dropping of such representations by government representatives (interview with Robin Grove-White).
But the AEBC did publish a number of reports which were highly significant in shaping the policy debate. Its first report, Crops on Trial , was published in 2001. This argued that the FSEs „were not enough to form the basis for a decision on commercialisation, and needed to be complemented by an open and inclusive process of decision-making about the commercialisation of GM crops‟. In particular, the AEBC argued that:
„It will be crucial for the public to be involved in the important decisions which need to be taken. We have to find a way to foster informed public discussion of

105 the development and application of new technologies: whatever decisions are ultimately reached, they will be more palatable if they have not been taken behind closed doors. At present, there seem to be no avenues for a genuine, open, influential debate with inclusive procedures, which does not marginalise the reasonable scepticism and wide body of intelligent opinion outside specialist circles. We need to harness new deliberative mechanisms, to develop participatory methods of public engagement, together with new capacities within
Government and industry for digesting and responding to the implications‟
(AEBC 2001: para 68).
In response, in May 2002 the government accepted the AEBC‟s advice, announcing that there should be a „national dialogue‟ on GM issues, that would be separated into three different strands – a review of the science of GM, a study of its economic feasibility, and a public debate. Preparation for these began in late 2002, with the main processes running in 2003.
The science review attempted to be „publicly driven‟, allowing public debate to set questions.
It used a web interface and some public meetings/workshops, reviewed extant scientific papers and to some extent surveyed fields of uncertainty. The writing of the final report by the Steering Group was a bitterly contested process, with threats made to the academic funding of dissident members. The economics review was carried out by the cabinet office, and explored the commercial viability of GM products under a range of future scenarios. The public debate GM Nation was the highpoint of formal „public participation‟ in the GM controversy in the UK.
The first step in setting up GM Nation w as the establishment of a Steering Board to oversee its planning and conduct. AEBC Chair, Malcolm Grant was invited by the
Secretary of State to also chair the steering board and appoint a membership that could gain public confidence and symbolise independence from the government. For example it had both a leading figure from the Five Year Freeze anti-GM coalition as well as from the industry body the „Agricultural Biotechnology Council‟ (ABC), made up of six agrochemical multinational companies. Eight of its members were also commissioners

106 from the AEBC, while two were co-opted from government departments. As one of its first tasks at its launch meeting in September 2002 the steering body had to appoint a contractor that would actually implement the debate. However, the steering board found it had very little choice in this appointment, and for various reasons had to appoint a government agency, the Central Office of Information (CoI). This appointment went ahead despite worries amongst a number of steering board members that the decision might compromise public confidence in the independence of the exercise from the government. Nevertheless, the CoI was appointed firstly because of budgetary constraints and secondly because of its established subcontracting arrangements which meant that it could avoid a lengthly European selection process over tender, thus working within the time constraints. Such constraints, of limited time and money, would shape GM Nation and diminish it in the eyes of its critics. The process began to be criticised by NGO‟s, academics and others from these early stages. These debates were articulated by a submission to the steering boards November 2002 meeting from a group of academics prominent in the fields of science policy and public participation. As well as criticising the budget and time allocated as too limited, it also argued that these limits would exacerbate a number of other problems including a lack of clarity as to the overall purpose of the debate and its relationship with governing institutions and official decisions. These connected to questions about the relationship of the debate to the eventual FSE results, and to the other strands in the dialogue. Furthermore, the submission raised questions of public suspicions about governmental openness to the debates outcomes and the top-down nature of the process (Healey 2004; 15, 20, 67). The steering board itself raised criticisms of the time and budgetary constraints, eventually in
February 2003 winning a commitment from the Secretary of State to double the budget and extend the time period:
„It soon became clear to us that a credible debate needed more money and more time.
We put these requests to Government in December 2002 and January 2003, and in
February the UK Government and the devolved administrations agreed to double the budget for the debate programme, to £500,000, and to extend the timetable for the debate to July, with the Steering Board reporting to Government in September. This

107 was still intended to allow for the expected publication of the first results of the farmscale evaluations‟ ( GM Nation PDSB 2003: 14).
The steering board had established the principle that the public should frame the questions for the debate. To do this a series of nine „Foundation Workshops‟ were held during November 2002 in Manchester, County Down, Ludlow, Reading, Wales,
Norwich, Bromsgrove, Edinburgh and North London in a series of towns selected for their geographical spread. Furthermore, this stage witnessed the development of a contrast between a conception of „the general public‟ versus another category of the
„Actively Involved‟, categories that would become significant in the subsequent reception and interpretation of the debates outcomes by various parties. As the Steering Board themselves put it:
Eight of the workshops involved members of the general public, representing four broad stages in life and two broad socioeconomic groups....However, the
Norwich workshop, for purposes of comparison, comprised participants who were „Actively Involved‟ in GM, half of them supporters and half opponents
(2003; 13)
Each of these foundation workshops had 18-20 participants meeting for three hours.
They also each had two facilitators and were developed, run analysed and reported on by
Corr Willbourn Research and Development a subcontracted company (Corr Willbourn
Research and Development 2003).
From these foundation workshops the Corr Willbourn Report identified six overlapping principle frames for the debate, around food, choice, information needs, uncertainty and trust, ethics and the targets and intended trajectory of GM technology. This report was then distilled into a series of tools for public engagement and participation that would be central to structuring the debate.
The first of these tools was a series of thirteen questions that would form the basic structure of GM Nation . These questions took the form of a series of statements ranging

108 from the optimistic or favourable to the critical or pessimistic towards GM crops. A series of „tick boxes‟ were then offered in response to these statements offering five choices ranging from „agree strongly‟ to „disagree strongly‟. These thirteen framework questions were distributed in the mass open meetings of GM Nation public debates as well as the selected „control‟ of the „narrow-but-deep‟ focus groups. After these thirteen closed questions there followed another two more open questions where participants were allowed five dotted lines to express there views, and also some more tick boxes to present „information about you‟ including gender, age, postcode and their involvement with the debate. This GM Nation information pack and feedback form/questionnaire was also distributed at many events and via the website and post. These therefore formed a mobile technology of engagement and participation, with the ability to incorporate many events and situations into „ GM Nation ‟. The Central office of Communications declared that wherever a batch of thirty or more feedback forms were ordered they would assume this represented a GM Nation meeting ( GM Nation PDSB 2003: 59).
The other tool that emerged from the Corr Willbourn Foundation Workshops report was the prepared common „stimulus materials‟ that all GM Nation participants would be exposed to before filling in the feedback form questions. This stimulus material had originally been planned as a single video. However, following the results of the foundation workshops expressing a desire for more diverse views coming from a variety of acknowledged partisan sources, some members of the steering board won the argument to have additional more pluralistic and diverse stimulus material. A variety of stakeholders engaged in the debate were therefore enrolled to help prepare their own answers and perspectives to the questions emerging from the foundation workshops.
These were then passed to a subcontracted company „Creative Research‟ working with the science museum to be worked into a more standardized, and perhaps more neutral format. Furthermore, by April 2003 the decision to attribute sources was abandoned due to lack of time to contact all the sources to gain consent. Thus the stimulus materials ended up being bland statements that were unattributed to any sources, perhaps making them less successful at stimulating and framing the debate. These materials were also put on a CD-Rom in a form identical to both the pages of the GM Nation website and the booklet that came attached to the questionnaire / feedback form. Together, the stimulus

109 material, questions and feedback form formed GM Nation tool that attempted to standardise the diverse moments and modes of participation into a nationally coherent and somehow measurable entity.
The public debate itself was launched on 3 June 2003 with a press briefing in London, and the first of the six Tier 1 meetings – facilitated round-table discussions based on stimulus material – in Birmingham. The rest of the Tier 1 events took place in Swansea,
Harrogate, Taunton, Glasgow and Belfast over the next ten days, attended in total by over 1,000 people. The government‟s Central Office of Information (COI
Communications) estimated that between 16 June and 18 July there also were a total of around 40 Tier 2 regional and county-level meetings, organized in partnership with county councils and other bodies, and more varied in form, including expert witnesses and debates around a motion. They also estimate that there were also 629 local Tier 3 meetings, largely organized by town councils and civil society groups for which the
„toolkit‟ was made available by the Steering Board, using „stimulus material‟ in paper, CD-
Rom or video form. There were thus an estimated 675 meetings in total. At each meeting in every tier feedback forms were made available so the participants could express further views. The Steering Board Summarised:
„Over 4,500 individual requests for materials were received by GM Nation . As a result 20,000 workbooks, 6,000 CD-Roms, over 1,000 videos and more than 70,
000 feedback forms were sent to members of the general public and interested parties. In addition, the contents of the workbook and CD Rom were available on the GM Nation website, along with the feedback form, which was available to complete between 3 June and 18 July 2003. During this period over 27,000 unique visitors to the website were recorded. ... In total 36,557 completed questionnaires were received by 18 July 2003 and were included in this analysis.
Of these, 18,771 were submitted in hard copy, and 17,786 were submitted on the website.‟ 49
49 http://www.gmnation.org.uk/docs/introduction_to_feedback.pdf
.

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In contrast to the public meetings of the open debate, the participants in which were
„self-selecting‟, the Steering Board also commissioned a series of „narrow but deep‟ focus group discussions in June and July 2003 to act as a „control‟. Ten different groups were convened with a total of 77 participants, chosen to be broadly representative of the general public, and selected to have no immediate connection or interest in the issue.
Each group met twice over a two week period: in the first meeting they were exposed to the GM Nation stimulus material; between the two meetings participants were encouraged to collect more information, and kept a diary to record their thoughts; finally, in the second meeting, the participants discussed what they had decided were the salient issues. At the beginning of both sessions, they completed the GM Nation „feedback form‟ with its thirteen closed questions, in order to determine how their opinion changed over the two weeks.
The GM Nation process of public events was planned to finish in July. However, the publication of the results of the FSEs was postponed from July until September 2003.
This lead to demands from the GM Nation steering committee and others to have the timescale of the debate extended, so that the FSEs could be included in the public‟s deliberations, but these were rejected by government. This raised the question of the whole relationship between the public debate and the FSEs: whether the in GM Nation the public would be allowed to deliberate on the scientific results, or whether these would be kept as two separate information feeds, with the deliberative power exclusively reserved for government. This move raised doubts amongst NGOs about the status of
GM Nation , and even suspicions at ministerial level:
„I think the best science that is available ought to be made available to the public. The only reason that the government wanted to keep them separate was because the FSE results came out wrong from their point of view. If the FSE results were a clean bill of health I‟m sure they would have been extremely keen, indeed demanding, that the GM
Nation , every member should be sent a copy of the results or something, to make sure that they got it in their head that their was nothing wrong with GM. But it all went wrong‟, interview with Michael Meacher MP, former Environment Minister

