Food security and the evaluation of risk

This paper investigates the changing methods of risk assessment for agricultural products and notes a deterioration in the likelihood that risk assessment exercises will be completed successfully. Genetically modified products are used as an example.

The changing nature of risk assessments is found to be inhibiting international market access, reducing trade and, hence, making investments in productivity enhancing technologies in agriculture less interesting. Achieving future food security goals will be more difficult

In its attempts to deal primarily, but not exclusively, with the GM issue, the EU is attempting to broaden the way risk is defined to include a host of socio-economic factors. Given that all new technologies will create some economic losers, redefining risk assessment will make seeking approval for new technologies less predictable and transparent. This, in turn, will alter the incentives to invest in new technologies needed to meet future food security goals.
While the GM issue has been the driving force behind the moves to alter risk assessment, once the new method of risk assessment becomes part of accepted international procedures... it can be applied to any new technology. This is a different issue than the EU simply refusing to approve GM-crops - which also alters the incentives to invest and has been written about previously.

The politicization of risk does not deliver either safer food or technological improvements. Science-based risk assessments have been successful in denying the commercialization of unsafe foods while politicized risk assessments continue to rule that consuming GM foods is a danger to one's health or the environment.

lf this regulatory divergence meant only that consumers in some rich countries have fewer food choices, the making of this kind of Type 2 error would not be a particular focus for concern. The EU has also made the granting of the most preferred market access for the products of developing countries... contingent on accession to the CPB – meaning that the non-scientific risk assessment methods are spread to developing countries that may most need productivity enhancing innovations...

@ Food security and the evaluation of risk: S. Smyth and colleagues in press.

 Via AJ Stein on Twitter