Precaution or prudent vigilance as guiding the path to global food security?

Abstract

Food safety is an obvious ethical demand as seen from the consumer’s perspective. It is also, at least in principle, in the best interest of States to protect their citizens from harm through nutrition. Food security is also an ethical interest of people, albeit perhaps not this obvious to all those who presently live in abundance. Sustainable food production can also be seen as basically an ethical task, since it recognizes basic interdependencies between people, environment and economy on a global scale, and aims at a remedy of existing or emerging imbalances. Globalisation is a fact of our times, and in the food sector globalisation can be assumed to increase rather than decrease due to more varied demands that follow socio-economic advances. Thus one may assume that the global trade of food, food technologies, and seeds and animals for food production will become even more important in the near future. The trade of genetically modified (GM) food-products has already triggered a heated debate about the Precautionary Principle, mainly in respect to food safety, but also in respect to other national interests. While some States emphatically endorse the Precautionary Principle as a regulative mechanism (as e.g. the EU countries), other States equally emphatically seem to deny this principle any role in international (or even national) regulations (as e.g. the USA). New food technologies are under way (e.g. functional foods, synthetic biology, in vitro meat or GM animals), and are typically proposed as a way to tackle the challenge of global food security. The trade of these products can be assumed to be even more problematic than what one has experienced so far. The US Presidential Bioethics Commission has recently addressed the regulatory needs of synthetic biology, and concluded that there is no need of the Precautionary Principle. Instead they propose a policy of ‘prudent vigilance’. The paper will discuss whether there is a real, substantive difference between these proposals, and whether global food security will need to endorse the one or the other.