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The Public Debate Steering Board (PDSB) published its report GM Nation? The Findings of the Public Debate in September 2003. This attempted to combine information from both the public debates and the „narrow but deep‟ groups and then refine this into seven „Key
Messages‟. These were: „(1) People are generally uneasy about GM; (2) The more people engage in GM issues, the harder their attitudes and more intense their concerns; (3)
There is little support for early commercialization; (4) There is widespread mistrust of government and multi-national companies; (5) There is a broad desire to know more and for more research to be done; (6) Developing countries have special interests; (7) The debate was welcomed and valued‟ ( GM Nation PDSB 2003: 51-3).
Challenges to the representativeness of the participation in GM Nation were raised by the official evaluation team, and echoed by industry and government. Later, the government responded:
„We accept that the findings of the public debate broadly reflect the current state of public opinion on GM crops. We acknowledge that people are generally uneasy about GM crops and food, and that there is little support for early commercialisation of GM crops in this country. However the results suggest that the general public may have a lower degree of outright opposition to GM than the participants in the debate, while still being very cautious. The debate has also confirmed that people‟s attitudes towards GM crops are shaped by a complex range of issues and concerns, and that to some extent GM crops have become a focus for much wider concerns‟ (Defra 2004).
However, the government would treat this result of public participation as just one more information feed amongst many. In the autumn of 2003 the whole series of separate parts of the process produced reports – the science review, the economics review by the strategy unit and most importantly for the government the results of the FSEs. Finally in
November came the AEBC‟s report on coexistence and liability. The conclusions of this

112 report would place still more major limitations on the commercial cultivation of GM crops and also had a significant affect on the eventual outcome.
Drawing on the FSE results, published from late 2003 onwards, ACRE gave three of the four crops negative appraisals: the herbicide / GM technology package around HR beet and two varieties of HR oilseed rape were found to have adverse effects on arable weeds when compared to conventional crop and herbicide regimes. By contrast, the GM / HR
Maize regime was found to be less damaging than the existing conventional herbicide regime. However, this existing conventional herbicide regime was based on Atrazine, a chemical that was due to be banned in the EU due to its negative effects. Thus none of the GM HR crops could be free from claims of damage to agricultural biodiversity.
These results surprised many, including oppositional NGOs who had assumed the criteria inbuilt into the FSEs would make the GM HR crop technology look favourable.
In March 2004, Margaret Beckett announced the government‟s decision – that the commercial cultivation of only one GM crop, the maize, could go ahead. However, even this permission was subject to a number of conditions:
1 that the experimental growing conditions continue to be applied;
2 that the consent holders be required to carry out further scientific analysis to monitor changes in herbicide use on conventional maize; and
3 that a scheme, funded by the GM sector itself, be set up to provide compensation to non-GM farmers who suffer financial loss due to the coexistence of GM and non-GM agriculture.
The fact that both the public debate and the scientific field trials had produced largely negative results enabled the government to announce a decision which was backed up by the science, but also would not, at least in the short term, run up against public opinion:
„I think it‟s one of the hallmarks of Whitehall under Labour that policy decision are made from an evidence base, I mean that‟s the message that‟s been going out very clearly and very strongly to the civil service and to advisory committees and so when you do get

113 evidence like this, that is hard scientific evidence if I can put it like that, then clearly as a politician you can make a decision that is more easily defensible than a decision that‟s simply based on public view, especially where you‟re dealing with a regulatory system that is governed by such a tight directive‟, interview, Brian Johnson, English Nature .
The industry, while publicly welcoming the „sound-science‟ based announcement, began to retreat. On 30th March Bayer CropScience, the German owners of Aventis, announced that this ruling had made Chardon LL „economically unviable‟, effectively ruling out the commercial growing of any GM crops in Britain for the foreseeable future.
GM was in effect kicked into the long grass as an issue in the UK. In a wider move, on
10th May Monsanto announced it was abandoning its plans to introduce its longtrumpeted GM wheat on to the world market, concerned that consumer resistance to
GM in Europe would damage the US export market.
To summarise the narrative in section 3, the European regulatory framework for GMOs which was established by the DRD (1990/220) contained an internal contradiction: it marked out GM as a separate category for regulation, but without containing any requirements for post-market monitoring. With lack of confidence in the regulatory system, the passage of each consent for a new GM crop or product became a hardfought battle amongst member states and Commission bodies, carried out behind closed doors within the DRD regulatory mechanism. Calls for labelling of GM products began early – from the European Parliament, from member states, and later on from retail organisations. From 1996 onwards, the condition became critical, with consumer resistance, protest movements, national bans, and a moratorium on new Consents, resulting in a regulatory void. This provoked significant changes to the regulatory framework, including: wider risk assessment and explicit reference to the precautionary principle; ethical considerations being given space for consideration; and mandatory public consultation. But the most significant shift is to coexistence, labelling and traceability – a new regime, whose fundamental logic is not that of the state but of the market.

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Greece, as we saw, exemplifies a group of GM-sceptical member states in its broad pattern. From the start it was characterised by an alliance between environmental NGOs and the state, and the influence of minor parties, which helped shape its anti-GM stance
(a pattern which was also seen in other anti-GM member states), a stance which was characterised by a discourse of the policing of national borders. It invoked Article 16 in order to ban EU-permitted GMOs from its territory, and, led by scientists who were themselves aligned with environmental, precautionary discourses, developed a range of bio-precautionary institutions in order to detect GMOs in food, feed and seed. There were some slight vacillations on the part of the government, but any attempts to move towards more pro-GM positions intensified grassroots and NGO actions. Over the period studied Greece moved slowly but positively towards grasping an alternative, non-
GM bioeconomic strategy.
The United Kingdom – the first Member State to adopt a neo-liberal stance, and the most pro-GM – wanted to move to GM commercial growing with some monitoring after 1996. But this strategy was derailed by an adverse public reaction, channelled through consumer/supermarket discourse and wildlife/agricultural biodiversity discourse. The government and industry cooperated in a plan to carry out the „managed development‟ of GM crops, partly to head off anticipated political demands for a moratorium (Levidow et al 1999: 4). But, with growing unrest, what had been framed as precautionary, monitored, commercial introduction became re framed as the FSEs – as safety trials being carried out before any decision to commercialise – in order to placate the public, and at the same time to justify the UK‟s own de facto moratorium to the EU in scientific terms. However, rather than dispelling public concern, the FSE‟s aggravated it.
The subsequent attempt to move beyond narrow scientistic apparatus with the AEBC and GM Nation ended up with the UK occupying the same position as anti-GM countries, albeit by a very different, contingent route: an unofficial moratorium, a scientific ban on certain crops, and a general blockage to GM agriculture, with no commercial cultivation of GM crops and few experimental plantings. Under the new EU guidelines the UK is currently attempting to negotiate a co-existence regime which would allow GM agriculture under certain specified conditions.

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4. The politics of life in the GM controversy
4.1 - Europe as a technological zone
We approach Europe as a „technological zone‟ in the sense developed by Andrew Barry
(2001). Barry suggests that increasingly government operates not just by mediating the relationship between population and territory, but also „in relation to zones formed through the circulation of technical practices and devices‟ (3). Barry builds on
Giandomenico Majone‟s conception of Europe as a „regulatory state‟ (1996). Majone argued that, whereas the US, with its deep-rooted ideological commitment to the market, responds to instances of market failure by regulation, European „welfare‟ states, preoccupied with redistribution and stabilisation, have generally responded to such problems through nationalisation or self-regulation (Majone 1996, p 10). However, the
EU is more like the US in being a „regulatory state‟, in that it consists not of a large centralised bureaucracy but a distributed network of regulatory agencies combating
„market failure‟ through environmental and consumer protection, and health and safety legislation (Barry 2001: 26-7).
While broadly agreeing with this analysis of the EU, Barry suggests that Majone‟s analysis of the regulatory state (i) neglects the role of technology in its constitution, and (ii) underestimates its contested and problematic nature. Using examples such as bathing water quality and food standards, Barry analyses the way that regulation in the EU requires the spatial comparability and connectedness of technical devices and practices;
„technology is expected to form connections across and establish boundaries around an empire, a firm or a nation-state‟ (25). In this account, standardisation turns from being a mundane and marginal issue to one of the central preconditions of creating a technological zone like the EU; „standardisation is critical to the formation of what I have called technological zones, and the generation of new spaces of political rule‟, by reducing blockages and securing boundaries „with clear and well-policed points of access‟
(63). He traces the way that the meaning of the term „harmonisation‟ shifted over the history of the European Union. The earliest uses of the term used referred to the reduction of social and economic differences between regions; however, from the 1980s onwards, „harmonisation‟ was used increasingly to mean the removal of impediments to

116 the flow of objects, capital and labour. It was thought that this form of harmonisation
„would eradicate the striations of national-state capitalism and create the entirely smooth space of multinational capitalism‟ (69-70).
However, Barry argues that the very act of regulating can bring about unanticipated consequences. „The ideal of standardisation is the fantasy of a smooth and homogeneous technological zone in which the speed of circulation is maximised. In practise, standardisation may produce new fractures and dislocations which may act as catalytic points for further political conflict‟ (63). We develop this observation by exploring the transformation of the European regulatory framework as laid out in section 3.1. The
1990 Deliberate Release Directive, with its delegated but harmonised system of regulating GMOs, contained within it the tension between precaution and neo-liberalism.
On the one hand, GMOs were classified as „living pollution‟, a special class of entities which by virtue of their origins in rDNA technology warranted their own system of regulation. On the other, the Directive gave companies a clear passage point at which to introduce a particular GMO into the European technological zone; once a GMO had been deemed to have been „safe‟ by a member states competent authority and the commission, it would be free to circulate without specific labelling within the whole
European Union. We trace the complex dynamics through which this original settlement collapsed: the European technological zone for GMOs was transformed through a series of ruptures from being a desired smooth space of circulation to a folded, ruptured space of barriers, absences and resistances; the epistemological stalemate over the safety of
GMOs resulted in a coexistence regime in which the GMO has to accommodate to multiple bioeconomies of GM and conventional agriculture; and the GMO, far from being admitted as a free and equal citizen of the European technological zone, is released always under license: labelled, traceable and always subject to recall.
4.2 - The DRD: governing GMOs as a special category. Life, pollution and technology
The regulatory framing adopted by the EU at the beginning of the 1990s marked out
GMOs as belonging to a separate and special ontological category. Such a precautionary categorisation had been justified by referring to the scientific novelty and uncertainty

117 surrounding the new technology. The EU‟s approach differed from that of the US and
OECD which was based upon the idea of „substantial equivalence‟ between GM and
Non-GM products, (measurable by a simple and reductionist content analysis that assumed the familiarity of the effects sought) leading these bodies to argue that GM crops needed no special regulatory category.
Thus the EU regulatory discourses began to focus on the containment and policing of a special new category that was simultaneously a life form, a new technology, a commodity and a potential form of „living pollution‟ that could threaten to contaminate and subvert the natural and social order. However, such a mode of regulation would help to symbolically mark out GM crops, a move which would have important consequences for the performance of patterns of regulation and conflict around the technology. As we saw in section 2.2, GM crops had been born saturated with cultural meanings invested in by all sides, having been produced by an industry that had proclaimed its mastery of „the secret of life‟, in Crick‟s famous phrase. It was perhaps therefore not surprising that the attempt by corporations to re-write the „code of life‟ of societies crop plants and foodstuffs would have a society wide symbolic and cultural impact. „Life Itself‟ was at stake, and with its many unruly meanings and potencies could disrupt the established regulatory patterns.
4.3 - Institutional ambiguity and the transition from risk to uncertainty
Having performed such an act of symbolic marking, the Directive then allowed their release into society and the environment with no machinery for post-market monitoring and regulation, assuming that its responsibility ended once the new varieties were released into the fields or supermarkets. This situation of institutional ambiguity that emerged from this discrepancy provided a strong ground for contestation by environmental and consumer groups and placed the supermarkets on the front line of a cultural and scientific battle they were not prepared to fight. A legitimatory meltdown followed, creating a regulatory void that was initially filled by NGO action and an insurgency of new public and outsider actors into the spaces of a previously technocratic regulatory realm. These shortcomings of the initial 1990 directive would also provide the logic for the introduction of a post market regime of labelling, traceability and

