"GMO" maize and public health. A little case of Schumpeterian policy in the EU

Giovanni Tagliabue

No 242323, 2016 Fifth AIEAA Congress, June 16-17, 2016, Bologna, Italy from Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AIEAA)

Abstract: EU lawmakers have been successfully struggling for a quarter of a century to refuse the cultivation of “Genetically Modified Organisms” on the Old Continent. A clear example is given by the revision of the accepted level of contaminants in maize: rather than admitting that Bt maize is safer than “non-GMO” varieties, and therefore European farmers should be allowed not only to import it, but also to produce it, politicians have raised the threshold of the poisonous fumonisins that may be legally present in food and feed. This decision is an example of a “Schumpeterian” approach to policy, where public choices are not inspired by a science-based mind-set, but are substantially dictated by a calculus of consent: most probably, EU politicians reckoned that an adjustment of the legal level of food poison would have cost them less than the possible outrage deriving from encouraging “GMO” cultivation.

Keywords: Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13
Date: 2016-06-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/242323/files/AIEAA_2016_Tagliabue.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aiea16:242323

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.242323

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2016 Fifth AIEAA Congress, June 16-17, 2016, Bologna, Italy from Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AIEAA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().