Transparency as Contested Political Terrain: Who Knows What about the Global GMO Trade and Why does it Matter?

Aarti Gupta
Additional contact information
Aarti Gupta: Aarti Gupta is Assistant Professor with the Environmental Policy Group of Wageningen University's Department of Social Sciences, the Netherlands. She is also the vice-chair of the European Union COST Action on Transformations in Global Environmental Governance and Associate Faculty in the European glogov.org network of researchers. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on global risk and biosafety governance, trade-environmental inter-linkages and the role of science in governance.

Global Environmental Politics, 2010, vol. 10, issue 3, 32-52

Abstract: This article explores the prospects for transparency to be a transformative force in global biosafety governance. It analyzes whether information disclosure can further a right to know and choose, and hence facilitate oversight over transnational transfers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It examines the question of "Whose right to know what and why?" with regard to GMOs in the agricultural commodity trade in relation to the global Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. I argue that the limited disclosure obligations in this global context follow rather than shape market developments, and that complex infrastructures of sampling, testing and detection are required to put disclosed information to use. If so, rather than a normative right-to-know of importing countries, a competing norm of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) prevails. I conclude that the potential of transparency to empower remains unrealized, particularly for the poorest countries most reliant on globally-induced disclosure. (c) 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/GLEP_a_00013 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:glenvp:v:10:y:2010:i:3:p:32-52

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().