118 coexistence the demand for which gave member state grounds for introducing the EU wide de facto moratorium.
The special categorisation created by the 1990 directive was intended to be a precautionary holding operation and thus a temporary state to be quickly displaced by more familiarity and knowledge, followed by the liberalisation of the directive and its harmonisation with the US model. However, this was based upon the assumption that uncertainty would be a temporary state. It did not take into account the proliferation of uncertainties that would be unleashed by this regulatory discourse. Furthermore it was based upon a model of limited uncertainty and growing knowledge, rather than one whereby more knowledge actually generates more uncertainty. This may also be understood as part of a wider shift from a culture of „risk‟ to „uncertainty‟ which has important social dimensions, relating to the increasing number of actors whose concerns and viewpoints are considered, thus leading to greater complexity. Risk as a limited and calculable concept corresponds to a social standpoint located within technocratic centres of control, while „uncertainty‟ represents the erosion of these central locations by complexifying and globalising flows with proliferating sites of and claims to knowledge.
When therefore the uncertainties did not simply get rolled aside, but began to proliferate the expectations that the deliberate release directive would be liberalised and made to harmonise with the US model were thwarted. Instead, the revised directive would become stronger and the requirement for segregation labelling and traceability would entrench the separate classes of GM and non-GM. Thus the governance of GM via the creation of a new and special category would not be a temporary measure, but would develop further, becoming the centre of the new round of legislation and the new EU
GMO regulatory framework. Governing the recombination of „life itself‟ would depend on the performance of a number of dichotomies, between GM and non-GM and between science and politics.

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4.4 - The innovation of the new regime of coexistence: From (nation) states to
(global) markets, from scientific governance to consumer choice.
The consequent inability to resolve the debate within the scientific framings of risk and safety led to an epistemological stalemate. The overall scientifico-cultural battle over
GMOs had not been won by either side and neither positive proof of safety nor of harm could be mobilised to gain unchallenged consumer acceptance or trust on the one hand, nor justify an outright legislative ban on the other. In the face of this stalemate a new mode of governance began develop, with the more relativistic discourses of consumer sovereignty and choice moving upwards to become the dominant regulatory framings in the EU.
Thus emerged the new regime of „coexistence‟, where „market choice‟ begins to eclipse
„safety‟ as the authoritative guideline. This presents an idealised vision of a new, normalised „post-conflict‟ regime of GM governance with a plurality of agri-food systems. Conventional, GM and Organic systems will purportedly exist alongside each other, ultimately regulated by the sovereign consumer exercising market choice through labels and brands. The collective subject of a concerned citizenry of the GM controversy period is replaced by individualised shopping choices. Citizen knowledge, deliberation and participation become replaced by consumer preferences.
However, behind the truce represented by the rhetoric of coexistence the GM war continues. On the one hand the coexistence regulations may prove too restrictive for profitable GM cultivation. In this scenario the EU‟s coexistence guidelines are interpreted strictly, strangling GM via tight regulation without having to invoking an outright ban and break the neo-liberal consensus of the WTO and EU. On the other hand, it is possible that coexistence may lead to the eventual dominance of GM agriculture, with the agency of gene flow and market forces leading to the proliferation and diffusion of modified genetic constructs through the agrifood system until choice is impossible. In countries such as Greece the former scenario may be crystallising as it consolidates an alternative bioeconomic strategy, while in the UK, anti-GM groups fear that the latter scenario is coming about. Thus the forces promoting and resisting the new

120 technology continue to manoeuvre for advantage within the new regime, raising questions about the permanence or stability of this new regulatory mode.
We have seen how different member states have employed different responses (including combinations of different responses) to the challenge of the GM conflict. One strategy is represented by Greece which centres on the defence of territorial borders and the invocation of national bans. Another strategy, represented by the UK, at first attempted the monitored introduction of GM agriculture with the model of large scale trials. While this was thrown into retreat, this model with its debates over separation distances stands as possible precursor of the regime of coexistence. Associated with this strategy was an attempt to manage the related public unease and opposition through a large scale public engagement exercise.
These two responses have implications for debates over the erosion of the power of nation states in a globalising world and also the related erosion of the authority of the
„centres of calculation‟ (Latour 1990) of high modernist statecraft. Thus we have noted how the UK saw the emergence of parallel expert committees – ACRE and the AEBC – related to two parallel mass experiments in „nature‟ and „society‟ that drew on and developed scientific and political forms of legitimacy respectively. This improvisation represented a departure from earlier simple monolithic forms of technocratic governance and an attempt to manage the incorporation of extra-scientific concerns in a new pattern of governance (even though this move was strictly limited). While this move can be found elsewhere, including in Greece, here it is less prominent as a strategy. This may be because the stronger anti-GM stance of the Greek state led to less internal domestic conflict and a more united national stance buttressed by arguments that remained within a predominantly scientific framing, with many scientific bodies forming not a bioindustrial complex, where industrial and regulatory science forms a hegemonic alliance, but something approaching what may be termed a „bio-precautionary complex‟ defending territorial borders from contamination. These divergences in regulatory modes among member states have eventually been worked through into the new EU strategy of coexistence.

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This regime of coexistence with its technologies of post market monitoring, labelling and tracing therefore represents an attempt to move into a new mode of GM regulation that shifts the regulatory membrane away from national borders to follow new contours which run within and beyond the boundaries of nation states. These new lines of regulation might run along supermarket shelves with the labelling of products and through agricultural landscapes attempting to demark areas of GM and non-GM agriculture.
The friction along these new contours may call for some forms of participatory management, as was seen in the UK. However, it is difficult to tell at this stage whether such friction and participation may only mark a period of transition, and whether the public reactions to coexistence will indeed eventually become managed with reference to individual consumerism rather than collective deliberation – or whether this may never become stabilised within the regimes of perpetual innovation and the manufacture of biotechnological uncertainty.
4.5 - Science and its others: spaces, separations and orderings in the governance of GMOs
In our narrative therefore, a major „dislocatory moment‟, rupture or „key turning point‟ can be identified between 1996 and 1999 with the crisis of the existing regime of directive 90/220 . This regime became unable to deal with the unruly and contested zone of „life politics‟ around GM agri-food and the GM battle became played out in a range of alternative political spaces and discourses.
A central theme that emerges from our narrative is the inability of the original 1990 directive‟s narrowly scientistic framings around positive evidence of environmental and health risks to address the much wider questions raised by the public debate. This narrowness of scope played an important part of the crisis and breakdown of the
European GM regulatory framework that lead up to the de facto EU wide moratorium in
1999 and the subsequent revision of the directive. The EU faced two competing imperatives; one outlined above was the need for wider criteria to match societal

122 concerns. The other imperative was to attempt to remain within the limits imposed by the WTO, which remained strictly scientistic, allowing only positive proof of harm to the environment or health to disrupt its attempt to create a homogeneous global market space.
Such imperatives imposed by neo-liberal bodies such as the WTO demonstrate once again how political, economic and cultural values may underlie and help form a regulatory structure, but are then hidden from view behind an apparently neutral set of scientific criteria. This may be understood as part of a continual process of purification, identified by Latour (1993) as part of the construction of the „modern constitution‟ where the world is divided into two separate realms of the „social‟ and the „natural‟. The house of nature, accessible by scientists alone yields „the facts‟, which are separate from and superior to „values‟. Scientific discourses about „the facts‟ are granted greater power and status than public discourses about „values‟. Powerful and technocratic forces are granted rule by their possession of the former category, while democracy may appear circumvented with the wider public only having access to their own subjective values, which are devalued and rendered secondary by such a constitution.
While both the EU and its member states found themselves under enormous pressure from both of the imperatives of technocracy and democracy outlined above, to govern the GM crisis they found themselves obliged to move in the direction of the latter and make some attempt to provide space for the wider considerations various European publics found important. Therefore the revised directive 2001/18 and its related legislation made some attempts to widen this set of framings, to include not only broader risk assessment criteria but also mentioning ethical considerations, public consultations and consumer preferences.
However, once wider framings and considerations are accepted as valid, a series of choices then emerge as to the „correct‟ place of these within the overall framework.
Might these different criterion be given equal consideration or will science remain the primary regulatory discourse, with others allotted a secondary role? Are science and its

123 others to be kept strictly separate, or be brought into conversation with one another?
What kind of discursive spaces does this all take place in? Should there remain a pure space for scientific regulatory discourses, accountable only to their traditional circle of acknowledged disciplinary peers and their established epistemological frameworks? Or should there be some kind of wider circulation, mixing and accountability of these discourses, with an extension of the acknowledged reviewing peers and permitted epistemologies? While these questions and dilemmas are not necessarily posed explicitly in the design of these institutional innovations, they are nonetheless performed implicitly.
In what follows, we shall attempt to trace these implicit performances during the attempt to regulate both GMOs and the public controversy around them. Within which discourses and spaces regulation is exercised and participation permitted becomes a key question for our analysis. Does this, for example, occur within purely scientific discursive spaces, or hybrid spaces which allow different combinations of knowledge?
Before we do this, however, it is necessary to add some more points about the nature of political space. Loeber, Hajer and Van Tatenhove provide us with the beginnings of taxonomy of political spaces. Starting with the claim that; „Over the past decades, the image of the state as a unified political space gradually has lost its convincing power‟
(2005: 6), they argue that in response to this two types of participatory spaces have emerged: Firstly, there are the formally instituted participatory spaces, usually initiated by the state but also sometimes by others such as corporations or NGOs (2005: 7) Secondly they point to the emergence of „new political spaces‟:
New political spaces are sites where processes of political judgment and decision making take place that exist next to or across the institutions that are traditionally considered the exclusive centres of political power. These
„new‟ loci of political activity may a priori be considered sites of
„participatory governance‟ as they by definition entail the involvement of
„non-state‟ actors. Thus, they form a second – potentially overlapping yet possibly distinct – type of empirical research objects in the P AGANINI project, in addition to formally arranged (state or non-state actor initiated) participatory practices (Loeber et al , 2005: 10).

