GM Food Law, Interest Groups, and Health and Climate Risks

Abstract

Interest groups may influence the making and enforcement of consumer protection law. Food laws are not an exception. Interest groups may shape food consumer protection policies, which may have a negative impact on consumers’ health, food choices, diet, and climate change. Food labelling laws can be an instance of such problem. This work provides some evidence from Canada. It discusses the development of GM food labelling legislation in Canada and the extent to which interest groups shape both the making of such legislation and the social construction of GM food risk. While this problem is well recognized, it has not been examined nor documented in the context of the law-making process. It is argued that some interest groups have played a critical role in the defeat of mandatory GM food labelling legislation for over 20 years in Canada. The views and interests of the biotechnology industry and political elites seem to have prevailed in the defeat of GM food labelling legislation and the establishment of a voluntary GM food labelling regime and an increasingly unreliable pre-marketing safety assessment system. It thus appears that low-risk bearing business and political elites have dictated the risk that high-risk bearing citizen-consumers must bear and have shaped food choices by positioning GM food in Canadians’ diet in the last 20 years while jeopardizing the environment. This is termed ‘authoritarian paternalism’. This work provides some preliminary empirical evidence focusing on the visible attempts to introduce GM food labelling legislation and the role of competing interest groups. The potential for labelling to increase commercialization cost and reduce GM food consumption worries the biotechnology industry of Canada, the world’s 4th largest producer of GMO crops. On the other hand, labelling is demanded by citizen-consumers seeking to gain some knowledge and exercise their free choices as their concerns over the risk of GM food to human health and the environment intensify. GM crops usually require huge amounts of herbicides and are often tolerant to them. Glyphosate, the world’s most used herbicide, has been found in foods available on Canadian markets. These concerns have been reinvigorated by the 2015 finding of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that glyphosate is probably a human carcinogen; Bayer’s approximately 11-billion settlement with more than 100,000 U.S. plaintiffs over claims that its glyphosate-based Roundup causes cancer; the European Commission’s ongoing assessment of whether to ban glyphosate; and the United States’ 2018 release of the final regulation of the 2016 National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard which came into effect in January 2022, joining 64 countries that have adopted mandatory GM food labelling.

Keywords: GM food, labelling, interest groups, health risk, climate risk, consumer protection law, legal reform, Canada