Growing uncertainty: The environmental risk assessment of genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant canola in Canada.

摘要

Debates about the novelty of Genetic Engineering (GE) for producing new crop varieties have resulted in a contradictory approach for regulating the products of biotechnology. The concept of “new old science” is introduced to describe the contrast between the Canadian federal government's innovation policies of the 1980s, important for fostering the growth of the biotechnology industry, and the current regulatory framework which assumes that GE poses no new risks and that the relative safety of biotechnology can be inferred from past experience with traditional breeding.; This dissertation examines the consequences of “new old” science in terms of the regulatory framework developed to assess the ecological risks posed by transgenic crops. In order to understand how the problem of environmental safety was addressed in Canadian biotechnology regulations, interviews with regulators, scientists and policymakers trace the development of the regulatory framework. In addition, Monsanto's regulatory submission for the environmental release of herbicide tolerant Roundup Ready™ canola, obtained through Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP), provides a concrete example of how the regulatory system operates and how scientific information is evaluated. The use of the concept of “boundary work” (Gieryn 1983; 1999) reveals the extent to which scientific knowledge is demarcated during the risk assessment process.; Findings suggest that regulatory concepts such as familiarity and substantial equivalence, although designed to trigger the environmental risk assessment of new crop varieties, focus scientific inquiry on the similarities between GEOs and their ‘natural’ counterparts. Conventional crops serve as the normative baseline for determining the environmental safety of GE crops where potential ecological harms are measured against a background of known and predictable risks.; The reliance of Canadian regulators on proponent-led field trial data carries serious implications regarding the integrity of the scientific and policy processes. In particular, the lack of clear boundaries between private and public interests undermines the credibility of risk assessment findings. The main conclusion reached is that the commercial focus of Canadian biotechnology regulations supports scientific assumptions that: minimize scientific uncertainty and misrepresent the complexity of ecological effects, and facilitate the approval of GEOs, foreclosing the need for comprehensive, long-term ecological studies. Ultimately, the implications of this translate into an unbalanced account of what is known and what remains to be known about the ecological risks posed by herbicide tolerant canola.