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These „new political spaces‟ emerge in response to the failure of the institutions of the
„high modernist‟ regime to cope with certain unruly problems around the „politics of life‟, thus creating conditions referred to in varying theoretical registers as „institutional ambiguity‟; „civic dislocations‟; „dislocatory moments‟; „turning points‟ or „ruptures‟ in the discursive field associated with periods of crises of institutional trust and legitimacy.
However, rather than there being simply new political spaces in the language of Loeber et al (2005), we can also detect the emergence of may be more accurately described as existing spaces that became newly politicised. When techno-scientific systems like the GM regulatory apparatus become politicised, „new political spaces‟ erupt within them – they are „new‟ precisely because they lay on the reclaimed ground for politics that had previously been submerged beneath the appearance of technocratic neutrality. An example we find of this in the UK narrative is the politicisation of the National Seed List hearings. While Seed list hearings or Court cases may be formal legal arenas, the eruption of the scientifico-political battles over GM within them transforms their original purpose, rendering them novel spaces. A similar pattern fits other spaces such as supermarkets. Therefore spaces that had previously seen purely as techno-bureaucratic, commercial, scientific or legal became places where the hybrid scientific/political discourses of GM were practised and became transformed by the participation of wider networks and rationalities.
Thus beyond the formal technoscientific discursive spaces of GM governance, such as formal scientific advisory committees, GMO life-politics erupted across Europe after
1996, in a series of „new‟ or newly political spaces. These were on the quays of great shipping ports, in the supermarket aisles and forecourts, in experimental crops fields and legal courtrooms, in community meetings and in previously obscure technical hearings.
Here items and artefacts such as antibiotic resistance markers and geneflow, which had previously been confined to the rarefied discourses of purely technoscientific elites suddenly began to circulate through wider zones and spaces.
Hence in the GM battle we see the emergence of a series of new political spaces, where science and its „others‟ become reconnected in new ways. These form hybrid zones,

125 where statements about the behaviour of genes, plants, ecosystems are allowed alongside statements about the behaviour of corporations, governments and scientists. The institutions of technoscientific governance could respond to these new political spaces in a number of ways. On the one hand, government institutions may simply ignore such hybrid spaces as illegitimate, and attempt to continue the governance of GMOs within the traditional spaces and discourses of a purified science On the other hand government institutions may attempt to allow a space for extra-scientific discourses, but may attempt to purify these into „science‟ and „ethics‟ or „facts‟ and „values‟, keeping the former as the only privileged category. This depends on a number of factors, not least the intensity of the domestic controversy. In our narrative we have traced these responses at the level of the EU and two of its member states, Greece and the UK.
It was within the UK that the domestic battle was at its sharpest, and the innovation of new forms and arenas of governance more apparent. Countries such as Greece, which invoked national bans, were as a consequence not driven into confrontation with sceptical publics and hostile NGO‟s. Rather there could be more of the appearance of a unified „national interest‟ keeping Greece „GMO free‟, with all major actors by and large united and speaking within a scientised discourse of national protection against the risk of damage to environment and health. At the EU level, the European Commission rarely finds itself confronting any such thing as an emerging „European Public‟. Rather such interactions are still primarily mediated via member states and their domestic political arenas, and secondarily by institutions of representative democracy such as the European
Parliament. To some extent trans-European stakeholder organisations have emerged, ranging from Europabio, (the European Bio-Industry association) to FOEE, (Friends of the Earth at the European level). Following the revision of the European regulatory framework, the European Commission did call a stakeholder convention to feed into its
„Strategic Vision for the Biosciences‟ document, but compared to the UK this remained a low key event.
The pattern in the UK was different to the extent that the government tried the
„managed introduction‟ of GM crops. This required not only the Farm Scale Evaluations of GM crops but also an attempt to manage the consequent public outcry via a complex

126 system of innovations ranging from the setting up of the Agriculture and Environment
Biotechnology Commission to the large scale public debate GM Nation . It is this series of experiments that the patterns of the separations and reorderings of science and politics are therefore most vivid.
4.6 - Spaces, separations and reorderings in the UK
In the narrative of the UK GM regulatory battle presented above in section three, it is possible to trace a pattern of the dislocation and reordering of the regimes, discourses and practices of high modernist statecraft. We can also follow this pattern through the series of „political spaces‟ in which it is performed, spaces that may be formal, informal, new or transformed. In this pattern of ordering we see acts of both purification and recombination, where the hybrid mixture of science and politics that is the GM controversy gets purified into separate spaces and discourses, but with the final right to recombine them reserved for the apex of central government. In tracing these patterns we therefore pay attention to which discourses are permitted a voice within these spaces; whether they are the purified discourses of „science‟ and „politics/culture/ethics‟ or whether such spaces call forth hybrid re-workings of these. Finally, we will note how that this pattern of ordering is not just spatial but also temporal, thus highlighting the control over the timescales within which these spaces would be allowed to unfold as another a key issue.
In its improvisation of new modes and arenas of the governance of life and science around GMOs the UK therefore found itself with two expert advisory committees – the
Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC) and the Advisory committee on Releases into the Environment (ACRE). In the ultimate enactment of GM governance in the UK, the former spoke as experts on „society‟ while the latter spoke as experts on „nature‟, thus exhibiting the dualisms at the heart of Latour‟s „modern constitution‟. The story of this period of GM governance in the UK is one of a rivalry between these different sources of authority. Furthermore, in the mass public experiment/engagement exercise of GM Nation a division is made between the arena of the „public debate‟ and parallel expert discourses, most notably the „science review‟ but also one on economic implications. These purifications represent a particular

127 maintenance of modernist modes of government in the UK in the face of the hybrid epidemiologies and arenas of participation that were erupting across Europe.
In our narrative, a major „dislocatory moment‟ or „key turning point‟ can be identified around 1998, with the crisis of the existing regime of directive 90/220 and ACRE. This regime became unable to deal with the unruly and contested zone of „life politics‟ around
GM agri-food and thus summoned forth a range of alternative political spaces and discourses. It is possible to identify a range of crucial new, formal and informal political spaces within the story of the UK GM battle. Beyond the formal instituted spaces of participation such as the AEBC, the GM dialogue and GM Nation , we can find a range of informal or new political spaces. These newly politicised spaces that feature in our narrative range from supermarkets, farmers‟ fields, village halls, National Seed List hearings, Magistrates and Crown Courts, to beekeepers‟ conventions and even to the management committee of the Farm Scale Evaluations themselves. The contests in these informal spaces could sometimes enter and transform the official technoscientific discourses of governance. For example, the public intervention into the Seed Listing process by various individuals and NGOs had a significant impact, and re-wrote aspects of the science.
However, in contrast to the proliferation of hybrid discourses within these new political spaces, it is striking how the formal participatory spaces initiated in response to the dislocatory moments of 1998 performed an unacknowledged process of purification.
Thus in our narrative of the division of labour between ACRE and the AEBC, and then of the three strands of the GM Dialogue we can discern a process of sifting and filtering of the scientific and the political back into separate discursive spaces.
In the original improvisation after 1998 ACRE was to be „strictly scientific‟, while the
AEBC was initially to address the wider, „strategic issues‟ combining both natural and social scientific expertise. However, this would actually become performed as a natural and social division of labour between the two bodies. The AEBC gained its unstatutory but powerful voice within the government‟s decision-making process by representing expert intelligence about the social reaction to, and the „public attitudes‟ about GM agri-food.

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Thus while ACRE could „speak for nature‟ via the FSEs, the AEBC would end up
„speaking for society‟ via GM Nation .
This tendency to separation and purification is also reproduced within the official „GM
Dialogue‟ itself, designed as a tripartite arrangement, with the public debate GM Nation partitioned from separate economic and scientific strands that remained led by appointed experts. „Facts‟ and „values‟ were in this way found to remain in the traditionally separate domains allocated to them under the „high modernist‟ regime. In contrast to the National
Seed List Hearings where participatory intrusion commented on, challenged and changed the science, here the public debate was to be kept isolated and permitted only to yield knowledge about its own values. The separate public debate would be an exercise yielding purely sociological information about the public and its „values‟ to the government. „Facts‟ would be left safe within the domain of expert discourses, unmolested by any such uncontrolled exposure to public participation.
The official spaces of GM Nation , and the wider „GM Dialogue‟ of which it formed a part, were key places for the articulation of alternative rationalities and networks – but also key in the separation of the issue into the three strands, thus curtailing the unconstitutional mixing of politics, science, and markets. We note in our narrative how the debate was to be diverted away from „improper‟ and hybrid spaces like the National
Seed List hearings into more appropriate forums, where public values and scientific facts would be chaperoned by panels of experts and permitted to make no unconstitutional liaison. The document from the UK Government‟s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) 50 that recommends the closure of the seed lists as a political space, also points instead, like a kindly but firm policeman, towards the forthcoming GM public debate as the appropriate place.
However, this act of purification of „science‟ and „politics‟ was only a prelude to their eventual recombination, an act which was reserved for that traditional apex of „high modernist‟ political practices, the UK government. The bifurcated process of
50 http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/nationallist/letter.htm
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AEBC/ GM Nation and ACRE/FSEs therefore ended up forming two separate expert mediated information-feeds for the sole deliberation and arbitration of the UK government. This was despite the intention and belief amongst key actors within the
AEBC and elsewhere that the timescale was to be ordered to make the public debate process of GM Nation a key space for societies deliberations on the final scientific reports on the Farmscale Evaluations.
This question of timescales for the process, which features as a key controversy and point of criticism during all stages of GM Nation including its preparation, conduct and evaluation, is therefore particularly telling. Before we detail this pattern of „high modernist‟ epistemological ordering revealed by the debate on timescales, it is worth making a brief point about timescales and GM in general. Most commentators (e.g.
Mayer 2003, Horlick-Jones et al . 2004) agreed that the UK GM debate process was too short, with the only formal space allowed for participation by the public squeezed into less than a month and a half in the summer of 2003. It is also a more general feature of the GM controversy that opponents tend to call for more time for public discussion and more research, demands that are often linked to calls for moratoria and freezes in the technology‟s deployment. On the other hand the promoters of the technology tend to favour a speedy closure of debate, admittance onto the market, and return on investment.
However, within this general tendency a more specific factor was at work. This was intimately connected to the question of ordering of kinds of authority in the government‟s decision described above. The central question became whether the public debate should finish before the publication of the FSEs, or be allowed to continue or be resumed to take the FSE results into account. Behind this issue of timescale is thus the deeply significant question of the ordering and priority of „scientific fact‟ over „public value‟ in the government‟s decision-making and legitimation strategies. Should the public debate be permitted to deliberate on the FSE results? Or should they be kept separate, with the science alone having the last word, and the government left as the final arbiter?
The AEBC and the government had each both advocated both possible positions on this question of timescale/ordering at different times in the initial preparations. However, after it was announced that due to peer review the publication of the FSEs would be

130 delayed from July into September 2003 (which was unexpected on all sides), the government was unwilling to adapt and extend GM Nation to account for this. Thus by the time the first FSE scientific reports were published in October 2003, GM Nation was long over, with even the Final Report and recommendations to government of the Public
Debate Steering Board completed and published a month earlier in September. The hierarchical modernist ordering of public value and scientific fact was kept intact.
When the government made its final announcement in March 2004 its legitimatory rhetoric was centred on ACRE‟s interpretation of the FSE reports and was therefore fully in keeping with the expert advisory system of the original 1990/220 directive and the epistemological ordering of the „high modernist‟ regime. The results from the
„information feeds‟ of the GM dialogue and GM Nation also featured in the argument, but as a subordinate element, which, while representing some change, also signals the overall persistence of the older form. However, the government was able to maintain its commitments to both of these legitimatory groundings in „science‟ and „public opinion‟, as the interpretations of the FSEs and the GM dialogue could, in this instance, be read in a non-contradictory way.
Therefore the development of official and unofficial participatory spaces around GM forms a complex pattern of articulation, hybridisation, separation and recombination.
This discussion of spaces, separations and orderings demonstrates a number of things:
New political spaces and formal participatory institutions have emerged in response to the dislocations or void experienced by the expert based „high modernist‟ GM regulatory apparatus. The existence of these practises of participatory governance does represent some erosion of the conventional nationally organised political spaces of high modernist statecraft and these new official participatory fora around the AEBC and GM Nation provided an officially recognised space for views and rationales beyond the narrow reductionist scientific advice framework. However, at the same time they played a role within a wider apparatus of GM governance that remained within the framework of „high modernist‟ statecraft. This acted to contain, separate and purify the GM issue back into distinct zones of politics and science, of society and nature, as befitting the maintenance of the „modern constitution‟ (Latour 1993). Despite the emergence of new practices and spaces of participatory governance, decision-making was kept at the apex of

131 governmental power. Furthermore, while the new political spaces around GM undoubtedly stretch in transnational dimensions beyond the nation state, the old modernist category of the national still remains a key political space and discourse, as the title of the public debate as „ GM Nation ‟ must suggest.

