Genetic Engineering in Agriculture
Philip Vergragt, Halina Brown
2006
This paper proposes a novel approach to including the public in evaluating the impacts of food and agricultural biotechnology modeled after the growing practice of sustainability reporting by companies. The most visible among those, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), when implemented properly, includes a wide range of stakeholders, including the financial institutions, companies, NGOs, and civil society, in an interactive multi-stakeholder discourse and collaboration. The reporting exercise would open the discussion about the R&D around new GMO products, and could mitigate potential adverse effects in an early stage (Constructive Technology Assessment). We specifically propose initiating a broadly based societal initiative aimed at developing of a new sectoral supplement of GRI Guidelines, specifically designed for the food and agricultural biotechnology sector.
