Food and agricultural biotechnology policy: how much autonomy can developing countries exercise?

The aim of this article is to explore the challenges of developing countries in deciding how to protect their environment and citizens from imported GM seeds and crops without violating the obligations under World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Cartagena Protocol on Bio-Safety (CPBS) agreements. Policy-makers in developing countries are confronted by variants of the challenges faced by their counterparts in industrialised countries in establishing new, and reforming existing, regulatory institutions for GM crops. Hence, this article aims to identify those challenges and explore the conditions under which these may be possible to resolve them.

Key challenges identified in this study are:

• there exists some tensions in developing countries between the objective of sponsoring and supporting the development of a GM seed/crop and that of protecting public health, environmental biodiversity and food security from the risks that its products and processes might pose
• governments in these developing countries are also encountering tensions between their domestic policy objectives of GM seed/crop with that of commitments arising from international agreements and rule-based institutions such as the WTO and the CPBS
• most of the developing countries are setting standards for GM seeds and crops based on WTO and CPBS rules, who are anxious that the rules of the WTO and CPBS oblige them to make decisions based solely on grounds of public and ecological health, and to adopt the same standards as those of the countries trying to export into their market - these rules of the WTO and CPBS have been widely interpreted as driving a process of regulatory convergence
• the knowledge of how to identify, assess and estimate reliably the risks to public health and environmental biodiversity from the introduction of the products of genetic engineering is also rudimentary
• challenges facing the governments of developing countries, in relation to GM crops and foods, are even more complex, and they often have relatively fewer institutional and scientific resources to draw upon.

• rules of the WTO and CBSP suggest greater scope for exercising discretion by developing countries in relation to GM crops and seeds under the terms of the CBSP than in relation to GM foods under the SPS Agreement of WTO, wherein, under the former case, risk assessments will of necessity be local rather than global
• even under the seemingly more demanding requirements of the SPS Agreement of WTO, the international disputes suggest that, at least provisionally, there exists greater scope for exercising autonomy
• moreover developing countries do not have to fall in line with their competitors and accept the importation of GM seeds or crops just because other countries (industrialised or developing) have deemed them acceptable in their own markets and environments, as long as a few conditions on the relevance of scientific evidences are met
• developing countries might lawfully be able to exercise considerable autonomy when setting regulatory standards, but however, given their limited financial and human resources, they may require multilateral collaboration.