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5. Performing publics and participation
In this section we will analyse some of the themes emerging from the patterns of participation. In particular, we will examine how different constructions and representations of the „public‟ emerged and were deployed. As we have seen from the narrative in section 3, the UK saw a particular pattern that differed from EU member states which relied on national bans to diffuse their domestic GM conflict. The UK saw a mode of „managed introduction‟ of GMOs, with the growth of the crops organised as a mass scientifico-precautionary experiment and a parallel public debate with events like
GM Nation in an attempt to manage the unruly outbreak of informal participation that surrounded the issue. GM Nation was one of the largest and most complex public participatory event in the whole cycle of contestation over the life sciences, and provides a rich example of many of the more general features of the construction, enrolment and deployment of different versions of „publics‟ that we are trying to describe. For these reasons this section will focus mainly on the United Kingdom case study in this section.
More generally across Europe, in our narrative account of the social and regulatory struggle over GMOs we have seen how public groups, outside the traditional bodies of technoscientific governance, began to engage in the debate and create new spaces of participation. This informal moments of participation raised a dilemma for these traditional bodies: whether (i) to ignore them as illegitimate (raising the danger of making the whole governance process seem illegitimate itself), (ii) to engage with them on their own terms (and thus opening up the possibility of altering the framing of the issue), or
(iii) to somehow incorporate them into the process of governance in a way that did not excessively disrupt it. These are the growing problems in every sphere of contested technologies, thus leading to what might be called the participatory turn in EU technoscientific governance.
However, once it becomes accepted that public participation has a necessary and legitimate place within technoscientific governance, further questions are then raised.
Firstly, what is public participation for? One possible rationale for public participation is epistemological , suggesting that it yields a wider knowledge-base, bringing in new standpoints that were in danger of being excluded by narrow techno-scientific framings.

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Another rationale is political , that of making decisions appear more legitimate by gaining the participation and consent of wider society. A second question revolves around who the public might be and how is this category to be constituted? The public is a problematic and contested category itself, variously constructed in both political theory and practice. Should there be a „representative‟ sample of the public, in social scientific terms? Should participants be selected for their knowledgeability in relation to the issue or for their typicality? How such questions are answered relate closely to which of the twin rationales of public participation mentioned above is dominant.
These dilemmas are particularly well illustrated in the debates around GM Nation in the
UK, and it is to these events that we will turn to examine the issues in more detail.
Already an outcome of a longer process of social conflict over the new technology, GM
Nation itself quickly became the subject of some controversy, especially over questions of its „representativeness‟. These questions revolved around whether a representative
„general public‟ had in fact participated, or whether those already critical towards GM crops had in some sense „captured‟ the process. That this latter had indeed happened was a claim made, in various degrees, by the biotechnology industry, by the government and by the official academic evaluators of GM Nation .
In these debates over the validity of GM Nation we can therefore detect contrasting views about what constitutes a legitimate construction or representation of the public. In particular we see a contrast between what we may term „engaged publics‟ or „issue publics‟ on the one hand and the „general public‟ on the other. A dominant theme of the debates during the construction, conduct and evaluation of GM Nation was how to arrive at a „pure‟ public, a „general public‟ unsullied by having been previously drawn into the
„public energy field‟ around the GMO issue. This theme runs through all the documents that feature in the preparation and evaluation of the debate, from the initial advice of the
AEBC, to the statements by the government, the planning and execution of the exercise by the steering board and COI, to the post-event evaluations and framings by academics, government and industry.

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As the official independent GM Nation evaluation team from the Universities of East
Anglia and Cardiff put it,
[T]he intent was to have a debate that was not dominated by significant pressure groups, but to access the „quiet majority‟. We interpret this to entail representative sampling of the population, as opposed to biased sampling of particular cliques. Representativeness may be ascertained in several ways: it may be determined according to the socio-economic and demographic profiles of the sample (in comparison to that of the general public), or by the attitudinal similarity of sample to population (Horlick-Jones et al 2004: 22).
Thus the evaluation team contrast those who participated in GM Nation with a „general public‟, one which they later proceeded to access via a conventional quantitative social scientific survey of opinion on GM (Poortinga and Pidgeon 2004). Those who attended
GM Nation are seen on this basis as being unrepresentative, in terms both of their demographics and in the intensity of their interest and opinion. Similarly the AEBC and the steering board had built into GM Nation a series of „Narrow But Deep‟ focus groups to create a representation of a pure, disinterested public to act as a „control‟ to balance against capture by stakeholder networks:
We believe that the Narrow But Deep element provides evidence of grass roots views and attitudes which might otherwise have been unheard during the debate.
If there is a silent majority, it would show itself here ( GM Nation PDSB 2003: 36).
Thus both quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used in an attempt to look beyond the publics of GM as manifest in the GM Nation debates, to find a „pure‟ public, a „silent majority‟ stripped bare of civil society mediation, to stand naked before the state and the social scientist. What we observe in this process is the deployment of a variety of what Lezaun and Soneryd (2006) call „technologies of elicitation‟:
The centrality of the public in science and technology policy has been accompanied, it must be noted, by the increasing deployment of technologies of

135 elicitation ; instruments, such as the opinion poll, the focus group, the counselling meeting, or the citizen jury, used to generate lay views on controversial issues and feed these views into the policy-making process. These technologies constitute, we would like to argue, a veritable extractive industry, one that engages publics in an attempt to increase the productivity of government (Lezaun and Soneryd 2006:
2).
Rather than these „technologies of elicitation‟ simply accessing a singular public and its opinions in an unproblematic way, they instead help to bring into being different publics, different forms of publicness, as well as different qualities of public knowledge via their different techniques. Therefore quantitative methods such as surveys or opinion polls tend to access the public as an aggregate of atomised individuals in a static and isolated mode, unable with their brief questions to uncover shifting opinions or the underlying dynamics and rationales behind the brief answers. The currents of discontent that may crystallise around an issue like GM can lie hidden from the view of such methods, but then appear to emerge suddenly amongst populations previously understood to be optimistic about biotechnology. On the other hand, methods such as citizens‟ juries or focus groups are able to articulate people into mobile collectives, where they can deepen their knowledge and shift their opinions in relation to the presented evidence and each other. Not only might this produce a better quality and legitimacy of debate, such responses can also yield interesting information for research.
However, the act of focusing, whether optically or socially, is also necessarily an act of selection, bringing some things into view at the expense of occluding others. Both methodologies and camps also position themselves as translators and managers of manifestations of public participation into „information‟ compatible with and of use to the official decision-making process. The focus group, poll or jury may shift in its rationale between research method and democratic forum. With such technologies of elicitation, scientific and political representation are intertwined. Furthermore, the products of these technologies and practices of elicitation can have distinct political uses and trajectories. The GM Nation final report and the UEA/Cardiff evaluation both deploy their respective technologies of elicitation to make the discovery that the general

136 public are less opposed to the technology than the self-selecting and participating minority.
Throughout the controversy over the representativeness of GM Nation , the expression
„silent majority‟ is frequently evoked. Such a „silent majority‟ can of course by definition never speak for itself, but must somehow be articulated from outside. It is united in silence, only in its unanimous muteness can it be constituted as a majority at all. This concept has a controversial history, deployed by powerful elites as a counterweight to the critical voices of social movements and civil society.
However, the political implications of either study and „technology of elicitation‟ also differ significantly. In the case of the UEA/Cardiff study (Horlick-Jones et al 2004), published in February 2004 (crucially a month before the Government‟s decision and therefore very much part of the political process), its conclusions were taken up by industry and politicians to weaken the political impact of GM Nation . The ambivalent
„silent majority‟ accessed via the representative, quantitative survey were deployed as political ballast against the critical „publics of GM‟ articulated by the meetings of GM
Nation . On the other hand, the disinterested „general public‟ articulated by the „narrow but deep‟ groups of GM Nation were found to point towards a rather different conclusion: „The more people engage in the issues, the harder their attitudes and more intense their concerns‟ ( GM Nation PDSB 2003, p51). Thus the disinterested are transformed via their engagement. The pure, disinterested public vanish as they pass through the focus group process, becoming instead engaged, focused and potentially mobilised participants.
Thus the two different technologies of elicitation bring to the fore different qualities of publics and knowledge. The abstract, mass, atomised and unengaged „general public‟ is only constructed as such by particular social scientific or political technologies such as the survey, the census, opinion poll or ballot. It is the atomised individual unit of
„population‟, constructed in relation to the nation state by a liberal theory that has no room for any intermediary between its atomic citizens and their state, as if no collective organs, epistemic communities, hybrid collectives or social movements are allowed to

137 intervene. This atomisation of the public renders it static in contrast to the mobilisation involved in the „narrow but deep‟ groups. Thus the ambivalent „general public‟ can be accessed as a silent but „democratic‟ ballast against the engaged minorities articulated through GM Nation – but only through the atomising and quantifying practices of particular modes of social science or political articulation. Such ambivalence might be transformed were these same population samples exposed to the collective deliberations of a focus group, a citizens‟ jury or a social movement mobilisation.
51
This has important dimensions of social exclusion and inequality. The UEA/Cardiff evaluation team, using demographic information find that the engaged minorities are part of relatively privileged and educated elites in contrast to the social status of the more ambivalent „general public‟. This latter are said to be excluded from both the GM Nation debate and from the educational and other privileges said to characterise most GM
Nation participants (Horlick-Jones et al 2004). This adds validity to the exercise of eliciting the opinions of the excluded. Yet given that public unease about GMOs is not just about the technology „in itself‟ but is intimately linked to the social dimensions of who owns, benefits from and controls it (Marris et al , 2001), it is also the case that the ambivalence of the excluded can rapidly be transformed into its opposite, in ways that as we have explained above, cannot be anticipated by the survey or poll. Furthermore, as we will suggest below, these patterns of class, status and hegemony are revealing about the body politic in the UK as a whole. This insight yields information not by the „vivisection‟ of phenomena via quantitative social science, but by apprehending it in an historical mode, as revealing how the living body politic, with its various mediating organs of civil society, social movements and class fractions, actually received GM crops.
51 It is tempting to suggest that, while the industrial interests can refer rhetorically to this excluded „general public‟ in their critique of GM Nation , to actually mobilise these excluded masses to actually engage with and „reclaim‟ the debate would have been too risky. It is as if this socially and politically excluded „silent majority‟ are only safe to invoke when left in an atomised, static and unengaged state, lest such mobilisation means they become an engaged and articulated body exhibiting the tendency found in the „Narrow But Deep‟ meetings.

