Good for the EU. If only our government showed the same care for its own citizens.
Sounds like a reasonable argument.
The burden of proof shouldn't be on the government, it should be on the manufacturer, similar to how medicines require FDA approval.
> "whereas the U.S. only bans them if people have already been harmed as a result of consuming said products"
I think those people harmed would disagree.
Also to "scientifically prove" something might not be as easy as it sounds. You may have a couple of studies that find a harmful effect, and then you have some (possibly industry-backed) studies that find no effect at all. You now have a strong hint, but no proof. At best it is "scientifically debated". Think of tobacco industry vs "smoking causes cancer", or oil companies vs "global warming is caused by humans".
These kinds of lawsuits don't exist in Europe, in the worst case a company will pay $10,000 to a single person. But there are other protections in place and if you take those away you will end up with much worse protection than the US has because this indirect regulation doesn't exist.
Yes, they'll release a product that might be harmful. The tradeoff is whether they can get away with it in court. The Ford Pinto case is a classic example of that kind of thinking gone wrong. I suggest you look its details up to see how our boardrooms think on things. It was really bad. Least they paid for it.
This is purely in theory, in particular for some industries and products.
C8 made lots of $$$ to DuPont, and it took 50+ years to be banned.
You can't prove, in a strict sense, that C8 caused harm to any given person. Also, you don't know that a product like C8 is harmful when you release it.
A company will release a harmful product very gladly, as long as it has a pool large enough of scientists, lawyers and PR professionals to keep the ball rolling for a long [enough] time.
The main arguments against GMO essentially boil down to that they may be harmful in ways we can't yet test for. Even if we had enumerated all the ways in which things could be harmful, we wouldn't know our list was complete. You might as well ban food that hasn't been scientifically proven not to harm invisible garden gnomes.
So the real question is: should something only be banned when it's 99.5% certain that it's harmful? Is 50% chance of it being harmful okay? Or 80%? And why?
The EU prefers to err on the side of safety. The US prefers to err on the side of profit. I don't see why the US approach would be better.
The very reason we're creating GMOs for food is to reduce the resources (land, energy, fertilizers, water, etc.) needed for food production. The motivation of course is that lower resource usage means lower production costs.
Requiring unreasonable burdens of proof mean greater waste in our food production, but that side of things isn't a scary and therefore gets less consideration than the limitless possibilities of unknown harms that could come from GMOs.
There's some drop in the price of a hamburger below which I'm not willing to risk a Leprechaun extinction. However, I'm willing to risk extinction of Leprechauns, Yetis, and Loch Ness "monsters" in exchange for less land needed to grow my food, and fewer children being under-nourished. These are real problems that GMOs can help with.
Imagine the hysteria if a GMO food item would have been involved in the chain of events!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...