> The U.S., for example, demands that statutory prohibitions on products to protect human health should only be allowed to be passed if it has been scientifically proven that these products really are harmful.
Sounds like a reasonable argument.
Sounds like a reasonable argument.
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.
> "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".
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 burden of proof shouldn't be on the government, it should be on the manufacturer, similar to how medicines require FDA approval.