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Rather than constructing a classical notion of the general public in relation to the state, the PAGANINI project attempts to understand the particular publics generated around a particular policy issue described in terms of a „public energy field‟ (Loeber et al , 2005: 43).
We may consider these as the „engaged‟ or „issue‟ publics of GM. Gaskell and Bauer
(2001; 63, 65) describe the „engaged publics of biotechnology‟, drawing on an earlier concept of an „issue public‟ (Converse 1964). However Gaskell and Bauer‟s „engaged public‟ is for biotechnology as a whole, including human biotechnology: a public they characterise as being by and large as male, over 55, with a university degree and favourable towards biotechnology (2001: 65). As we shall see, the issue public of GM, largely considered to have participated in GM Nation ‟s open debates, as well as in the wider dynamics of the controversy, is very different to that found by Bauer and Gaskell‟s work, especially in its more critical stance to agricultural biotechnology.
The range of publics interpellated by GM Nation that can be termed the „publics of GM‟ were formed from cultural or subpolitical networks around questions of food, health or countryside biodiversity. Rather than a „general public‟, these had emerged as particular publics emerging through their relationship with the GM issue. These could emerge in terms of a widely shared relationship to GM such as „consumers‟, or in more specific clusters such as organic or conventional farmers, allotment holders, bee-keepers, allergy sufferers, amateur ornithologists, naturalists. While the main mode of interpellation was through discourses of scientific cause and effect, other interpellative modes including alternative cosmologies and worldviews drew in actors ranging from the „natural law party‟, anthroposophists, eco-feminists, and anti-reductionists.
However, these „publics of GM‟ are more than simply the purely social „corporations‟ of
Hegel‟s civil society (Hegel 1952); they are rather part of heterogeneous networks, composed of both human and non-human actors (Law 1991). For example, the networks around agricultural biodiversity may involve collectives of ornithologists interwoven with the corn buntings, linnets and skylarks that appear threatened by the herbicide resistant
GM crop regimes. Alternatively, the networks around food and health may involve selfhelp groups of allergy sufferers, who connect to the GM issue through carefully constructed repertoires involving complex categorisations of foods and their own bodily

139 experiences. The „publics of GM‟ are not purely „social‟ publics, but are brought into the
GM energy field entangled within and articulated through these socio-material assemblages and hybrid spaces.
However, the practice of the purification of the GM issue into „natural‟ and „social‟ elements and spaces described above is also at work in the constitution of the purified
„general public‟. In the very act of being constituted as such a public, they are stripped bare of these associations with nature, technology or the material (see Latour 2004).
Rather than as knowing and embedded actors, brought into awareness of GM through these hybrid assemblages, the „general public‟ are constructed thorough their ignorance and lack of connection to the issue.
While we have characterised an issue public as being formed around the public energy field of a controversy rather than the nation states general public, the GM issue forms a series of publics and discourses that actually straddle these changes. The GM debate rests on the intersection of transnational GM energy fields and hybrid networks with traditional national polities, and thus leads to two types of pubic or democratic spheres – one around the issue, others around the territorial population. As we have seen from sections 3 and 4, the energy field of GM is also still shaped by national, classically modern institutions legitimised with reference to a territorially bounded population.
Hence the task of assembling a GM Nation – the publics of GM within the nation – to discuss a decision to be made by a classical modernist central state structure about a definite national territorial area. Thus the GM controversy exhibits a shifting ground between repertoires and invocations of different publics.
These issue publics of GM play an important role in the shaping of the controversy.
Thus to attempt to overlook them in the interests of constructing a general public would be to miss an important feature of the dynamics of the GM debate. The UEA/Cardiff evaluation team found in their general survey a „substantial minority subgroup of the general public‟ who shared the same profile as the engaged publics attending GM Nation
(Horlick-Jones et al 2004). While they say that „The extent to which this subgroup might be described as „politically engaged‟ in the GM issue is not clear‟ this does indicate the

140 substratum of criticality towards GM within society that the more explicitly engaged draw upon. The evaluation team‟s survey work identifies a significant minority of around
30% who are hostile to GM, with the larger majority of society being „ambivalent‟. Thus they claim „that current UK „public opinion‟ is not a unitary whole, but fragmented with considerable ambivalence co-existing alongside outright opposition‟ (2004, 9). However, that ambivalence is certainly not support for the project, but is better characterised as containing a criticality about GM shared with the „engaged publics‟ but along with a more open mind to what are described as potential future benefits. Furthermore, as we have seen, qualitative methods can show how such ambivalence may shift into other modes in different circumstances, as with the hardening of attitudes to GM amongst GM Nation ‟s
„narrow but deep‟ experiment. Ambivalence as a category may also mask a variety of views about GMOs, especially if, as in these debates, the main mark of distinction used to separate people into „hostile‟ or „ambivalent‟ attitudes to GM is that of an open attitude to possible benefits. This is because participants may have too much variation of views about the nature and possibility of these benefits, including the social conditions under which they may be realised, for this to be a useful category.
It is also worth noting here that the characterisation of the open debates of GM Nation as captured by the engaged minority of issue publics may also be too simplistic. GM Nation was not a homogeneous entity, especially in tier three. (Indeed, one of its most interesting features was the methods used to attempt to standardise the diversity of fora, locations and participants. The GM Nation booklet, with its stimulus material and questionnaire played an important role in this, forming a standard component which could circulate through this diversity giving it some coherence). This diversity was evident both in the formats taken by the meetings as well as in their locations, organisers and participants. While all the „tier one‟ launch events were given a uniform format of being split into small groups around a table and had a certain amount of collective deliberation, the other tiers of GM Nation open events took more heterogeneous forms.
Some held to the small group discussion table format, others were more like conventional public meetings with seating arranged in rows. Some were guided by facilitators and the GM Nation booklet, others revolved around a traditional debate format, with a panel of experts speaking for and against.

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There was also diversity amongst the locations, organisers and participants, making it important not to exaggerate the claims that the debate was captured by particular interest groups. The transcripts available from the „tier one‟ meetings show each tables rapporteur‟s summary of discussion. These frequently refer to divergent views expressed, in each table, and also to different interest groups represented.
52 At least one tier one meeting, at Harrogate, is considered to have been „more typical of a broader public‟
(Bruce 2003).
Of the other levels of meetings, the „tier two‟ events were organised around local government. These (like „tier three‟ meetings) therefore attracted those networks around local government such as elected councillors, representatives of the main political parties, etc., as well as those interested in the subpolitics of food, health, farming, wildlife and the environment. The „tier three‟ meetings were organised by a heterogenous array of civil society actors. On the list of 46 local „tier three‟ meetings given on the GM Nation website, not all were associated with anti-GM engaged groups. For example, two GM
Nation events were at county Royal Agricultural Shows and were organised by the big landowners „countryside alliance‟, not a location or group normally associated with environmentalism or anti-GM interests. Others were organised around scientific research organisations, such as the four events at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, well known for its development and promotion of GM agriculture. Others still were organised by agricultural colleges, local churches, parish councils, women‟s institutes and village halls and were attended by a cross-section of the community. However, from the list, it is also clear that a large amount of meetings were instigated by those engaged in the subpolitics of food, health and the environment. Thus Friends of the Earth and other explicitly environmentalist groups are associated with more than half of the local meetings. Yet more were organised around locations such as organic food outlets and farmers markets.
From this it can be argued that the GM Nation open events drew together the diverse engaged publics of GM. The accounts of the discussions and the results of the
52 http://www.gmnation.org.uk/ut_13/ .

142 questionnaires substantiate the claim that the majority of these participants were from positions critical towards the GM agri-technology.
However, other forces did take part in these GM Nation open events: firstly, the broader political networks around UK local government and politics who played an important role in all tier two events and most tier three events; and secondly the other engaged publics and stakeholders of GM – those who took a more supportive stance to the technology. These included some sections of the farming industry, (especially large conventional farmers organised around the UK‟s National Farmers Union) and members and supporters of scientific establishments, (especially given the potential impact of the debate on the cultural and political status of science and technology). As we have seen these networks supportive of GM were able to organise a minority of the tier three meetings, and also contributed to most other GM Nation meetings.
However, despite the presence around GM Nation of these two other social networks, it is significant that it was the GM-sceptical networks that were able to make the decisive impact on it. GM Nation thus revealed the relative weight of the mobilisable social networks around the GM issue at that time. It is particularly revealing that pro-GM networks were unable to „capture‟ the space of GM Nation , or at least balance the weight of the other more GM-sceptical forces. This perhaps reveals the very narrow base of support for the GM agri-food project that could be made manifest, despite the potentially revolutionary and far-reaching changes this new class technology might bring.
Neither the cadres of mainstream local government and political parties nor the subpolitical networks around technoscientific progress and modernised food and farming could come to the aid of the GM corporations or the central governments GM agenda.
Apprehended this way, GM Nation reveals a living „body politic‟ as it actually inhabited the space of the debate. This information is missed by trying to step over the actual participants in order to construct a „general public‟ via various „technologies of elicitation‟. The commercial, scientific and governmental innovators and proponents of the new GM agri-food system had been unable to build the necessary social layers of support for their technology. In this way GM Nation revealed the absence of the kind of
„hegemonic alliances‟ needed to give the new technology robust or widespread support

143 amongst various classes, networks and institutions of British society at that time. Instead as an experiment it provided a demonstration or manifestation of the scale of the subpolitical networks and discourses around „nature‟, of food, health and the environment that circulated through culture, the media, commerce, politics and many other places and that were able to challenge and resist the GM project.
Although arguably not representative of a „general public‟, nevertheless these engaged publics of GM may have their own kind of legitimacy, a point recognised by the official evaluation team:
We ... observed that these events were often dominated by discussions characteristic of a knowledgeable and experienced engagement in the GM issue.
However, in our view, this does not mean that the open meetings were without merit. Of course, engaged people with clear views on GM issues had a legitimate contribution to make in the debate. Moreover the exploration of their views was important, in view of their prominence within the political dynamics of wider debates about GM (Horlick-Jones et al 2004: 9).
However, the question then emerges from this observation as to what this „legitimate contribution‟ may be. Rather than merely trying to bypass these engaged publics in favour of some other construction, instead a new problem emerges: What role might engaged publics play in participatory exercises and technoscientific decision making?
Following on from the two rationales – epistemological and political – advanced to support public participation that we outlined earlier in this section, various arrangements or modes are on offer. Given the knowledgeability of these actors, there is a strong epistemological rationale for their inclusion, in order that policy processes would benefit from their knowledge and insight. However, are these publics then to be considered as somehow „lay experts‟ – and are these to be considered equal to the certified scientific experts, or does this even lead to the end of the expert/lay distinction altogether? Collins and Evans (2002) argue against the erosion of the expert/lay divide. Instead, they argue for a „third wave of science studies‟, which would allow us to grant stronger

144 epistemological rights to our subpolitical networks around GM. This approach elevates our engaged publics to the status of „uncertified‟ or „contributory‟ experts, giving them a recognised place and thus incorporating them within the existing scientific advice and policy process. However, this arrangement only grants admission to views closest to and commensurable with existing technocratic dominant discourses, and risks simply transforming publics into honorary experts. It also might even occlude the wider social issues at stake, assuming that an epistemological criterion for inclusion is knowledgability about technology and risk as things in themselves, rather than these wider social factors.
Most importantly, such moves risk losing the specifically public quality of issue publics by their enculturation as experts. This public quality is generated or enhanced by an explicit appeal to a public realm and a consideration of the public dimensions of a technology. This quality is made possible by simultaneous engagement and distance, being at once related to and distanced from an issue of concern. This allows a scrutiny of techno-scientific issues from perspectives outside the dominant paradigms of the regulatory and policy networks. By finding new institutional forms through which it can engage in „extended peer review‟ by such networks, technoscience can perhaps become re-embedded back into society while still retaining its specificity as a distinctive sphere of human activity.

145
6. Conclusion
In analysing the overall patterns of GM regulation in the EU, we can draw the following conclusions:
 The conflict over GM was structured by the contradictory imperatives built into the original 1990 Deliberate Release Directive.
This period had seen the emergence to centre stage of two great clashing imperatives confronting policymakers: firstly precaution, grounded in a growing awareness of the selfendangering dynamics of technology and environment, and secondly innovation, the perceived need, driven by intensifying global competition, for the EU to construct itself as an advanced techno-scientific knowledge economy. While the latter imperative focuses on the creation of a homogenised neo-liberal market zone, where all barriers to the free circulation of the products of innovation are progressively removed, the former imperative implies a more regulated zone, in which the movements of pollutants, products and organisms are subject to surveillance and control. Thus GMOs would not find automatic admission into the European
„technological zone‟, but would be marked as a separate regulatory category, requiring at least an initial precautionary assessment. The initial arrangement of the DRD was that, once having passed this assessment and been granted consent, the GMO would then be free to circulate unmarked. However, this process simultaneously added to the symbolic charge around the GMO, raising questions about safety which in the public‟s mind were left unresolved, and at the same time allowing for no post-release monitoring or regulation. While the contradictions within the DRD are not the sole cause or determinant of the GM conflict, they nevertheless played a vital role in shaping and structuring it. The logic of the directive set up the dynamics of the ensuing conflict within the EU, allowing various parties to demand a moratorium and suggesting a new round of regulation, leading to a system of post-market monitoring involving labelling and traceability.
 Different member states took different approaches . The two national case studies, Greece and Britain, were chosen largely because they largely exemplify two extremes in terms of member states‟ attitudes and approaches to agricultural biotechnology. The Greek government, with the most GM-hostile population in the

146
EU, little domestic biotechnological research, and an agricultural structure that did not lend itself to the high-productivity GM crops that were being developed, took a broadly consistent anti-GM stance within the EU, invoking Article 16 of the DRD to ban specific GM crops from its territory, and leading the call for an EU-wide moratorium. By contract, the UK, while having a population that was still predominantly anti-GM, had a government that supported the new technology, congruent with its historic commitments to an Atlanticist and neo-liberal stance, and also with its perception of biotechnology as an important symbol of its science base.
The battle-lines in the two countries were thus strikingly different. In Greece, the battles were fought along lines which corresponded to the national boundary, invoking discourses of defence of the Greek territory from contamination by
GMOs. Both state scientific institutions and civil society organisations were engaged in the extensive testing of food and seed to ensure that Greece was kept GM-free. By contrast, in the UK, as the government proceeded with a programme of precautionary commercialisation of GM crops, (later rebranded as a series of scientific experiments which provoked further widespread opposition amongst the populace), the battle lines ran within and beyond the nation state, following new contours between GM and non-GM fields and along the supermarket shelves. It is for this reason that the UK government had to engage in large-scale public participation exercise – not as part of a transition to a new, normalised, regime of participatory governance for agricultural biotechnology, but as a process of crisis management during a period when the existing regulatory regime was breaking down but had not yet been replaced by a new one.
 The controlled introduction of GMOs in the European Union performed the
GMO as a regulatory object, by dividing GM from non-GM and science from politics.
It did this by performing two divisions. First, by setting up a special regulatory system for GM crops and food, it delineated the GMO as a separate category of object, and thus in the same gesture brought into being the opposite category of non-GM crops and food. This latter category was to create new opportunities for parallel, „quality‟ bioeconomies, as individual farmers, regions and even whole countries such as Greece sought to gain added value from growing non-
GM food. Secondly, it sought to constitute the GMO in a particular way, attempting

147 to purify the GMO of its social and cultural dimensions and to constitute it as a purely technical object of regulation. However, this act of division was less successful; as GMOs started to arrive in European agricultural landscapes with their dense social networks, and attempted to penetrate European foodways, they became entangled with social meanings and socio-material connections. In Greece this dynamic serves to strengthen the general anti-GM stance of the government; insofar as Greece has to ask itself whether it is a „GM nation‟ it is only in a technical sense which requires the scientific testing for the very presence of GMOs in Greek fields, shops and warehouses, one in which hybrid bodies like the Greek Bioethics
Committee do not have to play a key strategic role. By contrast, the United
Kingdom, with its internal conflicts over the technology played out in new political spaces in hybrid politico-scientific terms, has to ask itself whether it is a „ GM Nation ‟ in a quite different, political sense – if the public, when convened in the right way, will decide that it wants to accept the new technology. But in convening the public to speak in official fora, the UK government channels public debate into one side of a bifurcated institutional structure, one which separates science from politics . Two parallel regulatory experiments thus take place: the farm scale trials of GM crops, to be interpreted by natural scientists; and the GM Nation public debate, to be interpreted by social scientists – thus giving the AEBC a key mediating role in the UK controversy. This institutional bifurcation attempts to keep nature and society separate, to ensure that the public will only deliberate on values, rather than on facts
– a dynamic which is further strengthened by the timing of GM Nation to finish before the results of the Farm Scale Evaluations are published. The separation also serves to leave conventional technocratic modes of governance intact, with the classical modern apex of the executive power of the state remaining as the ultimate decision-making power, the point at which the separate information feeds from the different regulatory experiments can be combined.
 Public engagement exercises are characterised by battles over the multiple, overlapping and shifting definition of the public. One of the key issues in the debate over the validity of GM Nation revolved around a distinction between
„engaged publics‟ on the one hand and the „general public‟ on the other. It was claimed that the open meetings predominantly attracted an „engaged public‟, those

148 already active within the debate, and that these may not have been „representative‟ of the public as a whole. Thus this engaged public was contrasted with a general public, often called „the silent majority‟. However, this silent majority can clearly never speak for itself, but has to be articulated from the outside. In the arguments around GM
Nation this was achieved both qualitatively through focus group discussions with screened, representative samples, and quantitatively by opinion polls. While this is a valid task – to look beyond the minority of the population who choose to participate in the open meetings, and to attempt to find out what other sections of society might think – it is a task that brings its own problems. Different „technologies of elicitation‟, rather than simply accessing „the‟ public and its opinions in an unproblematic way, function by bringing into being different publics, different forms of publicness, and different qualities of public knowledge. These methodological choices are therefore always politically charged; in particular, the concept of the
„silent majority‟ has long been used as ballast against the critical voices of social movements and civil society. Such moves also risk privileging an atomised mode of engagement which favours disengagement over the insights that may be generated by engagement and deliberation. This act of creating a purified public also served the bifurcation of the UK debate into separate zones of „science‟ and „politics‟ by not only stripping it from its social solidarities but also from its socio-material embeddedness, its scientific knowledgeability and its engagement. Furthermore, these reductionist methodologies cannot apprehend the roles played by the engaged publics within the body politic as a whole.
 GM Nation revealed the existence of society-wide subpolitical networks around food, environment and health; the challenge is to find a legitimate role for such ‘engaged publics’.
Rather than being disregarded as an unrepresentative minority, they should be valued within the participatory process – but how?
Undoubtedly they are knowledgeable actors, and one rationale for their inclusion is certainly epistemological, in order that policy processes would benefit from their knowledge and insight. One approach would be to elevate them to the status of
„uncertified contributory experts‟, and thus incorporate them within the existing scientific advice and policy process. However, this risks simply transforming publics into honorary experts, and also only granting admission to views closest to existing

149 technocratic dominant discourses. It also implies that the issue is simply one of knowledgeability about technology and its associated risks, rather than of its wider social relations. Furthermore, such a move risks losing the specifically public quality of issue publics, who despite their expertise are not simply experts, but people considering public aspects of a technology, by being at once related to and distanced from an issue of concern. Insofar as issue publics are able to scrutinise technoscientific issues from perspectives outside the dominant paradigms of the regulatory and policy networks, it is because of their simultaneous engagement and distance.
This allows a variety of different modes of relating to science, from the obsessive to the slightly interested: geeks, connoisseurs, fans, critics, all collected in distinctive patterns of sociality through the mobilisation around the issue. By finding new institutional forms through which it can engage in „extended peer review‟ by such networks, technoscience can perhaps become re-embedded back into society while still retaining its specificity as a distinctive sphere of human activity.
 The battle over GM helped to precipitate a transformation of the regulatory regime, which may form a new battleground.
This transformation was the result of an epistemological stalemate, itself the eventual outcome of a battle in which neither side could irrefutably establish that the products were either safe or harmful.
This shift in regulatory regime occurred along a number of different dimensions: from (nation) states to (global) markets, from discourses of safety to those around consumer choice, and from the calculation of risk to the management of uncertainty.
Firstly, the regulatory membrane was moved away from the national border, and instead began to follow new contours within and through nation states, between labelled products on supermarket shelves, and between GM and non-GM crops in fields. Secondly, the transformation involved the dethronement of positivistic
„centres of calculation‟ by relativistic tropes of consumer sovereignty, forcing the former to relinquish their unquestioned primacy and instead occupy a terrain where different rationales jostle for position. Thirdly, instead of GM governance being the preserve of state-appointed experts, pronouncing definitively on calculable and specific risks, now uncertainty intensifies, associated with a proliferation of voices which are ostensibly left to be managed by the market. This is the regime of coexistence, which declares its welcome to a plurality of agricultures – GM, organic

150 and conventional – within the European Union. However, this new regime becomes a further battleground: on the one hand it is possible that coexistence regulations could be used to stifle the new technology; on the other hand the release of GM crops into agro-ecosystems with the inevitable processes of gene flow might serve to carry the new technology into a position of dominance.

151
Glossary of acronyms
ACNFP
ACRE
AEBC
Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes [UK]
Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment [UK]
Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission [UK]
BSE
CA
CJD
COI
Defra
DRD
DUC
EEC
EFET
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy
Competent Authority (under Directives 1990/220 and 2001/18)
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
Central Office of Information [UK]
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [UK]
Deliberate Release Directive (1990/220, replaced by 2001/18) distinct, uniform and stable
European Economic Community
Enieos Foreas Eleghou Trofimon, Unified Body for Food Inspection
[Greece]
ENGO environmental non-governmental organisation
ETHIAGE National Agricultural Research Foundation [Greece]
EU
FSA
European Union
Food Standards Agency [UK]
FSE
GESASE
GM
GMHR
Farm Scale Evaluation
General Confederation of Greek Agrarian Associations [Greece] genetically modified; genetic modification genetically modified herbicide resistant
GMO
HR
MAFF
OST
NGO
PASOK
PDSB
RSPB genetically modified organism herbicide resistant
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food [UK]
Office of Science and Technology [UK] non-governmental organisation
Panhellenic Socialist Movement [Greece]
Public Debate Steering Board [UK]
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds [UK]
SCIMAC
UEA
VCU
WTO
Supply Chain Initiative on Modified Agricultural Crops [UK]
University of East Anglia value for cultivation and use
World Trade Organisation
WWF
YPAAT
Worldwide Fund for Nature
Ministry of Rural Development & Food [Greece]
YPEHODE Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works [Greece]

152
Key EU directives, regulations and guidelines 53
The main Directives and Regulations currently in force for process of authorising use of
GMOs are:
 contained use of GMOs – 1990/219
 experimental or commercial release of GMOs – 2001/18 (replaced 1990/220)
 food or feed containing, consisting of or produced from GMOs – 1829/2003
 labelling and traceability of GM food and feed products – 1830/2003
Council D irective 1990/219 on the contained use of genetically modified microorganisms, subsequently amended by Commission Directive 1994/51/EC(29) and
Council Directive 1998/81.
Council Directive 1990/220 on the deliberate release into the environment of genetically modified organisms, later amended by Commission Directive
1994/15/EC(33) and Commission Directive 1997/35, and then revised as 2001/18.
Council Directive 98/95 of 14 December 1998 amending, in respect of the consolidation of the internal market, genetically modified plant varieties and plant genetic resources, directives from the 1960s and 1970s on the marketing of beet seed, fodder plant seed, cereal seed, seed potatoes, seed of oil and fibre plants and vegetable seed and on the common catalogue of varieties of agricultural plant species
Regulation 258/97 of 27 January 1997 lays out detailed rules for the authorisation of novel foods and novel food ingredients. Novel foods must undergo a safety assessment before being placed on the EU market. Only those products considered to be safe for human consumption are authorised for marketing. Article 8.1. states: „Without prejudice to the other requirements of Community law concerning the labelling of foodstuffs, the following additional specific labelling requirements shall apply to foodstuffs in order to ensure that the final consumer is informed of ... (d) the presence of an organism
53 See complete details at http://www.icgeb.trieste.it/~bsafesrv/bsfeurop.htm
.

153 genetically modified by techniques of genetic modification, the non-exhaustive list of which is laid down in Annex I A, Part 1 of Directive 90/220/EEC.‟ http://www.biosafety.be/GB/Dir.Eur.GB/FF/258_97/258_97.html
European Parliament/Council Directive 2001/18 on the deliberate release into the environment of genetically modified organisms – revision of 1990/220,
Council Directive 2002/53 of 13 June 2002 on the common catalogue of varieties of agricultural plant species. Article 18 provides that „if it is established that the cultivation of a variety included in the common catalogue of varieties could in any Member State be harmful from a point of view of plant health to the cultivation of other varieties or species, or present a risk for the environment or for human health, that Member State may upon application, be authorised to prohibit the marketing of the seed in question in all or part of its territory.‟
Regulation 1829/2003 of 22 September 2003 introduced a simplified, centralised authorisation procedure for GMOs used as food or animal feed: if a company wants to market a GM crop in the EU, it does not need to request separate authorisation for the use of the crop as food or feed.‟
Regulation 1830/2003 of 22 September 2003 „provides a framework for the traceability of products consisting of or containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and food and feed produced from GMOs‟.
It seeks
 to harmonise traceability and labelling for the sake of the internal market;
 facilitate both the withdrawal of products where unforeseen adverse effects on human health, animal health or the environment, including ecosystems, are established, and;
 the targeting of monitoring to examine potential effects on, in particular, the environment. the implementation of risk management measures in accordance with the precautionary principle;

154
 to ensure that accurate information is available to operators and consumers to enable them to exercise their freedom of choice in an effective manner as well as
 to enable control and verification of labelling claims;
It exempts from labelling products with „traces of authorised GMOs in a proportion no higher than 0,9 % or lower thresholds established under the provisions of Article 30(2), provided that these traces are adventitious or technically unavoidable‟, and amends
Directive 2001/18 accordingly.
Commission Recommendation of 23 July 2003 on guidelines for the development of national strategies and best practices to ensure the co-existence of genetically modified crops with conventional and organic farming

155
Interviews
Date Location
Greece
1 05 April 2005 Athens
Interviewee Duration
(mins)
Intervie wer
Remarks
2 28 June 2005 Athens
(Greenpeace office)
3 05 April 2006 Chania
Leonidas Louloudis
(Assoc. Professor,
Faculty
Agricultural
Economics,
Agricultural of
University of
Athens) (one of five proposing scientists the establishment of a
GM information center)
Myrto Pispini
(Greenpeace-GR
Responsible for the
Anti-GMO campaign in Greece)
Vasilis Gisakis
(Chania activist)
82
39
40
4 07 July 2006 Rethymnon Konstantinos
Tsoukalas
(member of the
National Bioethics
Commission,
Emeritus Professor of
University
Sociology, of
Athens)
5 02 October
2006
Athens
6 03 October
2006
Iraklion
Takis Vidalis
(Scientific Officer,
National Bioethics
Commission)
Nikos Panopoulos
(Emeritus Professor of the University of
California at
Berkeley, Professor of the University of
Greece, member of scientific, biotechnology related committees in the US -
52
20
45
YV
YV
YV
MK,
YV
YV
MK
1 b-6
2 b-6
3b-6
Poor record-ing
4b-6
5b-6
Phone
6b-6
Phone

156
7 06 October
2006
8 11 October
2006
9 18 October
2006
10 25 October
2006
11 10 November
2006
NIH,USDA,DOE - and Greece ministerial )
Thessaloniki Athanasios Tsaftaris
(former member of the Greek
Competent
Authority for
Directives 219/90,
220/90 concerning
GMO, 1995
President of the
Greek Bioethics
Committee of the
General Secretariat for Research &
Technology, 1999-
2000 Secretary of
GSRT, Professor,
Aristotelian
University
Thessaloniki) of
Athens
Athens
Athens
Athens
Stamatis Sekliziotis
(responsible for
USDA Gain report on Greece, 2005),
US Embassy,
Agricultural
Division
Konstantinos
Anagnostou
(Officer
Directorate
Processing,
, of
Standardization and
Quality Contrôle of
Agri-food Products,
Ministry of Rural
Development and
Food)
Konstatinos Mpalias
(legal advisor of
Greenpeace Greece; prepared bill proposal to declare
Greece GMO-free country)
Ioannis
Hondropoulos
(Officer,
Biotechnologist, staff responsible for
35
36
31
43
85
MK 7b-6
Phone
MK 8b-6
Phone
MK 9b-6
Phone
MK 10b-6
Phone
MK 11b-6
Phone

12 18 August
2006
Athens
13 18 August
2006
Athens
14 18 August
2006
Athens
157
GM issues, Ministry of Environment,
Physical Planning and Public Works)
*Konstantinos
Mihos
(Personnel,
Agriculturalist,
Department of
Plant Production
Inputs, and
Member of Working
Group on issues related ti
Coexistence
Measures for GM,
& conventional biological cultivations,
Ministry of Rural
Development and
Food)
*Styliani
Horianopoulou
(Personnel,
Agriculturalist,
Department of
Plant Production
Inputs, and
Member of Working
Group on issues related ti
Coexistence
Measures for GM,
& conventional biological cultivations,
Ministry of Rural
Development and
Food)
Lyda Mpouza
(Personnel,
Agriculturalist,
Department of
Plant Production
Inputs, and
Member of Working
Group on issues related ti
Coexistence
Measures for GM, conventional &
40
40
80
MK 12b-6
Face to face, joint with*
MK 13b-6
Face to face, joint with*
MK 14b-6
Face to face

158 biological cultivations,
Ministry of Rural
Development and
Food)
United Kingdom
15 11 July 2005 Lancaster
16 29 Aug 2006 Dorset
Malcolm
(AEBC)
Grant 26
Alan Gray (ACRE) 76
17 06 Mar 2005 Anglesey Robin Grove-White
(AEBC)
18 16 Oct 2005 Copenhagen Robin Grove-White
(AEBC)
19 28 June 2006 Axminster Brian
ACRE)
Johnson
(English Nature and
20 06 Mar 2005 Anglesey
21 07 Sep 2006 Derbyshire
Sue Mayer (AEBC and Genewatch
UK)
Sue Mayer (AEBC and
UK)
Genewatch
22 27 June 2006 Parliament,
London
Michael Meacher
(former
Environment
Minister)
128
30
94
25
30
40
LR, BS
LR
LR, BS
Phone interview
LR, BS
LR
LR, BS Not recorded
LR
LR
Phone - not transcribed
23 07 Sep 2006 Yorkshire
24 22 June 2006 DEFRA,
London
Pete Riley (Five
Year Freeze)
Linda Smith (former
Head of GM Policy,
68
183
LR
LR
Science and
Regulation Unit,
Defra)
United Kingdom biotechnology interviews from ESRC-funded project
Phone - not transcribed
Risk and Sustainability: Moving Public Engagement Upstream, used with permission
25 26 Jan 2004
26 04 Mar 2004
27 15 Mar 2004
Brian Wynne
Doug Parr
(Greenpeace UK)
Ian Gibson (Labour
MP, ex-Chair of
Science and
Technology Select
Committee)
Nanotechnology,
28 16 Mar 2004
29 23 Feb 2004
30 24 Feb 2004
Nigel
(Zeneca)
Poole
Sir John Beringer
(ex-chair of ACRE)
Raymond Baker
(former former
CEO,
Biotechnology and

31 26 Jan 2004
32 30 Mar 2004
33 1 Mar 2004
159
Biological Sciences
Research Council.
Robin Grove-White
(member of AEBC)
Sir Thomas Blundell
(Founding Chief
Executive,
Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences
Research Council,
1994-1996,
Chairman of the
Royal Commission on Environmental
Pollution, 1998-
2005).
Sue
(Director,
Mayer
Genewatch UK)

160
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